International Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019
SPACE, POWER, IDENTITY
ISSN 2285 – 3324 ISSN-L = 2285 – 3324 DOI: (Digital Object Identifier):10.5682/22853324
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Ana-Maria Munteanu Ovidius University of Constanţa, RO [email protected]
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Adina Ciugureanu, PhD Ovidius University of Constanţa, RO [email protected]
EDITOR Ralucea Petre, PhD Ovidius University of Constanţa, RO [email protected]
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Valentin Vanghelescu University of Bucharest, RO [email protected]
Delia Vărzariu Bucharest School of Economics [email protected] International Journal of
Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication
https://crossculturenvironment.wordpress.com
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019
SPACE, POWER, IDENTITY
Coordinators:
Adina Ciugureanu
Florian Andrei Vlad
Ovidius University of Constanta
Editura Universitară
www.editurauniversitara.ro
&
Asociaţia pentru Dezvoltare Interculturală (ADI)
www.adinterculturala.wordpress.com ADVISORY BOARD
Sergiu Anghel National University of Theatre and Charles Moseley Cinematography ¨I.L. Caragiale¨ of University of Cambridge, UK Bucharest, RO [email protected]
Marta Árkossy Ghezzo Stephen Prickett Lehman College, New York, USA Professor Emeritus, [email protected] University of Glasgow/Kent [email protected] Adina Ciugureanu Ovidius University of Constanta, RO Ludmila Patlanjoglu [email protected] National University of Theatre and Cinematography ¨I.L. Caragiale¨ of Augusto Rodrigues Da Silva Junior Bucharest, RO Universidade de Brasilia, Brasil [email protected] [email protected] Giovanni Rotiroti Timothy Ehlinger Universita Occidentale, Naples, Italy University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA [email protected] [email protected] Daniela Rovenţa – Frumuşani Victor A. Friedman University of Bucharest, RO University of Chicago, USA [email protected] [email protected] Leonor Santa Bárbara Cornelia Ilie Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Malmö University, Sweden [email protected] [email protected] Ana Rodica Stăiculescu Mihai Coman Universitz of Bucharest, RO University of Bucharest, RO [email protected] [email protected] Ileana Marin Claudia Jensen University of Washington, Seattle, USA University of Washington, Seattle, USA [email protected] [email protected] Ana-Cristina Halichias Maria Do Rósario Laureano Santos University of Bucharest, RO Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal [email protected] [email protected] Florentina Nicolae Eduard Vlad Ovidius University of Costanta, RO Ovidius University of Constanta, RO [email protected] [email protected]
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International Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication
Space, Power, Identity
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ayad A. ABOOD Trauma and Identity in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's Sula ...... 4
Andreea-Victoriţa CHIRIAC (BECEANU), Adina CIUGUREANU The Role of Space in Character Development (Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Ion Creangă’s Memories of My Boyhood) ...... 12
Elena ENCIU The Portrait of a Steamy, (Un)Corseted Sub-Culture ...... 22
Adina CIUGUREANU, Fatima FARHOUD Between Semiosis and Social Practice: Fairclough’s Version of Critical Discourse Analysis .... 31
Ioana RADULESCU, Adina CIUGUREANU Toni Morrison’s Jazz: Hunting and Hiding in the Urban Jungle ...... 39
Sînziana POPESCU The Trauma of Re-Location in August Wilson’s The American Century Cycle ...... 49
Florian Andrei VLAD The Vagaries Of Identity And The Power Of Poetry: Ted Hughes’s Tales From Ovid And The Anxiety Of Influence ...... 57
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Bianca TANASESCU, Eduard VLAD Identitary Resistance to Confinement and Conformity: Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest ...... 67
Adriana VOICU, Eduard VLAD Primal Energy Vs. Intimations of Power Games In Ted Hughes’s Animal Poems ...... 76
Book Review: James Augerot and Ileana Marin on Ideology, Identity, and the US: Crossroads, Freeways, Collisions, eds. Eduard Vlad, Adina Ciugureanu, Nicoleta Stanca, Peter Lang, 2019...... 86
Notes On Contributors ...... 88
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TRAUMA AND IDENTITY IN ALICE WALKER'S THE COLOR PURPLE AND TONI MORRISON'S SULA
Ayad A. Abood Al- Saymary
Abstract: The present study explores the relationship of trauma to identity, with some reference to eco-consciousness, in African-American Literature. The literary texts chosen for analysis are Alice Walker's "The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's "Sula". The study begins with defining trauma, identity, and eco-consciousness and then analyzes the two novels accordingly. The study assumes that, more often than not, traumatic experiences have a negative effect on the identity of the traumatized persons. In some particular situations, a traumatic event may have a positive effect on the traumatized person and hence strengthens him/her. It all depends on the identity of the person before and after the experience. The relationship of trauma to identity is reciprocal in the sense that trauma can affect and shape an individual's identity and that an identity can be redefined after a traumatic experience. Learning how to cope with trauma rather than being overwhelmed by it is one of the options that some of Walker’s and Morrison’s “strong” characters are faced with.
Keywords: Trauma, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), identity, group identity, in-group, out-group
The world is overwhelmed with catastrophic events which are caused by war, terrorism, rape, discrimination, not to mention the natural disasters. Mostly, these tragic events, in addition to the physical wounds they cause, may leave emotional and psychological pains in the survivors as well. Actually, no one could exactly express, feel, or understand the trauma experience as the traumatized person could do. To speak out a trauma experience needs more courage in some cultures. A raped woman or an abused child will find it very difficult, sometimes impossible, to express what happened through language. In cases as such, the physical pain will leave a psychological impact on the traumatized person. For a number of decades, definitions of trauma were only restricted to include military combat veterans who participated in World War I and World War II. It is only after 1980 that trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have been redefined to include the experience of raped women, abused children, domestic violence in the same way as the
4 experience of soldiers regardless of the severity of the offence. Judith Herman’s groundbreaking Trauma and Recovery, published in 1992, asserts that women who have survived rape often experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in a way similar to men and women who have survived combat regardless of the severity of the actions or the events surrounding them. Drawing on Freud's principles that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and wishes of the author, Cathy Caruth, a pioneering figure in the field of trauma studies, in Unclaimed Experience, expands her theory of trauma in literature. Caruth defines trauma as "an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena" (Caruth 1996:11). Hunt (2010: 44) believes that besides being psychological, trauma is interpersonal, social and political. Therefore, the traumatized persons should include political and social elements in their trauma narratives. Narratives about history and politics are much equally important as about the psychological state of the narrator. In this respect, it is very important for the researcher who is interested in the study of trauma to understand the politics and the history that the narrator is discussing. The present sense of “Identity”, as many scholars believe, is derived from the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's concept of an “Identity Crisis”. Erikson's term of identity crisis is defined as referring to instabilities and uncertainties affecting the early development of children and teenagers, while the author also posits “the return of some forms of identity crisis in the later stages of the life cycle (Erikson 1968: 135). This definition was a starting point for many scholars to define and study identity. Hogg and Abrams (1988:2) define identity as "people's concepts of who they are, of what sort of people they are, and how they relate to others." Actually, this broad definition only implies an individual's conceptions about his/her own personality with regard to other people. Other scholars draw a distinction between personal identity on the one hand, and social or collective identity on the other. Deng (1995:1) uses the term identity "to describe the way individuals and groups define themselves and are defined by others on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, language, and culture." Jenkins (1996:4) defines identity as it "refers to the ways in which individuals and collectivities are distinguished in their social relations with other individuals and collectivities." Eco-consciousness is the awareness of people for the environment. In the 1970s, a new fiction emanates from the environmental movement which comes to be known as Ecofiction. Though the term “Ecofiction” is contemporary, its roots can be found in many ancient literary texts. The relationship between human and nature is very close to the extent that human beings are affected by nature and nature sometimes suggests ideas. Ecofiction is defined as "Fiction that deals with environmental issues or the relation between humanity and the physical environment, that contrasts traditional and industrial cosmologies, or in which nature or the land has a prominent role" (Dwyer, 2010:2). The term will become increasingly relevant as imbalances and serious damage to the environment, much in the same way in which traumatic experience affects individuals and groups, come to the fore of literary texts, whether labeled ecofiction or otherwise.
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Alice Walker's The Color Purple announces, from its beginning, a special illustration of what trauma can lead to as far as a young African American teenager is concerned. Celie, the novel’s narrator and main character, contributes to the unfolding of the narrative by writing letters to God, a very special form of an epistolary novel. First published in 1982, the book tells the story of Celie, an uneducated, fourteen-year-old black girl living in an African community in rural Georgia, probably in the first part of the 20th century. Celie begins writing letters to God because her father, Alphonso, abuses and rapes her several times, warning Celie that if she tells anybody he would kill her mother. Soon after, her mother dies of a serious illness. Celie's father, then, marries her to Mr. Albert who also treats her brutally. Nettie, Celie's sister, escapes Alphonso to take refuge at Celie's house. Mr. Albert has hidden desires of Nettie and when he advances her, she flees for her safety. Nettie promises Celie that she will write her letters but the letters never arrive. Later, Celie knows that all Nettie's letters are intercepted by Mr. Albert who hides them elsewhere. Eventually, Celie will find in Shug a sort of mother figure with a difference. In spite of her relative looseness and eccentricity, Shug promises to protect her after she hears of her father's sexual abuse and her husband's beatings. With the help of Shug's protection and encouraging, Celie's character has developed noticeably, her previous traumatic experience gradually being left behind. Trauma is also part of Toni Morrison's Sula, first published in 1973. Its story is set amid a black community living in the neighborhood of Bottom, in the city of Medallion, Ohio between 1917 and 1965. Trauma is first evoked by the life narratives of Shadrack and Plum, black shell- shocked veterans, who witness the horror of World War I. Although they should be respected for their wartime duty, they are treated differently because of their skin color. If Celie in Walker’s The Color Purple resorts to letters to God, equally desperate as he is, Shadrack creates National Suicide Day, a day on which people can commit suicide. Plum returns emotionally broken and becomes addicted to drugs and alcohol. The story centers on the relationship of two friends, Sula Peace and Nel Wright Greene from the very childhood to adulthood. Sula, a girl with a strange birthmark on her face, is a wild and energetic girl who develops a strong friendship with Nel, an orderly and proper girl, between the1920s and the 1940s. In their childhood, the two girls share a secret when Sula causes the accidental death of Chicken Little. As the story progresses, this friendship breaks down when Nel discovers an affair between Jude, Nel's husband and Sula. Jude leaves Nel, without Sula, to live in Detroit. A few years later, Sula falls seriously ill and Nel visits her. They argue about the betrayal and their friendship. Shortly thereafter, Sula dies. In the final chapter of the book, Nel goes to the graveyard to visit the grave of her best friend Sula. Nel painfully weeps, crying Sula's name loudly. Trauma, identity, and eco-consciousness have special literary representations in both Alice Walker's The Color Purple and in Toni Morrison's Sula. Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Morrison's Sula share many common features. Both novels address crises affecting social integrity in the African American communities where prejudice, patriarchy, rape and woman
6 abuse are prevailing in the early years of the twentieth century. The novels tackle cultural trauma, loss of identity, marginalization and dehumanization. All this is largely due to a complex set of negative life experiences involving not only specific situations, but also comprehensive patterns of abusive and violent treatment. Walker finds a memorable way to fathom Celie's character through thought presentation in a way to support character development as a whole, as well as the character’s response to specific kinds of experience, involving both resilience and vulnerability to trauma. With the different possibilities of thought presentation, writers of fiction in general are inviting the readers to share private information with the character whose mind is being explored. This piece of information might not be exposed to other characters especially if the character is sitting alone thinking loudly or being in a conflict with the other characters in the story. By using this type of character revelation, there is no way to suspect the reliability of the narrator, since here the author is depicting the “true” feelings and ideas of the character. The letters Celie writes to God and then to her sister Nettie, show how Celie's character has developed. This transformation from a completely naïve, weak, and submissive teenager to a solid twentieth century woman is a step forward in shaping her own identity. Celie overcomes her past trauma of rape and abuse through her self-education. The first pages of The Color Purple give the impression that the story is about trauma since Celie, in her first letter to God, writes about the bad treatment and rape her father inflicts on her. However, an in-depth study of Celie's character proves the contrary. The novel is about recovery from trauma. Celie finds safety and feels at ease in the letters she writes to God. This kind of safety and protection is further supported by the close relationship of Celie with Shug. Shug is a source of protection and an outlet for Celie to release her suppressed emotions. Coupled with Shug's support, Celie finds out that Mr. Albert, her cruel husband, has been hiding Nettie's letters from her. She confronts her husband for the first time and she decides to leave him to begin her journey of independence. With her emancipation from the racial and patriarchal community in which she lives, Celie's new identity begins to evolve: “I am so happy, I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time” (222). This friendship accelerates Celie’s recovery of trauma. Herman indicates that it will be very helpful if the traumatized have supportive families, lovers or friends. The care and protection they provide can have a strong healing impact. After reestablishing safety, “the survivor needs the help of others in rebuilding a positive view of the self. The regulation of intimacy and aggression, disrupted by the trauma, must be restored” (Herman 1992:45). Can one speak of the novel in relation to the previously mentioned ecofiction genre? Celie's interaction with nature is obvious. Celie's letter to God begins with "Dear God,"(p.4) and the novel ends with a letter "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God."(p.292). Celie develops a sense of understanding of the essence of God. Celie has been thinking of God as an authoritative white man who keeps himself at a distance. With the help of Shug, Celie comes to realize that God is far more than a person or a thing; that God exists in the surrounding nature. Nature is only a reflection of the power and the existence
7 of God. Fundamentally, Celie's new conception of God has evolved into "a personal, a spirit which cannot be confined to things and people, to be pursued directly by each person by observing and appreciating the wonders of nature" (Pratt, 2007:9). In her Letter 13 to God, Celie describes herself as a wood, a firm tree, bending but not breaking “I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree.” (24). These words imply exactly how Celie is trying to prove to herself how strong she is. She cannot verbally or physically resist her abusers but at least she will not break. By the end of the story, Celie succeeds in building her own community by gathering not only those people whom she loves but also the person who has been abusing her, Mr. Albert, her husband. Celie acquires her new identity through love, courage, and self- determination. Her identity is shaped by all her life suffering and life experiences. With the family reunion, she is very happy, more secure and more confident “But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.” (295). As demonstrated by Harris, toward the end of the novel, “Celie overcomes a multitude of oppressions constructed to destroy her soul and proves the power of the human spirit to rise above impossibilities and love herself regardless” (2010: 43). Toni Morrison's Sula deals at large with traumatic experiences of different kinds such as war trauma, mental illness, and betrayal that leave psychological impacts on the characters. Racial injustices can lead to post traumatic stress disorder. Identity-based trauma is very popular in African-American Communities. Shadrack and Plum have been victims of war Trauma. Besides the horrors of war, they are both treated differently because they are black. After their participation in World War I, Shadrack is taken to a hospital for treatment of PTSD. Shortly after, he is told to prematurely evacuate the hospital to make room for other patients. “When he stepped out of the hospital door the grounds overwhelmed him…” (Sula, 10). Upon his return to the Bottom, Shadrack starts his life of isolation and creates Suicide National Day on which persons are allowed to commit suicide. The inhabitants of the Bottom know that “Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power” (15). On the other hand, Plum returns emotionally wrecked and is addicted to drugs. His behavior is a childlike to which Eva, his mother, instead of helping him to overcome his trauma, responds in a very different way. Of course, Eva does not understand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and misinterprets Plum's behaviors. She sets him on fire because her love for him will not allow her to see him live this way indicating that “I done everything I could to make him leave me and go on and live and be a man but he wouldn’t and I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man not all scrunched up inside my womb, but like a man.” (72). Sula Peace also has some traumatic experiences. Jones (1999:140-41) states that Sula becomes both a victim and a victimizer at the age of twelve when her identity is forming. When she was a little child, she overhears her mother, Hannah, saying “…I love Sula. I just don't like her. That's the difference.” (57). Later, she causes the death of a little child, Chicken Little. She accidently throws him in the river, "The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where
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Chicken Little sank. (61). The rejection by her mother together with the accidental death of Chicken Little make Sula what she is: “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself” (92). Nel Wright, Sula's best friend suffers emotional trauma. Nel's identity begins to form with the beginning of her friendship with Sula Peace. For Nel, Sula is both a source of happiness and a deep sorrow. The childhood happiness suspends when Sula betrays her closest friend. Nel goes in an emotional trauma when she discovers that her best friend, Sula, has slept with her husband, Jude. This event marks the point of separation between Nel and Sula on the one hand, and Nel and Jude on the other. Nel's loss of identity is represented not by her loss of her husband Jude, but by her loss of Sula. When Sula dies, Nel, in the graveyard, comes to realize that “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl” (174). Morrison's Sula illustrates both collective identity, represented by the inhabitants of the Bottom community, and individual identity, represented by each character. As mentioned above, identity could be defined as how individuals and groups define themselves and are defined by others based on race, ethnicity, and culture. The residents of the Bottom, being African- Americans, are frequently degraded, sometimes ridiculed, not only by the old white people but also even by their white children. Four white boys in their early teens, sons of some newly arrived Irish people, occasionally entertained themselves in the afternoon by harassing black schoolchildren” (53), ”These particular boys caught Nel once, and pushed her from hand to hand until they grew tired of the frightened helpless face” (54). Indeed, these recurring acts generate hatred and increase disparity among people of different skins. By the same token, when a white bargeman finds Little Chicken's corpse in the river, he generalizes that all black people are “animals, fit for nothing but substitutes for mules, only mules didn't kill each other the way niggers did” (63).This generalization indicates that the blacks are inferior to the whites and are downgraded to the level of animals and worst. Similarly, the blacks create their own identity by keeping the whites at a distance, “They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. In that way, they regarded integration with precisely the same venom that white people did” (113). The relationship of trauma to identity is reciprocal in the sense that trauma can affect and shape an individual's identity and that an identity can be redefined after a traumatic experience. In Walker's The Color Purple, Celie's character, after her experience of rape and abuse, has developed significantly. The trauma of the past has a positive effect on her own identity. She begins the novel as a week and naïve girl and comes out a strong typical example of a solid twentieth century woman. On the contrary, in Toni Morrison's Sula, it is not only the trauma of war leads Shadrack to craziness and Plum to drug addiction; rather, it is the community in which
9 they live as well. The community of the Bottom does not understand that both Shadrack and Plum suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Moreover, it is revealed in this study that some of the characters in The Color Purple are aware of the nonhuman world around them. Being completely isolated from the people around her, Celie develops a relationship with God in her letters. She can express her feelings and ideas freely, which in turn helps polishing her own identity. Morrison's Sula discloses that collective identity does not necessarily involve harmony in society, crises and traumatic experience involving not only out-group victimizers and in-group victims. The Bottom's residents are treated differently by the Whites based on color, race, culture and language, but traumatic experiences are also part and parcel of in-group interaction, even between and among as good friends as Nel and Sula, as one of the most telling illustrations. This comes as a realization that one should not divide ethnic groups between good, immaculate victims and mad, bad, and dangerous victimizers. Both fictional characters and real people display a variety of features, including innumerable shades of grey, rather than black and white features. Learning how to cope with trauma rather than lamenting one’s plight is what some of Walker’s and Morrison’s characters are up to.
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Deng, Francis. M. War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan. Washington, DC: Brookings, 1995. Dwyer, Jim. Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2010. Erikson, Erik H. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1968. Harris, Melanie L. Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker, and Womanist Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Hogg, Michael and Dominic Abrams. Social Identifications: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes. London: Routledge, 1988. Hunt, Nigel C. Memory, War and Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Jenkins, Richard. Social Identity. London: Routledge,1996. Jones, Carolyn M. “Sula and Beloved: Images of Cain in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” In Bloom, Harold (Ed.) Modern Critical Interpretations: Toni Morrison's Sula. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999: 133-147. Morrison, Toni Sula. New York: Vintage International,1973.
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Pratt, Louis H. “Alice Walker’s Men: Profiles in the Quest for Love and Personal Values.” In Bloom, Harold (Ed.) Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 2007: 5- 17. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books,1982.
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THE ROLE OF SPACE IN CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CHARLES DICKENS’S DAVID COPPERFIELD AND ION CREANGĂ’S MEMORIES OF MY BOYHOOD)
Andreea-Victorița Chiriac (Beceanu), Adina Ciugureanu
Abstract: This article aims at establishing the role of space in the development of child personalities as portrayed by Charles Dickens in David Copperfield and Ion Creangă in Memories of My Boyhood. For this purpose, it will analyse the chronotopes of the city and compare them with the chronotope of an idyllic village, both nineteenth century places. It will also explore the conditions offered by the learning establishments and the impact they had on the development of the characters. Per Gustafson’s three pole model of meanings attributed to place will be applied in the reading of the two nineteenth-century novels with a view to creating images of the interactions between the self, the environment and the others, that is, between the individual, the place and society. Schools have to promote and to encourage creative thinking and also to enable the students to acquire practical knowledge. Consequently, it is important to make an evaluation of the Romanian and English nineteenth-century schools depicted in the two novels in terms of the ability to achieve these requirements. The analysis will also focus on establishing the role of the schools in shaping the students’ personality and contributing to their evolution and transition from childhood to adulthood.
Key-words: Education, nineteenth-century schools, chronotope, place, space
Introduction The nineteenth century was a period of great changes in England and, to a lesser extent, in the Romanian Principalities, due to the Industrial Revolution and the scientific discoveries that brought about an unprecedented economic growth as well as social and political transformations. As a result, there were many reforms meant to improve the living conditions and the quality of life in both countries. There were also numerous reforms in education which is why many novels written in the nineteenth century focused on education as one of their themes. Although writers did not have a direct impact on things such as laws, social injustices and flaws in the education system, they attempted to change society through their literary works. The means by which they achieved their goal is by producing changes in people’s way of reasoning and increasing awareness about problematic areas in need of improvement. Both Charles Dickens and Ion
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Creangă are outstanding writers of the nineteenth century that can be considered social critics who tried to use their literary works as tools for social reform. The learning establishments presented by Charles Dickens in David Copperfield and by Ion Creangă in Memories of My Boyhood will be compared and contrasted in order to reveal the attitude of the two authors towards the representation of the nineteenth-century school. Boarding schools such as Salem House Academy (David Copperfield) look dreadful and gloomy because of the harsh conditions they offer. The students who live there suffer from hunger, poor lodging conditions and abuse by teachers and fellow students. There are also better schools, more expensive, such as the one run by Dr. Strong (David Copperfield) in which boys of middle and upper middle class learn. The Romanian author, Ion Creangă offers a satirical description of the state school starting with the primary school in Humulești, where flogging is a common ritual, and continuing with the Orthodox Seminary in Fălticeni, where teachers used to skip classes. Discipline is essential in teaching because it offers students a set of principles that can guide their behaviour in school and later on in society, but the way it is instilled may interfere with the process of learning and hinder creativity. In both fictional works discipline plays a key role in the education system. Great emphasis is put on it in the schools described in detail by Charles Dickens (David Copperfield) and Ion Creangă (Memories of My Boyhood). While there is an undeniable need for discipline in the process of education, the two writers depict the verbal and physical abuses used to maintain discipline in a striking way that makes school more similar to a military facility rather than to a learning institution. Thus, they aim to draw attention to the need to encourage moderation and to discourage abuse. In order to reveal important effects that the environment had on the children’s personality development, the spatial perspective and the role of particular places is worth investigating.
Spatiality and the meaning of place Space and place theories are mainly based on Bill Richardson’s Spatiality and Symbolic Expression (2015) and on Robert Tally’s Spatiality (2013). The former points out that there are “many very different dimensions of spatiality, so that in some the emphasis is on philosophical issues, in others on social dimensions, in yet more on aesthetic concerns, or on issues of belonging, or even on issues of sensory representation” (Richardson 231). The perception of space has evolved from that of mere geographic place to more complex approaches such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope, phenomenology - Heidegger’s concepts of “being-in-the-world” and “Dasein”, environmental psychology, and ecocrticism. In Spatiality (2013), Robert Tally refers to the “spatial turn” in cultural and literary studies which discusses matters of space, place, and mapping that become “spatial or geographical bases of cultural productions”, brought forward, in recent years, for “renewed and forceful critical attention” (12). This on-going research, revolving around the idea of space and its complex relationship with history, time, individuals and society, offers new perspectives and allows for the reinterpretation and reassessing of literary works.
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The increased interest in the field of spatiality and the new approaches that aim to make an accurate description of the dynamics between space and literature are continuously transforming contemporary criticism and making the choice of one approach over another more difficult. A way of guiding the selection of the most adequate approach is suggested by John Pickles in PHENOMENOLOGY, SCIENCE AND GEOGRAPHY. Spatiality and the Human Sciences (2009) when he explains his reasoning process “The question is not, which conception of space is most useful? The question is, to what do we refer when we talk about spatial behaviour? [...] Where this perspective is adopted for the study of human spaces the important questions then become why we wish to know this, and what prior assumptions have been incorporated in the evaluative and interpretative process to make this perspective an important one” (168). It is, thus, relevant for the present study to select those approaches that better reveal the dynamics between the child characters of the two novels, the schools they attend and the society they live in. An analysis of place alone would not be able to show how society, with its intricate set of rules, norms and values, shapes the protagonists’ personalities. Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope” to refer to the connections between the spatial and temporal relationships in literary works. Consequently, an examination of the chronotopes in David Copperfield and in Memories of My Boyhood can give insight into the interaction between the characters and the society they live in and it can also illustrate the ways in which this interaction transforms the individual. According to Mikhail Bakhtin in “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” (1981), the chronotope is the term that can be used to describe “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” and “it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space)” (84). As a result of these characteristics, through space, time is transformed and becomes visible and space becomes sensitive to the variables of time. Mikhail Bakhtin gives examples of chronotopes that can be found in literature such as the road, the meeting, the theatre, the city, the encounter, human life, adventure, the threshold and nature among many others. He also points out that major chronotopes can include countless minor chronotopes and they are “mutually inclusive, they co- exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another and find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships” (252). For the present study the chronotopes selected for analysis will be those which can help establish the link between the nineteenth century society and the development of the main characters. The focus will be on the interactions between the individuals and the places towards which they feel a certain attachment and the extent to which they affect their journey towards adulthood. Another useful tool that will be used in order to assess the influence of the school environment on the children’s evolution is the one put forward by Per Gustafson. In Meanings of Place: Everyday Experience and Theoretical Conceptualizations (2001) Per Gustafson provides a three pole model of meanings attributed to place. He claims that the meanings of places “can be mapped around and between the three poles of self, others and environment” (5). This entails that the importance of space can be inferred from the interactions between: the individual and the
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place, the people and the place and the people and the individual. This model of meanings attributed to space relies on clear criteria of analysis and aims to provide a sociological perspective on the role played by space in the formation of the child characters.
SELF
Life path, emotion, activity, self- identification
Knowledge, shaping the place Friends, relatives, social relations, community
Localization Anonymity Recognition Citizenship Tradition, organizations, Opportunities associates Meeting “others”
Physical environment, distinctive features/ events, Perceived institutions, types of place, characteristics, localization traits, behaviour ENVIRONMENT “Atmosphere”, Type of OTHERS street life inhabitant
Fig. 1. The three-pole model of meanings attributed to place, redrawn after Per Gustafson (10)
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The chronotope of the city vs. the chronotope of the village Both David Copperfield and Memories of My Boyhood belong to the bildungsroman genre, are supposedly autobiographical and attempt to describe the events in a realistic manner. The fact that they have many traits in common and are written at the same time period allows for an interesting parallel between them. A first observation related to the time-space relationship is the fact that the novels that belong to the Bildungsroman genre usually include the chronotope of the road because the main character has to overcome difficulties and go through a journey of initiation. Both Nică and David, the two protagonists, have to travel away from home and go through a process of personality shaping on their own. In Victorian Selves (A Study in the Literature of the Victorian Age), Adina Ciugureanu draws attention to the fact that the Victorian novel is a ‘character novel’ that focuses on the “conflict between the self and the resisting environment”. This conflict is eventually resolved and the protagonist emerges as a complex and complete individual (44). Hence, the journeys of initiation that David, and Nică by comparison, go through can be considered as necessary struggles against the social environment. Another significant feature shared by these two autobiographical novels is the use of biographical time in the narrative. The concept of biographical time is explained by Roderick Beaton in “The World of Fiction and the World “Out There”: the Case of the Byzantine Novel” as time in which events have “irreversible consequences, they define the movement of a biographical subject through time, which in turn is part of the uniquely unfolding process of history” (182). Realistic novels often employ the technique of fidelity to actuality. Because they are written in the nineteenth century and this is also the time of the ‘grand’ narratives, the social issues and concerns presented are the same as well. Some of these issues are: the process of urbanisation, the need for reform in education, the existence of class division and poverty. While there are numerous similarities that can be found in the structure and as a result, in the literary interpretation of the two novels, there are also differences that are worth considering. The process of urbanisation is reflected in the English and Romanian novels by the protagonists’ journey towards manhood: they start it in the village and complete it in the city. In Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), Franco Moretti mentions a different organisation of space in the European Bildungsroman that is centred around three core locations: the village, the provinces, and the city, and goes on to explain how the analysis of the characters in relation to these places generates a set of intriguing oppositions (65). The village is associated with traditions and family, whereas the city reflects the modern, the new and the unknown. The provinces and the city offer the opportunity of a future career, while the village remains a place reminiscent of childhood, but unable to provide the perspective of a bright future. Both protagonists, Nică and David, leave their native villages and embark on the journey towards maturity that leads them rather unwillingly to the universe of the city. Nică leaves his beloved village, Humulești, to study at different schools in order to fulfil his mother’s wish of seeing her son become a priest. David leaves his natal village Blunderstone as a result of his stepfather’s decision of sending him away from home, at Salem House Academy, a boarding school near London.
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The chronotope of the idyllic village is central to the narrative in Ion Creangă’s Memories of My Boyhood. Even when the place of the action changes, there is frequent reference to the beloved natal area. Each of the four parts that comprise the novel begins and ends with references to the main character’s natal village and home. These descriptions reveal the importance of the chronotope of the village for Nică. Humuleşti is the rural space which the narrator carefully constructs by sentimentally recollecting familiar landmarks of the village and the surrounding area. The village is not just his birth place or a space that comprises numerous familiar locations such as the church, the school, the graveyard, the Ozana River and his childhood home. It is a place of great sentimental value that the protagonist associates with family and friends and the background of some of his most cherished childhood memories. For Nică, the chronotope of the village becomes a symbol of his happy and carefree childhood and acquires new dimensions. The village becomes a whole universe, his childhood universe which he is unwilling to depart with. He desperately tries to avoid leaving “And now you're thinking of leaving your village, my boy, with its charm and its beauty, and going to that strange and faraway place, if your wretched heart will let you! And I tried very hard to make mother understand that I might pine and sicken for love of her, and even die among strangers” (Memories, 95), but in spite of his resourcefulness in finding convincing reasons he fails to convince his mother. Charles Dickens makes use of the chronotope of the city in many of his novels including David Copperfield. The chronotope of London reflects the norms and values of Victorian England. David, unlike Nică, does not plead with his parents to remain home as he is aware his mother has no authority on the matter and his stepfather’s decision is final. Another reason is the fact that the presence of Mr. Murdstone alters the harmony of the happy home which is no longer the blissful and idyllic place it once was. David leaves the familiar village of his early childhood and his home to find his path in life in the urban environment. He first observes London with a mixture of admiration and fear:
What an amazing place London was to me when I saw it in the distance, and how I believed all the adventures of all my favourite heroes to be constantly enacting and re- enacting there, and how I vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and wickedness than all the cities of the earth, I need not stop here to relate. (David Copperfield, 63)
The image of the school as a new chronotope, however, will leave a profoundly negative impression on David. Furthermore, the connection with the natal village is permenantly severed when his mother dies and he becomes an orphan. In Victorian Selves (A Study in the Literature of the Victorian Age), Adina Ciugureanu points out that the use of the orphan theme “enables the writer to describe a character free from any social constraints and any parental influence or guidance” (58). Hence, by becoming an orphan David can only look towards the future as the past no longer offers any possibilities.
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The dynamics behind character formation When discussing the concept of social time in “Time and Biography” (2002), John Robb offers David Copperfield as a clear example of biography in social time (155). Thus, a sociological approach would be suitable for the study of this novel. A sociological perspective is also provided by Per Gustafson in Meanings of Place: Everyday Experience and Theoretical Conceptualizations (2001). Per Gustafson’s three pole model of meanings attributed to place can be applied in the analysis of the novels under scrutiny in order to obtain a clear image of the dynamic relations between the self, the environment and others. So as to establish the role of the school in the development of the child characters of the novels, the present study will focus on the interactions taking place in the academic environment. Therefore, in this context, the self will be represented by the main character, the environment by the learning establishments and the others by the teachers and students in those institutions. The interaction between these three dimensions inside the school will reveal the positive or negative influence of the nineteenth century schools on the formation of the individual. The first type of interaction that will be looked at is the one between the school and the students. The protagonists of the two novels attend more than one institution due to various reasons and circumstances. David attends Salem House Academy near London and Doctor Strong’s School in Canterbury. Nică attends several schools: the one in his village, Humuleşti, the school in Broşteni, the school in Târgu Neamț and two seminaries, one in Fălticeni and the other in Socola, near Iaşi. The geographical location of the schools shows that their journey to adulthood takes them further and further away from their native place. Another aspect worth- considering in the relationship between the student and the school is the opportunities which the establishments are able to offer. Nică’s entire academic trajectory is meant to secure a future career as a priest, which would ensure financial security and respect in the society. The first institution that David attends is not chosen in view of a career as his stepfather uses it as merely a means of sending him away from home. The second one is meant to provide a good education and it is carefully selected for this purpose by his aunt. The influence of the environment on the child is obvious in David Copperfield from the detailed descriptions that he provides. On the one hand, the exterior of the first school “Salem House was a square brick building with wings; of a bare and unfurnished appearance” (68) leaves the impression of a deserted building. Similarly, the interior which is described as dirty, untidy, filled with an awful smell, with ink all around and even mice on the floor, comes as a complete shock to the young and impressionable child: “I gazed upon the schoolroom into which he took me, as the most forlorn and desolate place I had ever seen” (68). Such a place definitely does not provide a suitable learning environment. On the other hand, the second school presented by David seems to offer far better learning conditions. Even if, at first glance, the school gives the impression of “a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air about it” (191) the classroom is
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a pretty large hall, on the quietest side of the house, confronted by the stately stare of some half-dozen of the great urns, and commanding a peep of an old secluded garden belonging to the Doctor, where the peaches were ripening on the sunny south wall. There were two great aloes, in tubs, on the turf outside the windows; the broad hard leaves of which plant (looking as if they were made of painted tin) have ever since, by association, been symbolical to me of silence and retirement. (193)
The pleasant atmosphere provided by Dr. Strong’s school has the right attributes to secure study and learning. In Memories of My Boyhood, Nică does not focus on the image of the school. The only spatial references he makes are the ones about the venue of the schools and the fact that the fine room which functions as a school in Humuleşti was built next to the church’s gate following the priest’s orders. This actually shows that school and religion were very well-knitted and that one of the crucial disciplines in the school curriculum was the Bible. The lack of descriptions of the school or the classroom is indicative of the fact that they met with the protagonist’s modest expectations or they simply did not leave a positive or a negative effect on him. The only items used in the process of learning mentioned are the religious books used as didactic resources and the whip called St. Nicholas and the bench named Dapple-Grey used for punishment. The second type of interaction examined will be the one between the protagonist and the others, more precisely, the teachers and the schoolmates. In both novels the teachers put great emphasis on instilling discipline in the school. Discipline is undeniably necessary in the process of learning because it is meant to ensure a suitable environment for acquiring knowledge. So as to instil discipline teachers often rely on a set of rewards and punishments whose efficiency is determined by their degree of moderation. In both novels there are examples of physical punishments that were applied to students in different circumstances. In Memories of My Boyhood, the students often receive physical corrections and at the beginning of the novel Nică explains how each weekly assessment of the students’ progress resulted in the use of St. Nicholas and the Dapple-Grey which almost determined him to quit school. In David Copperfield, David mentions the frequent beatings with the cane or the ruler that the boys suffered and feared in Salem House. Mr. Creakle is described as an “incapable brute” that took pleasure in his physical abuses “He had a delight in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite” (78). However, there are also teachers like Mr. Mell and Dr. Strong who do not use such cruel practices and who have a better relationship with their students and better results. The relationship between the students in the school and the main characters is generally good with only minor incidents that interfere with the harmony within the group. David manages to make two close friends at Salem House: Tommy Traddles who is goodhearted but poor and James Steerforth who is wealthy and gets better treatment because of his status. In the beginning, at Dr. Strong’s School, David is really worried about fitting in because of the experiences he has gone through and which he thinks have transformed him. His remark “in less than a fortnight I was quite at home, and happy, among my new companions” (201) shows the importance of the relationship between students, which was almost like a second family. Nică’s account of the time
19 spent with his classmates also shows a close friendship. They form a meaningful relationship and manage to create lasting memories such as the incident when they used their books to catch flies instead of learning. The third interaction is that between the others and the environment. The result of this relationship between the teachers and the school is the creation of a certain atmosphere. In David Copperfield the rules imposed by the teachers, the punishments, the timetable of the school activities, the lodging conditions and the image of Salem House create a prison-like environment. This is not the case in Dr. Strong’s school where the atmosphere allows students to learn and improve themselves. In Memories of My Boyhood, the atmosphere in the schools in which the process of learning takes place varies from productive in Humuleşti to unreliable in the seminary in Fălticeni, also called the “priest factory” whose methods of teaching were “a terrible way to stultify the mind” (71). The present analysis proves the importance of space in the development of the individual, but it also reveals the fact that it is a process that results from the complex interactions of social, spatial and individual factors. In “Milieus of Creativity: The Role of Places, Environments, and Spatial Contexts”, Peter Meusburger argues for the importance of space “Place matters, because a stimulating environment and a talented individual must come together and interact before a creative process can occur” (98), but he also warns against the dangers of conformity that might restrict an individual’s freedom of thought and expression (122). It is therefore necessary for a child character to be evaluated from multiple perspectives in order to understand how various factors influence their transition to maturity.
Conclusion The spatial approach used to analyse Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Ion Creangă’s Memories of My Boyhood offers fresh insight into the vital role that society and the schools as space/ place played in shaping the child characters. In David Copperfield, the chronotope of the city reflects the realities of the nineteenth-century society whereas, in Memories of My Boyhood, the whole narrative revolves around the chronotope of the idyllic village. It is obvious that the learning institutions presented in these two novels do not act as sole influencing factors. Another noteworthy aspect is the fact that some institutions failed to achieve their purpose, that is, to provide knowledge, while others managed to have a positive impact on the development of their students.
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Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M. “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel”. The Dialogic Imagination: four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press: 1981. https://archive.org/details/dialogicimaginat0000bakh_r5j1/page/n5/mode/2up Beaton, Roderick. “The World of Fiction and the World “Out There”: the Case of the Byzantine Novel”. Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider. Papers from the Thirty- Second Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, 1998, 1st Edition. Edited by Dion C. Smythe. New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 179-188 Ciugureanu, Adina. Victorian Selves (A Study in the Literature of the Victorian Age). Constanța: Ovidius University Press, 2004, pp 54-85. Creangă, Ion. Memories of My Boyhood, Stories and Tales. Translated by Ana Cartianu and R.C. Johnston. București: Minerva, 1978. http://www.tkinter.smig.net/Romania/Creanga/index.htm
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. London: Puffin Books, 2012.
Gustafson, Per. “Meanings of Place: Everyday Experience and Theoretical Conceptualizations.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 21(1) ,2001, pp. 5-16. Heidegger, Martin. On time and being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972. Meusburger, Peter. “Milieus of Creativity: The Role of Places, Environments, and Spatial Contexts”. Milieus of Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spatiality of Creativity. Edited by Peter Meusburger, Joachim Funke and Edgar Wunder. Springer, 2009. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London, New York: Verso, 1998 Pickles, John. PHENOMENOLOGY, SCIENCE AND GEOGRAPHY. Spatiality and the Human Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Richardson, Bill. Spatiality and Symbolic Expression: On the Links between Place and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Robb, John. “Time and Biography”.Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality. Edited by Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik and Sarah Tarlow. New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, 2002, pp. 153-171. Tally, Robert T. Jr. Spatiality. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
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THE PORTRAIT OF A STEAMY, (UN)CORSETED SUB-CULTURE
Elena Enciu
Abstract: Most scholars trace the beginning of the neo-Victorian novel back to the 1960s, followed by steampunk novels some twenty years later. Also, the first critical works trying to define neo-Victorianism appeared in the late 1990s, before scholars started to write their papers on steampunk around the year 2009. Nevertheless, this does not mean that steampunk derives from neo-Victorianism, but rather, in a more realistic approach, that the two literary genres and the two critical traditions evolved separately, discussing similar themes. As steampunk does not seem to go anywhere, except backwards into the future, this article aims at exploring the main elements and characteristics of this escapist sub-genre in novels written by Gail Carriger, Kate Locke, China Mieville, W. Gibson and B Sterling.
Keywords: steampunk, retrofuturism, magic, (techno)fantasy, science, steam, corsets
If fantasy is a genre born in Great Britain and adopted by the Americans in the 1970s, steampunk took shape directly in the United States. In 1975 three young authors, studying at California University, Tim Powers, James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter were proposed by editor Roger Elwood to participate in a series of ten volumes about King Arthur. Coincidentally, the Arthurian source of inspiration is characteristic to fantasy and emerged stronger in Victorian England. Jeter, who writes Morlock Night to rewrite Arthur in the nineteenth century, uses Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor as his main source of inspiration and makes the study known to the other two authors. All three share a common passion for Dickens’s work. As the project fails, they are left with the already written manuscripts. Nevertheless, Jeter succeeds in publishing Morlock Knight in 1979, specifically identified as a sequel to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). The term “steampunk”, coined by accident by Jeter, has given rise to much speculation and debate. It is baked in the evolution of science-fiction as a reaction to “cyberpunk”, an overly- technologized fictional world where the frontiers between humans and machines, between the real and the virtual worlds get thinner giving way to a liberal, cynical world. Cyberpunk is a dystopic type of science-fiction that brings to the center the hacker as both hero and anti-hero, a
22 sub-culture with higher aspirations that takes itself too seriously. Almost opposed to it, steampunk suggests a playful return to the sources, with a visible pleasure to storytelling. The “punk” elements continue to divide the community of fans. To be fair, nobody can prove that Jeter can claim the discovery of something truly revolutionary and Mike Perschon reinforces this idea when he criticises audiences for believing that everything written under this name must “have a resistance force” as it is not applicable to all works.(Perschon 50) Part of the confusion is caused by authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling who wrote seminal works in both genres. The Difference Engine (1990) is considered one of the most important works of the genre although it does not reflect the relaxed style of the beginnings of steampunk. Despite the definition given by numerous “fans” of the genre, steampunk is not Victorian science-fiction. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are rather the grandparents of this sub-culture called steampunk, initiated by accident by James Blaylock, Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter during the 1980s that resembles more a visual culture than a literary one. Steampunk dares to imagine to what extent the past would be different if the technological advancements of the future arrived earlier. It is a type of retrofuturist science-fiction that uses Victorian inventions and gadgets such as steam engines to reinvent this age. Retrofuturism as a trend, having steampunk as the main character, refers to more than an age that has lost its trust in the future. The exact origin of steampunk is uncertain and shows significant variations from one novel to another. Certain works, such as The Difference Engine (2011), as historiographic metafiction, move through steampunk and neo-Victorianism, suspended between the paraliterary limbo and the consecrated postmodernism. Certain journals, like “The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies”1, demonstrate a certain open-mindedness regarding steampunk and do not treat this sub-culture as an accepted branch of neo-Victorianism. In terms of literary and critical enterprise, neo-Victorian literature and steampunk have their own separate paths that occasionaly happen to cross. It is also very important to reiterate the fact that steampunk is not only or before anything a literary genre: according to Mike Perschon it is an aesthetic genre. (11) Through fashion, magic and dance shows, steampunk manifests its aesthetic influence. It is close to impossible to name all movies that show steampunk elements (Sherlock Holmes of 2009 and 2011), but their growing presence underlines the strength of holmesian adaptations. Steampunk is everywhere: in fashion, art, music, accessories, literature and film. A steampunk novel can be written under the influence of its predecessors, but it is written first and foremost in strong connection to the present and within a material culture: Want your steampunk to have more punk? Fill the aesthetic with your activism. Want your steampunk to have more steam? Make your aesthetic accurate. Just looking for a good time? Then add some absinthe to your aesthetic, and let loose the dirigibles of war (or exploration) and head for the horizon. Implicit in retrofuturism’s malleability as either nostalgia or regret is the elasticity of steampunk as an aesthetic: these three lenses can be trained upon myriad types of stories, serious and whimsical alike. (Perschon 241) When discussing steampunk, the problematic derives directly from the aesthetic approach, relying on the notions of “bricolage” and “detournement”, defined by Patrick Novotny in his article “Chapter 6: No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration”. When discussing cyberpunk, an earlier form of science-fiction,
1 In the special issue from 2010 of “The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies”, Jason B. Jones is one of the authors who makes a clear distinction between steampunk and neo-Victorianism, setting the two ideologies apart in his analysis of Alan Moore’s works. 23
Novotny makes a distinction between the two forms of appropriation stating that “detournement is the appropriation of existing cultural fragments in such a way as to alter and invert their meaning” (Novotny 100) while “bricolage is the transgressive activity of individuals who are able to appropriate cultural styles and images for their own ends.” (102) Perschon uses the term “bricolage” instead of pastiche to describe the checkered style of steampunk authors who bring together a multitude of elements in order to imitate a particular author and designates “detournement” to texts with a powerful revisionist potential. He insists that “the spectrum should not be read as valorizing one of these positions over the other” (Perschon 98), but at a closer look, it is “detournement” that enables a closer perspective on the social and political structures, left in confusion after the technological revolution. Mike Perschon, therefore, offers a perspective on steampunk that is both scholarly and personalized. He cites the works of Hadley, Kaplan and Gutleben and revisits the criticism against the too limited definition of neo-Victorianism (226), formulated by Heilmann and Llewellyn in their seminal study Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (2010), who argue that neo-Victorian texts must be “self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery, and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (4). Maybe the definition of neo-Victorianism that he provides in The Steampunk Aesthetic seems too vague:
neo-Victorianism indicates steampunk’s evocation but not accurate re-creation of the nineteenth-century. […] steampunk is the suggestion of this period, but not necessarily place or even time. Steampunk can occur in any time, and any locale (in this world or a secondary one), but it repeatedly suggests the nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century to us in one way or another. (Perschon 238)
This statement does not include the intention to redefine the national or temporal limits, to rewrite history from a different perspective. To him, neo-Victorianism is an element in his area of research, an element of lesser importance. Thus, one of the characteristics of the genre is precisely the fact that it lacks a clear theoretical ground: it does not have a clear definition that unites all fans and critics. At its origin, the novel is all about a playfulness that an entire body of works chose to take seriously. Steampunk is ludic and manages to encompass the magic of the past. This fact, rarely mentioned by other critics other than Perschon is more visible in Gail Carriger’s trilogy The Parasol Protectorate (2009) and less in The Difference Engine (1990), where the supernatural is absent. This shows that steampunk has always been fantasy masked as science-fiction, or a hybrid genre that ignores generalizing boundaries. Characterized as a mode, a sub-genre, an aesthetic, steampunk is an extremely flexible term, both on a grammatical and conceptual level and this flexibility is reflected by its perspective on time, gathering in just one word many different kinds of retro-futurisms. Steampunk is another face of retro-futurism. Perhaps, when it comes to the contemporary production and the comprehension of the audiences, steampunk is retro-futurism. Steampunk is not just about otherness: the term is part of a ramification of names that, on the one hand, colonizes the twentieth century with its dieselpunk and atompunk, and on the other hand, glances into the past through clockpunk. But these distinctions are little mentioned and little respected. The sub-genres continue to emerge without our knowing whether they should be taken seriously or not. In his book, The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of
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Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature (2010), Jeff VanderMeer even provides a small humoristic guide on the usage of new coinages that adds to clockpunk and dieselpunk terms such as boilerpunk, raygun gothic, stitchpunk, mannerpunk, where Gail Carriger’s works might fit, and gaslight romance. (58-59) Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, steampunk has gained notoriety outside the borders of its mother-country, the United States of America. Using images of heroes and dragons, corsets and gadgets in bright colors or, on the contrary, in dark shades, steampunk novels catch the eye of the reader. The books themselves, apart from their content, become important as aesthetic objects as one should always be reminded that steampunk, despite its growing popularity as a literary genre, finds its natural habitat at conventions or on specialized websites that promote objects, items of clothing and accessories fashioned to suit certain tastes. Thus, it is before anything else a material sub-culture, an extremely visible movement that remains marginal. In a narrow and historical definition of the genre, science-fiction as a specific literary genre does not exist before nineteenth century science became sufficiently advanced so that authors like Mary Shelley could become inspired to write novels in which men move beyond the boundaries of what was known as possible. By doing this, it aligns itself to an older stream of imagination that makes it return to the first mythical stories of humanity. Clearly defining this genre is important in order to understand that imaginary writings are not a uniform mass. There is a distinction to be established between the scientific discourse in the context of a steampunk novel and the extrapolation of a scientifically proven fact in telling a story: science-fiction is a narrative inspired by science, resulting from science and not a magical invention shaped to look like science and formulated using scientific terminology. This difference is important. In her novels, Gail Carriger plunges into a serious thought process: confronted with the living dead, nineteenth century science does not have the means necessary to formulate a theory explaining such an aberration, one that produces a system based on the idea that the soul is a quantifiable matter, a notion inconceivable for Victorian spirituality. In her works the difference between the living, the living dead and the inanimate result from the nature of the links between the body and the soul, or the presence or absence of particles of inner “aether”. Despite the fact that the characters in Gail Carriger’s Blameless (2010) enjoy exploring the supernatural mystery using a pseudo-scientific discourse, they cannot “make” science: the attempts of Club Hypocras to artificially make vampires and warewolves with transfusions and electroshocks are not only deemed to fail but also reprehensive from a moral point of view. In the end, this attempt ended up reducing the Club to “[…] only one small branch, and their actions became sadly public. Quite the embarrassment, in the end” (Blameless 49) The personal dimension seems essential to understand the role of magic as a superior, transcendental force: it is not necessarily good or moral. The disruption of the natural order represented by necromancy is limited to just one man and one moment, while evoking the advancements of science in neo-Victorian fiction seems to operate in the shadow of the twentieth century horrors, such as eugenics or the atomic bomb. Steampunk, that tries to exorcise this menacing horizon with its pseudo-science, is even more impregnated by it. Magic has a sort of inner energy, stronger than that of human nature and is able to limit the damage that humans might cause, opposed to science which does not have the same inner energy and it is limited by human agency. The privileged status of present-day skepticism and rationalism has been the object of scholars’ attention throughout the years. In her article “Anna Kingsford: Scientist and Sorceress”(2006), Alison Butler states that science and magic should be
25 better understood instead of considered “exclusive and disparate notions” and she argues that “the study of magic is particularly susceptible to this type of present-centeredness because of the traditional understanding of magic as belonging to the primitive and the irrational.” (Butler 62) Thus, the difference between magic and science is not only limited to a set of generalized labels or the authorial perspective. This idea might seem difficult to reconcile with the technological advancement, or with the things considered impossible, magical and in time they become part of the daily routine thanks to progress. In the Victorian period, there were numerous points of contact between science and magic, thus the line between the two concepts becomes particularly fluid in neo-Victorian novels:
[…] unlike the more rigid, discipline-based, institutionalized science characteristic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, nineteenth-century science is both chaotic and unregulated. In the first three decades of the century, science was still closely allied, at least in the public imagination, with magic, alchemy and the occult. (Willis 10)
To be able to make a clearer distinction between magic and science, it is necessary to clarify the historical context of the fictional creation. As Alex Warwick argues in his article “Margins and Centers” (2006): “it is […] not new to suggest that nineteenth-century science is deeply influenced by, as well as being an influence on, nineteenth-century culture […], particularly literature.” (5) Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless character, Sherlock Holmes, earns the Victorian public’s adulation despite his personal flaws through the use of his extensive knowledge on phrenology and the analysis of fingerprints to solve the cases and save the Empire, thus validating them as sciences, but a contemporary author who writes a detective story cannot adhere to the same line of thought, especially when he knows the consequences described by criminal psychology. The neo-Victorian writer is unable to escape his or her own context when re-writing the past. It can be tempting to favor the self-made theories, to say that science-fiction is to be taken as it is and that the objective criteria that might lead to a clear definition of the genre are open to negotiation. Perhaps a certain lack of distinctions between imaginative literatures in general can invalidate the history of science-fiction and reduce the development of distinct genres to editorial etiquette. At the same time, there is also a point of view according to which novels such as Carriger’s popular series belong to science-fiction if the focus is not on hard science, but on social science, as the theory on the ways of the soul is both difficult to follow on a pseudo- scientific level, and intuitive due to its social applications. As Mike Perschon emphasizes, the absence of an official definition for steampunk, a definition that takes into consideration the expansion of the genre, leaves the door open to a hidden arrogance on the part of some critics. As an example, Gail Carriger’s work was judged as not sufficiently “punk” to satisfy the self- proclaimed purists: “the series was marked as a romance, and ‘real steampunk’ could not be romance (this by the ‘serious’ Steampunk aficionados, who wish to exclude any silly girls from their tree fort).” (Perschon 86) Perschon has a descriptive approach to steampunk and would rather consider the balance between different elements without insisting on fixed patterns and boundaries. Recently, along with steampunk writer Cherie Priest and pop-culture scholar Jess Nevins, I have begun using the idea of a spectrum for talking about steampunk. The spectrum answers the question ‘how steampunk is it?’ not ‘is it steampunk or not?’. If you look at the side of those
26 goggles, you’ll see a little dial attached to each lens’ control- that’s to govern intensity. With those dials, we can intensify each feature’s presence in our goggle-gaze […] (17) According to him, steampunk relies on three major ingredients: retrofuturism, neo- Victorianism and technofantasy, with the latter easily destroying the difference between magic and science. Technofantasy would constitute steampunk’s specific “novum”, “irrational and inexplicable to the modern reader.” (157) This assumed irrationality can be translated, especially in Carriger, into a ludic usage of the pseudo-scientific discourse. Asked about the source of inspiration for coining these words, Carriger invokes her fascination for the tradition of technical jargon initiated in series such as Star Trek. The etymology of these coined “fake words” could be entertaining to analyze, but real pleasure resides in the accumulation of new words, each more absurd than the other, the enchanting rhetorical questions and the emphasis expressed by the choice of punctuation, the interjections and the italics. The words, most of which are incomprehensible and almost impossible to pronounce, are invoking sounds rather than a real dialogue. Perschon, touching upon the problematic association of Star Wars to technofantasy, concludes: “SF like Star Trek is making an attempt to sound scientific. Steampunk rarely tries.” (164) Another important element, even if it seems like a reductive synecdoche for steampunk, steam is not just a smoke curtain, but a moving force, a bridge between all these works. Each steampunk author exploits in his or her own way the poetical value of an invented source of energy, but the driving force imagined by Mieville in Perdido Street Station (2003) goes the extra mile. The mathematics that makes his motor function constitutes a xeno-encyclopedic version of chaos theory. It means to calculate the potential energy of a situation and to make the resulting equation into a machine propelled by steam and/or thaumaturgy. Thus, it becomes possible to access the relationship between cause and effect, so much so that the crisis increases and gradually consumes itself, creating a retroactive loop that can lead to perpetual movement. The pseudo-scientific jargon is by no means to be taken seriously as fact: Isaac demonstrates the importance of an intension by conducting an experiment on a piece of cheese: “The crisis was all about potentiality. If he had no genuine intention to crush the cheese, it would not be in crisis. You could not trick an ontological field.” (Mieville 216) In addition to humor, it is the literary value of such language that amazes readers and scholars alike, the way in which, during tense moments in the intrigue, these paradoxes give mathematics a poetic dimension:
The engine applied rigorous crisis logic to the original operation. A mathematical command had created a perfect arithmetic analogue of a source code from disparate material, and that analogue was simultaneously identical to and radically divergent from the original it mimicked. […] The process was, from absolute first principles of analysis, modelling and conversion, utterly riddled with crisis. (Mieville 554)
This passage, despite its serious and scientific tone, is “riddled” with paradoxes, starting with the perception over time, trapped between the infinite – the imaginary mathematical operation is detailed over multiple pages- and something almost instantaneous. Perhaps Perdido Street Station cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts: the writing process, from the occurrence of the first idea to laying it on paper, is expressed by the “crisis” that can also be read as a metaphor for inspiration or like an element in the literary structure. The metatextual dimension is evident and constitutes a characteristic of steampunk, the genre that imitates works from the Victorian canon in a manner totally divergent from the model.
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Mieville encourages the idea that through this pseudo-science all the energies invented for and by steampunk are at their core, literary energies. Far from falling into self-reflection, the meta-literary characteristic fuels in its turn all the different communication systems that reflect on and question the process of writing imaginative literature. Apart from steam and gadgets, corsets are essential and easily recognizable steampunk elements and so are the different sources of energy proposed to replace steam in the discussed novels. Both elements present a real potential in overthrowing Victorian power structures and have their own discursive codes. For any reader interested in the subversive qualities of steampunk clothing bricolage, the fetishism of corsets represents a dilemma: the negative implications of encouraging women to adopt a means of controlling the female body to the limit of torture could actually result in progress. In the uchronic setting of The Immortal Empire series written by Kate Locke, corsets are inevitable and are modified and adapted so that they serve as armor for the bodyguards called halfies. God Save the Queen (2012), Locke’s first book in the series, introduces Xandra Vardan, the daughter of a vampire and a prostitute, now fighting in the Royal Guard to protect the Aristocracy. In Locke’s The Queen is Dead (2013), the second book in the series, Xandra, who makes a remarkable entrance when, during a combat training course, states : “there was nothing special about my clothes- snug black and white striped bloomers with a vest-like corset, and my usual arse-kicking boots, but the kids continued to stare” (38) The lexical field describing societal norms – “nothing special”, “usual”- serve as a pretext to describe her garments with false modesty. But the mixture itself is subversive in its eclecticism: the boots are more weapons to be used in combat, rather than fashionable accessories, and the idea of combining a corset with the bloomers is certainly obsolete. This article of clothing played an essential role in the women’s liberation movements, first in 1850, then again between 1870 and 1880 and remains controversial today. From a respectable Victorian lady’s point of view, Xandra is wearing openly her undergarments, but uses this as a source of power instead of a vulnerability or an objectification. Thus, the corset becomes one of the most important symbols of steampunk as it is an object that belongs to the past, made iconic in the nineteenth-century, and stands for the politics of an entire society and for oppression. In wearing as the only clothes what was originally created to stay hidden, all of the original connotations are re-interpreted. The importance of bright colors in Xandra Vardan’s clothes and sugary hair marks a visual connection between punk fashion and Lolita2 style. Although uncommon, Gail Carriger was given the opportunity to choose the cover image for Soulless (2009)3 and later made it her mission to include a description of the dresses worn by the models on each of the following volumes. Thus, clothes and dress code are not just random accessories, but profoundly personal within the novels and prove an interchangeable relationship between the images and the text. If one of the characters from Parasol Protectorate would find it difficult to accept wearing their corsets on the exterior, Carriger herself follows steampunk tendency and proves to have an impressive expertise regarding corsets. The “Retro Rack” blog, where Gail Carriger talks about steampunk fashion and provides detailed descriptions of the outfits she chooses to wear at conventions4, serves as an important
2 Fashion style emerging in the 1990s, in Japan. It promotes doll-like casual outfits and it can be divided into a plethora of sub-genres such as gothic Lolita, punk or industrial Lolita. 3 http://gailcarriger.com/2009/10/07/how-soulless-got-its-cover/ 4 http://retrorack.blogspot.com/2011/10/proper-foundation-garments-part-3.html 28 communication channel between author and audience and allows an even more personal approach to the text. On this blog Carriger shares “backstage” secrets and intimate details about her works. This can be viewed as a marketing strategy, but also a way of appropriating, personalizing the literary endeavor that produces the series of novels. Also, once steampunk fashion became a lucrative industry, the sub-culture valorizes the do-it-yourself trend. Each item of clothing becomes charged with its own history, maybe as important as the final visual effect. Steampunk’s metaliterarity does not rest only in its isolated images, but forms and informs all the works belonging to the genre. It is even more surprising that even though steampunk is not primarily a literary movement, it appears to be just like one of its engines, a communication engine that responds to its own questions and continually produces new stories. Steampunk, that does not appear to insist on passing serious theories, brings into attention the emptiness of recycling clichés, but what is truly remarkable is not the technical fetishism. The difference between surface and depth, between the golden gadgets of technofantasy and the plain difference engines isn’t always clear and is almost always flexible and interchangeable. The neo- Victorian elements can easily glide from diversion to divergence in their treatment of technology and history.
Works Cited
Butler, Alison. “Anna Kingsford: Scientist and Sorceress”. David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis (eds.) Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking. London: Anthem Press, 2006, pp. 59-70 Carriger, Gail. Soulless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 1), New York: Orbit, 2009 ------Changeless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 2) New York: Orbit, 2010 ------Blameless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 3) New York: Orbit, 2010 ------Heartless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 4) New York: Orbit, 2011 ------Timeless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 5) New York: Orbit, 2012. ------“How Soulless Got Its Cover” October 7, 2009 http://gailcarriger.com/2009/10/07/how-soulless-got-its-cover/ ------”Proper Foundation Garmets, Part 3: Corsets!” October 27, 2011 http://retrorack.blogspot.com/2011/10/proper-foundation-garments-part-3.html Gibson, William and Sterling, Bruce, The Difference Engine. London: Orion Publishing Co., 2011 Hadley, Louisa. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 Heilmann, Ann and Llewellyn, Mark. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century,1999-2009. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Jeter, K.W. Morlock Night [1979]. Botley: Angry Robot, 2011 Jones, B. Jason. “Steampunk & the Neo-Victorian in Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”. Neo-Victorian Studies 3:1, 2010, pp. 99-126 Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana- Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
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Press, 2007. Kohlke, Marie-Louise. “A Neo-Victorian Smorgasbord:Review of Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s 'Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1990-2009'.” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2010): 206-217. La Ferla, Ruth. “Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds” May 8, 2008 https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html Locke, Kate. God Save the Queen. ( The Immortal Empire Book 1) London: Hachette Digital, 2012. ------The Queen is Dead. ( The Immortal Empire Book 2) London: Hachette Digital, 2012. ------Long Live the Queen. ( The Immortal Empire Book 3) London: Orbit, 2013. Mieville, China. Perdido Street Station. New York: Del Rey Books, 2003. Novotny, J. Patrick. “Chapter 6: No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration”. Political Science Fiction, eds Donald M Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998, p. 99-123 Perschon, Mike. The Steampunk Aesthetic: Technofantasies in a Neo-Victorian Retrofuture. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2012 Vandermeer, Jeff. The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature. New York: Abrams, 2011 Warwick, Alex. ”Margins and Centers”. David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis (eds.) Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth- Century Thinking. London: Anthem Press, 2006, pp. 1-16 Wells, H.G. The Time Machine [1895]. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995 Willis, Martin. Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent,Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006
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BETWEEN SEMIOSIS AND SOCIAL PRACTICE: FAIRCLOUGH’S VERSION OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Adina Ciugureanu, Fatima Farhoud
Abstract: This article provides an overview of how texts have been researched in developments of Discourse Analysis that have considered the interplay of social practices and linguistic structures. This survey cannot leave out the social theories that deal with semiotic analysis and how the semiotic dimension of communication is linked to corresponding social practices. In this socio-linguistic narrative, Fairclough’s pioneering theories in Critical Discourse Analysis would assume a key position in what is to follow below, starting from earlier developments in Discourse Analysis, cultural studies and semiotics. What is more, discourse has a constructive impact on aspects of identity, a central concept in many approaches related to culture and its critical investigation.
Keywords: Semiotics, CDA, discourse, cultural studies
Norman Fairclough is a key figure in contemporary context-based approaches to discourse as social interaction, in which ideology plays a key position, within larger formal structures provided by semiosis and its attending representation complements. Discourse is not a collection of linguistic structures, it is, as Fairclough’s title of his 1989 volume, associated with power. It is also associated with identity and its social dimensions, while the semiotic component of human communication is also to be taken into account. Fairclough identifies dimensions or aspects of the so-called “constructive effects of discourse” as far as social identities are concerned: “ Discourse contributes first of all to the construction of what are variously referred to as social identities and subject positions for social subjects and types of self (Fairclough 1992: 64). It is known that a language displays certain communication possibilities and a specific potential, but it excludes others, by the sets of meanings that are associated with certain combinations of linguistics elements, and the ways in which they are configured. But texts as elements of social events and interactions are not merely the outcome of the potentials promoted by languages. One needs to recognize intermediate organisational entities of a specifically linguistic sort, the linguistic elements of networks of social practices. According to Fairclough social practices are the things people have accepted and learned from the environment, culture, and society they live in. Discourse is therefore not only what is said, but also how something is said within a certain structure, combining semiotic, linguistic, and social dimensions. To put it briefly, Fairclough defines his main preoccupation with the “connections between language use and unequal relations of power” (Fairclough 1989, p.1).
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An American undertaking, the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, under the guidance of leading semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok, initiated in the 1950s, has displayed a preoccupation with bringing together semiotic analysis and the study of culture and society. In so doing, it has brought into an interdisciplinary conversation theorists from the social sciences and the humanities, including those from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Great Britain (Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall). This, in a way, prepared the ground for related research in what would become Critical Discourse Analysis, in a tradition including the semiotic preoccupations of Claude Levi Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure. Iris Smith refers to Professor Sebeok and to his Oklahoma Project for Discourse within both an interdisciplinary and international context, also covering a long historical span:
There is no “American school” of semiotics. No one who knows Thomas A. Sebeok or his work would be surprised to hear him say this. The geographical boundaries of the United States or those of Canada, Brazil, France, or Sebeok’s own Hungarian homeland certainly have not contained, and do not appear to have significantly shaped, the development of semiotics in the last hundred years (Smith 3).
Although the social dimension is increasingly influential in Critical Discourse Analysis and in cultural studies, scholars in the Sebeok tradition stress and focus upon semiotic examination in light of the fact that semiosis influences social practice, social organizations, and social order. In other words, semiosis is both socially involved and performative, in spite of the early impression that it is highly formal. It is aware of the fact that we usually communicate rather casually, although people ordinarily talk or write in order to create a response or a reaction. Answers to the question of how semiosis causes impacts are easy to find in common social interaction. Clarifying how semiosis creates impacts would require a causal clarification that initially distinguishes what it is that produces impacts linked to properties of causal obligation, a relatively hidden causal component. For Fairclough in CDA as well as for semioticians proper, semiosis has been seen as an element of the social process which is dialectically related to other components. This combination shows that language communication does not use a transparent language but involves both vision and perspective, the latter being largely ideological. As Eduard Vlad puts it, “To assume that language is transparent and that we can see the real world through it is naïve (Vlad 2018: 16). Relations between structural elements are dialectical, being different but not ‘discrete’. The trend in critical social science of perceiving social reality as ‘conceptually and culturally mediated’, such that the objects of Critical Discourse Analysis are concomitantly material and semiotic in character leads to the realization that it is necessary to focus on the dialectical relations between the material and semiotic in both normative and explanatory critical work. According to Fairclough 2006, the objects of critical social analysis are ‘material–semiotic’, simultaneously material and semiotic in character. A central concern is with relations between the material and the semiotic (or ‘discourse’), which would be seen as dialectical relations. Significantly, his 2008 book is named A Dialectical-Relation Approach to Critical Discourse Dnalysis in Social Research. Fairclough argues that CDA focuses also on the relations between semiotic and other social elements but not only on semiosis as such, the nature of this relationship differing between institutions and organizations, in addition to time and place, and it needs to be established through analysis.
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Power, institutions, beliefs and cultural values are semiotic in part, they internalize semiosis without being totally dependent on it for the revelation of their mechanisms. So, it would be insufficient if analyses of political institutions, for example, would consider these institutions as purely semiotic objects. Then, one couldn’t ask such important questions as: what is the relationship between semiotics and other elements that define human social interaction and account for power asymmetries and inequality, for example? All social elements have dialectical relations of meaning, being different but discrete at the same time. These relations between semiosis and other elements call for interdisciplinary research – more exactly, it requires CDA to be integrated within frameworks for trans-disciplinary research, in which, apart from semiotics, critical cultural theory and empirical cultural studies approaches figure prominently. CDA is brought into interaction with sociological and social logical inquiry in an attempt to explore to what degree and in what ways discourse changes are changes in social dynamics, to investigate the socially transformative impacts of discursive practices. Moreover, it is a theory or method which is in a dialogic relationship with other social theories and methods. It is to engage with them in a transdisciplinary rather than just an interdisciplinary way, by the meaning that the particular co-engagements on particular aspects of the social process may give rise to developments of theory and method which change the boundaries between different theories and methods. What distinguishes transdisciplinary from other forms of interdisciplinary research is that, in bringing disciplines and theories together to address research issues, it sees dialogue between them as a source for the theoretical and methodological development of each of them. Fairclough argues that critical social analysis has an interdisciplinary character, due to the fact that objects need it to bring together disciplines whose primary concern is with material facets of social realities and disciplines whose primary concern is with semiotic facets. This means that dialectical relations between the material and the semiotic are a necessary focus in both normative and explanatory critique. This approach focuses on the relation between structure and events, then, it focuses on the relation between semiotics and other forms of inquiry, these two relations are called – dialectical relations. Fairclough suggests that particular ways of representing social life (discourses) may in many ways be enacted in specific ways of acting (genres or social practices), and inculcated in certain ways of being (certain styles). They can be seen together in texts as what brings subject, objects and action – the so-called cosmologies of a phenomenon – to prominence. Discourse, genre, styles and social practices contribute to the structure/agency/action link. Thus, a systematic analysis of text can in many ways capture this complex pattern. In addition, another systematic type of discourse component is register, which represents a variety of language linked to specific situations of use stressing discourse’s context- bound, structural and functional characteristics. Thus, according to Douglas Biber,
The description of a register includes three major components: the situational context, the typical linguistic features, and the functional relationships between the first two components (Biber and Conrad, 2009: 6–11). The situational context involves description of the circumstances of text production and reception, as well as the relationships among participants. For example: Is the text produced in speech or writing? Is the addressee present, and is communication interactive? What are the primary communicative purposes?
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According to Fairclough, focusing on discourse can thus provide inroads into various dimensions of social life and how they are arranged around a social phenomenon – their origins and outcomes. Social life is reflexive. That is, people not only act and interact within networks of social practices, they also interpret and represent to themselves and each other what they do, and these reflexive and self-reflexive interpretations and representations shape and reshape what they do. In his 1992 volume, Discourse and Social Change, Fairclough constructs a perceptive framework for his type of discourse analysis that clearly sets discourse in a more comprehensive context of social relations. It combines text analysis, the analysis of processes of text production and interpretation, and the social analysis of discourse events. Fairclough has consistently worked on a dialectical theory of discourse and transdisciplinary approach to social interaction and change. His research has examined the discursive aspect of contemporary processes of social transformation. In Fairclough’s theoretical interpretations, discourse is a three-dimensional concept which involves three major aspects, ‘texts’ which are the objects of linguistic analysis, ‘discursive practices’ which refer to the production, distribution, and consumption of texts, and, last but not least, ‘social practices’ which can be defined as the intermediate organizational entities between structures and events. These discursive practices are most likely related to the power relations, ideologies and hegemonic struggles that discourses enact and dramatize. More specifically, according to Fairclough, discursive practices refer to processes of text production, distribution, and consumption. These processes refer to different kinds of discourse depending on social factors. Thus, texts are produced in specific ways in specific social contexts. Fairclough exemplifies their action in newspaper processing and publication in the following way:
a newspaper article is produced through complex routines of a collective nature, by a team whose members are variously involved in its different stages of production - accessing sources such as press agency reports, transforming these sources (often themselves already texts) into a draft report, deciding where to place the report in the newspaper, and edltlng the report (Fairclough 1992: 78).
There are three types of analyses carried out in Fairclough's model: the textual analysis, the discursive analysis and the social analysis. Fairclough proposes that “textual analysis involves the analysis of the way propositions are structured and the way propositions are combined and sequenced” (Fairclough 1992: 79). There follow grammar and vocabulary components. Cohesion in texts mainly deals with people's word choice and word meaning and how they create a unitary whole, structurally speaking. Moreover, metaphor deals with words combined into clauses and sentences. Transitivity, modality are instrumental in showing with how clauses and sentences are linked together. Connectives argumentation deals with large scale organizational properties, interactional control, sentence length and complexity. Texts are produced in specific ways in specific social contexts and they are also consumed differently in different social contexts. Consumption and production can be individual or collective. The second type of analysis, the discursive analysis, specifies the nature of the processes of text production and interpretation. Is has to do with the interaction of the text production and interpretation, which has the same characters as in the text-and-interaction view of discourse. This type of analysis is undertaken at the interpretation stage.
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Fairclough applies three distinct but interrelated aspects to link the text to its wider social context which are: the coherence of texts, the force of utterances and the intertextuality of texts. Sometimes the coherence relations are constructed inferentially, driven by explicit features of the text, such as anaphoric references, connectives, transitional phrases and rhetorical predicates. Attention should be given to speech acts after text analysis in order to analyze the functions of the utterances. Intertextuality is the property that texts have of being full of segments of other texts, hence, it sheds light on the three processes (production, distribution and consumption). Production in an intertextual overview focuses on how the historicity of texts always constitutes additions to existing 'chains of speech communication' consisting of prior texts to which they respond. Then, distribution helps exploring stable networks in which texts move along, undergoing predictable transformations as they shift from one text type to another, for example, political speeches usually become or change to a news report, but focuses on how the ‘outside’ of a text is brought into the text. Moreover, there are two types of intertextuality, Fairclough argues, which are: manifest intertextuality and constitutive intertextuality or interdiscursivity (Fairclough 1992:85). In manifest intertextuality, other texts are explicitly presented in the text under study; they are ‘manifestly’ marked or cued by features on the surface of the text, such as quotation marks through which the original text is reformed and changed. This reformation and manipulation of original texts are referred to by Fairclough as 'direct discourse representation' in which parts of other texts are incorporated into a text and usually explicitly marked off with devices such as quotation marks and reporting clauses. And finally, the constitutive intertextuality refers to the complex relation of genres or discourse types’ convention. Fairclough argues that “a text may incorporate another text without the latter being explicitly cued: one can respond to another text in the way one words one's own text” (Fairclough 1992: 104). To be more specific, text analysis is not only related to or linked to linguistic analysis; it is also assumed that interdiscursive analysis also has an important part to play. Fairclough argues that this type of analysis sees texts in terms of the different discourses, genres and styles they draw upon and articulate together. It is closely related to orders of discourse and social change where many values are integrated to go beyond the textual level and cause the receiver to look for hidden discourses. Textual analysis includes, apart from purely linguistic analysis, analysis where appropriate visual images and body language display features of texts that can be seen as revealing its interdiscursive dimensions. Fairclough’s model differs from other models in that this theory’s main interest is in examining intertextual relations as power relations, and arguing that intertextuality can provide a key site of contestation and struggle, likely to lead to what might be called positive social change. This practically explains the difference between semiotics and Discourse Analysis, on the one hand, which are more linguistically and structurally concerned, and Critical Discourse Analysis which, like more empirically oriented cultural studies approaches and more theoretical critical Cultural Theory, are socially committed. The third dimension in Fairclough’s framework is ‘social analysis.’ It considers discourse as social practice. That is, discourse in relation to ideology and power placing it within a view of power as hegemony, and a view of the evolution of power relations as hegemonic struggle (Fairclough,1992:86). Texts can bring about changes in people’s knowledge by meaning that they learn from them, thus reminding of semiotic processes and apporaches. Many kinds of social elements are linked to the area of public attitudes, beliefs, values. They articulate semiosis together with other non-semiotic social elements. Social practices mediate and intervene in the
35 relationship between social structures at the most general and abstract level and specific social events, social fields and institutions. These take shape as networks of social practices. Social practices involve verbalising discourse and weaving it together with non-discoursal social elements. Finally,
[…] texts have causal effects upon, and contribute to changes in, people (beliefs, attitudes, etc.), actions, social relations, and the material world. It would make little sense to focus on language in new capitalism if we didn’t think that texts have causal effects of this sort, and effects on social change. These effects are mediated by meaning-making” (Fairclough, 2003:17).
Textual analysis includes linguistic analysis as well. According to Fairclough, this type of analysis is called ‘interdiscursive analysis’ which sees texts as different discourses genres and styles they draw upon and articulate together. Fairclough distinguishes between intertextuality, as a relation between and among texts, and interdiscursivity, as relations between discursive formations or more loosely between different types of discourse (Fairclough 1992: 117-118). This method of interdiscursive approach is appropriate for visual images and ‘body language’; and these features of texts can be seen as realizing their interdiscursive features. The tradition in critical social science, Fairclough argues, is that of viewing social reality as conceptually mediated. The objects submitted to critical social analysis are both material and semiotic in nature. It follows that it is necessary to focus on the dialectical relations between the material and semiotic in both normative and explanatory critically analyses and work. Consequently, the critical social analysis that CDA engages in has, as already stated previously, an interdisciplinary character, since the nature of its ‘objects’ requires it to bring together disciplines whose primary concern is with material facets of social realities and disciplines whose primary concern is with semiotic facets. The necessity of developing approaches to text analysis through a transdisciplinary dialogue with perspectives on language and discourse within social theory and research in order to improve the capacity to analyse texts as elements in social processes thus becomes obvious. That involves developing a theory of discourse and methods of analysing texts. To put it more specifically, this stresses its ‘trans-disciplinary’ character, in that dialogue across different disciplines is seen as the source for the theoretical and methodological development of each of the various, interrelated approaches. The elements of orders of discourse are, in addition to discourses proper, genres and styles. They are not obviously considered merely as nouns and sentences as elements of linguistic structures. These elements choose certain possibilities stipulated and provided by language and leave out other possibilities – they control linguistic variety for specific realms of social experience. So, orders of discourse are to be considered as the social patterning and monitoring of linguistic variation. When one comes to texts as defining features and elements of social events, the overdetermination imposed on language by other social elements becomes very salient: thus, they are more than just effects of linguistic structures and orders of discourse. Text thus show that they are also effects of other social structures and practices in all their aspects, so that it becomes very challenging to separate the factors shaping and moving these texts in social life. Therefore, CDA goes beyond the formal framework of semiosis as such, to the examination of relations between semiotic and other social elements. The nature of this
36 relationship varies between institutions and organizations and according to time and place, and it needs to be established through analysis. The social process is seen as the interplay between social structures, practices and events as three levels of social reality. At the level of the social practices, one can identify ways of representation, or genre discourses, and ways of being, or styles. In this context, semiosis, on the one hand, as part of the action, as the way of interacting and acting through speaking or writing. Thus, different genres can be told apart as various ways of interacting by means of discourse, with interviewing being a good illustration of a genre, for instance. On the other hand, semiosis appears in the representations which are also a part of social practices – representations of the material world, of other social practices, reflexive self- representations of the practice in question. Representation is a semiotic matter, and one can identify different discourses which are likely to represent the same area of the world from different perspectival positions. So far, we looked at the process of making texts as a facet of social action and interaction with the representational dimensions of semiosis featuring prominently. As a conclusion, we might say that texts have casual effects and cause changes on personal attitudes or beliefs as well as on their actions, social relations, and the material world. This is not a simple mechanical causality. One cannot assume that specific features of texts can bring specific changes in people’s behaviour and knowledge automatically or changes in political or social behavior. Texts can have causal effects without them necessarily being regular effects, because many other factors in the context determine whether particular texts as parts of particular events actually have such effects, and can lead to a particular text having a variety of effects. Semiotics and various forms of context-bound pragmatic approaches working in conjunction with Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis are thus to be considered for a more comprehensive view of social experience in order to promote a better understanding and better prospects for social change in general.
Works Cited
Biber, Douglas. “Register and Discourse Analysis.” The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Eds. James Paul Gee and Michael Handford. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp.191-208. Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. New York: Longman, 1989. ______. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1992.
______. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman, 1995
______. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
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Smith, Iris. “Introduction: Thomas A. Sebeok: ‘The Semiotic Self’ in America.” Eds.T. A. Sebeok and Iris Smith. American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, Vol. 6, pp. 3 – 18.
Vlad, Eduard. Cultural Studies: Archaeologies, Genealogies, Discontents. Bucuresti: Editura Universitara, 2018.
38
TONI MORRISON’S JAZZ: HUNTING AND HIDING IN THE URBAN JUNGLE
Ioana Rădulescu, Adina Ciugureanu
Abstract: Toni Morrison’s Jazz brings to the fore the story of a black couple who, attracted by the dream of freedom, find themselves in the position of seeking social integration in the 1920s Harlem. Setting the novel in the first decades of the 20th century, Morrison inevitably turns the reader into a witness to one of the most significant social and cultural movements on the American scene marked by the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age. The present paper explores the space of the City seen as an illustrative embodiment of both social and moral decay. It seems to accumulate the characteristics of a chaotic and degrading space home to reversed social and moral values, therefore reaching the essence of decay. Exceeding its main background function, the City becomes a consistent character in the novel which acts almost demiurgically. In the urban jungle of the City, individuals are given only two options to survive: hunt or be hunted.
Keywords: the City, decay, reversed values, urban jungle, jazz
The City Morrison is portraying in Jazz is the 1920s Harlem, the part of New York where the blacks were living after they migrated from the South. Their wish to come north and live in Harlem was due to the fact that they felt more freedom there than in the southern regions where segregation was still an important issue. Therefore, as Beavers stated, “Jazz offers the reader a glimpse into how millions of African Americans migrating north left behind the immobility that plagued their lives in the South in hopes of becoming more fully themselves” (97). Living in Morrison’s City is, actually, living according to the Jazz Age rules. Before discussing about the City as an urban jungle home to danger, degradation, eccentricity and gossip, we should not overlook the social and cultural context of the 1920s as “Morrison’s characters find themselves in a moment when the symbolic geography of the Harlem Renaissance and the antecedent conceptual geography of the Jazz Age are manifest” (Beavers 97). As a result of the Great Migration of the blacks from the southern regions to the northern ones in the name of freedom, New York’s culture was also assaulted by a new musical genre – jazz – which was regarded at the time as the music of the slaves. According to Beavers, “Jazz in the 1920s was considered alternately scurrilous and disreputable” (94) being associated more to the idea of savage behavior and rituals. Due to this pejorative perspective, jazz music was rather seen as part of the subculture on the American scene: “it wasn’t real music – just colored folks’
39 stuff: harmful, certainly; embarrassing, of course; but not real, not serious” (Jazz 59). According to Beavers, “one of Jazz’s most important achievements lies in the way it reveals the psycho- social underpinnings of the controversy generated by the arrival of jazz music on the American scene, as if faster dance rhythms spelled inevitable doom” (94). The relation between the individual and the place / space he lives in is essential as it plays an important role in the construction of identity. In his work entitled Postmetropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Soja sees humans as “intrinsically spatial beings, continuously engaged in the collective activity of producing spaces and places, territories and regions, environments and habitats” (6). With her novel Jazz, Morrison successfully illustrates the close relation established between individuals and the spaces and places they live in, as well as the consequences of it. When Joe and Violet Trace migrated to the City, it was a space of the unknown which had to be explored. Already facing individual tensions of the self caused by numerous traumatic past experiences and feeling “fragmented, foreign, without function” (Barnes 290) they strive to integrate themselves in a space which gradually turns to be nothing but the perfect embodiment of both social and moral decay. In her article entitled “Re- Membering the Song of My Self— African-American Self-Formation in Toni Morrison’s Jazz”, Wei-ching Lai refers to Joe and Violet as a “displaced and misplaced couple” (601) which have been extracted from their rural comfort zone and introduced into the space of the City by the dream of freedom. Lai’s use of the word misplaced consequently makes us regard the City as a misspace home to reversed social and moral values which inevitably turns the individuals into miscitizens as, “on the one hand, our actions and thoughts shape the spaces around us, but at the same time the larger collectively or socially produced spaces and places within which we live also shape our actions and thoughts” (Soja 6). The main locus of the novel is the City. Even from the beginning the narrator confesses: “I’m crazy about this City” (Jazz 7). Consequently, we are offered a meaningful image of a fascinating space that obsesses and enslaves people. What is interesting is the fact that the narrator does not use the verbs like or love which express increasing degrees of preference, but the phrase I’m crazy about. If we were to analyze these three structures from a pragmatic point of view, we would order them in terms of intensity as follows: like – love – be crazy about. Therefore, the City is a place which people do not simply like, or love, but they feel a sentiment that gets close to insanity. Moreover, the use of the adjective crazy is meant to cancel any rational input which turns the City into a space of intense emotions and feelings that have the power to influence people’s behavior transforming them into emotional slaves who act only according to their feelings. This makes us state that the City becomes a supreme entity in the novel, the central character, which rules people from all directions, just as a puppeteer does with his puppets. One may say that the use of the adjective crazy is justified by the blameless need to express the highest degree of preference on the part of individuals when it comes to the space of the City together with all that it offers. But if we see it as an anticipation of what is going to happen in the City, the adjective crazy seems to preserve its main pejorative meaning. It makes
40 people crazy and in Joe’s case, it turns people into predators and criminals, driven only by their feelings and emotions. In his book entitled Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Herman Beavers states that “the novel is full of characters who engage in dangerous acts of misconduct: marital misconduct, social misconduct, criminal misconduct, […] and the attendant risks of that conduct are central features of the novel’s plot” (94). Together with its demiurgic control upon individuals, the City also offers them utopian freedom: “I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it” (Jazz 8; our emphasis). It becomes a supreme background entity which tricks people. Individuals have the impression that they are in control of their actions but, unfortunately, it is only a false impression. Everything they do seems to be dictated by a supreme entity which has the power to stifle or cancel their self-will. Therefore, we cannot help noticing a light biblical similarity. Just like Adam and Eve were trapped into sin by utopian freedom and power, the individuals living in the City are given the impression that they have unlimited freedom and may deny responsibility for their acts. But after individuals have experienced the utopian freedom of the City, they are welcome by regret, sorrow and tormenting consciousness. The City is the metropolitan picture of Eden in which utopian freedom tricks individuals into sinful acts to turn them into tormenting souls later on. Freedom is just an illusion which individuals cannot help being tricked by. Despite the utopian freedom it offers, the City is nothing but a large cage where individuals struggle to survive: “the rooms are like the empty birdcages wrapped in cloth” (Jazz 11). We witness a metamorphosis of the City from what is perceived as a physical and social place to a superior and absolute space of decay. In this city, “daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half” (Jazz 7), maybe just as Violet did in the church with the eighteen-year-old girl’s face. Every single physical detail of the city seems to be either the anticipation to, or the equivalent of, the characters’ actions. While describing the City, the narrator confesses: “In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons” (Jazz 7). The difficulty the narrator faces while telling the difference between people and statues could be interpreted as a striking similarity, if not even identity, between the inhabitants of that place and the statues. Therefore, the residents of the City could easily be mistaken for statues. Just like some rock products, the people in the City seem to be characterized by coldness and stillness. Even so, downwards, the City is home to the hustle and bustle atmosphere of a big metropolis. It is interesting how the narrator feels the need to delineate two horizontal levels when describing the atmosphere of the City: a deep level of stillness and coldness and a hectic shallow one: “In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women” (Jazz 7). We consider the City as a space of contrasts: both plain and weird. It is plain because “the novel […] depicts the life of plain, ordinary people immersed in the urban jazz milieu of the 1920s. The protagonists of the book are an unlicensed, crazy hairdresser (Violet Trace) and a beauty product seller (Joe Trace)” (Lai 601)
41 and it is weird because later in the novel, Joe will find himself in the position of the murderer who kills in the name of love and Violet will experience both revenge and forgiveness as ways of self-healing. Probably the most striking perspective on the City is that of an urban jungle in which “regular people corner thieves in alleys for quick retribution and, if he is stupid and has robbed wrong, thieves corner him too” (Jazz 7). In this jungle, every predator may become the prey and the other way round, as everything lies in each individual’s ability to struggle for his position and there is no room for weakness: “And what goes on in its blocks and lots and side streets is anything the strong can think of and the weak will admire” (Jazz 9). In order to survive in this jungle, people must be extremely careful not to become the prey of predators as “what it is is decisive, and if you pay attention to the street plans, all laid out, the City can’t hurt you” (Jazz 8). In these lines the City is given the image of a maze in which the key to survive is not to give up, otherwise the City overwhelms you: “Nobody says it’s pretty here; nobody says it’s easy either” (Jazz 8). The City becomes a space of a continuous struggle to survive and this survival consists in the individual’s ability of not becoming possessed by others. It is the space of continuous hunting and hiding. Joe comes to the City attracted by the urban utopia which the majority of people could not resist. Nevertheless, as he subconsciously continues to be hunted by the regret of not having met his mother, he falls in love with Dorcas whom he perceives, to some point, as the mother he has always hunted. It is in this city in which Joe turned from being hunted into a hunter. He is now hunting Dorcas just like he used to hunt his wild mother. The fact that they hide in Dorcas’s aunt’s flat everytime they meet does not only mean illicit love, but also the decision of hiding away from being hunted by their own predators, Dorcas’s aunt and Joe’s wife. Described as “enchanting yet dangerous” (Lai 603), the life in the city, the key to survive is taking precaution: “I haven’t got any muscles, so I can’t really be expected to defend myself. But I do know how to take precaution. Mostly it’s making sure no one knows all there is to know about me” (Jazz 8) and observing: “Second, I watch everything and everyone and try to figure out their plans, their reasonings, long before they do” (Jazz 8). Tomorrow is safe and certain as long as you do something for that today. Maybe living is not the proper notion, but surviving is indeed. Individuals have to struggle to survive or die just as Violet’s birds had only two options when they were freed by her: “She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you” (Jazz 3). If individuals want to survive they have to stick to a well developed strategy whose main ingredient is precaution: “All you have to do is heed the design – the way it’s laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow” (Jazz 9). Like the animals living in a jungle, the individuals living in the City have to hunt in order not to be hunted. Precaution is a defensive weapon, whereas observation is an offensive one. These two concepts create a kind of micro space to which each individual belongs to, thus challenging the feeling of belonging to the macro social space of the City. As a result, we can state that
42 individuals survive in the macro space as long as they manage to keep their micro space safe as it is vital for them to protect their self-space. In the City, defense and hospitality should go hand in hand: “Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time” (Jazz 9). In order to survive in this city, individuals have to perfectly combine two mutually excluding elements - defense and hospitality – and, in this way, to keep the enemy as close as possible. The City becomes, thus, the space of a permanent competition whose prize is surviving. The individual faces a complicated and conflicting relationship of the self and the others which Ralph Ellison describes as an “individual assertion within and against the group” (234) when he analyzes the relation between jazz music and identity: Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. (Ellison 234) Therefore, just like in the case of a jazz music extract, the individual continually gets into and outside the community, isolates himself or struggles to integrate, supports the community or challenges its unity. His versatile nature could be regarded as a consequence of his need to survive in the space of the City which inevitably turns him into both a hunter and a prey. The individual becomes a performer of a jazz music extract who struggles to define his self by both rejecting and assimilating the community as:
the relationship between a solo player and the other musicians in a musical performance can be metaphorically extended to the relationship between an individual and his community. Just as a player in an improvisation defines himself against and through his fellow musicians, so an individual can define himself against and through his community. (Lai 598)
We consider Violet as the perfect embodiment of the defense – hospitality dichotomy. Violet’s identity seems to be made up of two selves: the insane Violet who attempts to cut an eighteen-year-old girl’s face at her funeral and steals a baby and the sane Violet who makes up women’s hair in the neighborhood. Therefore, we witness a double-leveled image of the City: it is an ordinary social place where people have different jobs and a space of decay where people commit acts of violence and even crimes. Considering Alice Manfred’s attitude towards jazz music which started to invade the City’s streets, the City is not only a jungle where people hunt or hide, it seems to reach apocalyptic dimensions of misconduct and degradation: “the men, you know, the things they thought nothing of saying out loud to any woman who passed by could not be repeated before children” (Jazz 56). Women were becoming more and more daring as they showed “not just ankles but knees in full view; lip rouge red as hellfire; burnt matchsticks rubbed on eyebrows; fingernails tipped with blood” (Jazz 56). The way in which women’s lips and nails are compared
43 to blood and hellfire obviously portrays the City as an apocalyptic space. From a highly traditional and conservative perspective, the new cultural shift seemed not to be in tune with what being a mother involved and it was seen as a threat and alteration of this status: “you couldn’t tell the streetwalkers from the mothers” (Jazz 56) when “a woman with a baby on her shoulder and a skillet in her hand sang ‘Turn to my pillow where my sweetman used to be … how long, how long, how long’ ” (Jazz 56). Alice Manfred’s words seem to support and successfully justify F. S. Fitzgerald’s statement in his essay entitled “Echoes of the Jazz Age” according to which the Jazz Age “was an age of excess,” besides being “an age of miracles,” “an age of art”, and “an age of satire” (324). Jazz music did not seem to appeal to the general public’s taste of the time as:
songs that used to start in the head and fill the heart had dropped on down, down to places below the sash and the buckled belts. Lower and lower, until the music was so lowdown you had to shut your windows and just suffer the summer sweat when the men in shirtsleeves propped themselves in window frames, or clustered on rooftops, in alleyways, on stoops and in the apartments of relatives playing the lowdown stuff that signaled Imminent Demise. (Jazz 56) Herman Beavers supports Alice Manfred’s reluctant attitude with socio-cultural arguments stating that “the anxieties 1920s popular music incites in Alice Manfred reflects how the shift from the Victorian sensibilities of the late nineteenth century, which emphasized sobriety and restraint, were being displaced” (114) by a type of music that “made you do unwise disorderly things” (Jazz 58) and “just hearing it was like violating the law” (Jazz 58).
Jazz music, or better said, the way it was regarded at the time, holds the key to the reader’s understanding of the cultural behavior of the 1920s. Alice Manfred is responsible with the bringing up of her niece in respectable conditions and she is “worried about how to keep the heart ignorant of the hips and the head in charge of both” (Jazz 60). Her main aim is to keep the girl away from any danger the City may imply and she believes that the new music which started to invade the peacefulness of the streets is one of it since “the word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music” (Fitzgerald 325). Alice Manfred’s rejecting, preventative and highly suspicious attitude towards the new music demonstrates the fact that
Morrison’s novel calls attention to the role music plays on the cultural scene, and the narrative treats a moment when audiences are wary of jazz music and its implications, making it impossible to read Jazz and not consider the roles speculation and consumption play in the constitution of the black urban subject. (Beavers 96)
When trying to figure out what exactly made people behave so savagely,
44
Alice thought, No. It wasn’t the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn’t the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shameless or apart and wild. (Jazz 58)
The agent that determined people’s misconduct was considered to be the music as it “was getting worse and worse with each passing season the Lord waited to make Himself known” (Jazz 56). Considering Alice’s thoughts, the City seems to be a stage where people dance on apocalyptic music as if the jazz rhythm would send maleficent impulses meant to wake up their savage behavior and “the dances were beyond nasty” (Jazz 56). Just as Fitzgerald stated, we witness “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure” (325). In Fitzgerald’s view, 1920 people’s hedonistic behavior is similar to the attitude full of adrenaline shown in war time as both seem to be based on the carpe diem attitude. According to him, jazz “is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. […] Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” (325). When she hears the music, Alice becomes “aware of flesh and something so free she could smell its bloodsmell” (Jazz 58), which highlights the fact that the freedom it incites in people is a savage one. It strengthens even more our portraying of the City as a jungle where individuals either hunt or are hunted, all this urban chaos being synesthetically backgrounded by the smell of blood, which stands for the individuals’ savage instincts, and by the jazz music. According to Beavers,
Alice is therefore highly suspicious of jazz because it eroticizes the urban subject and diminishes the individual’s grasp on the tenets of respectability and responsibility. Her trepidation reflects a common attitude of the time, since jazz was often associated— however unfairly— with dangerous places. (113)
In Alice’s opinion, what is to be called responsible for all the disorder and violence in the City is the music as she “swore she heard a complicated anger in it; something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction” (Jazz 59). The music has the ability to seduce people and make them act out of their social and moral censors. In Alice’s eyes, this music is a beast which feeds itself with violence: “the part she hated most was its appetite. Its longing for the bash, the slit; a kind of careless hunger for a fight or a red ruby stickpin for a tie – either would do” (Jazz 59). The feelings and emotions that this type of music stirs up in people are not positive as “it faked happiness, faked welcome, but it did not make her feel generous, this juke joint, barrel hooch, tonk house, music” (Jazz 59). Just like a maleficent entity, under the false impression of benevolent acts, it hides evil purposes being “a City seeping music that begged and challenged each and every day, ‘Come,’ it said, ‘Come and do wrong’” (Jazz 67). Using fake positive
45 emotions, it tricks people into acting violently: “It made her hold her hand in the pocket of her apron to keep from smashing it through the glass pane to snatch the world in her fist and squeeze the life out of it for doing what it did and did and did to her and everybody else she knew or knew about” (Jazz 59). This music does not simply lead to violence, it is violence taking into account the way in which the silence of the street Alice lives on is abusively broken into by the music: “even if you lived, as Alice Manfred and the Miller sisters did, on Clifton Place, with a leafy sixty-foot tree every hundred feet, a quiet street with no fewer than five motor cars parked at the curb, you could still hear it” (Jazz 56). It becomes clear that individuals cannot resist the music as it is everywhere. It becomes a burglar who illegally enters people’s micro spaces by force and all that is left for them to do is to hide: “Better to close the windows and the shutters, sweat in the summer heat of a silent Clifton Place apartment than to risk a broken window or a yelping that might not know where or how to stop” (Jazz 59). However, what Joe and Violet were attracted by when they left the rural area of Virginia in the South, was the dream of freedom that New York, the largest modern city in the 1920s, seemed to shelter. The City offered its citizens almost everything, except some things ironically emphasized by the narrator:
everything you want is right where you are: the church, the store, the party, the women, the men, the postbox (but no high schools), the furniture store, street newspaper vendors, the bootleg houses (but no banks), the beauty parlors, the barbershops, the juke joints, the ice wagons, the rag collectors, the pool halls, the open food markets, the number runner, and every club, organization, group, order, union, society, brotherhood, sisterhood or association imaginable. (Jazz 10)
If we were to take a closer look at the type of facilities offered by the City, we would state that despite their variety, they are meant to fulfill only the daily necessities. Taking into account the wide types of stores and boutiques, we could state that the City is mainly concerned with its citizens’ basic needs, entertainment and eccentricity, totally neglecting education (no high schools) and safety (bootleg houses and no banks), which clearly shows the policy of discrimination. It turns the City into a commercial space where almost everything has a price and can be either sold or bought (a macro market). Therefore, we are given a strong image of 1920s Harlem’s urban consumerism mainly characterized by “increased pace: swifter trains and automobiles, technologies that speed up communication, the speed at which acquisition and expenditure occur, how an individual’s status can change overnight” (Beavers 94). Apart from physiological facilities, the City also offers its citizens various forms of entertainment, but if we were to pay closer attention to the way the narrator mentions them, we could state that they tend to be quite degrading: “the party, the women, the men […] the juke joints” (Jazz 10). The City is home to vices, it is the place where “you can pop the cork and put the gold glass mouth right up to your own” (Jazz 11). It is a space of danger, violence and adventure,
46
“where you can find danger or be it; where you can fight till you drop and smile at the knife when it misses and when it doesn’t” (Jazz 11), just like in a western atmosphere. It is a space that fascinates individuals with its danger and eccentricity. “Set at a time when fashion, advertising, and slick magazines were becoming the order of the day” (Beavers 96), the City (Harlem) is the space of gossip: “there are paths slick from the forays of members of one group into the territory of another where it is believed something curious or thrilling lies. Some gleaming, cracking, scary stuff” (Jazz 10). The community seems to be made up of multiple smaller groups which hunt each other in their search for the extraordinary. Therefore, the unity of the community is highly damaged. People “find themselves butting in the business of people whose names they can’t even remember and whose business is none of theirs. Just to hear themselves talk and the joy of watching the distressed faces of those listening” (Jazz 11). In his book entitled Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Herman Beavers also points out the fact that one of the most striking images of the City that the reader is given even right from the beginning of the novel is that one of “a conceptual space where speculation becomes synonymous with knowledge” (94). The narrator’s opening words, “Sth. I know this woman” (Jazz 3), portray the City as a space of gossip where speculation is sufficient to satisfy knowledge – a shallow one. According to Beavers, it is one of the consequences of the nineteenth – twentieth century shift when the Victorian discipline and morality was replaced by the idea of celebrity which “becomes a measure of social progress” (95) and “being able to watch a love affair unfold in a magazine leads people to believe they are participants in a culture that emphasizes spectatorship” (95). Therefore, the pejorative image of the City is much more emphasized, turning it into an urban space of degradation where individuals are only concerned about their daily necessities, entertainment and extravagance because this is what they are offered by the 1920s Harlem. Just as Beavers notes, encapsulating the Harlem Renaissance manifest, Morrison portrays the City as a space in which “we are presented with images of decadence and moral decline, but we are just as quickly seduced by the illusions of opulence and political possibility that take the form of advertising, radio, modern cinema, and popular entertainment” (97). Due to the wrong distribution of facilities we could state that the City is a space of reversed values, keeping it close to Beavers’ statement: The rhetorical postures of the 1920s were distinguished by the need to position the individual as an entity growing apart from cultural tradition, where the medium through which cultural tradition was disseminated became so incredibly rife with information that the fixed identities associated with a concrete sense of values were abandoned in favor of the plasticity of value. (95) It is not a proper environment for education and self-fulfillment as there are no high schools. The pejorative image of the City is even ironically emphasized in the narrator’s discourse: “bootleg houses (but no banks)” (Jazz 10). The City is a space where safety is constantly threatened by illegal acts. It is a space of temptation and illegality. In this bipolar
47 organization of the City, banks are substituted by bootleg houses, which produce good money but do not offer the possibility of local investment in the absence of banks. By offering its citizens a wide range of facilities which everybody can have full access to (“perfectly ordinary people can stand at the stop, get on the streetcar, give the man the nickel, and ride anywhere you please,” Jazz 10), individuals get the impression that they also have freedom. The truth is that this freedom is utopian because you can “ride anywhere you please although you don’t please to go many places because everything you want is right where you are” (Jazz 10). The utopian freedom the individuals are offered is nothing but the effect of a sui generis space that is created in order to dominate and isolate. Taking everything into account, the City seems to be the perfect image of social and moral decay. It is home to all sorts if vices, violence, eccentricity and gossip, which inevitably turn it into a space of reversed social and moral values. It is a space of both intense love and violence, a space of contrasts which has the power to influence individuals’ behavior in a pejorative way, turning them into criminals. Individuals are first attracted by the illusion of freedom and safety and later on they end up trapped in an urban jungle where they either hunt or are hunted. The key to survive in the maze of the City is precaution and observation. From a moral point of view, individuals do not live in the City, they just struggle to survive.
Works Cited
Barnes, D. H. “Movin’ On Up: The Madness of Migration in Toni Morrison’s Jazz”. Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. Ed. D. L. Middleton. New York: NY & London, UK: Garland, 2000. 283-295.
Beavers, Herman. Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1972.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” The Fitzgerald Reader. Ed. Arthur Mizener. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963. 323-331
Lai, Wei-ching. “Re-Membering the Song of My Self— African-American Self-Formation in Toni Morrison’s Jazz”. EurAmerica 36. 4 (2006): 591-612.
Morrison, Tony. Jazz. London: Vintage, 2016.
Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000.
48
THE TRAUMA OF RE-LOCATION IN AUGUST WILSON’S THE AMERICAN CENTURY CYCLE
Sînziana Popescu
Abstract: Spanning the twentieth century, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle captures the lives of its characters in various decades of the century. The struggles of the African American community of the Hill District in Pittsburgh, where the author was born, are shown in the plays belonging to the Cycle. Analysis of plays such as Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, and Fences, will focus on demonstrating how re-location played an important role in the lives of the African American community from the first generations of Africans brought over into slavery to the new generations of free African Americans.
Keywords: trauma, re-location, African American, August Wilson, slavery, Great Migration
Combining history with imagination and August Wilson’s own story, the plays of the American Century Cycle span the twentieth century giving insight on the African American struggles to build a life for themselves in the free North. The plays deal with the sons and daughters of the slaves, newly freed and fleeing a still dazed and confused South for a more permissive and free North. Reality is different and rather harsh when the promised riches of the North seem to escape the grasp of the African Americans who are left with doing menial jobs declined by whites and are still seen as being subjugated to the white majority. The trauma of re-location is visible with the older characters more than with the young who strongly believe that now in the free states of the North they will have an easier time rising from rags to riches. In these plays the on-going struggle of the African Americans is ever present. The plays discussed in this essay follow the lives of characters who have been wronged, who have struggled and still struggle to make both ends meet. Plays such as Gem of the Ocean and The Piano Lesson deal with the subject of slavery. Both are set in years after the Emancipation Proclamation: 1904 for Gem of the Ocean and 1936 for The Piano Lesson, respectively. In the case of the first play, 41 years had passed since Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation which freed the slaves. Wilson’s play shows that not much had
49 changed during these years. The United States found themselves in the Reconstruction period after the Civil War ended and with the start of 1877 the segregation period began. The Jim Crow laws created the “equal but separate” slogan which meant that all persons of color were separate from the white majority. This is much more visible in another of Wilson’s plays, Fences. Here the main character Troy Maxson gets into a debate with his boss on the topic of why the African Americans are not allowed to drive the garbage trucks but are kept only in the back of the truck as garbage bin haulers. The issue of slavery appears in all the ten plays of The Cycle as distant memories of the characters of the plays. The characters who have lived those times of slavery seem to still have open wounds; they know that the idea of the promised lands of the North should be taken with a grain of salt as they see times have not changed very much. In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone the Great Migration to what seemed a welcoming North is linked to Bynum’s Binding Song which helps people face their destiny. At times this destiny can be traumatic. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences are usually analysed together as the central characters of the plays seem to face the same problems: Ma Rainey does not accept that times have changed, and as a blues singer continues to sing her songs in the traditional way, the way in which they were meant to be sung. Troy Maxson also refuses to see that times have changed and refuses to let his son try out for the football team and try and make a name for himself as a professional footballer. What is interesting is the fact that in the two plays both Ma Rainey and Troy are characters living in their period of time: set in the 1920s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom shows a female character who has managed to speak out her mind, she has a voice of her own and manages to impose her opinions on the white owner of the studio where she records her albums. On the other hand, Troy manages to convince both his boss and the Union that he is very much capable of being a driver on the garbage trucks. The Piano Lesson revolves around the story of Berniece and her brother, Boy Willie. The family piano, an heirloom of the slavery, is the object of dispute between the two siblings: Boy Willie wants to sell it and use the money to buy the land on which his family had been subjected to slavery, while Berniece vehemently tells him that she is not going to let him sell the piano which is the only connection she has with the family history. The carvings on the piano tell the story of the family and of their traumatic past. To sum up, the five plays deal with re-location: each of the families has moved from the rural South to the industrial North which meant not just simply moving, but, in many cases an escape from slavery. Gem of the Ocean tells the story of Citizen Barlow who arrives at the house on Wylie Avenue, the house of Aunt Ester, demanding to see her. The first in chronological order of The American Century Cycle, Gem of the Ocean is also the first play to introduce a new generation alongside the old one. The play shows one of the first generations of the post-emancipation era. The family is made up of Aunt Ester, her protégé Black Mary, Eli, Solly Two Kings, and Caesar. Caesar represents the law and one of the disturbing forces that arrive at the house of Aunt Ester. Citizen Barlow is the other disturbing source, but as the play develops, he takes center stage and becomes a part of Aunt Ester’s family as well. The action of the play is thus centred on Citizen, making him the main character. Nevertheless, Wilson does not seem to focus solely on one character, the plays of The Cycle do not seem to establish a particular character as the main one. Aunt Ester is central to the whole of The American Century Cycle, being the oldest, the ancestor (even her name when pronounced sounds like ‘ancestor’). Black Mary has her spot in the limelight too as she has to make up her mind whether or not she wants to take Aunt Ester’s place. Solly is important to the play as he represents a character whose place seems, at the time of the play, rather unneeded. Nevertheless, Wilson shows the harsh reality: Solly, a member of
50 the Underground Railroad, is still needed 41 years after the freeing of the slaves to do what he knows bets: bring former slaves North. The play starts off The American Century Cycle and is the setting of two aspects of major importance for the African American community: the passage of the slave ships and the Great Migration. The passage of the slave ships across the Atlantic is revived in the play through the shamanistic ritual performed by Aunt Ester when helping Citizen Barlow face his immediate past. The City of Bones found in the mid of the Atlantic, an imagined city, has been created by the bones of those who died on the voyage and were thrown into the ocean. Citizen has to cross an imaginary ocean to arrive at the gates of the City. In order to receive entrance he must acknowledge his guilt that he stole a bucket of nails from the mill where he was working. His action led to another worker being blamed and the eventual death of the wrongly accused man. The journey that Citizen must undertake will not only make amends to the one he wronged, but will also reveal to him the dreadful story of his ancestors. The events taking place at the beginning of Gem of the Ocean show the traumas of re- location from the rural South to the industrial North. The generations of freed slaves and of those born after the abolition of slavery form two separate parts of society. The freed slaves understood that the promised land of the North was nothing more than a utopia, while the new generations born after the liberation had yet to learn the fact that the African American was still at the mercy of the white majority. All these events move towards one of the most important moments of the play: the reliving of the traumatic events through a journey. Rudolph Binion explains in his Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature and Film the way in which Sigmund Freud saw hysteria, as a pile up of traumatic events (19). In the case of Citizen Barlow there is only one traumatic event that has piled up in his memory and creates the agitated state in which he presents himself to Aunt Ester. Freud believed in “cathartic therapy” which consisted in “teasing the traumatic material behind the patient’s symptoms out of oblivion or repression with the aid of hypnosis, (…) and then inviting the patient to recognize how he or, (…), her was reliving that pathogenic material” (Traumatic Reliving 20). Freud believed that through hypnosis the traumatic event could be dealt with through reliving thus curing the patient. Binion presents a list of Freud’s cases that have worked when he applied the hypnosis method. Nevertheless Freud did not have a one hundred per cent success rate: Binion writes about one of Freud’s cases who “took Freud through several hundred successive cycles of symptoms deciphered and dissolved one by one only to be replaced immediately afterwards” and that the “dyed-in-the-wool compulsives might likewise preserve their compulsiveness intact beneath any number of its malleable showings” (23). Therefore the conclusion that can be drawn is that a traumatized patient is not always willing to relive the traumatic event. Analysing the journey to the City of Bones through the idea presented by Freud, that of reliving the trauma, creates a successful case of hypnosis in which the trauma is relived and which gives the traumatized character the cure for his trauma. Through a ritual that looks very much like a hypnosis session, Aunt Ester starts the process of healing Citizen Barlow. The journey begins with his line “It’s moving! The boat’s moving! I feel it moving! The land … it’s moving away! (Gem of the Ocean 2.2). The imaginary boat is taking him to an imaginary city through an imaginary journey. Everything around him resembles a boat journey doubled by the help of Aunt Ester and the others around her. The journey is traumatizing: Citizen refuses to go to the City of Bones throwing away the paper boat in his hand, an act which brings a symbolic whipping of the recaptured slave by the white slave traders. He is thrown into the hull of the boat and his journey continues. When he asks for water Aunt Ester tells him:
51
Aunt Ester: There is no water, Mr Citizen. All you have is your chain link. The boat got into trouble. The water was lost overboard. The captain took what was left and set out in a small boat. He was a mean man. He was a selfish man. The captain of the Gem of the Ocean. He took all the water and left the crew to die. But they survived. They followed the law of the sea. Life is above all. God raised it to a great height. Live, Mr Citizen. Live to the fullest. You got a duty to life. So live, Mr Citizen! Live! (Gem of the Ocean 2.2.70- 71)
Aunt Ester is said to be two hundred and eighty five years old, making her as old as the period of slavery on the territory of the United States. This means that she was among the very first Africans brought to the Americas as slaves: she knows exactly what happened on the ships. Her words are an indication of the traumatizing journey that was the Middle Passage and it is through her words that Citizen experiences one traumatic event, part of the collective past of the African American community, which brings him to his own traumatic event that of facing Garret Brown at the gates of the City of Bones to ask for forgiveness. Harry J. Elam writes that “the City of Bones actively remembers the loss of those that did not make it across the water” (Gem of the Ocean and the Redemptive Power 166). The journey taken by Citizen Barlow is representative for the Middle Passage and those whose bones have built the City are the ones who did not make it across the ocean. Through his journey, with the help of the receptacle of memory of the community represented by Aunt Ester, Citizen remembers “those seemingly forgotten black travellers those who were too infirm for the journey, those who mounted unsuccessful insurgencies, those who jumped into the cold, uncertain water” (Elam 166) choosing death over a life in bondage, their bones building a city. Aunt Ester tells Citizen that this city is a kingdom that holds all those who could not make it across the ocean. The City of Bones becomes thus a place of memory for the characters of Gem of the Ocean. Wilson creates a strong connection between his characters and their history. At times it seems that the characters have to go back in order to move forward as the playwright wants them to acknowledge their ancestry, to embrace the fact that their ancestors came from Africa, and the culture and traditions that the slaves brought with them to their new homes. Through the shamanic ritual that Aunt Ester performs on Citizen Barlow the ancestry is revealed to the reader as well and the history of the Africans brought to America is revealed to Citizen. Aunt Ester’s action shows what Elam calls “the redemptive power of history” (76): Citizen is shown the history of his ancestors and by undergoing the voyage to the city of bones he is redeemed. Elam writes that “Citizen Barlow and the others do not learn from the past in a simple way” (76), that with Wilson redemption has a deeper level of understanding. Citizen has to feel, he goes on the journey to the city of bones both mentally and physically, he suffers along with the others on the ship. Albeit an imaginary journey the power of the episode is sensed from the very beginning, the trauma of re-location being visible throughout the journey to The United States. The second important aspect present in the first play of The Cycle is the Great Migration. This meant the massive movement of the freed slaves North from the rural South. There are differences between the first generation of men and women born into freedom, in a more permissive North, and the former slaves. The two generations can very well be those who still remain in the South and those who have managed to come North. Solly Two Kings is a relic of the past, as the play is set in 1904. He is an Underground Railroad member and it seems that he
52 is not needed anymore as the slaves have been free for 41 years now and are able to freely travel around the United States. But the reality is different: Solly is still needed, he is still called upon to perform his duty as a helper of those in need and bring them safely to the North. This shows the struggling years after the Emancipation Declaration: the Southern slave owners from generation to generation were not keen on giving up on their slaves, thus more or less refusing to accept the new reality. On the other hand, the North was not exactly ready for the avalanche of men and women who were coming here to find a better life. Aunt Ester’s home “reconfigures the way station that is Africa at the start of a century that has rid itself of slavery’s issues but not of its vestiges and implications” (Nadel 18). Aunt Ester’s house seems to be the border between the rural South that still holds relatives captive, and the North that does not look like the promised land for those who arrived here and were disappointed by what they found. If Gem of the Ocean shows the struggle of remembering the past, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone focuses on the characters finding their song. Bynum takes the role of the helper this time, his role being that of helping people find their own song. The song is the destiny of those he helps, a shared past. Herald Loomis is the main character of the play, a man who has spent seven years in bondage under Joe Turner. He arrives North with the intention of finding his wife and be reunited with her and their daughter. Patricia Gantt comments that by clinging to this belief “he can be free of painful memories and construct a new identity for himself” (Gantt 7). Re-location is shown in the story of Loomis through the years he spends in bondage: he was a free man when Joe Turner came and caught him. The episode is traumatic not only for Loomis who finds himself in bondage but for his wife as well. Patricia Gantt considers Harold’s belief that reuniting his family will help him move on as being a wrong one. On the other hand the character who seems to have found the strength of moving on and making a life for herself is Martha: she has run away from an oppressive South, made her way North and managed to make a living there. The trauma of re-location is present in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone through the stories of Harold and Martha Loomis: they have both been re-located, thus having their lives changed. Harold is the embodiment of a newly freed man who now has to take his life into his own hands and must make a living for himself in a new world in a new city. Martha shows a strong woman who manages on her own to leave a South where living was dangerous and comes North to make a life for herself. Martha Loomis is one of the examples of strong women present in Wilson’s plays: she has chosen to think her husband dead and has managed to navigate through life without his help. When they meet she gives the impression that she does not need a man in her life in order to feel complete, to feel that only by having her family whole again she will have her old life back. The story of the piano that belongs to Berniece, a family heirloom, comes through the mouth of Doaker, the man who knows the story of the piano and how it came to be in the family. The play shows two important aspects of re-location: first the fact that Africans were brought to America as slaves, and second the re-locations which took place among the slave owners. Families were split without a second thought, thus passing from one slave owner to another, leaving one family member behind. In The Piano Lesson the redeeming feature comes from the story of the piano which takes Berniece and Boy Willie back so that they can move forward. Berniece finally accepts that she has to play the piano, she has to embrace her past with all its ghosts and accept her heritage. Boy Willie comes to understand that their ancestry and their heritage are more important than material gain. On the other hand, the fact that he wants to own the land that belonged to the former enslaver of his family is a matter of “pride of ownership” (Londré 116). Apart from being a matter of pride it is also the way in which Boy Willie sees “a
53 way of redeeming the history of the family” (Londré 116). The piano can be seen as a constant reminder for him of the history of his family and by removing it, both he and his family will be redeemed. Once again Wilson shows that it is better to cling to these heirlooms, to the stories of the past, and by embracing them to find redemption. Set thirty years apart Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences show two characters who seem to have managed to escape the hardships of having moved North. Nevertheless Wilson reminds us that there still are hardships to overcome. Thus, Ma Rainey is being exploited for her voice and for the financial gain that she can bring to the white owners of the studio where she records her music, while Troy Maxson has to fight the system in order to move from working in the back of the garbage truck to being a driver. Even though Ma Rainey is the one who gives her name to the play, it seems to focus more on her band members than on her. Absent for the majority of the play Ma Rainey seems to have power from afar upon both the white owners and on her band members. Nevertheless, the figure who shows the trauma of re-location is Levee, a young man who has escaped from the South and has gone to Chicago to become a musician. The trauma is indicated through the short fragments of revelation which escape Levee, such as the story of how he tried to save his mother from her attackers. He is angry with the world and believes that he is owed something for the hardships he has been subjected to. If he is not given, then he will take: he does not shy away from facing the white owner of the studio, even though he does not understand that he is only a tool for the man who offers to buy his songs from him, and in his rage does not turn away from committing murder. Alan Nadel comments that the incident of Toledo stepping on Levee’s shoes becomes “the focus for Levee’s frustration, disappointment, and rejection” while the act of stabbing Toledo is “a furious and self-defeating attempt to assert his self-worth” (Nadel 103). Levee becomes the figure of re-location for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a tragic character who seems to stand for all the African Americans who have come North in search of a better life. The act of murdering Toledo in a fit of anger is a search of asserting self-worth but can as well be seen as a way of proving that he is still in control of his own fate even though the odds prove him wrong. Through him Wilson shows best the un-welcoming treatment that newly freed African Americans received when coming North, the fact that the white men still used the African Americans for their personal gain neglecting to see beyond their personal interests. Nadel comments that “the band becomes the embodiment of the blues” (103). Levee’s life story can be seen as being a blues song, the embodiment of the struggle of those who came North with hope in their hearts. Troy Maxson is a character who is larger than life. As in the case of Levee, his trauma comes from running away from his father and his abuses. Troy ran away and had to fend for himself in the world, a world that did not welcome him with arms wide open. A former baseball player, he did not manage to be selected to one of the major teams. Throughout the play Troy gives the impression that he is the character who suffers the most: his lost baseball career, his struggle to become a garbage truck driver, the loss of his mistress in child birth, all these are the traumas of Troy’s life. What happens around him seems to escape Troy’s vision: the fact that his son Lyons is a struggling artist pushed to gambling because his career as a musician is a failure, the fact that Cory might be able to have a career in sports because now times have changed, the fact that his brother has been severely wounded in the Second World War. All these seem to pass by Troy as his problems take center stage and are deemed more important than anything else. It is in these other struggles that the trauma of re-location can be found: Lyons goes to jail, Cory
54 runs away and joins the Marines, Gabriel moves away from his brother’s house, and Rose separates herself from her husband, but continues to live in the same house. Despite all this Troy manages to stand out as a figure of representation for trauma re- location: from a very young age he runs away from his father’s house and tries to make a living for himself. The wrong choices he makes pave his road to jail, where he learns to play baseball, and help him understand that stealing and killing is not the way to make a living. Because of the battles Troy wages for most of his life after prison, Matthew Roudané sees him as “a survivor, a warrior whom Bono, his dear friends, and Rose, his wife, admire and love” (138). He is indeed a survivor and a warrior, the fact that the play takes place during the years of remarkable figures such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, during the age of the civil rights movement, and the fact that Troy fights for what he believes is his right as a hard worker to drive a garbage truck show this exact aspect of his personality. It is because of this that Troy Maxson can be seen as one of the key figures of the Cycle, one the fighters for the rights of African Americans, who at times gives the impression that he has achieved the impossible. The American Century Cycle spans the twentieth century, showing the struggles of the African Americans starting with the turn of the century. Each of the ten plays is set in the present time of the decade of the century for which it stands. Nevertheless, the plays look to the past, to the ones who came before the new generations of African Americans and learn from them, their mistakes and their achievements, in order to move forward. Re-location is present in all of the plays analysed, but it does not deter the characters in their journey forward into making a life for themselves and becoming upstanding citizens of the community. The general trait of Wilson’s Cycle seems to be looking back in order to go forward. Looking into the ways re-location has changed the lives of their ancestors the present generations find ways of moving forward, while accepting and embracing their past.
Works Cited
Bigsby, Christopher. “August Wilson: the ground on which he stood”. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 1-27.
Binion, Rudolph. Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature and Film. London: Karnac Books, 2011.
Booker, Margaret. “Radio Golf: the courage of his convictions – survival, success and spirituality”. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 183-192
Elam, Harry J. “Gem of the Ocean and the redemptive power of history”. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 75-88
Gantt, Patricia. “Ghosts from ‘Down There’: The Southerness of August Wilson”. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: August Wilson. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009, pp.5-20.
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Londré, Felicia Hardison. “A piano and its history: family and transcending family”. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp.113-123.
Nadel, Alan. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: cutting the historical record, dramatizing a blues CD”. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 102-112
Roudané, Matthew. “Safe at home?: August Wilson’s Fences”. The Cambridge Companion to
August Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. pp. 135-144
Wilson, August. Gem of the Ocean. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007
---. Joe Turner’s come and Gone. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007
---. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007
---. The Piano Lesson. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007
---. Fences. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007
56
THE VAGARIES OF IDENTITY AND THE POWER OF POETRY: TED HUGHES’S TALES FROM OVID AND THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
Florian Andrei Vlad
Abstract: One can read, or misread, Tales from Ovid as the mythologizing of a certain stage in the development of a poetic identity in relation to Ovid as the main father figure, so to speak, with other important literary figures as landmarks in a long poetic tradition. Apart from this more explicit intertextual relationship that may dramatise Bloom’s anxiety of influence theory, a more veiled one, featuring Sylvia Plath Hughes and other feminine figures inhabiting his encounters with inexorable doom, also seems to be very important in what one might call “Tales from Ovid about Hughes.” The stories of myth and physical and psychological transformations that he brings into the 20th century will be his version of his own identity in relation to influence and interaction with the Other. In such a poetic mythology he will obviously cast himself as a tragic hero, even if a biographical reading of Tales from Ovid was not encouraged by the poet himself.
Keywords: anxiety of influence, identity, self-definition, alterity, mythologizing, misreading
Identity has always been a complicated story rather than a stable entity. It has always involved a dynamic interplay between continuity and change, between the individual, the personal and the social, and dealing with poetry and identity is part of this complicated story. A social psychologist like Kath Woodward briefly defines its scope and problematics: The identity story is one that has been told around different relationships, such as those between the personal and the social and those between self and others. Any study of identity involves exploring these relationships and the others that underpin ideas about identity, not only in the present, but also in their formulation, conceptualization and reproduction across time. What is a relationship can also be construed as a tension, or even an opposition (Woodward 2002: 1).
Relationship, tension and opposition are part and parcel of the process of artistic creation and identification as very active interaction. As far as art in general is concerned, this interaction means bringing face to face tradition and experiment, influence and resistance to influence. Harold Bloom’s agonistic theory of the “anxiety of influence” in his 1973 classic volume, a
57 phenomenon that poets experience and strong artists overcome, arguably applies to such poetic identities as Ted Hughes’s. Bloom equates poetic history and poetic influence, “since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (Bloom 1973: 5). What is more, T.S. Eliot’s theory about tradition and the “historical sense” that each poet should have, thus incorporating in his work the whole of poetry from the Homeric epics onwards, completes the picture. In this article, this last pronouncement is illustrated by the “misreading” of the Homeric and Ovidian works, with Shakespeare as a defining artistic landmark in Hughes’s artistic self-definitions and identifications. Ted Hughes defines himself in relation to a long tradition, but also to the challenges of the present, in which competition is as serious as the feeling engendered by the anxiety of influence that the “great tradition” displays so prominently. Referring to the representational aspect of language and its properties, Adina Ciugureanu reminds us of Derrida’s inscribing it “in a network of differences that differ and defer meaning” (Ciugureanu 1997: 14). Ted Hughes does not appear to leave representation and its properties to roam free: he chooses to differ rather than defer in his agonistic conversation with tradition and influence. To the idea of influence and to the historical sense, one is likely to consider, as far as Ted Hughes is concerned, a strong dose of poetic definition by confrontation and rivalry. This has to do with the above-mentioned, very general phrasing of “the challenges of the present.” It involves, first and foremost, no other than Hughes’s fiercest competitor: his wife, Sylvia, more Plath than Hughes. This poetic definition, on both sides of the very special relationship as well as the great divide, is particularly obvious in such poems by Sylvia Plath as “The Colossus” or “Daddy,” where the oppressive father figure, engendering anxiety of influence in the former, love and hate in the latter, appears to apply more to Ted Hughes than to Otto Plath. As for Ted Hughes himself, the pieces of his Birthday Letters can be read as his very articulate attempt at poetic reconciliation with Sylvia, while presenting his own version of their relationship as well as of his own version of his and of Sylvia’s identities as star-crossed lovers, as well as individuals. An inclusion of Hughes’s last volume, his last will and testament, as well as the expression of the poetic reunion of his better self with his doomed Sylvia would require more than the limited space of such an article as this. Therefore, the subsequent lines will focus more on the historical sense and anxiety of influence that will define Hughes in relation to some illustrious predecessors and somewhat less in relation to his formidable antagonist, rival, usually identified in poetry as Sylvia Plath. If Birthday Letters was published in 1998, the year of his death, Tales from Ovid had been published the previous year. As an adaptation and selective translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hughes’s 1997 volume is more than a misreading of a great predecessor. It defines the British poet’s identity not only in relation to Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, but also to Sylvia, whose Collected Poems he will edit, but whom he will also hide in various guises in his Tales from Ovid, before highlighting her figure in Birthday Letters. The mythic dimension which Hughes will intensely resort to in his comprehensive attempt at poetic self-definition in relation
58 to all these formidable predecessors and to his contemporary rival will, in the words of Lynda Bundtzen, be tantamount to “elevating his personal catastrophes beyond autobiography”(Bundtzen 2013: 132). There are, therefore, several coordinates and approaches that can be taken into account while assessing Hughes’s poetic achievement in his Tales from Ovid. In addition to what has been said above, Rycroft’s very brief definition of identification, a summary of various psychoanalytic positions, would very usefully describe what Ted Hughes does while writing poetry and defining himself in relation to alterity. Thus, identification is “the process by which a person either (a) extends his identity into someone else, (b) borrows his identity from someone else, or (c) fuses or confuses his identity with someone else” (Rycroft 1995:76). Should one speak of Hughes’s mythic dimension in Tales from Ovid or of his anti-mythic approach? Joanny Moulin, in her “Ted Hughes’s Anti-Mythic Method,” takes this dilemma from an earlier article by Stuart Hirshberg and refers to Hughes’s own ideas, as expressed in an interview. Thus, although admiring T.S. Eliot, Hughes does not follow the illustrious predecessor’s mythic method of giving shape to the vast panorama of meaninglessness and futility of the Waste Land as expression of contemporary history. Hughes’s method, which one might call either mythic with a difference or anti-mythic would apply inwardly, not outwardly. This is how Moulin puts it very briefly: “Hughes said that a poet must “develop inwardly,” which means to find out the patterns to organise the “inner world.” This may lead to the creation of an “original mythology” (Moulin 2005: 86). One can thus read, or misread, Tales from Ovid as the mythologising, rather than anti- mythologising, of a poetic identity in relation to those important figures and their works, with Ovid as the main father figure, so to speak, with Sylvia and other feminine figures as inhabiting his encounters with doom. This original mythology will be his own version of his identity in relation to influence and interaction with other poetic identities. In such a poetic mythology he will obviously cast himself as a hero, in the wake of Achilles and Aeneas, although a biographical reading is not encouraged by the poet himself. Carrie Smith is fully aware of this when she goes as far as mentioning the poet’s fixation about this attitude as: “Hughes’s fixation on avoiding the potential for his poetry to be read through a biographical framework, specifically that relating to his and Plath’s life together” (Smith 2018: 196). Although Smith does read the poetry in Cave Birds contextually, in terms of manuscript omissions, a similar reading focusing on the omissions of major stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Hughes’s Tales from Ovid might lead to enlightening discoveries. Sometimes one defines oneself or something or somebody else by omission, and Hughes is no exception to that statement. He will thus work hard to prove that he is not the pathetic figure that Plath ridicules in “Amnesiac,” dated 21 October 1962. In that poem, the masculine figure is possessed of a “beautiful blank.” The name, the house, the car keys, as well as “The little toy wife,” are “erased, sigh, sigh” (Plath 1981: 233). Everything and everybody have gone down the drain. Like a little child, the masculine figure hugs his pillow, dreaming of a new one, “Like the red-headed sister he never dared to touch” (233). The masculine figure, obviously the husband that has run away,
59 finally declares his permanent desertion: “O sister, mother, wife,/ Sweet Lethe is my life./ I am never, never, never coming home! (233) That is a far from heroic figure that the angry wife as poet assigns to her amnesiac husband, and it should be read as even more deliberately offensive than that of the sinister macho figure that Sylvia assigns to Ted, in a poem which, arguably, only apparently represents “the real” Otto Plath, “Daddy.” It is also worth remembering that “Amnesiac” is finished less than a week before Sylvia’s 1962 birthday, her last. In his “Introduction” to The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes makes some very illuminating remarks about Sylvia’s fashioning what would become her Ariel volume of poetry: “She had her usual trouble with a title. On the title-page of her manuscript The Rival is replaced by A Birthday Present which is replaced by Daddy. It was only a short time before she died that she altered the title again, to Ariel (Hughes 1981: 15). In this context, “Amnesiac” may be seen as “a birthday present” that Sylvia gives Ted, rather than a present she receives from him, on her forthcoming birthday, October 27, 1962. “Daddy” as a possible name for the whole collection would undoubtedly have clearly shown that the poems were intended to hurt the bad daddy figure that the runaway husband stood for. As it turned out, the daddy figure was kept to represent Sylvia Plath’s love hate relationship with the father figure in the one specific poem that bears that name. In “Daddy,” although initially the biographical coordinates tend to unambiguously and exclusively point to a hyperbolic, demonic picture of Otto Plath, things finally change. Thus, the female speaker in the poem claims to ritualistically kill two “daddies,” the second obviously being the missing husband: “If I've killed one man, I’ve killed two- / The vampire who said he was you/ And drank my blood for a year,/ Seven years, if you want to know” (Plath 1981: 224). This may be seen as another birthday letter, written two weeks before Sylvia’s above-mentioned birthday, addressed to the missing husband and to the poetic rival. Is the persona in the poem to be seen in relation to Ovid’s Procne or to Ovid’s Philomela, and is Hughes anywhere in relation to one particular Tereus? Who is the one having had her tongue cut out, Assia, who has not reached her artistic potential, or Sylvia, one might ask oneself, and one might be wrong in looking for straightforward answers of this kind. As for A Birthday Present, the provisional name of the volume that would become Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, it will prompt Ted Hughes’s less ironic response that he will come up with, long after his deserted wife’s death: Birthday Letters. However, it will be in Tales from Ovid that Hughes will weave discreet aspects of two lives and of a poetic biography with his own response to illustrious predecessors as his impressive illustration of his “anxiety of influence.” In opposition to such representations as the “amnesiac” and the “vampiric daddy,” Ted Hughes will come up with himself in largely mythic narratives of doomed, star-crossed love feeding part of his poetic odyssey of self-definition. Much in the way in which Ovid would try to emulate and “misread” his formidable predecessor Vergil’s Aeneid, who, in turn, competed with the Homeric epics, Ted Hughes, in his adaptation and selective approach to some of Ovid’s stories in his Metamorphoses, will undertake to frame his life narrative as well as his poetic identity within a very dignified framework. If this is the result of an anxiety of influence, it is of a very poetically
60 productive nature. The formula features a texture of ancient myths hiding or highlighting biographical events, figures, relationships within a fully realized poetic sequence which engages with Ovid’s work from a completely different perspective. Although evidence is missing about the main reason why Ovid was punished by Augustus and relegated to the eastern edge of the Empire, one is tempted to attribute the poet’s fall from the emperor’s grace to the perceived licentiousness of his Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Augustus, almost paranoid about preserving and reinforcing his authority, had become intent on promoting and enforcing discipline, order, morals, Roman virtus. His daughter’s looseness may have been seen by him as influenced by Ovid’s invitation, probably made tongue in cheek, extended to married women, to learn the art of committing adultery. However, it is much more likely that Augustus hated The Metamorphoses more than the less serious-minded poetic works, a statement which is obviously liable to be taken issue with. Whereas the Homeric epics legitimized Greek hegemony in the Aegean Sea, while featuring the destruction of rival Troy, Vergil’s Aeneid evoked the mythical foundation of Rome by the Trojan hero Aeneas. Rome is now the master of Greece, while preserving some of Homer’s mythological figures and of his native land’s cultural heritage. What is more, the Aeneid goes one step further in both legitimizing and extolling authority in its narrative about the creation of the Empire and its law and order. However, if the Aeneid extols order, Ovid’s pieces in The Metamorphoses, while superficially assuming the shape of an epic, with an invocation of both divine and terrestrial authority, appear to be dangerously subversive. Ovid invokes mutability and transformation rather than stability and order, while also stressing the gradual decline from the Golden Age of moral goodness to the consecutive ages of silver, bronze and iron, with wars and immorality becoming stronger, with the gods punishing the mortals for their impiety, while they themselves show their immorality and erratic behaviour. Praising Augustus and his adoptive father, Caesar, turning them into demi-gods did not help much, in this context: “Why should I speak of all these provinces, / Of savages, sea-ports and little towns,/ For all the Earth and all the people in it/ Even the sea’s unconquered hemisphere/ Shall be servants of your Caesar’s son” (Ovid Book XV: 451). The year is 8 A.D., which features an unfortunate coincidence: the completion of The Metamorphoses and the relegation of the poet. Is it because of the Chaos with which Ovid’s work starts, of the decay that it evokes and of the insufficient praise of the paranoid and arrogant emperor, Caesar’s adopted son? How about this, which shows what a poet had to say to stay alive and within the comfortable confines of the Eternal City: “So Caesar burns as an eternal star./ Though here on earth bright Caesar's son denies/ A glory that outshines his father’s light,/ Fame calls him much too modest, and ignores/ His will to be far less than she desires” (451). The “much too modest son of Caesar,” Augustus, must have hated Ovid’s temerity at displaying confidence in his poetic immortality, as only emperors are supposed to aspire to that elevated condition. Is it too far-fetched a conjecture to imagine that ending the Epilogue of The Metamorphoses with the following lines was deemed a crime of lèse majesté?: “As long as
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Rome is the Eternal City/ These lines shall echo from the lips of men, /As long as poetry speaks truth on earth, /That immortality is mine to wear” (Ovid Epilogue 452). And so it was to be, with Ovid emulating his illustrious predecessors and his major work becoming, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond them, the most influential classical literary text. In addition to the potential that the artistic undertaking of reengaging with Ovid’s Metamorphoses promised, Ted Hughes must have found in Ovid more than a predecessor to ritually kill in Freudian fashion. Arguably, he must have been a kindred spirit, although the two had been differently rewarded for their “mistakes.” These transgressive gestures had probably more than an artistic dimension, having to do with the interweaving of life and art, the former’s influence on the latter, but also the other way round, affecting more than the artist himself. For Ovid, it had to do with his poetry, its impact on Augustus’s authority and its influence on such important figures as Augustus’s daughter, Julia. Ovid had both challenged the formula of the Virgilian epic, confirming a story of greatness, power and stability, and the idea of a stable identity in general, thus advocating fluidity and change, transformation. The reward for such a “revolutionary” vision, already mentioned above, was conferred by Augustus in 8 A.D.: the irrevocable relegation to Tomis. As for Ted Hughes, his mistakes involved the complicated relationships both with poetry and with Sylvia Hughes and Assia Wevill and their tragic denouements. The reward was a mixed blessing, which influenced the way he would cope with these catastrophes, prompting him to assume the troubled subjectivity of a guilt-ridden artist in the wake of Gerard de Nerval and of his poetic attempt at self-definition in his “El Desdichado”: “Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l’inconsolé,/ Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie :/ Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé/ Porte le soleil noir de la mélancolie” (Nerval web). “The dark one, the widower, the unconsoled” would come up with his final artistic atonement in his Birthday Letters, thus providing the necessary closure to a tormented and dramatic identity. Unlike Ovid, who had fallen in disgrace in Augustus’s imperial Rome, Hughes would become Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom: a consolation prize? Be that as it may, as clearly stated above, Tales from Ovid, published one year before Hughes’s death, provides the focus of the current article, as it shows, in a more veiled and arcane manner, some of the imbrications and implications of the British poet’s selfhood, in addition to his link to the exiled Roman poet “with his demolished tower.” In addition to loss and “demolished towers,” which are there, hidden among Hughes’s adaptations, there are also affirmations of the transformative power of extreme outbursts of passion. In The Metamorphoses and Tales from Ovid, both the Roman poet and his British “translator,” respectively, are creative adaptors. Ovid’s fifteen Books and the more slender volume by Ted Hughes display very subjective selections and a great deal of imaginative engagement: the tales they tell do not faithfully follow a mythological tradition and its emergent conventions in order to convey the cultural heritage that the older myths encompass. Their works are, arguably, portraits of the two artists having reached artistic maturity and trying to define
62 themselves, in less straightforward ways, through the tales they apparently tell only about the others, gods and mortals alike. Ovid, aware of the wide range of variants of the mythic tales, deals with them to illustrate his thesis and to define himself in relation to it. To trace the various threads he follows and to compare what he selects and what he leaves out requires the patience and competence of a knowledgeable scholar of “ancient lore,” so to speak. For the present purpose, which aims at defining Hughes in relation to his predecessors and to one of his contemporaries, drawing some general lines about Ovid’s attempt at self-definition is all that can be done in a limited space. Ovid had always been the singer of love, and love, as everybody knows, is usually blind, having to do with coups de foudre (Jupiter providing the occasional lightning) or with Cupid’s arrows. After Ars Amatoria, Ovid uses his genius in the artistic marathon that the framework of the epic provides. In it, instead of law, reason and order, he extols mutability and the irrational. The transformations he evokes are either corporeal and literal or psychological, the transformations thus metaphorically revealing the subject’s initial character. Lycaon, in Book I, the rude, violent human planning to kill his guest, who happens to be Jupiter in disguise, is turned into a wolf. Daphne, the virginal, innocent daughter of Peneus, is turned into a beautiful laurel tree. Everything is based on passion, love, lust, with the gods hardly supplying any moral standards that the humans should look up to and abide by. Most of the time, the gods are vindictive, unpredictable and irrational. By comparing Augustus and Caesar to these gods, Ovid draws attention, wittingly or not, to the largely arbitrary, dictatorial will with which they have come to rule the Roman res publica. But then, in spite of the almost inevitable flattery of the emperor, Ovid, heralding, well in advance, the famous Romantic pose that Hughes himself will attempt to use in a post-Romantic age, exalts his own poetic ego and his firm belief in his genius and his carmen’s power transcending the centuries well into a perpetual immortality. This is the crime of lèse majesté which has already been evoked, which was probably the first, if not the last straw when exile was decreed by the omnipotent Augustus. Hughes’s portrait of the artist as a mature man is easier to take a look at, since his mythological landscape is far more selective. If Ovid drew from the whole wealth of Greek and Roman mythological narratives, selecting, twisting and shaping his stories to make them his own and thus fashioning his own definitive poetic immortality, Ted Hughes only selected from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, this far more limited scope is vast enough for an outstanding artistic achievement and the best poetic formula for placing its author within the dignified framework that he needed to tell his own identity narrative. Hughes expresses his relationship, indebtedness and interaction with his predecessors through his adaptations of the Ovidian tales, but also through his commentary on such great “father figures” as the authors of the Metamorphoses and of Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, on their interest in “tortured subjectivity.” This is the vein that Hughes appears to share with both Ovid and Shakespeare in the above-mentioned works:
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In this vein, Shakespeare’s most Ovidian work was his first – Titus Andronicus. Thirty or so dramas later, in Cymbeline, his mild and blameless heroine Imogen – whom her beloved husband will try to murder – chooses for her bedtime reading Ovid’s shocking tale of Tereus and Philomela (Hughes 1981: viii).
Quite significantly, the title of the story of Tereus, Procne and Philomela, which is one of the tales Hughes chooses to deal with in his adaptation, features only the man’s name. It is that of the king of Thrace, Tereus, the son of Mars, who marries Procne. Theirs is a doomed marriage from the outset, as “Hymen and Juno and the Graces, / those deities who bless brides, shunned this marriage” (Hughes 1997: 229). At least at first sight, Philomela appears to be secondary, like her sister. Married to Procne, Tereus falls a victim to his Id, like most gods in Ancient mythologies. As it appears, reason is secondary for both kings and gods, passion is primary, and Hughes thus expresses Tereus’s coup de foudre for Philomela: “Suddenly he himself was like a forest/ When a drought wind explodes it into a firestorm” (Hughes 1997: 230). Both rapist and victim are to blame in an apparently patriarchal discourse, which feminists and not only are bound to find outrageous: “She was to blame – her beauty” (230). As for Tereus, it is his “uncontrollable body” which explains the universal truth that “Thracians are sexually insatiable” (230). Both Ovid’s and Hughes’s stories of myth and passion are under the sign of both Proteus and Cupid, and gods and mortals appear to be victims of doomed passion, whom exalted and tormented subjectivities may turn into both monsters and ethereal selves. In Tereus’s particular tale from Ovid, Philomela and Procne, greatly disturbed by anger and frustration, turn into horrible monsters. After Tereus rapes his sister-in-law Philomela, cuts off her tongue to prevent the retelling of the terrible story, his wife Procne finds the victim, kept in solitary confinement in the forest. The two women’s fury is, like Tereus’s body, “uncontrollable,” and Hughes is as good as Ovid at representing extremes of feeling. With her sister’s assistance, Procne, the wife, devises the most horrible form of revenge: she will kill the couple’s innocent son, Itys, will cook him and serve him to his father, Tereus. One has to be a great artist, like Ovid and Hughes, to convincingly make such hideous transformations as those initially affecting the two wronged women. These are psychological transformations, rather than physical transformations. Procne as a wife and loving mother, and an innocent virginal figure such as Philomela, turn into the human equivalents of the Graeco-Roman Furies. The mere fact of a short summary is unfair, as it does not imaginatively reconstruct the enormity of the deed and its consequences for everybody concerned in the doomed trio: Tereus, Procne, Philomela, which is the stuff that tragedy is made of, both in the ancient world and in the modern one. After a detailed description of Tereus’s torment on realizing that he has eaten his beloved son, there follows the gradual final transformation of the three doomed figures. Initially, they had all been defined through passion, lust, parental love, apparently seen as uncontrollable, escaping the ego’s control. Now they are turned into flying creatures, released from the constraints of their terrestrial bodies, rising above their biological determinism into the ethereal realm of the hoopoe, the nightingale and the swallow.
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Although this is not the last tale from Ovid that Hughes recounts in his outstanding style, the story of the doomed trio features towards the end of the volume. Placing the story at the very end would have made it too conspicuous, too liable to be interpreted in relation to someone’s real life narrative as one of the components of the overall identity of a poet with stories to tell and stories to hide or artistically transfigure. Instead, Hughes chooses to give particular end-emphasis and end-weight to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. At first sight, a reader may link this final story not only to Ovid’s tragic characters, victims of doomed love and parental enmity. One might be reminded of Boccaccio’s and of Chaucer’s adaptations of the story of the ill-fated lovers. However, for many, the first reaction would be to think of the comic use that Shakespeare makes in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some innocent ordinary people, mostly artisans, including Bottom, unsuccessfully try their performance skills at playing the two lovers’ tragic story. However, it is the more elevated story of two different backgrounds (more specifically here, two families at great enmity) and of an unfortunate combination of circumstances which conspire to affect Romeo and Juliet’s star- crossed love which is the prevailing impression after all. To what extent does the final story in Tales of Ovid have to do with Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare? It is a question worth considering and writing about at length. Equally interestingly, to what extent does it have to do with two 20th century poets who are initially separated by a fissured wall, like in the original tale? The fissured wall from Ovid’s tale might be seen as the Atlantic Ocean in Hughes’s tale. It is the pond that both unites and divides at least two English-speaking poetic traditions and two cultures. Do the Pyramus and the Thisbe in Hughes’s account come from different cultures and are their relationship affected by both passion and misreading, misunderstanding and false steps within a more elevated pattern of being under the power of myth and art? If so, that would complete the overall design of Tales of Ovid, while at the same time completing the story of Hughes’s ego development narrative with a story of a doomed duo having transcended the boundaries of the mundane through Poesis, which - unlike Amor - vincit omnia. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, like Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, firmly claim that identity is fluid, undergoing change, but poetry can endow it with dignity and permanence in its mutability.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Second Edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bundtzen, Lynda K. “Traumatic Repetition in Capriccio.” Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected. Ed. Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts, and Terry Gifford. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013: 130 – 144. Ciugureanu, Adina. High Modernist Poetic Discourse. Constanta: Ex Ponto, 1997.
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Hughes, Ted. “Introduction.” Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. by Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981: 13 – 17. ______. Tales from Ovid. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Moulin, Joanny. “Ted Hughes’s Anti-Mythic Method.” Ted Hughes: Alternative Horizons. Ed. Joanny Moulin. London and New York: Routledge, 2005: 86 – 92. Nerval, Gerard de. “El Desdichado” 66 IDENTITARY RESISTANCE TO CONFINEMENT AND CONFORMITY: KEN KESEY’S ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST Bianca Ionescu-Tanasescu, Eduard Vlad, Abstract: The author’s of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s experience as well as his personal inclinations prepared him to play his role of the “psychic outlaw” figure and to serve as the liaison agent between the earlier Beat Generation and the counterculture movement of the 1960s, for which he turned into a cult character and a guru, rivaling Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Timothy Leary. The current article describes Ken Kesey’s “psychic outlaw” role in that age of consensus through the mediation of his best-known novel’s protagonists, McMurphy and Chief Bromden. One of them will be able to fly over the cuckoo’s nest. Keywords: cult fiction, the Combine, the counterculture, psychedelic culture, the Beats. It all started with what would become Ken Kesey’s most critically acclaimed and best-selling novel, published in 1962, but very much a book reflecting the spirit of the discontents of the previous decade. His One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would soon become a cult novel of the hippie generation. Whissen considers this cult novel to be a “modern morality play,” an allegorical cultural text, displaying religious overtones. The necessary archetypal characters of this morality play include a messiah or savior (R.P. McMurphy) and his apostle and disciple (Bromden) in a narrative in which good is victorious over the power of darkness, even if temporarily (Whissen 1992: 164). Ken Elton Kesey may be seen not only as a link between the Beats and the psychedelic culture of the hippies of the 1960s, but also as a son of the Great Depression years. He was born in 1935 in La Junta, Colorado, which his family left, to settle in Springfield, Oregon, during the Second World War. It is there that Kesey first attended school, before he went on to study at the University of Oregon, from which he graduated in 1957.The following year he began his studies as Stanford, California. As a student, he would also show to be a good wrestler, rising as high as the Olympic pre-selections of 1960. Creative writing was also something young Kesey was good at. Stanford University (where he had enrolled in creative writing) is the place where he came across the psychology student who led him to the environment that would inspire him for his best known work: Vik Lovell, to whom his best book will be dedicated. Lovell told him about the research on experimental drugs, such as LSD, being conducted at the Menlo Park veterans’ hospital. As a matter of fact, it was part of a secret CIA program called MKULTRA, which would be declassified several decades later. The idea was to test the reactions of people, potential spies, for example, to whom drugs had been administered. As scientists needed paid volunteers willing to serve as psychedelic guinea pigs, Kesey became one of them. He both 67 accepted the sum of money he was offered and the opportunity to investigate alternative modes of perception and consciousness which drug consumption produced. This appears to be an unexpected episode in the confrontation between the military- industrial complex and ordinary, but rebellious people, mainly artists, resisting its power. This time, young Kesey is paid, obviously working for the system and the power elite. He feels very patriotic, since he serves his country, he gets some money and feels high. Kesey becomes accustomed to LSD, he is also given peyote, Ditran, mescaline, which would eventually cause his long term drug addiction. Since LSD was still legal at the time, what is more, produced and marketed by a respectable Swiss pharmaceutical firm called Sandoz, Kesey is not likely to have worried much. Anyway, not enough research had been done by then to discover the terrible side effects and long term consequences of drug use. His job as a night attendant in the same hospital gave him both the time and the experience of that place and its inmates that would allow him to create the book that would make him famous. Like the Beats, Kesey is interested in the artistic potential of representations of madness. The fact that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became “cult fiction” in the United States is largely due to another central theme that it highlights. The central theme has to do with forms of resistance to what is here called the “Combine.” This theme, which was gaining particular prominence among the minority nonconformists of the 1950s and 1960s, will become even more prominent when the general conformism of the two above-mentioned decades is followed, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, by the rebelliousness of the counterculture. The novel shows the behavior of a determined rebel, McMurphy, initially defying the constraints of society as a troublemaking individual, then turning into a sort of mythical hero rising to defend the cause of the many and the weak and suffering the eventual ordeal. The first form of resistance that McMurphy will appear to put up, and with which he tries to inspire the other inmates, is the refusal to accept the prevailing discourse of mainstream normality imposed on everyone inside the cuckoo’s nest, as Knapp notes: Randle McMurphy succeeds in destroying the order of the ward, and in liberating some of its patients, not through any kind of direct attack on the system, but simply by refusing to speak the language which sustains it. His most telling weapons are jokes, games, obscenity, make-believe, verbal disrespect (Knapp 2007: 45). At the time, forms of resistance to mainstream culture were beginning to take the shape of experimentation with psychedelic drugs, which gave some of society’s discontents the impression of free access to a more exciting universe. The consequences of this kind of playing with fire were not fully known and understood either by the medical world or by ordinary people. The most successful fictional feature of the text is the use of an unreliable narrator to tell the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy. The half Indian Chief Bromden, the character-narrator, recounts the main events and incidents of his being confined to a psychiatric ward. He does not focus on his behavior, but on the “advent and crucifixion” of the hero, the charismatic protagonist. The sharp contrast between the protagonist and the world in which he chooses to descend, initially believing that this will be an easy place of rest for him, is noted by Terence Martin: 68 When Randle Patrick McMurphy swaggers into the cuckoo’s nest, brash, boisterous, with heels ringing off the floor “like horseshoes,” he commands the full attention of a world held crazily together in the name of adjustment by weakness, fear, and emasculating authority. As chief Bromden says, “he sounds big” (Martin 2007: 3). The narrator appears to be a secondary character. He witnesses the exploits of the protagonist and learns something about himself in the process, the design of the novel reminding one of the narrative perspectives of such fictional works as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Any interpretation of the novel involves addressing the question whether Chief Bromden is a secondary character or as central to the story as McMurphy himself and how they relate to the story of resisting the power of the Combine. One of the most memorable sections of the novel is its beginning, which, because of the strange, paranoid vision, suggests that the story is seen through the deranged lenses of a madman’s mind. The reader thus appears to agree with everyone inside the narrative. Everyone thinks that Bromden is a hopeless psychiatric patient, in addition to being deaf and dumb. The hospital attendants, taking advantage of his apparent weakness and vulnerability (although he is very tall and strong), bully and push him around, making him to sweep and tidy up in their place, hence the character’s nickname, Chief Broom. The very first things he says confirm the realization that he is a paranoid schizophrenic, the inmate that belongs to the “cuckoo’s nest.” Bromden’s strange vision, his hallucinatory perceptions will only stress, by their hyperbolic aspect, dimensions of reality which one usually takes for granted. Through Chief Bromden’s awed perspective, the beginning of the novel represents the Big Nurse seeing the black orderlies fooling around, gets angry and turns, in Bromden’s terrified eyes, into a huge, monstrous creature that wraps her long tentacles around the orderlies, ready to strangle them to death. No sooner is she seen about to do that than the patients gather in the corridor and the vision changes back to normal. The monster gives up “her hideous real self” and returns to her normal appearance, a combination of apparently contradictory features, or at least that is how the narrator sees her. As it will become apparent in the subsequent sections of the novel, Bromden, like the other helpless inmates of the asylum, is intimidated by the mother figure of the Big Nurse, hence the combination of terrible machinery, doll-like face and imposing womanly figure, which awes and subdues the “children.” Ruth Sullivan, in her “Big Mama, Big Papa, and Little Sons in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” is quick to note how Kesey deals with Freud’s Oedipus Complex in his novel, assigning different roles to the characters, as mother figure (Nurse Ratched), father figure (McMurphy) and sons (Bromden and the other inmates (Sullivan 2007: 15). Although using the immediacy and vividness of the present in his narration, it dawns on the reader, as the novel progresses, that Bromden is telling the story in retrospect, in an attempt to decipher its meaning as he goes along, his mind becoming less and less deranged. His vision becomes clearer and brighter, the vividness of his sense perceptions, although occasionally marked by his mental problems, will gradually make him acquire the status of a narrator whose voice and vision are worth considering. Something supporting Bromden’s strange statement that “it is the truth even if it did not happen” is his realization about the existence of what he calls the “Combine”: a vast machine- like institutional structure controlling people both inside and outside the asylum. It is the paranoid narrator’s visualization of oppressive authority. In it the Big Nurse is perceived to be a 69 powerful and dreaded figure. She is pictured as a composite entity including the authoritative Big Mother, a monstrous, implacable machine, ready to deal with any sign of resistance. Before the situation becomes dramatic, though, the narrator describes one the frequent occasions on which a public relations man of the mental hospital guides visitors willing to see what the mental hospital looks like and how it is organized, stressing how modern the place is, what a cheerful and happy atmosphere reigns there. If mentally ill people were mistreated in the past, civilization has brought great progress in dealing with insanity. However, the narrator is not fully convinced of that, on the contrary. In fact, he is afraid of real and imaginary electronic and mechanical devices, such as microphones in his broom handle or even in the pills he is taking. The Indian thinks that the hospital is just a “factory” of the Combine, and its inmates are mechanical defective parts, and therefore needing repair. Bromden believes that the hospital, just like other institutions, such as schools and churches, are meant to keep people disciplined. Unlike the other institutions, though, the hospital fixes the “twisted” individuals up, sometimes making them better than new, the Indian claims: The ward is a factory for the Combine. It’s for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart (38). There are clearly-defined circumstances that can explain how the Indian’s alienation came about. Bromden is a six-foot-seven-inches tall former World War II combatant who was shocked by the terrible uses of modern technology. He transfers the artificial fog used to hide military objectives during the war to the surroundings of his ward, where “metaphorical fog” is seen both as an instrument of oppression (probably the effect of medication on the minds of the patients), and as a means of escape against authority. The fog, deafness, and dumbness appear to have helped the Indian survive in the hospital for a long time. In addition to being a World War II veteran, he is also a hospital veteran, as he says: “I’m the one been here on the ward the longest, since the Second World War. I been here on the ward longer’n anybody. Longer’n any of the other patients” (16). Bromden’s feigned deafness and dumbness is meant to isolate and protect him from the others. Initially, Bromden felt that it was society that made him silent and invisible, turning him into a non-entity. As Lupack correctly observes, “…even as a young boy he felt his invisibility in a white man's world and learned that Indians are misfits, bereft of any real sense of self (Lupack 68). His deaf and mute status also allows the Indian to overhear and report, as a narrator, exchanges that the hospital staff would otherwise keep from him. Assuming deafness and dumbness, Bromden accepts a less-than-human subaltern position in the hospital. The Indian deliberately diminishes, belittles his presence. He is seen by patients and staff as deaf, dumb, Chief Broom, hardly more than a piece of furniture, a tool. He sees himself as “very little,” much smaller than McMurphy, although he is a very tall Indian, the tallest man on the ward. The Big Nurse probably reminds him of his mother, a white woman who controlled her giant of a husband, the Indian chief. The father, whose Indian name means The-Pine-That- Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, gives up his proud name for his wife’s surname, Bromden. It will be easier for him to get his Social Security number in this way. His wife will also persuade him to accept the deal whereby the Indians’ lands and way of life (they are fishermen) are 70 destroyed by modern technology: a hydroelectric dam will be built, the Indian settlements will be flooded. Significantly, the traumatized son sees his very tall Indian father getting smaller and smaller and his white mother bigger and bigger, finally twice her husband’s size. Gradually, with McMurphy’s assistance, Chief Bromden will see himself grow up again, and regain his prodigious strength. Kesey appears to use the stereotype of the Native American as innocent child to be educated and initiated into adulthood by his white father. The white father here is not a representative of the Establishment, but the “psychic outlaw” himself, Randle Patrick McMurphy. McMurphy initially comes over as a picturesque character, an adventurer, troublemaker, gambler, who finds a way of escaping the rigors of the prison work camp. Seen this way at the beginning of the novel, he appears to resemble the protagonist of Heller’s Catch-22, also examined in this chapter of the dissertation. Yossarian, the protagonist of Joseph Heller’s novel, was pretending to be ill in order to avoid flying more missions. McMurphy is pretending to be mentally ill, the “cuckoo’s nest” appearing to him to be a better place to be than the jail in which he is serving a sentence for assault and battery. Simulating madness brings him to the asylum, in which he intends to relax and have an easy time, gambling, playing poker, thus earning some money as well. He is very friendly, he jokes and shakes hands with the madder and less mad inmates, with the so-called Acutes and with the Chronics alike. He declares to be delighted to be admitted to an “Institute of Psychology.” Knowing how to interact with the inmates, he first tells them that they look normal to him. On the other hand, he claims to be very mad, the maddest person around. He declares that he is ready to challenge the person who claims to be the most prominent madman, as he wants this honor to be his. There is a dramatic confrontation which follows, between the champion, Harding, and the challenger, McMurphy. Very ironically, to prove that he is mad, McMurphy confesses to having voted for Dwight Eisenhower, while Harding claims to have done so twice so far. McMurphy, in order to beat his opponent, expresses his determination to vote for Eisenhower for a third presidential term, “this November” (Kesey 20), a temporal clue that sets the novel in 1960). The result of the competition entitles McMurphy, the recently arrived inmate, to claim the leading status among the patients, getting “bull goose loony” position. McMurphy wants to give the impression to the inmates that this is an important title, rather than the sign of a bigger mental handicap. The narrative which follows will clarify the newcomer’s relation to the other characters and to the narrator character. In the children’s folk rhyme that features as the book’s epigraph, a children’s folk rhyme, goes, “one (goose) flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” One will have to wait and see which of the “geese” will manage to do that, who will be the bull goose loony breaking free. An interpretation of the novel will depend on answering this question. Is it McMurphy who, through death, is released from what he had thought would be an easy game and then proved to be an ordeal or is it Bromden, no longer Chief Broom, who becomes aware of who he is and what he can decide to do? Randle McMurphy gradually realizes that the treatment the patients undergo, including shock therapy, even lobotomy, does not appear to help them recover, on the contrary. What is even worse, Nurse Ratched encourages the patients to spy on one another. If something embarrassing is revealed about one of the inmates, he is publicly humiliated, thus diminishing even more his self-esteem. McMurphy realizes that something is very rotten in the cuckoo’s nest and that he cannot stay uninvolved, while the others are manipulated and humiliated. He will use his newly acquired “bull goose loony” position to defy the orders and the regulations imposed by 71 the head nurse, thus undermining her authority. At first he may have done that just to have fun, in order to entertain the other inmates and himself. He had planned from the beginning to make Nurse Ratched lose her temper, to show that she is not in absolute control. McMurphy will soon find it difficult to put up with the terrible, humiliating ways in which the Big Nurse uses therapy not in order to treat and cure patients, but in order to keep them under control, while making them feel vulnerable, dependent and childish. During group meetings, for example, which are meant to provide therapy, the patients, who are in general told to spy on one another, are in turn encouraged to reveal embarrassing details about themselves as well, and the rest are urged to figuratively destroy them in a game meant to divide, humiliate and control the inmates. McMurphy realizes that it is his responsibility to help the patients recover their self- esteem, self-confidence and develop their sense of hanging together against their common enemy. He will succeed in getting most of the inmates to vote against Miss Ratched, in spite of the fact that all of them are afraid of her. He will get ten of the Acutes and two female prostitutes, the only female characters seen as good (totaling thus twelve Apostles of the protagonist in an allegorical interpretation) to join him on an outing. This memorable fishing cruise will urge the inmates of the cuckoo’s nest to make decisions, to enjoy action in the open air, to have a good time, to prove to the others and to themselves that they are full of initiative, resourceful and dignified people. McMurphy will understand Bromden’s stratagem and he will manage to persuade him to discard his deaf-and-dumb mask and to start communicating with him. He thus gradually and symbolically begins to transfer to the Indian, his most important disciple or apostle, part of his power. As a consequence of the interaction between the two, Chief Broom will gradually become Chief Bromden again. He will also become more lucid and articulate about the challenges he must cope with. He vividly recalls all the key issues and problems his ethnic group has had to deal with. Bromden will become courageous enough to get involved in a fight between McMurphy and the attendants, although he is fully aware now that this is a losing battle, that they will be outnumbered and overpowered by the subordinates of the Combine. The Indian will thus have to accompany his newly acquired father figure, McMurphy, the two having to undergo electro-shock treatment as punishment for their rebellious behavior. Bromden comes back from the EST room alone, and is hailed as a courageous hero by the other inmates. This announces the scene when McMurphy will leave his “apostle” alone, who is ready now to deal with the Combine on his own. Barry Leeds not only finds that the Indian is McMurphy’s best pupil, he is the survivor that combines the strengths of his mixed heritage: Bromden is McMurphy’s most successful disciple. It is not until the very end of the novel, however, that it becomes clear that Bromden has surpassed his teacher in the capacity to survive in American society and to maintain personal identity in spite of the Combine. (Leeds 42). It has become obvious by the end of the narrative that in Kesey’s novel women play the villains against whom McMurphy wants to direct all the male inmates of the ward. Nurse Ratched not only appears to be in control of the inmates. She also seems to intimidate and to push Doctor Spivey around, taking over absolute control over the psychiatric institution. She is also shown to be a friend of young Billy Bibbit’s mother, another woman who makes it difficult 72 for a man – her son – to achieve maturity. In Leslie Horst’s words, “Big Nurse appears to be a perversion of femininity” (Horst 465). Billy Bibbit’s story is a good illustration of the catastrophic influence, here illustrated as that of a domineering woman, can have on a vulnerable young man having to cope with his identity crisis. A timid, stuttering virgin, Billy is urged by “his father,” McMurphy. This will happen during the farewell party that will lead to the catastrophic denouement of the plot. When the Big Nurse, the intimidating mother substitute, catches Billy and his woman having sex, she humiliates the young man, also threatening to inform his mother about a very serious offence. Terrified, the young man commits suicide. This will lead to the episode in which McMurphy violently confronts the Big Nurse. As punishment, McMurphy is to undergo lobotomy. He is then shown to have turned into a pathetic vegetable. Lobotomy symbolically equals castration here, and the Big Nurse finally prevails over her rebellious antagonist. It is at this stage that the reader might think again about the overall interpretation of the narrative and about its central protagonist or pair of protagonists. Various interpretations may focus on McMurphy as a Christ- like or Messiah figure and on his final fate as a sort of ordeal that he has to undergo in order to allow his disciples, especially Chief Bromden, to break free from the constraints of the world of confinement. This applies to the space inside, but also outside the asylum, in which they are made to live a far from dignified life. Thomas J. Slater, for example, stresses McMurphy’s centrality and his Christ-like stature, as seen through the eyes of his main disciple, the Indian: … the Chief’s depiction of McMurphy as a Christ figure is blatantly obvious. McMurphy comes into the ward, gathers his followers about him, instructs them in how to live, and then sacrifices himself for them even though he has done nothing wrong. He dies merely because he is a threat to the status quo (Slater 124). This is probably the main interpretation, with McMurphy as the protagonist, but this is not the only one. Although he discusses the duo at the core of the plot as fundamental to the interpretation of the book’s message, Fred Madden is one of those who find the disciple’s role central to the narrative, as he is the one who grows, and finally flies over the cuckoo’s nest: “At first McMurphy seems to be “big” from the Chief’s point of view, but by the end of the novel, his cap is “too small” for the Chief to wear”(Madden 109). Chief Bromden has by now recovered his sense of dignity. He does not want to see his mentor turned into a vegetable. Out of respect, he strangles McMurphy while he is sleeping, thus preserving his role model’s dignity. Being reminded by one of the other inmates of McMurphy’s unsuccessful attempt at lifting a very heavy control panel, he summons his huge physical strength, tries hard and lifts the huge piece of equipment. He then uses it as a heavy tool to break out of the asylum, and manages to do what McMurphy had wanted to do: to fly over the cuckoo’s nest. Bromden recovers his pride and self-esteem, combining what is best in his mixed family and racial background. His final gesture is, like Huck in Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to run away from civilization. Unlike Huckleberry though, Bromden does not light out for the Indian territory to stay there, only to see what his brothers have been doing. He would then head for Canada, away from the country that has destroyed the ancestral lands he had grown up in. Chief Bromden is not seen as seeking integration in mainstream America, the way Kesey will eventually do, settling at his ranch and looking after his family as any respectable American citizen. He will fly over the whole of the cuckoo’s nest, which appears, in this satiric novel, to 73 refer to the whole of the United States. Through this gesture, at least within the universe created by his fictional work, the author comes up with a memorable expression of a discontent rejecting the conformism of the Combine as a whole. Works Cited Horst, Leslie. “Bitches, Twitches, and Eunuchs: Sex-Role Failure and Caricature.” Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Text and Criticism. Ed. J.C. Pratt. New York: Penguin, 1996: 464-471. Huffman, James R. “The Cuckoo Clocks in Kesey’s Nest.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 29-42. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. J.C. Pratt. London and New York: Penguin, 1996. Knapp, James. “Tangled in the Language of the Past: Ken Kesey and Cultural Revolution.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 43-52. Leeds, B.H. Ken Kesey. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Lupack, B.T. Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction: Inmates Running the Asylum. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. Madden, Fred. “Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner.” Martin, Terence. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the High Cost of Living.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 3-14. Oliver, Paul. Foucault: The Key Ideas. McGraw Hill, 2010. Parsons, Anne E. From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pratt, J.C., ed. Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Text and Criticism. New York: Penguin, 1996. 74 Slater, Thomas J. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: A Tale of Two Decades. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 123- 136. Sullivan, Ruth. “Big Mama, Big Papa, and Little Sons in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 15-28. Whissen, T.R. Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. 75 PRIMAL ENERGY VS. INTIMATIONS OF POWER GAMES IN TED HUGHES’S ANIMAL POEMS Adriana Voicu, Eduard Vlad Abstract: The current article brings together a series of critical landmarks associated with power and ideology within the framework of literary and cultural studies and how they shed light on poetic representations, focusing on significant poems by Ted Hughes. At a time when “the gentility principle” (A. Alvarez) was seen as a negative feature of Movement poetry, Ted Hughes extols energy and extreme forms of feeling and sensation in which power, rather than gentility, is a key term. Keywords: gentility, power vs. energy, ideology, subjectivity, self One thing that is worth stressing from the beginning is the distinction made in what follows between energy and power. If energy may be seen as a physical coordinate, power may be considered in contemporary cultural contexts as a defining feature of culture, in which such poetry as Ted Hughes’s is one important component. Once this distinction is made, the next step is to examine how energy and power are interwoven in such poems as Hughes’s early poetry. It can safely be said that words do not mean all by themselves, out of a specific context. One of the words which may convey a variety of meanings in such contexts is this short word that can go a long way, in many directions: power. As said above, in both cultural and literary studies, the concept of power has assumed central position, as any cultural practice, including social behaviour and literary communication. Definitions of arts in general, literature in particular, definitions of culture as a broad range of artifacts, beliefs, institutions, involve representation and discourse, both of them driven by power differentials. Power defines what culture and its specific expressions do, rather than what they mean, in a community at a certain historical stage. This has been particularly important over the last few decades, when ideological and political compulsions have also become very prominent in the explorations of what literary texts, including poetry, do in the cultural marketplace where symbolic meaning is produced, fought over, disseminated and consumed. One can then say that poetry is power, which would be a very general statement, therefore devoid of any discriminatory … power. However, more detailed examinations of the connections between raw energy and constructed power might illuminate aspects of poetry, and Hughes’s poetry particularly lends itself to such an approach. 76 In the sense that it acquires in a social context, in which ideology is a key issue, the concept of power, as described by Barker, refers to what a group of people do, while organizing their views on themselves and on the world, being legitimated by an ideology (Barker 2004: 161). Power has traditionally and straightforwardly been related to coercion, as it is by force that certain practices, concepts and ideas are imposed. A post-structuralist point of view, however, adds that power is productive and ubiquitous, affecting all social classes and individuals, flowing in all directions, not only from the oppressor toward the oppressed. Power is everywhere and pluridirectional. It obviously finds its central place in politics, both domestic and international, with geopolitics stating this very clearly. Power has always lurked in every area of human activity, even in contexts which apparently were above or beyond it, such as the beautiful real of poetry, for example. An examination of power’s workings and mechanisms is therefore useful in any cultural investigation, and the study of poetry is one of the important fields of inquiry. Therefore, power, politics, and poetry are likely to go together, one may quite safely state today. If power is part of politics, then politics is everywhere and poetry is political. Simon Gunn refers to the authority of political philosopher Steven Lukes, who mentions three types of power. The first, which he called the one-dimensional view of power, focused on the act of decision-making in the political process. Power resided with those whose will prevailed where a conflict of interest or policy was apparent. What was significant in the one-dimensional view was that to count as such power must involve a visible conflict between actors with differing interests or preferences on a particular political issue. The two-dimensional view of power accepted this emphasis on conflict and decision- making, but added the ability to control the political agenda – what counts as a political issue and what does not – and the fact that conflict and interests might be hidden as well as open. It thus criticised the (in Gunn 83) previous view as overly concerned with the direct behaviour of participants and as ignoring the latent or contextual issues in any political conflict, including the potential significance of “non” decision-making. Finally, Lukes proposed a three-dimensional or “radical” view of power. While not excluding conflict and decision-making from view, this extended the concept of power from the immediate political process to include the “socially structured and culturally patterned behaviour of groups and practices of institutions” (Lukes 1974: 22). Power was thus less an effect of individuals than of collectivities. It was not restricted to situations of overt conflict between observable interests, but might be exercised to prevent needs or grievances finding political expression in the first place, as in cases of manipulation or the imposition of authority. The radical view, favoured by Lukes himself, thus incorporated within the definition of power the possibility that any consensus might be artificial and that real interests could exist beyond those politically visible in any given situation (in Gunn 84). This complex view of power is obviously reminiscent of Foucault’s view on power as ubiquitous and pluridirectional and lends itself to an examination of how any cultural product, such as a poetic text, works. Whether it is unidirectional or pluridirectional, power implies the presence of a subject performing a controlling task. It could be an all-encompassing system of monitoring and control, 77 like Foucault’s panopticon, or it can appear as a group conveying messages “encoded with cultural meaning” (Oswell, 49), and, regardless of its form, it definitely implies the creation of an ideology. According to Terry Eagleton, there are countless definitions and applications to this versatile term, as it is encountered in all fields, from literature to politics or mass media. Eagleton’s view on ideology is that it can mean: “the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life, a body of ideas characteristic of a particular group or class, ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power, identity thinking, social illusion, action-oriented sets of beliefs (17).” Despite the fact that they are not interwoven, these definitions have the self as the central piece, and the communication relations that take place in a wide range of contexts. Although Eagleton provides answers to questions regarding ideology and offers comprehensive definitions, she also reveals the darker side an ideology could imply, proving that “ (…) ideologies are passionate, rhetorical, impelled by some benighted pseudo-religious faith which the sober technocratic world of modern capitalism has thankfully outgrown; on the other hand, they are arid conceptual systems which seek to reconstruct society from the ground up in accordance with some bloodless blueprint. (19).” In other words, sometimes there may be no difference between a nicely told story and a political doctrine, as the person uttering the word will exercise power over the public, and manipulate their thoughts. Moreover, as ideology comes from the word idea, ideal, all manifestos or political promises allure the people with an idea of a society, an idyllic place where everyone will get along with each other and live happily ever after provided they obey the speaker’s rules. Terry Eagleton discusses the way in which Hegel’s influence was reflected upon Marx’s Manifestos and his ideology as a whole. In his Manifestos, Marx described the difference between the persecuted labour force, where workers were seen as pawns used in the benefit of society, and the ideal of a non-alienated labour, the more humane side of it (59). John Hartley, in Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, highlights Marx’s power of words and the extent to which he was able to influence people, making them resent monarchy or the bourgeoisie and pleading for a capitalist society. In his book, one can be reminded of how Marxism regarded the empowered produced by industrialization, stressing the idea that capitalism unleashes productive forces. Nevertheless, Marxism is all about dominance and history as a succession of class struggle configurations, about which class will dominate the others using coercion, law, divide and rule strategies, and hegemony. In Marxist approaches, power “was something to be taken from someone else, and exercised over them” (Hartley 182). Once again, the two opposite sides of the term ideology are highlighted, as on the one hand, they promise a heavenly state of being, an utopic land where there are equal rights for everybody, while on the other hand, there is the harsh truth that a group of people, regardless of its size, is bound to listen to a leader and obey the rules imposed. Power can and will be encountered in history and literature alike in terms of dichotomy. Not only power, but also the notion of ideology can also be discussed from this point of view. We can see the problematic of power on a wide spectrum with Marx at one end of it with his 78 theory about class struggle and with Foucault on the other side, who chooses to adopt a different perspective on the idea of power, trying somehow to reach an agreement, or, better yet, to find peace in presenting his solution to this power-coercion topic. Hartley puts the two views in opposition and states that Foucault applies theories of truth, knowledge, power and the self. In his view, power is not coercion, power is “taking charge of life,” and in order to obtain this, a person needs knowledge. Nick Mansfield, in his book on Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Harraway, says that Foucault considered the individual as both under the effect of power, as well as the element of its articulation. In other words, people are under the influence of power, but they are also capable of exercising power. Everything that makes us who we are, our bodies, our gestures and language, are the effect of power, designed for us, rather than by us. We are so fit to bear the power because we always want to consider ourselves as independent and far from being affected by it (Mansfield 54). Sara Mills discusses Foucault’s theories and ideas in her book, Foucault, and she highlights the fact that unlike Marxist representatives who argued about the manner in which a higher power, such as the State, has the ability to make people submissive, Foucault focuses on quite the opposite, namely the resistance to power relations (34-35). The individual, in his view, is not only affected by, but also has the ability to influence power, thus power becomes not domineering, but rather a strategy, a system of relations, a chain linking all the members of society. Not only does Foucault try to find reconciliation between power and the individual, but he also aims at finding a connection between power and knowledge, claiming that knowledge is not necessarily something inborn, but a product of the influence of numerous institutions and practices (79). Hartley calls attention to the differences between the two ideologies: while Marxists focus on “struggle,” Foucauldians rely more on knowledge, truth, discourse, self, sexuality and govern mentality as sites of power. However, can anyone be truly the believer in just one concept? Is there such thing as a pure doctrine, or do they all come from the same basic idea but add details to bedazzle the consumer, the viewer, the reader, the passer bys and the ones about to be influenced? Regardless of their names and topics and agenda, no matter how peaceful they might seem, they all bear the same core trait: power. Their opinions matter more, their ideas are better, their agenda is perfect, and their religion will get you redemption the fastest. Considering this cultural background, this turmoil where the great thinkers of the world discussed the importance and the essence of power, writers also endeavored to give memorable expression to feelings and thoughts associated with how power is shaped in human interaction, turning their attention to writing as a means of achieving redemption from such sins as solipsism. In postwar British Literature, such writers belonged to a cultural group called The Movement, whose representatives were, among others, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, Kingsley Amis. Ted Hughes was one of the writers who stood distinctly apart from what critics such as Alfred Alvarez called the gentility of some poetry of that age. Alvarez, in his introduction to The 79 New Poetry, mocked the British gentility, referring to the sets of values a group of people adhere to. Alvarez defined gentility as “the belief that life is always more or less orderly, people more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controllable” (in Tuma, p. 45). Alvarez was against gentility and called for the poets’ awakening, as he considered that in the social context of wars, genocides and trauma, gentility came as a denial of all the horrors faced by the world itself, implicitly turning a blind eye to all the interior angst and struggle each individual was fighting with. If Larkin was one of these genteel poets, Hughes was definitely not. Al Alvarez was pleading for a new type of poetry, one that would reveal the darker side of the individual and society as a whole. He discussed the writing techniques of British poets and he seemed to fancy and admire Hughes’s poetry. While Larkin and The Movement as a whole were seen as provincial, insular, unemotional (genteel), others, like Hughes, were bent on creating powerful expressions of unbridled energy, violent emotions and sensations featuring prominently. Analysing the historical and political background after the Second World War, John Press offers an insight into the changes occurring throughout the world, focusing on its influence on literature. He argues that British poets could not comprehend the true meaning of a tragedy, comparing the effects the war had on Great Britain to what happened in China, Asia or Africa. Nonetheless, he analyses what power started to mean in a new British society, where many reforms took place and politics were changed and adapted to a new life. Press points out how power was associated with education, hence more and more people could finish their university studies, find a good job and be better paid, therefore power meant knowldge. On another note, this access to power also meant that writers, by means of their work, had the power to influence their readers opinions. Most British writers turned to evoke the effects the Second World War had on them, without being too engulfed in politics, as Press highlights: “Scarcely any poets in England turn nowadays to communism as a source of hope, nor do they feel the least enthusiasm for and anticommunist crusade. For them the Soviet Union is not so much a monstrous tyranny as a narrow, rigid, illiberal, dull bureaucracy, remarkably efficient in certain ways, but fundamentally a dreary civilization”(15). The British poets chose to reflect their inner struggles, or turn to vivid portrayals of their society, inferring meaning by means of metaphors, although most of the descriptions are placed in urban scenarios. In his works, Ted Hughes strays from the urban landscape and chooses the natural and animal kingdom as means of expressing his feelings and conveying his powerful messages or complaints. Nature in Hughes’s poetry is different from that illustrated in the poems written by the Romantics, in the sense that it is far from being an oasis, a harmonious place. Hughes’s nature is fierce, wild and governed by Darwinian laws, a battlefield where only the fittest shall survive and the strongest shall prevail. Nonetheless, Hughes’s poetry is not a documentary about the survival of the fittest. This struggle contains the essence of all beings, the beauty of life. All the poems are metaphors revealing the estrangement of humans from their primordial selves. Most of his poems can also be analysed in relation to Freud’s theory, especially that regarding the self. Freud’s theory stated that even the smallest gestures or reactions to different objects or 80 situations bear a deeper meaning and can convey an important message about a particular individual. A broad explanation of Freud’s theory of the self is encountered in Nick Mansfield’s work on “Subjectivity: Theories of Self from Freud to Haraway”, and, as it is explained in this work, Freud would call these events subjective to potentially violent energies and conflicts. The conflict between the conscious and unconscious resides in the great amount of energy invested in making the unconscious thoughts and debris hidden from the conscious side. Nevertheless, as Mansfield concludes, “the nature of repressed material is to defy repression and to seek to express itself” (29-30). This is precisely what writers convey thorough their work, and this discrepancy and battle against rational and primal energies are easy to find and recognize in many of Hughes’s poems. Most of the poems written by Hughes feature a creature that is commander-in-chief, the one who has the power, gifted with mythical powers which may or may not show mercy towards the mortals. Each poem shows a different side of the story: it is as if the same story of sorrow and grief is being told from all points of view possible. The writer somehow tries to exhaust all the possibilities not to give the reader an answer necessarily, but maybe to find the answer for himself, because faced with such horrors one rational person may not find a satisfying answer to the question “Why?”. Some of his most memorable poetic creations celebrate the power and freedom that animals express, either in the wilderness or when coping with the terrible constraints of captivity. Such poems are “Hawk Roosting,” “The Hawk in the Rain,” “Jaguar,” and “Second Glance at the Jaguar,” found in his volume of poetry A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Poems. Hughes choice of protagonists if far from random as all of them unveil a deeper meaning behind their role, as well as about their legacy. “The Hawk in the Rain,” the opening poem in the volume of poetry, features a majestic hawk, the choice for which is not random, as in mythology, the hawk has always borne a very important significance. The poem juggles with the eye-I dichotomy, meaning what the writer sees and what he recounts. We are faced with two sets: telluric and aerial. On the one hand, the writer is on the muddy ground, somewhere which resembles the war’s trenches, his mouth filled with mud, his state of mind almost catatonic, looking up at a hawk flying. There is an antagonism between the earthly world and the aerial one, as the writer is struggling to survive on the ground, using all his force, while the hawk is flying effortlessly, as a divine creature, which is able to “hold all creation in a weightless quiet.” In this instance, the man is powerless and he is admiring the creature’s grace, thinking he is struggling in mud, facing the rain, with no possibility to withstand the weather, while this creature is carelessly minding its flight. Nevertheless, the end of the poem shocks the reader, as the hawk catches a gust of wind and falls on the ground like and airplane hit midair. All of a sudden, human and animal are in the same position, at the same level. In this poem the power is attributed to chance, thus nature itself becomes the ruler, the commander-in-chief. Merciless, nature spares no one, regardless of their importance. What is decided shall be done, although when talking about nature, and its forces, the prevalent idea is that it cannot be controlled and it has no rules, so nothing can be prevented, everything is inevitable. 81 The other poem dealing with the same protagonist, “Hawk Roosting,” changes perspective. This time, the power belongs to the speaker, the hawk. The hawk appears as a God- like creature looking at the world beneath it from the top of the trees. He is resting, contemplating his own existence, praising its perfection. He states that everything about him resembles perfection and each body part was created with a purpose, and to its advantage. The hawk is nature’s perfect killing machine and he is proud of it, stating “There is no sophistry in my body:/ My manners are tearing off heads -” (20). The hawk appears as a merciless God, who accepts no change. With the back at the sun, he allows no change, thus invoking an almighty power. Another animal with a huge power is the jaguar. The image of the jaguar is of utter importance, as not only is this creature powerful by its nature of predator and its sly moves, but it also bears mythological weight, as Maria Leach points out in the “Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend,” when stating that the jaguar was believed to be a shamanic creature, able to attack the Sun and the Moon (537-538). One of the most impressive poems dealing with this dichotomy is “The Jaguar,” a poem which describes encaged animals such as monkeys, lions, parrots which cannot attract the viewer’s attention as much as the jaguar does. The jaguar appears as a majestic creature, fearsome, beautiful but trapped in a cage for the public to gaze at freely. The public is hypnotized by the jaguar’s beauty “At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized” (13). The jaguar appears as a mythical creature, blind and deafened by its own heartbeat, which cannot see the limitations brought by its own cage: “ His stride, is wilderness of freedom:/ The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel./ Over the cage floor the horizons come” (13). There is a contrast encountered in Hughes’s poem, regarding man and nature, between the rational energy and the primal, raw energy that animals possess. In Hughes’s poem, The Jaguar, there is a barrier between the viewer and the jaguar, and the animal’s imprisonment in a zoo is not accidental at all, as Craig Robinson points out. The zoo bears two meanings: on the one hand, it allows the viewer to rejoice the energy of the wild animals and come into contact with them, and, on the other hand, it tames the wilderness, protects humans by means of cages. Hughes’s jaguar “maintains its liveliness through an inward-looking self-sufficiency” (Robinson, 21). Hughes aims at portraying nature as a source of power and wants to help readers get in contact with the raw energy of nature. Another poem dealing with the image of the jaguar is “Second Glance at the Jaguar,” describing the jaguar’s tension at being trapped between bars. The tension is beautifully portrayed by means of versification and enumeration, giving the reader the whole image of imprisonment and longing for freedom. The jaguar appears as a great creature planning its revenge on the humans who trapped him and exposed its imposing figure to the unworthy world: 82 Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly, He’s wearing himself to heavy ovals, Muttering some mantrah, some drum-song of murder To keep his rage brightening, making his skin Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the cain-brands, (...) Hurrying through the underworld, soundless. (38) Both poems stress on the idea of man’s imprisonment; the jaguar is a metaphor of man’s primordial self, which has been suppressed and replaced by modernity. Terry Gifford argues: “He is objectively caged but subjectively free, since he cannot formulate the concept of imprisonment. He is an example to the man who longs to live fully in those energies” (64). As a result, the Foucauldian point of view is reiterated, as man is both the subject and the object of power, and power is a primordial force governing everything and anything. Ted Hughes nature poems focus on the relationship between the humans’ world and the animals’ world, a relationship animated by what appears, at first sight, to be mere physical energy, but whose mythologizing transcends the here and now of the empirical and apparently ordered world. Animals are given mythical powers and traits and their energy appears to shine even in the drabbest surroundings. The animals in Ted Hughes’s poems do not resemble those in the Romantics’ poems: Hughes’s animals are ferocious, powerful and domineering, leaving the humans mesmerized and attracted by their beauty. Ted Hughes’s nature poems appear as displaying a network of metaphors or symbols which form energetic combinations. They are parables which start from in-depth analyses of the human psyche, but go from thinking toward the energetic possibilities of the imagination, a trajectory which became obvious in “The Thought Fox.”. The poem describes an evening when the poet saw a fox. Nonetheless, the whole poem becomes a metaphor for creative energy and the manner in which a work is made. The first contrast comes from the two different worlds: the writer’s safe place, the house and the wilderness outside, where foxes can roam freely. The poem also displays the eye-I dichotomy theme, or the theme of gaze, where its reversibility is available: the writer gazes at the fox, and the fox looks back. In analysing the poem, Adina Ciugureanu draws a parallel between the fox’s steps and the poet’s inspiration in the writing process: “the footprints left in the snow by the animal are compared to the poet’s prints on the blank page” (Ciugureanu 176). The steps taken by the fox, the eyes staring back at him and finally a revelation, are all steps in the creative process, whose corner stone is imagination. Imagination’s goal is atonement, the healing of the split between the mind and the rest of our faculties. Starting from the narrow world we all inhabit, with its hubristic human perspectives and habitual complacencies, the imagination reaches inward towards the roots of our being and outward towards the powers of the non-human world. We know that all mirrors held up to nature, even by scientists, are distorting mirrors. All descriptions of nature are coloured by attitudes, are partly descriptions of the contents of the observer’s own psyche projected onto the receptive face of nature. But before imagination can operate in this way upon the outer world, it must make the necessary inner and outer connections to allow creative energy 83 to flow through the body and all its faculties. This process does not happen in the night by accident, as darkness carries a more important meaning, discussed by Keith Sagar, in his work, The Laughter of Foxes. He comments upon the creative flow of a writer, comparing it almost to a journey the mythical heroes took in the Underworld, stating that the imagination is like an antenna projected from the known self into the darkness of the unknown, and thus any gaze into the darkness becomes an insight into the unconscious mind, accessing all the hidden ideas and revelations (45). He concludes that:” The poet’s job is hence to release as many as he can of the caged beasts of his being, at least as a prerequisite, before he can do anything else, such as understand, control or recognize those energies” (45). Given the cultural context, the aftermath of World War II, Nietzsche’s nihilism, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory, it is easy to understand why humans have this sense of loss, this feeling that life is useless, and choose to live their lives with eyes half-closed. In this case, Hughes turns to nature, in an attempt to awake the inner strength of humans whose subconscious had been staying latent for generations. Hughes’s animals and plants alike are embodiments of human powers and traits that have been suppressed, denied or hidden for so many reasons. Summarizing the main characteristics of Ted Hughes’s nature poems, Press concurs that their originality consists of their raw and grotesque portrayal of life, regardless of how repulsive or eerie they are. Hughes manages to depict the inner quality of each being, and rejoices the otherness of the wild animals. Press concludes that “Ted Hughes is strong: in the ability to respond to the abundant vitality of the natural world, to respect the life that proliferates in alien modes of being, strange, beautiful and protean, defying all attempts to cage them in the metaphysical categories” (188-201). Hughes’s animals dare to be different, or better yet, themselves: individualistic, self- centered and selfish. These animals heartily assume the role of gods and such other similar deities, struggling to lead the life they want, managing to set an example for all the people who feel doubtful about their lives. Hughes’s characters are willing to take the power and teach humanity a valuable lesson, that there is power in accepting one’s true nature and rejoicing life for what it truly is. A poem therefore becomes a journey into the depths of one being, accessing all the knowledge and information possible through imagination and analysis. Works Cited Barker, Chris. The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications, 2004. Ciugureanu, Adina. Post-War Anxieties (British Literature in the 1950s and the 1960s). Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2006. pp. 171-186. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991. Eason, Cassandra. Fabulous Creatures, Mythical Monsters, and Animal Power Symbols: A Handbook. London: Greenwood Press, 2008. 84 Gifford, Terri and Neil Roberts. Ted Hughes: A Critical Study. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Hartley, John. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies. London: Routledge, 2002. Hughes, Ted. A Ted Hughes Bestiary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Hughes, Ted. New and Collected Poems. 1957-1994.London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Leach, Maria (editor). Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. USA: Frank and Wagnall’s Publishing Company, 1972. Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of Self from Freud to Haraway. Australia: Allen&Uniwn, 2000. Mills, Sara. Foucault. New York: Routledge, 2003. Oswell, David. Culture and Society. London: Sage Publications, 2006. Press, John. Rule and Energy. Trends in British Poetry since the Second World War. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Robinson, Craig. Ted Hughes as Shepperd of Being. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Sagar, Keith. The Laughter of Foxes. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Tuma, Keith. Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998. 85 BOOK REVIEW: JAMES AUGEROT AND ILEANA MARIN ON IDEOLOGY, IDENTITY, AND THE US: CROSSROADS, FREEWAYS, COLLISIONS, EDS. EDUARD VLAD, ADINA CIUGUREANU, NICOLETA STANCA, PETER LANG, 2019. More than a conference proceedings which gathers Romanian and American scholars’ papers presented at the 2018 RAAS – Fulbright biennial conference, the volume Ideology, Identity, and the US: Crossroads, Freeways, Collisions is conceived as a forum on major challenges of American culture by the two well-versed editors—Eduard Vlad and Adina Ciugureanu. While many of the texts engage with literary works that document the challenges posed by a diverse society (12 novel, a play, a travelogue, 2 non-fiction testimonial accounts, and 2 films), there are two dealing with the fundamental concepts for American politics and history such as individualism, exceptionalism, and “white localism”, and other two focusing on how Romanian- American identity is forged and presented in the US. The ambitious volume whose title promises a hot debate over two concepts which are forever intertwined (ideology and identity) does not only expand interdisciplinary approach beyond literary and cultural studies by adding theoretical incursions into studies of migration, ethnicity, heritage, trauma, and religion, but it also brings together viewpoints about segments of American society which otherwise would not be discussed together. For example, Anca Dobrinescu’s exploration of multiracial identities in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Percival Everett’s Erasure sets a relevant context for Raluca Rogoveanu’s account on the double-identity ethos of Romanian-Americans and for James I. Deutsch’s discussion of the Romanian presence 86 at the 1999 Smithsonian Folk Festival when the diversity of Romanian heritage somewhat responded to American multiculturalism. Juxtaposing articles that mutually increase their impact and relevance builds unexpected cultural bridges: Oana Gheorghiu’s examination of the American Islamic identity in a post 9/11 era precedes Roxana Oltean’s analysis of the relationship between Jewish Holocaust survivors in the Promised Land and American interests in legitimizing such an endeavor. It is the two articles on journeys, real and fictional alike, that dig deep into the American understanding of the Other as it, simultaneously, defines itself. Eduard Vlad reads Mark Twain’s less known text The Innocents Abroad through a geopolitical lens, thus perfectly anticipating Adina Ciugureanu’s argument that roads — imaginary, as those in Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona, or real, as later the fans of the novel and entrepreneurs built them—create, maintain, and bring to prominence Californian identity myths. The never-ending dynamic between myth and reality is what characterizes the diversity of California, a conglomerate of Native Americans, Mexicans, and Americans. Ann Marie Plane disentangles the meanings of the phrase “Native American,” emphasizing the immigration–exclusion dialectics which has not yet succeeded in overcoming inequity and discrimination. About problematic identity or, better said, a quest for identity as a form of survival, is Lucia Opreanu’s text dedicated to Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. For Iuliana Vizan, the novels of Yoshiko Uchida, Journey to Topaz and Journey Home, record the challenges of Japanese Americans after WWII and stir an informed conversation about the tension between multiculturalism and ethnic identity. In the first and second sections of the volume, one can identify ideological and identity- building threads that connect the arguments of the papers. In the third part “Crossroads and Collisions,” the reader is confronted with powerful critiques of the American society’s contradictions. Alina Cojocaru follows the disastrous trajectory of Philip Roth’s character from American Pastoral, integrating it into a larger conversation about pastoralism seen in opposition to city life. Philip M. Hosay’s “Donald Trump and American Individualism” and Bill Issel’s “Fighting Words: How White Power Localism Undid Great Society Liberalism and Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency” are, by far, the most spirited texts. They both point to deeper contradictions in American politics and history. Barbara A. Nelson’s reading of Patricia Park’s Re Jane as an example of a double jerry-rigged identity: of the character and of the author, provides an insightful look into the process of integrating this Asian American contribution into the American literary canon. For Mihaela Cristina Oancea, Cormac McCarthy re-envisions the mythical hero of the Frontier who continues to represent something essentially American, while for Florian Andrei Vlad, Salinger and the Cohen Brothers create protagonists who resist their crises by experimenting with foreign cults or self-conceived ones. The impressive tour de force that crosses territories, identities, theories, and literary genres, is admirably opened by Professor Stefan Avădanei, mentor for many of the Romanian scholars who participated with texts in this volume. His “The Humpty Dumpty Syndrome: A Conversation” anticipates the conceptual complexity of the approaches that follow. In the spirit of the entire volume, this first text both clarifies and questions the concepts at work in any theoretical endeavor. Only at the end of the volume, the reader realizes that actually Professor Avădanei’s invitation to constantly challenge theories and definitions has been fulfilled by all 14 authors. 87 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS AYAD A. ABOOD AL- SAYMARY graduated from Shat Al-Arab University, Basrah, Iraq, the College of Education for the Humanities, Department of English, in 1998. He completed his M.A. in Linguistics/ Stylistics in 2002, University of Basrah. His thesis was entitled Paralinguistic and Quasi Paralinguistic Analysis of G.B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man. He enrolled in the Doctoral School for the Humanities at Ovidius University in 2019. The title of his PhD thesis is The Representation of Trauma in Some Selected Contemporary Novels: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Ayad A. Abood Al- Saymary has been teaching English drama in Shatt Al-Arab University College, Basrah, since 2002. His main fields of interest are Stylistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. JAMES E. AUGEROT is Professor Emeritus, University of Washington, Seattle. He has dedicated his life to the study and teaching of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Romanian language and culture. His primary interest has been in language acquisition. To this purpose he has published teaching materials for Russian, Bulgarian, and Romanian. His area of expertise has extended to Balkan Linguistics and the investigation of the common characteristics among Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and other neighboring languages. He was Fulbright Lecturer at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania, 1966-1967, and at Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, Bulgaria. He also served as President of South East European Studies Association (2001-2005), Secretary-Treasurer Washington Association of Foreign Language Teachers (1978-80) and Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Romanian Studies (1993-2010). His publications include The Sounds of English and Romanian (Bucharest University Press, 1984), a study co- authored with Dumitru Chitoran and Hortensia Pârlog, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Academy of Sciences, Bucharest, 1968), “Romanian” in Encylopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Ed. (660-663), edited by Keith Brown (Elsevier: Oxford, 2006). ANDREEA-VICTORIŢA CHIRIAC (BECEANU) holds a BA in English and Spanish Language and Literature and an MA in Anglo-American Studies at Ovidius University of Constanţa. During her studies she has taken part in an Erasmus mobility at Universidad Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which enabled her to develop cultural awareness and to enlarge her academic and linguistic knowledge. She is currently enrolled at the Doctoral School of Humanities at Ovidius and is writing her thesis titled Literary Representations of Education in the Nineteenth-Century England and in the Romanian Principalities under the supervision of Professor Adina Ciugureanu. Her research interest covers education and comparative education, British and Romanian culture. ADINA CIUGUREANU is Professor Emerita of British and American Culture at Ovidius University Constanta, Romania. She was the Dean of the Faculty of Letters between 2004–2012, the President of the RAAS between 2012–2016 and has been the treasurer of the EAAS since 2012. She was Director of the Institute for Doctoral Studies at Ovidius University between 2016- 2019 and Director of the Doctoral School of Humanities between 2006-2012 and 2014-2016. Her research ranges from nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American culture to feminist studies and popular culture. She has published six books (among which Modernism and the Idea 88 of Modernity, Constanţa: Ex Ponto, 2004, Post-War Anxieties, Constanţa: Ovidius University Press, 2007, Efectul de Bumerang, Iaşi: Institutul European, 2008) and over 40 articles in edited volumes and prestigious academic periodicals. She has co-edited a few studies among which National and Transnational Challenges to the American Imaginary (Peter Lang, 2018) and Ideology, Identity and the US: Crossroads, Freeways, Collisions (Peter Lang, 2019). She is the winner of two Fulbright grants and is currently writing a book on city space in fiction from urban studies and geocritical perspectives for which she did research during her second Senior Fulbright grant awarded in 2017 at UCSB, California. FATIMA FARHOUD graduated from the Applied Science University, Amman, Jordan. In 2016 she earned her MA degree in Linguistics from the University of Bucharest. She is currently a PhD student at Ovidius University of Constanta where she is doing research on critical discourse analysis. Since 2014 she has been working as a translator and as a teacher in private schools. At the moment, she is teaching at Jerusalem school in Bucharest. ILEANA MARIN teaches interdisciplinary courses at the University of Washington, Seattle, and at the Center of Excellence in Image Studies of the University of Bucharest. She has published books on tragic myths, Pre-Raphaelite artists, and on Victorian aesthetics of erasure. Her studies on the de-humanizing power of art and the artistic legacy of communism, have drawn praise from specialists as have her articles and conference presentations on the materiality of literary, pictorial, and graphic texts. Most recently, she has focused on E-Literature and digital arts. Winner of several research grants, including a Fulbright Fellowship in 2004, she has explored multimedia dialogues between text and image and the transformation of artworks into cultural icons. Co-founder, and currently the Board Chair, of the Seattle American Romanian Cultural Society, Ileana Marin participates in expanding cultural exchanges and educational programs between the US and Eastern Europe. SÎNZIANA POPESCU is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities, Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania. Her research focuses on trauma and memory studies in general and on places and sites of memory in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, in particular. She is currently teaching English in Constanţa and writing her dissertation under the supervision of Professor Adina Ciugureanu. IOANA RĂDULESCU is a Doctoral Student at Ovidius University of Constanta, where she is currently attending the Doctoral School of Humanities. She is involved in the Philology field of research and is mainly interested in Contemporary American Literature. She is also the author of the article “A Case Study on Teaching Skills in a Romanian Middle-School” (2014) and the article “The Public versus the Private in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior” (Peter Lang, 2019). BIANCA L. IONESCU-TĂNĂSESCU graduated from Law School at “Ovidius” University in 2009. She did an M.A. in Criminal Sciences, from which she graduated in 2010. After that, she enrolled in the Doctoral School for the Humanities at “Ovidius” University in 2013. Her PhD thesis is titled Corporate Culture and Its Discontents in Postwar America. Bianca L. Ionescu- Tănăsescu lives in Constanţa, where she works as a legal adviser in the field of public services. She is interested in the examination of the impact of the postwar economic and political new 89 order on American society, both on US culture at that time and on its impact on the subsequent decades. EDUARD VLAD is Professor of British and American Studies at Ovidius University, Constanta. He is currently serving as Director of the Doctoral School for the Humanities there, as well as President of RAAS. Testifying to his interest in both British and American Studies are some of his most recent books, co-authored with F. A. Vlad: Literary Selves and Grand Narratives in the First American Century (2016) and Early British Gothic and Its Travelling Companions (2017). Cultural Studies: Archaeologies, Genealogies, Discontents was published in 2018, while Globalization, Geopolitics and the US appeared in 2019. Previous volumes are: Larkin: The Glory and the Gloom (1997), Romantic Myths, Alternative Stories (2004), American Literature: Responses to the Po-Mo Void (2004), Ironic Apocalypses: The World According to Vonnegut (2004), Authorship and Identity in Contemporary Fiction (2005), Journeys out of the Self (2005), Perspective critice asupra globalizării culturale (2010), Dictionar polemic de cultura americana (2012). FLORIAN ANDREI VLAD holds an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg and a Ph.D. from “Ovidius” University, Constanta, in whose Faculty of Letters he has been teaching British and American literature for some time now. His first book-length volume on American fiction, based on his Heidelberg MA thesis, Fictional Americas at War, was published in 2006. After defending his PhD thesis, New Flesh, Old Demons, on representations of contamination in American literature, he went on to co-author a book on British literature - British Gothic and Its Travelling Companions - and one on American 19th century: Literary Selves and Identity Narratives in the First American Century. The book based on his PhD thesis was published in 2019. ADRIANA VOICU graduated from Ovidius University in 2010. She continued her studies and applied for the M.A. program in Anglo-American studies, from which she graduated in 2012. In 2019 she enrolled in the Doctoral School for the Humanities at Ovidius University. The title of her PhD thesis is The Less Deceived and the More Deceived: Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin under the supervision of Professor Eduard Vlad. Adriana Voicu lives in Constanta, Romania, where she has been teaching English and Romanian since 2010. She is particularly keen on exploring hidden meanings behind Hughes’s and Larkin’s poems. 90