Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Vol. 34, núm. 1 Junio 2012
34.1 (June 2012) 34.1 (Junio 2012)
EDITORS Dirección
General Editor: Isabel Carrera Suárez Universidad de Oviedo Managing Editor: Esther Álvarez López Universidad de Oviedo Book Reviews Editor Book Reviews Editor (Literature and Cultural Studies) (Linguistics) Belén Martín Lucas Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez Universidad de Vigo Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
Copy Editor: Carla Rodríguez González Universidad de Oviedo
EDITORIAL BOARD Consejo de Redacción board of advisors Consejo Asesor
Andrew Blake Heinz Ickstadt University of Winchester Freie Universität Berlin
Martin Bygate J. Hillis Miller Lancaster University University of California at Irvine
Angela Downing Susheila M. Nasta Universidad Complutense de Madrid Open University
Teresa Fanego Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Universidad de La Rioja
Fernando Galván Luzmila Urbanová Universidad de Alcalá de Henares University of Brno
board of referees Consejo Científico y Evaluador
Joan C. Beal Marcella Bertuccelli Papi Anita Biressi University of Sheffield Università di Pisa Roehampton University Jesús Benito Sánchez Nilufer E. Bharucha Maggie Ann Bowers Universidad de Valladolid University of Mumbai University of Portsmouth Kris van den Branden José Francisco Fernández Zoltán Kövecses Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Universidad de Almería Eötvös Loránd University Mario Brdar Charles Forceville Manfred Krug Josip Juraj Strossmayer University University of Amsterdam Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg Laurel J. Brinton Javier Franco Aixelá Merja Kytö University of British Columbia Universidad de Alicante Uppsala University Manuel Broncano Jean-Michel Ganteau Alberto Lázaro Texas A&M International University Université Montpellier 3 Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Jorge Luis Bueno María del Pilar García Mayo Ursula Lenker Universidad de Vigo Universidad del País Vasco Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Graham D. Caie Cristina Garrigós María José López Couso University of Glasgow Universidad de León Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Clara Calvo Dirk Geeraerts Dámaso López García Universidad de Murcia University of Leuven Universidad Complutense de Madrid Gordon Campbell Lincoln Geraghty María Losada Friend University of Leicester University of Portsmouth Universidad de Huelva Shirley Chew Vincent Gillespie Ricardo Mairal Usón University of Leeds University of Oxford uned Robert Clark Cristina Giorcelli Ana María Manzanas Calvo University of East Anglia Università di Roma Tre Universidad de Salamanca Thomas Claviez Manuel José Gómez Lara Javier Martín Arista University of Stavanger Universidad de Sevilla Universidad de La Rioja Tom Cohen Francisco Gonzálvez García John McLeod University of Albany Universidad de Almería University of Leeds Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre Agnieszka Graff Lavinia Merlini Universidad de Murcia Warsaw University Università di Pisa
Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy Leighton Grist Silvia Molina Plaza Universidad de Zaragoza University of Winchester Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Francisco J. Cortés Rodríguez Adolphe Haberer Rafael Monroy Universidad de La Laguna Université Lumière-Lyon 2 Universidad de Murcia Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas Felicity Hand Carmen Muñoz Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Universitat de Barcelona Pilar Cuder Pilar Hidalgo Jo Anne Neff van Aertselaer Universidad de Huelva Universidad de Málaga Universidad Complutense de Madrid Daniela Daniele Juan Carlos Hidalgo Heather Nunn Università di Udine Universidad de Sevilla Roehampton University Rocío G. Davis Ton Hoenselaars Begoña Núñez Perucha City University of Honk Kong Utrecht University Universidad Complutense de Madrid Denise de Caires Narain Jacqueline Hurtley James Ogude University of Sussex Universitat de Barcelona University of the Witwatersrand Celestino Deleyto David Johnson Ana Ojea Universidad de Zaragoza The Open University Universidad de Oviedo Balz Engler Stephan Kohl Mohamed-Salah Omri University of Basel Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg University of Exeter Joanne Madin Viera Paisana Jürgen Schlaeger Geoff Thompson Universidade do Minho Humboldt-Universität Berlin University of Liverpool Klaus-Uwe Panther Elena Seoane I. M. Tieken-Boon van Ostade Universität Hamburg Universidad de Vigo University of Leiden Pedro Javier Pardo María Josep Solé Sabater Harish Trivedi Universidad de Salamanca Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona University of Delhi Ruth Parkin-Gounelas Neelam Srivastava Javier Valenzuela Aristotle University of Thessaloniki University of Newcastle upon Tyne Universidad de Murcia Javier Pérez Guerra Alasdair Spark Carmen Valero Garcés Universidad de Vigo University of Winchester Universidad de Alcalá de Henares James Procter M. S. Suárez Lafuente Aritha van Herk University of Newcastle Universidad de Oviedo University of Calgary Victor J. Ramraj Juan Antonio Suárez Boris Vejdovsky University of Calgary Universidad de Murcia Université de Lausanne Caroline Rooney Henry Sussman Ruth Wodak University of Kent University of Buffalo/Yale University Lancaster University Dianne F. Sadoff Justine Tally Pilar Zozaya Rutgers University Universidad de La Laguna Universitat de Barcelona Esther Sánchez Pardo Paloma Tejada Caller Universidad Complutense de Madrid Universidad Complutense de Madrid Abstracting and Indexing
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Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 34.1 (June 2012) 34.1 (Junio 2012)
Table of Contents • Índice
Articles • Artículos
Classic Comedy as a Barometer for Present Times or the Debunking of Categorial Delineations of Nationality in Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949) Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy · Universidad de Zaragoza...... 11
“Pioneers for the Mind”: Embodiment, Disability and the De-hallucination of American Empire Manuel Herrero · University of Wisconsin-Madison...... 27
A Mestiza in the Borderlands: Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet Ana M.ª Manzanas Calvo · Universidad de Salamanca...... 47
9/11 and the Psychic Trauma Novel: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man Sonia Baelo-Aullé · Universidad de Zaragoza...... 63
Literary and Historical Discourse in Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq N.S. Gundur · Tumkur University ...... 81
Reconsidering Coduction: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the Spanish Lay Reader in Intercultural Dialogue Terri Ochiagha · Universidad de Alicante ...... 97
A Constructional Account of Advising: Construal Operations and Social Conventions Nuria Del Campo Martínez · Universidad de La Rioja ...... 115
“The Official Language of Telefónica is English”: Problematising the Construction of English as a Lingua Franca in the Spanish Telecommunications Sector Maria Sabaté i Dalmau · Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona...... 133
—7— 8 table of contents • índice
Reviews • Reseñas
Christopher S. Butler and Javier Martín Arista, eds. 2009: Deconstructing Constructions reviewed by Juan Gabriel Vázquez González...... 155
Hans Boas, ed. 2010: Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar reviewed by Iraide ibarretxe antuñano...... 163
Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Juan Rafael Zamorano Mansilla 2010: Systemic Functional Grammar of Spanish: A Contrastive Study with English reviewed by Anne McCabe ...... 171
Eterio Pajares Infante (ed. Fernando Galván) 2010: La traducción de la novela inglesa del siglo XVIII reviewed by Begoña lasa ...... 179
Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, eds. 2009: A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance reviewed by Jordi Sánchez-Martí ...... 185
Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, eds. 2010: Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Possessing the Past reviewed by Margarita Estévez Sáa ...... 193
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez 2011: Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613-1713 reviewed by Jorge figueroa dorrego ...... 199
Acknowledgements...... 205
Editorial policy, instructions to contributors and abridged guidelines...... 207
ARTICLES
ARTÍCULOS
ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26 issn 0210-6124
Classic Comedy as a Barometer for Present Times or the Debunking of Categorical Delineations of Nationality in Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949)
Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected]
Comedy is a funny business. You can watch a film and find it absolutely hilarious, but go back to the same movie a few years later and be totally unimpressed by it. Changes in appreciation of the sort show that comedy is not constituted solely by its texts, but also by surrounding and intersecting discourses, all of which presuppose familiarity with or recognition of here-and- now sociohistorical concerns. This said, through or by means of the process called “articulation”, developed by Stuart Hall in the eighties, my aim in this paper is to tease out how a classic comedy like Passport to Pimlico can respond to and can be remodelled by social change. Indeed, while Cornelius’s film parodied the not-so-funny situation of post-war England, its fun-poking at the consequences of freedoms obtained by independence gains new or re-newed resonance in the wake of devolution in Scotland and Wales and the potential for national fragmentation it throws up.
Keywords: Passport to Pimlico; comedy; Ealing comedy; articulation; identity; devolution
. . .
La comedia clásica como barómetro de la época actual o el desmantelamiento de delineaciones categóricas de nacionalidad en Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949)
La comedia es un género peculiar. Podemos ver una película y encontrarla divertida, pero ver la misma película años después sin que cause ninguna impresión. Tales cambios de estimación demuestran que la comedia no está constituida únicamente por sus textos, sino también por discursos que se agregan y entrecruzan, lo que presupone un conocimiento de los temas de aquí y ahora relativos al momento sociohistórico. Mediante el proceso denominado “articulación”, desarrollado por Stuart Hall en los ochenta, el objetivo de este artículo consiste en desentrañar cómo una comedia clásica como Passport to Pimlico puede dar respuesta o puede ser remodelada por el cambio social. Aunque la película de Cornelius parodiaba la situación nada divertida de la Inglaterra de posguerra, su burla de las consecuencias de las libertades obtenidas gracias a la independencia adquiere una resonancia nueva o renovada cuando se sitúa en la perspectiva del traspaso de competencias en Escocia y el País de Gales y el potencial de fragmentación nacional que conlleva.
Palabras clave: Passport to Pimlico; comedia; Ealing; articulación; identidad; devolución
—11— 12 chantal cornut-gentille d’arcy
1. Introduction Compared to Hollywood’s vast production empire, film making in Britain has always seemed more of a cottage industry.1 Invariably exposed to the unequal competition of this formidable ‘other’, the history of British cinema has therefore been, according to Gilbert Adair (1985: 14), “the history of an inferiority complex” —a defeatism, David Sutton adds, that has conditioned both the conception and perception of British films since the earliest days of the industry (2000: 1). Indeed, British cinema has come up against constant criticism from as far back as the 1930s, when writer Paul Rotha dismissed British studios as being “filled with persons of third rate intelligence inclined to condemn anything that is beyond their range” (Jones 2005), right up to François Truffaut’s spiteful comment, made in 1969, that “there was a certain incompatibility between the words ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’” (Barr 1996: 1). Such disdainful remarks logically led to a general lack of interest for British cinema. As a consequence, for many years a number of fine films and directors were under-appreciated, as Alan Lovell implied when he described British cinema as “The Unknown Cinema” (2001: 200). Eventually, this critical bias veered to more positive tenors with the publication, in the 1970s, of such works as Raymond Durgnat’s A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (1970), Rachael Low’s The History of the British Film, 1918-1929 (1971; 1985), and more importantly, Charles Barr’s authoritative Ealing Studios (1977) and All our Yesterdays (1986), both of which proved fundamental in developing an altered vision (and knowledge) of British cinema (Lovell 2001: 205). Considered to this day a “definitive study” of Ealing (Fitzgerald 2009), Barr’s first book charts the evolution of the company from its beginnings as a little backwater studio facility, through to its becoming a significant cinematographic corporation with a string of classic films to its name, and on to its decline and fall. It was, as Barr explains, between 1947 and 1955, when Ealing produced a number of highly successful and critically acclaimed comedy films, that the company really came into its own.2 Dramatising so thoroughly and entertainingly Balcon’s call for “a projection of the true Briton to the rest of the world” (Kardish 1984: 67), films such as Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947), Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949), Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951) and The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955) were soon internationally perceived as almost synonymous with ‘Britishness’ and the British way of life (McCabe 2005: 27). The French critic André Bazin was later to refer to the Ealing comedy cycle as a distinctive filmic
1 Financial assistance from the Ministry of Science and Education and the Diputación General de Aragón, under project grants FFI2010-15263 and h12, is gratefully acknowledged. 2 Although the studio name has become almost exclusively associated with the comedies, its production cycle was quite varied. For example, It Always Rains on Sundays (Robert Hamer, 1947) interwove themes from the ‘woman’s picture’ and the thriller with a ‘realist’ portrait of London’s East End, while The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1949) and I Believe in You (Basil Dearden, 1952) were socially orientated films about the police force and the probation service respectively (for detailed analyses of the films, see Barr 1998).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 classic comedy as a barometer for present times 13 strand that signalled “the appearance of a British cinema that was original and free from the influences of Hollywood” (Ryall 2005). Together then, Ealing comedy, Comedy and British identity constitute the starting point for my proposed exploration of how a genuinely British, post-war classic like Passport to Pimlico might be seen to acquire new or re-newed resonances in the totally different, twenty-first-century context of the post-national. Indeed, with a devolved parliament and assemblies already in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, respectively, the once United Kingdom appears to be entering an irreversible drift towards rupture or what Tom Nairn called, over thirty years ago, “The Break-Up of Britain” (1981).3 In trying to read contemporary concerns into a film of the past, my analysis ofPassport to Pimlico can therefore be presented as an attempt to put in practice the theory of articulation developed by Stuart Hall in the eighties when he argued that the meaning of cultural texts and practices is invariably the result of “a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions . . . be connected” (Hall 1997a: 141; Slack 1997: 115; my emphasis). Put simply, the process Stuart Hall labelled “articulation” is the exercise of mapping connections, establishing correspondences, linking “this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics” (Lawrence Grossberg, qtd. in Daryl Slack 1997: 115), but with a view of meaning as always expressed in (and determined by) a specific context, a specific historical moment, within specific discourse(s). Hence, after a brief preamble on certain distinguishing features of Comedy, the film will be examined historically, that is, as a spoof on ongoing, post-war hardships. This background information will then enable me to concentrate on how this comic depiction of the establishment of a ‘nation within the nation’ somehow relates to the general situation of Britain today.
2. Comedy In keeping with Aristotle’s definition of comedy (Wimsatt 1955: 10-11; Corrigan 1981: 9-10), Passport to Pimlico deals with ordinary characters in everyday situations in an amusing way. Set in a close-knit London ‘village’ community of small shopkeepers, the film brings alive the tensions and rows as well as the values and loyalties of “lower types” who suddenly find themselves in a totally “ludicrous” (as opposed to “serious”) situation which “is not painful or destructive” (Corrigan 1981: 9). Following another strand of the comic genre, the ordinary and everyday in Passport to Pimlico can also be viewed as transformed into a brief, carnivalesque liberation from the established authority of Whitehall and, more so, from ‘official’ British citizenship (Scott1990 : 175; Gray 1994: 35).
3 The issue of the “Break-Up of Britain” has recently made national and international headlines as Prime Minister David Cameron is contemplating the possibility of staging a Westminster-led referendum on Scotland’s secession from the United Kingdom.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 14 chantal cornut-gentille d’arcy
Operating as it does in a ‘middle zone’ between the serious and the absurd, comedy is widely perceived as a refuge for people in search of light relief. And yet, as Andy Medhurst insists, the genre also has a deeper side. “Comedy”, he states, “is a barometer of social change” (2007: 11), hence my partial appropriation of the expression in this paper’s title. The crucial point here, as emphasised by Medhurst, is that comedy is not constituted solely by the text (in this case a visual text) or the text’s contents, but also, and more importantly, by a number of other surrounding and intersecting discourses concerning the socio-historical moment. From this perspective, Passport to Pimlico can also be viewed as a satirical comedy, designed to expose the follies and vices of individuals and/or the perceived weaknesses of society at a given moment in time. As John West cautions (2000), however quaint, cosy and backward-looking this classic of the Ealing comedy genre may appear to be, it also “hints at darkness and conflict”. In order to understand the comedy in Passport to Pimlico we need to be alert to the ways in which it expresses the nature of the historical moment.
3. The film in its historical context As several historians and critics have noted (Ford 1988: 6-8; Lloyd 1993: 294-301; Barr 1998: 80-107; Aldgate and Richards 1999: 154-58; White 2008: 69-74), after the sacrifices of the Second World War, ordinary people demanded change. They wanted new freedoms and a society that would guarantee a “fairer deal for all” —key words of the National Health Service, set up by the new Labour government (Ford 1988: 6).4 Despite a number of other significant domestic reforms introduced by the government, all aimed at improving people’s lives,5 Britain was burdened with a huge post-war debt that seriously affected the country’s economic wellbeing —a situation exacerbated by persistent financial crises (Morgan2001 : 62-64). As a result, there were continuous shortages of raw materials and of basic food supplies that made the maintenance of rationing and austerity seem all the more oppressive to a population by then weary of so much State-administered planning and control over their lives. In part, it is this frustration that Passport to Pimlico expresses. Even before the story begins, spectators are presented with a full screen title, “dedicated to the memory of ”, followed by a still shot of personal points coupons, clothing books, ration books surrounded by a wreath. This funereal opening points two ways, combining as it does a solemn look back in time: a remembrance of the war and ordeals undergone during the war, and a dream-bid for a better future when the daily grind of frugality, restrictions and coupons will have disappeared from
4 In this respect, Labour’s resounding electoral victory of 1945 and the ousting of the great wartime leader, Winston Churchill, can be interpreted as a sure sign that the electorate was not prepared to revert to the unjust society of the pre-war years, with its rigid class system and 1930s-style economic hardships. 5 Apart from legislating publicly financed social welfare, other notable measures included the national insurance system, increased old age pensions, a major education reform, a new drive for State-subsidised council houses, together with the nationalisation of industries and transport (Lloyd 1993: 294-301).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 classic comedy as a barometer for present times 15 people’s lives for ever.6 Thus, once the plot is set in motion, the recent war and its domestic after-effects are constantly underlined and/or recalled by means of a proliferation of realistic details, ranging from bomb sites, ration queues, press headlines, documentaries, TV news reels, siege, barbed-wired demarcations, evacuation, hunger, to community resistance and patriotic singing.7 And yet, for all the film’s apparent faithfulness to the documentary-realist tradition of British film-making, it very soon becomes evident that these iconographic and thematic reminders of wartime experiences and on-going difficulties merely serve as the backdrop for a tongue-in-cheek, wish-fulfilmentfantasy . In this respect, the opening scenes already playfully invite spectators to travel away from the drab reality of post-war Britain. To the accompaniment of ‘exotic’ Latin music, a ‘Humphrey-Bogart-type’ figure in a white suit stands by a fan mopping his brow with a handkerchief. The camera then pans outside to take in a woman lounging on a sun-bed and removing her South American-style sun hat, before making a slow descent to arrive in front of a notice, outside a fish shop, announcing “frying today”. Almost immediately, therefore, any illusion that the action might be transporting spectators to some distant tropical location is cut short, especially when a radio announcer is heard informing listeners that they have just been treated to “lunchtime music by Les Norman and his Bethnal Green Bambinos”. In thus raising the audience’s expectations only to shatter them, this opening scene epitomises the public’s deeply felt yearning to escape post-war gloom and disenchantment. Once the brief flight into the fantasy world of ‘foreign’ sunshine has ‘evaporated’, there follows a montage sequence of vignettes, each reflecting the uneventful daily routines of several Pimlico characters. Together, these brief fragments provide a panoramic view of how ordinary British men and women fared four years after the end of the war. Spectators are thus introduced to residents of the area: the fish shop owner, Huggins (Roy Gladdish); his assistant Molly (Jane Hylto); Elie Randall (Hermione Baddeley), the local fashion “expert”; the friendly police constable, Ted Spiller (Philip Stainton); Mr Wix, the bank manager (Raymond Huntley), and the greengrocer, Mr Pemberton (Stanley Holloway), his wife (Betty Warren) and their daughter Shirley (Barbara Warren). Amidst this amalgam of different experiences, small private tensions come to light. Molly’s —perforce limited— glamorousness is thus shown to ‘fall flat’ on her boss, who is besotted with Shirley Pemberton. Meanwhile, Wix’s subordinate position within the financial institution he works for —we meet him submissively enduring a reprimand from a superior— is contrasted with Arthur Pemberton’s affable disposition and relaxed business orientation. Almost immediately, however, it turns out that larger, more ominous forces are also at work in Miramont Place. Greed and self-interest presently surface, threatening to submerge
6 Apparently, the film was inspired by a newspaper item spotted by its screenwriter, T.E.B. “Tibby” Clarke, which related that during the war, in order to maintain the full legislative authority of a Dutch law which decreed that the Dutch royal succession must be born on national soil, a room in Ottawa where the family was in exile from the German occupation was officially declared Dutch territory (Brown 1984: 37; Perry 1985: 112). 7 In this respect, Passport to Pimlico reproduces many of the conventions of wartime films (see, for instance, Street 1997: 50-60; Barr 1998: 13-38).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 16 chantal cornut-gentille d’arcy the community interests of Pimlico families. During a Borough Council meeting, Albert Pemberton’s scheme to convert a derelict area in the neighbourhood into “somewhere decent for the children to play” is voted down by the Council-members who prefer to go for big money by having the place sold as “valuable building land”. Pemberton’s project is so far removed from the acquisitive concerns of the majority that even Wix (no longer the timid subordinate) is shown disdainfully dropping ash from his cigar on the model of the playground Pemberton has constructed. Meanwhile, the mayor, evidently satisfied with the vote, decrees that “the borough is in no position just now to finance daydreams”. Exasperated, Pemberton accuses his fellow councillors of being obsessed with “pounds, shillings and pence”. This said, as Charles Barr notes, it is important to remember that “by using the form and tone of comedy, the film is able to say the startling things that it does” (1998: 105- 6). It would appear that, for all its playful caricaturing of various Council members, the scene barely disguises a serious argument. Indeed, audiences at the time could not have failed to recognise in the voting session an ironic send-up of the ideological split that pervaded the political scene in post-war Britain, made manifest through growing contentions between supporters of Labour’s socially-oriented, interventionist measures (Pemberton’s dream of a community leisure space) and those sectors who clamoured for liberty of enterprise and free-market capitalism (the winning money-making option; see Lloyd 1993: 294-301). Recalling the period in his autobiography, Michael Balcon wrote: “the country was tired of regulations and regimentation, and there was a mild anarchy in the air. In a sense our comedies were a reflection of this mood . . . a safety valve for our more anti-social impulses” (Aldgate and Richards 1999: 156). Certainly the key phrase here is “a safety valve for our more anti-social impulses”, since it expresses in a nutshell the nature of the release offered inPassport to Pimlico. As the council meeting is drawing to an end, an unexploded bomb suddenly goes off, revealing a Burgundian treasure, accompanied by a historical document which Professor Hatton-Jones (Margaret Rutherford) soon brandishes as proof that Pimlico is legally independent of the British State. The local bobby’s exclamation, “Blimey, I’m a foreigner!” thus sets in motion a Bakhtinian, carnivalesque inversion of the prevailing state of affairs. Now that Pimlico —or more concretely, Miramont place— is, legally speaking, Burgundian land, the locals find themselves gloriously free of government laws, controls and regulations. Ration books are torn up, identification papers destroyed and licensing laws ignored. Details apart, the liberating nature of this ‘make believe’ situation stems from its offering fulfilment for everyone’s dreams, Pimlico residents’ new- found freedom presumably being longingly shared by audiences at the time —at least for the duration of the film. In little time however, problems —and more comedy— ensue as black marketeers flood in to Pimlico on a scale which threatens to unleash anarchy onto its streets. Before local citizens can appeal to the state for help, they come up against the shock discovery that Whitehall has decided to suppress the existence of this unrestricted zone inside London
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 classic comedy as a barometer for present times 17 by sealing Pimlico off from Britain and imposing its own frontier controls around the district. At this point, even Pemberton, till then a firm defender of negotiations with the government rather than the ‘everyman for himself ’ stance advocated by Wix and Garland, is stung into defiance and exclaims: “In future we’ll ruddy well be foreigners!”. Now faced with an outsider threat, an enemy to be vanquished, Pimlico inhabitants recover the spirit, the resilience and, more importantly, the unity of wartime London. The ‘Burgundian’ community start fighting the war again in miniature. In short, Whitehall bureaucrats are eventually beaten by communal effort and self-sacrifice. Pimlico re-enters the United Kingdom and, in the open-air celebration that marks the end of hostilities, the newly issued identity cards and ration books are actually welcome by the district residents. A sudden downpour and consequent temperature-drop neatly brings this fantasy holiday from restrictions to a festive close. This is, the film seems to say, Miramont Place, Pimlico, England, the UK, with its rain and ration books (Barr 1998: 106).
4. “Articulations”: national, gender, class identity Without doubt, to watch the film today is to find more laughter coming from the screen, as the characters laugh at themselves and each other, than from spectators. Passport to Pimlico is, like the whole cycle of smart, satirical films, known today simply as “Ealing comedies”, strictly a period piece. And yet, it is precisely in view of the film’s datedness that the concept of “articulation” becomes such a vital resource for the unearthing/uncovering of how certain meanings produced in very specific conditions may resonate withinanother cultural and historical moment. Traditionally associated with Karl Marx, Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, the notion of articulation has taken on a special resonance in Cultural Studies thanks to Stuart Hall’s writings. Hall defined his use of articulation in the following terms:
“articulate” means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an “articulated” lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? (1997: 141)8
8 As explained by Stuart Hall, his definition of articulation was prompted by the need to distance himself from the postmarxist conception of articulation voiced in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). Hall’s disagreement with Laclau and Mouffe centred on their conceptualization of all cultural practices as discursive: “[Laclau and Mouffe think] that the world, social practice, is language, whereas I want to say that the social operates like a language . . . [They] have let slip the question of the historical forces which have produced the present, and which continue to function as constraints and determinations on discursive articulation” (1997a: 146-48). See also Stuart Hall, ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without
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In short, articulation describes the means by which cultural elements can be joined, as well as the contingent nature of those linkages. Hall claimed in this interview that there is nothing essential in these cultural combinations (just as a trailer section can be moved onto any truck), but that under certain conditions specific combinations are most likely and have something to tell us about the nature of those conditions. Following Raymond Williams, Hall has also insisted that “[m]aterial circumstances are the net of constraints, the ‘conditions of existence’ for practical thought and calculation about society” (1997: 44). The advantage of this concept of articulation in the context ofPassport to Pimlico is that it allows an examination of Henry Cornelius’ film as part of a cultural pattern, rather than as an isolated creative act. Indeed, if upon release, Passport to Pimlico provided audiences with the opportunity to momentarily escape drab, post-war reality through a nostalgic, backward-looking commemoration of wartime solidarity, another key theme in the film is the insightful meditation it offers on contending versions of national identity —an issue that continues to be as pertinent today as it was in those difficult times. During the partition, that is, during the brief period when ‘Burgundy’ erects itself as a ‘nation within a nation’ and as the siege against the independent territory goes ahead, Connie Pemberton emphatically voices the residents’ bulldog determination to ward off “foreign” aggression and “never, never to be slaves”:
If the Nazis couldn’t drive me out of my home with all their bombs and rockets and doodlebugs, you don’t catch me packing up now . . . We always have been English and we always will be English, and it’s just because we are English that we’re sticking up for our rights to be Burgundian.
At first sight, these words appear to reinforce an outmoded, ‘John Bull’ notion of plucky, ‘little England’ nationalism. From our twenty-first century stand however, Ms Pemberton’s heartfelt assertion also raises the issue of the relationship between present-day notions of Britishness and Englishness. In comedy-theory terms, the beauty of the conceit of transforming Pimlico and its citizens into Burgundy and Burgundians respectively is that it dodges any fixed notion of nationality, allowing the protagonists to temporarily negotiate their own version of who they are or wish to be. Hence, for all its shoring up of a shared stock of images, values and traditions, generally accepted as making up the essence of Britishness, Passport to Pimlico seems bent on demonstrating that national identity does not exist in any singular, uncontested form. On the contrary, by emphasising the way in which certain, specific —even ludicrous— circumstances affect an imagined community’s sense of itself (as well as its perception of those not pertaining to the ‘in-group’), Passport to Pimlico shows how vulnerable identity is to challenge, and consequently how easily the certainties of a prescribed national identity are made subject to change. From this optic,
Guarantees’ (1997b: 25-46); Jennifer Daryl Slack, ‘The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies’ (1997: 112-27).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 classic comedy as a barometer for present times 19 the ambiguities of national identity are already strategically evoked in the film’s ‘pseudo- tropical’ opening —the heat-wave scenes playfully effacing the dividing line between an anchored British (or rather, English) identity and ‘otherness’. Amusing as this scene is in the assumptions it offers of what it might be likenot to be English, it also reflects a deeper ambivalence towards national identity.9 Indeed, by swiftly and suddenly bringing viewers back down to earth after a flight of fancy, the British ‘reality’ the narrative comes round to is, comparatively speaking, deadening and deflating. From this same perspective, the film’s conclusion, which sees the Burgundians’ reabsorption into the United Kingdom accompanied, as commented before, by typical British weather, likewise only serves to reinforce a sense of identity as entrapment (West 2000). These ironic sequences also raise two crucial questions: is the film’s portrayal of post- war Britain really the way the citizens perceived it at the time? Given the opportunity to construct a community in their own image “the Burgundians . . . recover the spirit, the resilience and local autonomy and unity of wartime London” (Barr 1998: 102- 03). Dispensing with the inherited inflexibilities of gender, nationality and class, they “submerg[e] differences that are otherwise intractable” (Barr 1998: 103). Women become, if not prominent, at least included in the decision-making process. Pointedly too, the Duke of Burgundy (Paul Dupuis), although a foreigner, is made welcome — to the extent that the people of Pimlico are willing to surrender to his sovereignty, a scenario which clearly contravenes Britain’s long-standing insularity, to the point of being almost jarring to those members of the film’s current audiences who oppose greater (or sometimes any) involvement in the European Community.10 Pemberton, whose idealistic plans were out-voted when Pimlico was but a district within the capital, finds himself acting as Burgundy’s first minister with the power to win the community its swimming- pool and leisure ground. Similarly, Wix is able to show his worth in both the negotiations with illustrious Cabinet members and in his adroit handling of the Burgundian economy. Indeed, it is Wix who hits upon the solution to the deadlock —“a Burgundian loan to Britain”— as he and Pemberton are unified in their pursuit of Burgundy’s interests. This symbolic reconciliation of the previously estranged Wix and Pemberton affirms the consensual partnership of social and business interests which would emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. Described as “an arch labour film” (Aldgate and Richards 1999: 155), defending the government’s policy of sustained privations and continued national unity as the route to a better future for all, the question at hand is: in what ways can Pimlico inhabitants’ ‘break- away’ experience be convincingly connected to more contemporary circumstances? Benedict Anderson proposes an answer in the introduction to his seminal Imagined
9 In the following section, I shall be drawing on John West’s (2000) most perceptive delineation of the ideological/political correlations that may be established between the film’s morale and changing perceptions of “national” identity in Britain. 10 Pushing the argument further, the Burgundians’ more accommodating version of nationalism could be said to contrast with the chauvinism and xenophobia prevalent among the far-right in Britain today.
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Communities (1983), where he argues that nationalistic feelings (and one might add, any form of identity politics) expropriate personal identity, transforming intimate experiences into the raw material of politics. With hindsight, therefore, it appears that Clement Attlee’s 1945 government eventually foundered on the electorate’s unwillingness to accept the prolonged hardships required for the creation of the “more just society” envisaged by Michael Balcon (Brown 1984: 32). This said, it is also worth remembering that it was only with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 that consensus was dispensed with. As well as beginning a systematic erosion of all those social provisions initially implemented by Labour, Thatcher’s hard-fisted rule proved to be as authoritarian and intransigent as the executive the Burgundians were faced with. During the eighties, the dogmatic inflexibility of the Conservatives induced a ‘Burgundy style’ retreat of many left-of- centre opponents. In the capital, Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council, which had proved a resolute, democratic and popular thorn in the government’s side, was abolished. Mining communities were torn apart during the lengthy and highly emotive strike of the mid-eighties, which at times verged on becoming a small-scale civil war. The Greenham Common women who protested against the basing of us nuclear missiles in England likewise provide an image redolent of the Burgundians: ordinary people uniting in a determined opposition to the intransigent machinery of the state and a menacing foreign influence. Above all, voters in Scotland and Wales persistently rejected the Conservative party while England continued to return enough Conservative MPs to govern the whole of Britain. Consequently, the accrued resentment of the Scots and Welsh at having to live under policies which they themselves had vigorously opposed further echoes the plight of the Burgundians who became ‘foreigners’ in their own country.11
5. Devolution As is known, when the Iron Lady’s dogmatism became a liability for her party, she was replaced by John Major, whose attempts to lead a less authoritarian administration did not
11 From the mid-1980s onwards, the political climate in the UK was propitious for the re-emergence of Scottish and Welsh nationalism as an alternative to an increasingly unpopular Tory government. Some of Thatcher’s policies, such as the poll tax, were unpopular across the country. But the effects of an economic policy that pursued privatisation as a means to an unregulated free market struck the Scottish and Welsh economies particularly hard. Moreover, Thatcher’s more centralist, authoritarian style of governing antagonised many voters who resented the concentration of power among governing elites in Westminster. In particular, a belief in individual responsibility, linked to a strong sense of Britishness, were essentially middle-class, English values, clearly at odds with the tradition of collective solidarity and community prevalent in the Scottish and Welsh. As disaffected voters turned instead to Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, the dwindling Conservative votes in those two parts of the UK exacerbated the perception that policies were imposed from Westminster by a British government which lacked a clear democratic mandate in Scotland and Wales (Elias 2008: 61). As mentioned before, the novelty today is David Cameron’s proposal to hold an independence vote in Scotland within the next 18 months —a plan that somehow clashes with Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond’s intention of having the vote take place in 2014, making it coincide with the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 classic comedy as a barometer for present times 21 prevent his own downfall in 1997,12 brought about by the huge appeal to British voters of Tony Blair’s consensual and moderate stance. Intent on presenting New Labour as the tribune for “modern” Britain, the most striking initial symbol used by Blair to represent national renaissance was the image of “Cool Britannia” which sought to amalgamate traditional national authority with the cultural cachet of multicultural Britain (Oakland 2001: 40-45; 50-51). Labour’s devolution of civil, economic and political powers from Westminster to new national assemblies in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast can be seen as a modern revival of the kind of consensus alluded to in Passport to Pimlico.13 And yet, looking across the United Kingdom now, undergoing as it is this radical devolution experiment, a paradox presents itself. Credited with providing a spur to Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish nationalism, the fact is that Labour’s constitutional change appears to have rested precisely on the very division(s) it aimed to solve. In other words, the devolution processes set in motion by New Labour were founded on the assumption that identities are innate, primordial and exclusive rather than fluid and relational. Viewed in this light, it seems that, apart from drawing to a close the historical Act of Union of 1707, what devolution has brought into effect is the political legitimization of Partition and/or the drawing of internal boundaries as the best formula for good neighbourhood. In short, one way of apprehending these recent developments is to say that devolution is the best (indeed, the only) way of preserving the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However, the contrary argument also holds strong, insisting as it does that devolution is the prelude to inevitable and unavoidable disintegration (Dinwoodie 1996).14 Either way, the result is a current British constitutional settlement with differing forms of devolved government for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with no devolved government whatsoever for England, and with Welsh, Scottish and Ulster MPs able to vote on English matters at Westminster, whereas English MPs cannot vote on similar issues for Scotland, Wales and Ulster. Not surprisingly, therefore, devolution has also been posited as the reason for the resurgence of nationalism in England (Rojek 2007; Cannadine 2007). Indeed, as nationalist Cyning Meadowcroft pointed out some years back, after centuries of military, economic and legislative dominance over the other component parts of the United Kingdom, the English are now “the poor relations —denied a nation-specific parliament and the culture absent from the classroom where it is not deemed politically correct” (qtd. in Davies 2000: 2). In a word, now that there is no longer a British Empire that gave the nations of Britain
12 What actually happened was that, before resigning, Margaret Thatcher ‘hand-picked’ her loyal protégé, John Major, as successor, thus curtailing Michael Heseltine’s and Douglas Hurd’s aspirations to lead the party. 13 For a detailed account of how powers have been devolved from Westminster to the three regions since 1998, see Smith (2008: 1-8). 14 Although as leader of the Conservative party David Cameron deliberately kept a low front on the issue of devolution, several of his public declarations since he became Prime Minister after the elections in May2010 hint at his fears of too much regional independence leading to a “broken Britain” (Macintyre 2009: 11). Indeed, on some occasions, Cameron set out this anti-devolution position in no uncertain terms: “When I say I am Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I really mean it. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland —we are weaker apart, we are stronger together, and together is the way we must remain” (‹http://www.britologywatch.wordpress.com›).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 22 chantal cornut-gentille d’arcy common cause and interest, now that there is no British Steel, National Coal Board, British Rail, no national gas nor electricity corporations to glue the nations together, the concept of British national identity is undergoing substantial redefinition.15 Against these shifting configurations of identity, perhaps the idea of border controls, so comically dramatised in Passport to Pimlico, isn’t too fanciful. In a much anthologised scene, the Burgundians are shown stopping the underground train for border formalities. While Wix fusses about currency, Pemberton obliges a tourist by stamping his passport with a Pemberton’s stores imprint. However ludicrous this light and playful sequence might appear to be, it finds its matching part in the results of a pre-1997 referendum survey, undertaken in Cardiff, which revealed potential voters’ fears that if devolution was successful, travellers would have to carry passports between England and Wales (Petro 1999). In his essay “The Argument of Comedy” (1949), the by now classic critic and theorist Northrop Frye suggested that in ancient Greece there were two periods of comedy, “old comedy” and a later “new comedy”. The first, he said, accepted that society was unchangeable and that vice and folly could only be ridiculed in such a way as to enable a brief ‘carnivalesque’ holiday before a return to conformity. The second suggested an alienating social order could be reshaped; it often involved an escape to nature before a return to a regenerated society (White 2008: 73).16 Considered in the tradition of “old comedy”, Pimlico community’s short (but intensively lived) emancipation from British law and government-imposed regulations decidedly recalls the gay, affirmative, and militantly anti-authoritarian, carnival spirit which, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, allows otherwise marginal figures, often not seen as participants in national decision-making, to become visible and powerful agents for a limited period of time (Scott 1990: 175; Gray 1994: 35; Medhurst 2007: 68-71).17 On this reading, the rebel citizens’ eventual return to the national fold (and to familiar restrictions) denotes the film’s determined effort to present a unified and unifying, monolithic image of the nation. On the other hand, from the prism of “new comedy”, it would seem that Passport to Pimlico carries with it its own prophetic evocation of a new social order. If, as Northrop Frye states, “the movement of (new) comedy is usually the movement from one kind of society to another” (1981: 84),
15 On this point, the findings of the 23rd British Social Attitudes Survey, published by the National Centre for Social Research in 2007, make for salutary reading. Apparently less than half of Britain’s inhabitants (44%) saw fit to describe themselves as “British” (Rojek 2007: 7-12). Likewise, although the issue of race is significantly absent in Passport to Pimlico, this state of affairs was not going to last long. Indeed, many British people today, conscious of living in a postcolonial world, find it dreadfully ‘uncool’ to adhere to the nationalist idea of Britishness as the nerve- centre of a world-wide, empire-building enterprise, nowadays generally associated with illegal invasions, slavery, the forced appropriation of wealth and the imprisonment of critics and foes. 16 These ideas are reiterated in Northrop Frye’s “The Mythos of Spring Comedy” (Corrigan 1981: 84-99). 17 The fullest exploration of carnival in Bakhtin’s work is Rabelais and his World (1984). In this book, Bakhtin argues that Rabelais’ sixteenth-century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel is based on, and can only be understood through, late medieval-early Renaissance “popular-festive forms”. Rabelais and his World describes an elaborate aesthetics of medieval peasant culture, referred to alternately as “the people”, “the folk”, “the second world”, “the unofficial world”, and “popular-festive culture”, defined against the “official world” of civil and religious authority.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 classic comedy as a barometer for present times 23 it might be affirmed that the makers of the film actually anticipated developments by pinpointing those cracks, already existent in post-war Britain, that were eventually going to lead to an increasingly compartmentalised nation.
6. Conclusions Rather than a straightforward analysis of the Ealing classic, Passport to Pimlico, as an endearingly flippant comment on post-war hardships, I have made particular use of the process called “articulation” to establish connections and/or relationships between the film itself, comedy as a genre, social contexts and shifting configurations of national, gender and class identity. In comedy-theory terms therefore Passport to Pimlico —in which the residents of a London street briefly break from the national body and escape the ordeal of rationing— has been read as a celebration of the small man’s struggle against impersonal authority, as a wish-fulfilment fantasy, and as a carnivalesque liberation from the established order. This said, there is no denying the social function of comedy in voicing contemporary tensions, conflicts or grievances. From this optic, this eccentric visual narrative can be seen as having served the double purpose of humorously taking people’s minds off post-war shortages while also upholding the Labour government’s programme of austerity, based on war-time solidarity. However, by re-examining the film’s conventional wisdom from the perspective of the new social and political realities of Thatcher’s Britain and Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia”, it appears that the rift, rupture or partition depicted so comically in Passport to Pimlico still makes plenty of sense decades later. Indeed, while Thatcher’s dogmatism à l’anglaise indirectly prompted the strengthening of nationalist identity in the three “Pimlico” peripheries of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, New Labour’s decentralising reforms have attracted much criticism from those sectors who fear —as David Cameron has recently insinuated— that devolution might ultimately trigger a ‘Balkanisation of Britain’. With hindsight the basic theme in this classic comedy is not so much its back-looking affirmation of national identity, based upon wartime unity and togetherness, but a farsighted warning concerning the danger of fostering unbridgeable territorial enclaves.
Works Cited Adair, Gilbert and Nick Roddick 1985: A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film. Kent: Columbus. Aldgate, Anthony and Jeffrey Richards 1999: Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present. London and New York: IB Tauris. Anderson, Benedict 1983: Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1984 (1968): Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP. Barr, Charles 1998 (1977): Ealing Studios. Dumfriesshire: Cameron.
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— (ed.) 1996 (1986): All our Yesterdays. Worcester: Trinity. Britology Watch ‹http://www.britologywatch.wordpress.com› (Accessed 7 August, 2011) Brown, Geoff 1984: ‘A Knight and his Castle’. Geoff Brown and Laurence Kardish, eds. Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema. New York: Museum of Modern Art. 17-41. Cannadine, David 2007: ‘Britishness: Devolution, Evolution and Revolution’. Paper presented at Why Policy Needs History. Wednesday 5 December, 2007 ‹http://www. historyandpolicy.org/docs/david_cannadine_britishness.pdf› (Accessed June, 2009) Corrigan, Robert W. 1981: ‘Introduction: Comedy and the Comic Spirit’. Robert W. Corrigan, ed. Comedy: Meaning and Form. New York: Harper & Row. 1-13. Daryl Slack, Jennifer 1997: ‘The Theory and Method of Articulation’. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge. 112-30. Davies, Mike 2000: ‘Dividing one Nation into Four’. The Birmingham Post 1 Feb: 2. Dinwoodie, Robbie 1996: ‘Devolution Risks Disintegration of uk’. Herald Scotland 27 Jan. ‹http://www.heraldscotland.com› (Accessed 7 August, 2011) Durgnat, Raymond 1970: A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence. London: Faber & Faber. Elias, Anwen 2008: Minority Nationalist Parties and European Integration: A Comparative Study. London and New York: Routledge. Fitzgerald, Theresa 2009: Basil Dearden ‹http://www.filmreference.com/ DirectorsCo-Du/Dearden-Basil.html› (Accessed 1 June, 2009) Ford, Boris 1988: The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain: Since the Second World War. Vol. 9. Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge UP. Frye, Northrop Herman 1949: ‘The Argument of Comedy’. English Institute Essays, 1948. New York: Columbia up. 58-73. Gray, Frances 1994: Women and Laughter. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hall, Stuart 1997a (1986): ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall’. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge. 131-50. — 1997b (1986): ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees’. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge. 25-46. Kardish, Laurence 1984: ‘Michael Balcon and the Idea of a National Cinema’. Geoff Brown and Laurence Kardish, eds. Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema. New York: Museum of Modern Art. 43-73. Jones, Alison 2005: Rev. of Cosier Face of UK Film: Shepperton Babylon, by Matthew Sweet. The Birmingham Post 5 March ‹http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-129761695. html› (Accessed June, 2009) Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1985: Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
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Lloyd, T.O. 1993 (1970): Empire, Welfare State, Europe: English History 1906-1992. Oxford: Oxford up. Lovell, Alan 2001: ‘The British Cinema: The Known Cinema?’. Robert Murphy, ed. The British Cinema Book. London: bfi. 200-05. Low, Rachael 1971: The History of the British Film, 1918-1929. London: Allen & Unwin. —1985: Film Making in 1930s Britain. London: Allen & Unwin. Macintyre, James 2009: ‘The Folly of Devolution’.New Statesman 138.4964: 11-12. McCabe, Bob 2005: Comedy Movies. London and New York: Rough. Medhurst, Andy 2007: A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities. London and New York: Routledge. Morgan, Kenneth 2001(1990): British History since 1945: The People’s Peace. Oxford: Oxford UP. Nairn, Tom 1981: The Break-Up of Britain. London: New Left. Oakland, John 2001: Contemporary Britain. London and NewYork: Routledge. Perry, G. 1985: Forever Ealing. London: Pavilion. Petro, Pamela 1999: ‘Ambivalent Autonomy’. The Atlantic Monthly ‹http://www. theatlantic.com/issues/99apr/9904wales.htm› (Accessed May/June, 2009) Rojek, Chris 2007: Brit-Myth: Who do the British Think they Are? London: Reaktion. Ryall, Tom 2005: close up: The Electronic Journal of British Cinema. Part 2 ‹http:// www.personal.centenary.edu/~jhendric/film_history/2005_369_syl.ht.› (Accessed May/June, 2009) Scott, James C. 1990: Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale UP. Smith, Connie 2008: ‘Devolution in the uk: Powers and Structures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’. Briefing 1: 1-8 ‹http://www.clicp.ed.ac.uk/publications/ briefings/briefing01.pdf› (Accessed 6 August, 2011) Street, Sarah 1997: British National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Sutton, David 2000: Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy, 1929-1939. Exeter: U of Exeter P. West, John 2000: ‘Seasick on the Serpentine: Englishness, Otherness and Consensus in Passport to Pimlico’ ‹http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/ fr0300/jwfr09a.htm› (Accessed June, 2009) White, John 2008: ‘Passport to Pimlico’. Sarah Barrow and John While, eds. Fifty Key British Films. London and New York: Routledge. 69-74. Wimsatt, W.K. 1955: ‘Introduction’. W.K. Wimsatt, ed. English Stage Comedy. New York: Columbia UP. 3-21.
Films Cited Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947) Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949)
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Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949) Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949) The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951) The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951) The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955) It Always Rains On Sundays (Robert Hamer, 1947) The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1949) I Believe in You (Basil Dearden, 1952)
Received 24 August 2011 Revised version accepted 18 February 2012
Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and one of the founder members of ibacs (Iberian Association of Cultural Studies). Apart from a number of articles on cultural studies, feminism and British cinema, her publications include the edition of several Culture and Power volumes, as well as the more recent Estudios Culturales: Teoría, Política y Práctica: Lawrence Grossberg (2010). She is also the author of El cine británico de la era Thatcher: cine nacional o “nacionalista”? (2006).
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana. Universidad de Zaragoza. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Campus Universitario s/n. 50009, Zaragoza, Spain. Tel.: + 34 976761538 (ext. 3996).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 11-26· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45 issn 0210-6124
“Pioneers for the Mind”: Embodiment, Disability and the De-hallucination of American Empire
Manuel Herrero Puertas University of Wisconsin-Madison [email protected]
This essay charts the discursive dependency between the ideology of us expansionism during its most aggressive period (1803-1845) and the social construction of disability. My case study is Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Ichabod Crane —the tale’s agent of national expansion— oscillates between embodied and disembodied states of being. His absent/ present body illustrates the larger tension between a nascent us imperialism and the egalitarian republicanism of the national creed. Using Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage, I theorize Ichabod’s disabled body as an important visual cue of imperial formations: an incomplete body politic to be rehabilitated through the creation of empire. When citizens of the early republic stared into the collective mirror of their national literature, they discerned a fragmented and shapeless body politic. This traumatic exposure produced a compensatory reverie in which onlookers hallucinated nation and empire as complete, cohesive entities. Undoing this assemblage, Ichabod’s anomalous, ever-changing body symbolizes the incongruous us body politic and invites readers to de-hallucinate American empire, exposing the artificial wholeness of body and nation.
Keywords: us expansionism; disability; Washington Irving; Lacan; body politic; imperialism; national allegory . . .
“Pioneros del espíritu”: personificación, discapacidad y la des-alucinación del imperio americano
Este artículo examina la dependencia entre el discurso expansionista de ee. uu. en su apogeo histórico (1803-1845) y la construcción social de la discapacidad. Mi análisis se centra en ‘La Leyenda de Sleepy Hollow’, de Washington Irving. Ichabod Crane, el protagonista y agente expansionista del relato, alterna estadios corpóreos e incorpóreos. Su cuerpo discapacitado recrea el conflicto entre el imperialismo estadounidense en su fase embrionaria y los valores igualitarios y republicanos del credo nacional. A modo de marco teórico, la fase del espejo de Lacan nos permite redefinir el cuerpo discapacitado de Ichabod como una referencia visual clave
—27— 28 manuel herrero puertas
en el imaginario imperialista: un cuerpo incompleto cuya satisfactoria rehabilitación conlleva la creación y agrandamiento de un imperio. Cuando los ciudadanos estadounidenses empezaron a producir y asimilar imágenes del colectivo nacional, se encontraron con un ‘cuerpo político’ informe y fragmentado. Esta revelación traumática empujó a una alucinación compensatoria en la que imperio y nación aparecían como entidades bien definidas. Entendido como la antítesis de dicho ensamblaje, Ichabod materializa un cuerpo político estadounidense deshilvanado e inconexo. Mediante este cuerpo discapacitado, Irving invita a sus lectores a ‘des-alucinar’ el imperio americano y desenmascarar la supuesta totalidad de cuerpo y nación.
Palabras clave: expansionismo de ee. uu.; discapacidad; Washington Irving; Lacan; cuerpo político; imperialismo; alegoría de la nación
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1. Introduction Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ (1996b: 291-318) ends in sheer contradiction. After local bully Brom Bones disguises himself as the Headless Horseman and scares Ichabod Crane away from Tarry Town, Irving bifurcates the plot somewhat disconcertingly: on the one hand, a local farmer claims that Ichabod, the unbecoming pedagogue and “singing-master”, had relocated “to a distant part of the country; had kept school and studied law at the same time, had been admitted to the bar, turned politician, electioneered, written for the newspapers, and finally had been made a justice of the Ten Pound Court”; on the other, though, the town’s “old country wives” insist that “Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means” and that “the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow” still resound with his “melancholy psalms” (Irving 1996b: 317-18). Haunting and civilizing the American wilderness at once, Ichabod is put to a strange, antithetical task by the author. Through this impossible assignment, this essay argues, Irving taps into a generalized anxiety about the geopolitical expansion of the United States. When this tale appeared in the definite edition of The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1820), Irving’s audiences encountered important questions. What narrative of the national future was there to uphold: the institutional or the supernatural, the material or the spectral, the one in which citizens occupy new frontiers or that other one in which a disembodied voice finds itself sempiternally tied to the point of departure? In short, was American expansion a ghostly or a practical enterprise? Why did Irving imbricate the two? Ichabod’s complex personification of theus body politic opens up some of these questions. Examining Ichabod Crane as an anxious political allegory allows us to unearth the text’s deep concern with national futurity and to overcome, as a result, those interpretations that simplify it as Irving’s compensatory gesture for a non-existent American past (Hoffman 1993: 86-87; Fiedler 2003: 25-26). More significantly, this approach reveals a reciprocity between figurative embodiment and the imperialist discourse of us expansion. This reciprocity explains the centrality of the present/absent body in this and other narratives of nation-building, as the collective task of consolidating the territorial and identitarian us boundaries hinges on anomalous bodies like Ichabod’s, bodies that appear, disappear, stretch and break apart with ostensible facility. Inquiring into the motives, unfolding and implications of Irving’s unresolved ending, this article reads ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ as a tale of disembodied pioneering that dramatizes the identification mechanisms through which us citizens embraced an embryonic national identity. A critical paradigm for these instances of identification emerges in every scene in which Ichabod assumes an image of himself: from broken- mirror reflections to sustained analogies with African Americans to the final vis-à-vis with the Headless Horseman, these images are never consistent. The author drives Ichabod into specular associations that increase readers’ awareness of the us body politic as a disabled —mostly fragmented— construct. Thus, Irving’s allegory —via Ichabod— of the expansionist us offers an interesting case study that pushes scholars toward new directions. Approaching the body politic through the lenses of disability theory suggests
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 30 manuel herrero puertas the critical road less travelled, one that leads to allegorical embodiments in which empire is not materialized through an athletic colossus but a cripple. Unmasking the fiction of disability paves the road for our understanding of the fictions of American empire, its racialized taxonomies, its dynamics of exclusion and the failures of its democratic pledge. The tale’s duplicitous conclusion, alternating Ichabod’s embodied and spectral manifestations, does not come unannounced. From the outset, Irving describes the newly-arrived pedagogue in terms of lack rather than endowment: “tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together” (1996b: 293). Based on Ichabod’s abnormal physique as a mirror-image of the body politic, the following pages trace this discursive conjunction between imperialism and physical disability, eventually postulating that a disabled body often acts as an expansionist body: its ontological deformities and absences perpetuating the promise of prosthetic amendment and augmentation. Positing citizens’ bodies as ‘lacking’ entities, us imperialists buoyed their project of endless completion. In ‘Sleepy Hollow’, Irving disarticulates this principle by conflating Ichabod’s expansionist body —politic— with the no-body of a ghost. That is, Ichabod succeeds in enlarging the national territory only as long as his ghostly counterpart remains stuck in square one. If the rhetorical appropriation of disability by us imperialism suggests that tomorrow’s incorporation depends on today’s corporeal fragmentation, Irving introduces Ichabod’s disembodied pioneering —the simultaneous dematerialization of the body and expansion of the body politic— as the reductio ad absurdum of such logic.
2. Disembodied pioneering Later sections will explore, via psychoanalytic and disability theory, Irving’s precocious awareness of the discursive cross-fertilization between imperialism and physical disability, as he articulates it through Ichabod, whose insatiable appetite and endless consumption of resources narrows his frame instead of aggrandizing it. For now, it is useful to situate Ichabod, first and foremost, as one of us historiography’s predilect subjects: the pioneer. His inland movement to Sleepy Hollow heralds the later displacements of the western frontier during the first half of the nineteenth century. Like ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (1996c: 33-49), the other most anthologized tale from The Sketch-Book, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ dabbles in a chronology of profound political transformation. Both stories orchestrate abrupt jumps between the isolated colonial past preserved in the Hudson Valley’s Dutch settlements and a narrative present in which the post-Revolution republic struggles to assert its identity. Irving’s doppelgänger narrator, the antiquarian Diedrich Knickerbocker, voices a nostalgic lament that also rings a note of nervousness toward “the great torrent of emigration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country” (1996b: 293). By the time of the story’s publication, this restlessness was far from abiding: between 1816 and 1821, James Monroe’s government
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 “pioneers for the mind” 31 had annexed as states a fair expanse of the territories gained in the Louisiana Purchase (1803), while the echoes of the Lewis and Clark expedition had already implanted in the minds of Americans a divinely ordained call to build their nation from sea to shining sea. Ichabod Crane represents those who embraced this call wholeheartedly. Halfway through the story, the schoolmaster’s unleashed fancy “presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where” (1996b: 300). Constantly referred to as a “morsel”, Katrina does not originate desire herself as much as provide Ichabod with the means to enlarge both his biological body and the republican body politic (2000: 298-99). Irving de-eroticizes Ichabod’s desire for Katrina Van Tassel, turning it into a national fantasy of expansion and social reproduction. Since the story is set c.1790, Irving orients Ichabod and his prospective offspring toward two territories about to enter the Union as states: Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796). The third alternative, “the Lord knows where”, ironizes the providential call of Manifest Destiny, as God’s own hand was believed to guide the expansion and occupation of the West (Stephanson 1996: 6-15). Removed Native American nations and enslaved people of African descent remained on the losing end of this process. Historian Reginald Horsman has explained us expansion by means of its alliance with Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy and biological essentialism so that, even if “the Indian policy of Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe was based on ideas of improvability stemming from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment”, such notion of improvability soon receded and was supplanted by the scientific racism behind polygenesis —the assumption that different races do not share a traceable common ancestry— and phrenology (1981: 114). These theories justified removal, exploitation and genocide by offering “irrefutable” evidence of Africans’ and Indians’ innate inferiority. In the infamous words of slavery apologist Thomas R. Dew: “the Ethiopian cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots” (qtd. in Horsman 1981: 123). In result, territorial expansion was not a by-product but the direct consequence of a pseudo-scientific determinism reified through physiognomic variations of skin, size, sex and complexion. Racialized hierarchies shaped Manifest Destiny into an imperial project of subjection deeply at odds with the democratic values that expansionists had promised to extend to the furthest continental corners and beyond. Official racism impelled us expansion while visibly debunking the egalitarian principles at the core of its sacrosanct mission. Even if the republic could only stretch through the movement, reproduction and physical toil of actual bodies populating the landscape, otherized African and Indian bodies foiled national growth or, at least, compromised its liberal agenda. In ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, Ichabod’s ambivalent fate as both a thriving stalwart of the us body politic and a bodiless spirit plays out these appropriations of the human body by expansionist discourse. Scholars of us imperialism, like John Carlos Rowe, have outlined the process by which “peoples of color, women and workers consistently
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 32 manuel herrero puertas colonized within the United States” mingled “with a variety of ‘foreign’ peoples successively colonized by the United States outside its territorial borders”. From the point of view of the colonized subject, this internal/external dimension proved almost irrelevant, as its rhetorical justification “could be deployed for new foreign ventures even as it was required to maintain the old systems of controlling familiar groups within the United States” (Rowe 2000: 8). Given the era’s aggressive expansionism, this process had no end in sight. The desire to aggrandize the borders of the republic overlapped with a Nativist apprehension toward the different alterities that successive incorporations presented to a male, ableist, Anglo-Saxon standard of citizenship. Even Walt Whitman’s extolment of American inclusiveness was not exempt from the anxiety of incorporation:“Is this then a touch? Quivering me to a new identity”, asked the poet (2002: 684). Like Whitman, many us citizens shuddered at the ‘new identities’ grafted onto the national body with every annexation. Against the nationalist emphasis on enclosure, expansionism and a nascent imperialism constantly re-opened and sutured their body politic around wider areas of influence. This precarious equipoise between democratic aggrandizement and the domestic tyrannies of slavery and Indian removal culminated in two key episodes of us political history parallel to Irving’s literary production: the Missouri Compromise (1819-1821) —aiming to resolve the body politic’s internal imbalances— and the Monroe Doctrine (1823) —destined to present a homeostatic American body politic in the eyes of the world. The House of Representatives drafted the Missouri Compromise as a short-term solution to the crisis of slavery, stipulating that, for every annexed free state, a new slave state should follow. Although this intended harmony was believed to prevent dissenting parties from abandoning the Union, the political assemblage that ultimately emerged from the Compromise barely concealed the widening cracks between slave and free states, especially as the western territories awaited incorporation. With every annexation, it became more obvious that the republic was disintegrating. Looking back to the Missouri Compromise, Abraham Lincoln illustrated its true outcome through a cancer metaphor: “Thus, the thing [institutional slavery] is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death” (1922: 118). The powers behind the Missouri Compromise refrained from ‘cutting’ the national body politic and allowed the ‘cancer’ of slavery to metastasize instead. Ichabod’s expansive, fragmentary and ultimately ethereal anatomy proves indeed an apt correlate to this image: his limbs might reach out for miles, but his body would always be “loosely hung together” before vanishing into thin air. James Monroe participated ardently in the Missouri debates (Brickhouse 2004: 15-32; Murphy 2005: 17-32). His efforts to eradicate slavery at home occurred almost simultaneously with his eponymous doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine cordoned off the American hemisphere against European intervention, yet its proto-imperialist maneuver also aimed to create a subtle tie of dependency between the us and newly independent American nations such as Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela and Chile. Like Irving did with
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Ichabod, Monroe also assigned himself an impossible task, wanting to appease the internal schism around slavery by conflating the national territory with the entire American continent. In his 1823 State of the Union Address, the Doctrine’s official inception, Monroe alleged that “by enlarging the basis of our system and increasing the number of States the system itself has been greatly strengthened in both its branches” (2004: 290). Nonetheless, the escalating North-South hostility soon curbed the government’s belief that a bigger body politic would result in a healthier one. The intellectual history behind the Missouri Compromise and the confrontations it aimed to resolve —at best only postponing them— paves the road for our understanding of the Monroe Doctrine. Seen as a corollary to the Missouri Compromise, the Monroe Doctrine facilitated a shield and a sword: a shield to defend the hemisphere from European imperialism and a sword for the us to instigate its own American empire. That shield also meant to cover up the dramatic schisms within the republic. Emerging from this atmosphere of dissent and separatism, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ suggests that maybe nobody was willing to show up and hold the shield and the sword, that nation- building constituted, after all, a project of disembodiment. In fact, Irving’s sketch predates several explorations of disembodiment at pivotal moments in us literary and intellectual history. In ‘Nature’ (2007: 15-58), for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously conceptualized a transcendental relationship between the American man and his vast continent. For the Concord philosopher, individuals could “own the landscape” only after shedding the material burden of the flesh and transmogrifying themselves into a “transparent eye-ball” (2007: 18). An immaterial eye, not a hand, was to colonize America. Emerson’s volatilization of the body, like Irving’s, was not devoid of contradiction. Namely, Emerson also hesitated between the world of the flesh and those transparent states that transcend it. In his most ardent expansionist plea, Emerson reminded the “Young American” that “any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism” (1983: 216). But transparent eyeballs do not dig wells nor do they plow the fields. Both Emerson and Irving wonder which is the best option for the us citizen at the dawn of an expansionist era: whether to make history or to haunt it from the margins, to remain an active body within a system that discriminates and brutalizes other ‘inferior’ bodies or to transcend the confines of his body and body politic into an immaterial state of contemplation and inaction. Escaping the anatomical strictures of the body, jumping out of the epidermis into an alternative, more mobile and fluid existence no doubt invigorated the restless expansionist spirit, but it also enacted a democratic fantasy of absolute sameness. For Ichabod and Emerson, dislodging the self from the body constitutes a gesture of liberation and, simultaneously, of denunciation: an empowering move toward a life of the mind fraught with possibility and, occasionally, at last, desperate resort in the face of ostracism and violence. At once a successful pioneer body and a ghost haunting the pioneered locales left behind, Ichabod delivers an insightful comment on the antithetical crusade of us
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 34 manuel herrero puertas expansion, a crusade that tried to augment the nation without jeopardizing its egalitarian foundation. Caught in disembodiment’s discursive trap, Ichabod escapes neither his body nor the authority that a patriarchal, xenophobic community has inscribed on it. This trapping gains relevance as Irving converts Ichabod into a proxy for the national corporation. Politicking his way into public office, Ichabod does not merely symbolize the national community; he becomes officially inscribed within it. The problem is that he also remains a ghost. Embodiment and disembodiment carry out different tasks, it seems. Stranded between corporeal and disembodied states of being, the American pioneers imagined by Irving and Emerson struggle to harmonize both in order to safeguard the national crusade: to occupy the continent and to lead the world into economic, technological and intellectual progress. Irving’s choice of Ichabod as an agent of us ascendancy reveals the author’s uncertainty about the national self, as seen, for example, when Irving ironizes Ichabod’s roots in Connecticut, “a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodsmen and country schoolmasters” (1996b: 293). Here, Irving categorically separates those characters qualified to tame America’s uncharted geographical spaces from those “pioneers for the mind” in charge of developing the national character. This divide recalls the Cartesian mind/body dualism, whose split between embodied and disembodied planes of existence hampers the expansionist project outlined in Ichabod’s pioneering delusions and in the model of national growth assumed in the Missouri Compromise and the Monroe Doctrine. Irving’s cast of characters substantiates this Cartesian divide: as I will discuss later, the weedy Ichabod is the tale’s expansionist actor, whereas the hyper-embodied and muscular Brom Bones stands for a Jeffersonian ideal of yeomanry immobility that disdains the early nineteenth-century quest for unlimited expansion and centralized government. Halfway between Ichabod’s evanescent frame and Bones’s blunt physicality, Irving introduces the fragmented, disabled body. Physical disability, understood as the social construction of impairment, lends Irving a useful primer.1 Through it, he verbalizes the distress that befalls the American hero when he fails to harmonize his transcendent and material obligations, among them, to fulfill the imperial designs of Manifest Destiny without losing his innate innocence. Unlike impairment, “disability is a representation”, claims Rosemarie Garland Thomson, meaning that the disabled body always arises from a specific referential context: legal, scientific, artistic, etc (1997: 6). To Thomson’s list, I add Ichabod’s catalogue of embodiments and disembodiments, which unveil disability as a fabrication buttressing the normative discourses of nationalism and imperialism. As already mentioned, Ichabod’s disorganized body speaks to the political community he belongs to. His westward movement has inspired Donald Pease to interpret Ichabod as
1 Traditionally, impairment means the existence of a corporeal lack or anomaly (e.g. missing limb), whereas disability stands for a disadvantage imposed on the impaired individual by a social order desensitized to bodily difference (Siebers 2008: 65-68, Russell 2011: 72-74).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 “pioneers for the mind” 35 an agent of progress who fails to transform his community of arrival, being transformed —if not destroyed— by it in reverse (1987: 17). Revisiting Pease’s suggestive framing, I consider Ichabod a simultaneous agent and victim of us western expansion, a catalyst of national progress who does not hesitate to deploy violent methods in his mission and, at the same time, a victim whose non-normative body becomes heavily racialized through recurrent comparisons with African American bodies and who cannot endure the mirror vision of the Headless Horseman, a nightmarish reminder of Ichabod’s bodily disorders and of the fragmentary body politic of the post-Revolution state.
3. Imperial armor: The body (politic) in the mirror stage What kind of anti-imperialist critique, then, drips from Irving’s tale of disembodied pioneering? I opened my argument characterizing Ichabod as a problematic mirror image of us imperial aspirations, a mirror image that resuscitates in the encounter with the Hessian Horseman. These specular associations recall Jacques Lacan’s theory of corporeality and self-identity known as the “mirror stage”. In order to elucidate the interrelationship between disability, embodiment and empire, the theory of the mirror stage renders a useful analysis of imperial epistemologies and their signifiers’ dependence on physical disability. This section and the close readings that follow show how Irving’s narrative of disembodiment reverses the constitutive process of the mirror stage and exposes the imperial body politic of the us as a fragmented, phantasmatic and impossible venture in its racial heterogeneity. The mirror stage provides a critical paradigm that unlocks the idealized figuration of a well-bounded and coherent nation-state in perpetual expansion, especially as this ideal animated specific resolutions like the Missouri Compromise and the Monroe Doctrine. On the contrary, Ichabod’s embodiment and disembodiment of the us unmasks this idealized construction precisely by undoing the mirror stage’s assemblage. Also, because this narrative exposure connects us with ulterior modes of signification and identification embedded in language itself, my argument concludes by labeling Irving’s reversal of the mirror stage a ‘de-hallucination’ process rather than a return to reality. Briefly put, the mirror stage theorizes self-perception by examining the turning point in which a human baby stops seeing his or her own arm, leg or abdomen as ‘parts’ and re-organizes them into a differentiated whole after looking at his or her reflection in a mirror. What the mirror stage teaches us, then, is that the self can only be defined externally; that is, by means of an image of the self that lies outside the self. Fuelled by this unresolved paradox, the mirror stage gains explanatory weight throughout Lacan’s career: from a developmental phase (“historical value”, 1936) to a permanent model of subjectivity (“structural value”, 1950s). According to the latter model, the mirror stage explains the “formation of the ego through the identification with an image of the self ” (Homer 2005: 18). Lacan stresses the dynamics of this “identification”, which he describes as “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (2002: 4).
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No doubt, the body’s materiality focalizes this assumption. Any instance of identification —understood in Lacanian terms— revolves around the body. The mirror stage shifts our perception of the body from a collection of scattered parts, organs and functions, also called “imagos”, to a totalizing whole —or “gestalt”— larger than the sum of its parts (Lacan 2002: 6, 13). This gestalt reconfiguration creates an illusion of corporeal autonomy that compensates for and tries to minimize our myriad bonds of dependency with the external world —starting with the baby’s dependency on the body of the mother. This fiction of corporeal self-reliance feeds the ableist discourse that pervades Western society since the eighteenth century. Whereas physical disability accentuates our dependency on the world outside the flesh (through prostheses, technological implements, monitored assistance), the gestalt form of the mirror stage induces a clear- cut division between itself and the surrounding environment. On the contrary, disabled persons —especially after amputation or disfigurement— have a harder time demarcating their own individuality, given their subordination to external agents. It is at this point that disability and psychoanalytical theory cross paths. Lennard Davis has pioneered —somewhat timidly— a connection between disability and the mirror stage, a connection that I intend to fortify by triangulating it with psycho-historical representations of empire. Davis explains the social nervousness around the disabled body by means of a mirror stage gone astray. First, he invokes Lacan’s notion of self-formation as a movement from the corps morcelé —a shapeless collection of scattered body parts or imagos— to the “enforced unifying of these fragments through the hallucination of a whole body”. After recreating the mirror stage’s hallucinated wholeness, Davis introduces the variable of disability:
the disabled body is a direct imago of the repressed fragmented body. The disabled body causes a kind of hallucination of the mirror phase gone wrong. The subject looks at the disabled body and has a moment of cognitive dissonance, or should we say a moment of cognitive resonance with the earlier state of fragmentation. Rather than seeing the whole body in the mirror, the subject sees the repressed fragmented body . . . the true self of the fragmented body. (1995: 139)
For Lacan and Davis, the fragmented body does not derive from extraordinary circumstances (e.g. accidents, diseases). It rather represents humans’ a priori condition. “True self ” and “fragmented body” join the same equation, an equation too often overlooked, given that our embrace of the anatomic gestalt projected in the mirror represses this disjointed self. As a consequence of such repression, the triumphant ableist “ego” shuns those images of physical disability that connect us back with a pre-mirror stage, uncanny version of our bodies. Disability, therefore, interpellates an earlier vision of the self: dependent, abnormal and incomplete. Is the mirror stage, then, a psychic mechanism to help us cope with our innate disability? In the following extract, Lacan comes close to an answer: “For the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 “pioneers for the mind” 37 the body to what I will call an ‘orthopedic’ form of its totality —and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development” (2002: 6). The totality of the body can only be “orthopedic”: its wholeness does not rest on its flesh and bones but on a symbolic “armor” that integrates anatomical fragments into a whole. Here Lacan rescues Sigmund Freud’s view of man as a “prosthetic God”, a vulnerable being whose survival depends on his body’s technological extensions (1962: 76). Freud’s tenet presupposes human civilization as a sustained endeavor to overcome our many disabilities. From our physiological dependence on oxygen, water and food to our bodies’ incapacity to fly on their own, disability might comprehend a wider catalogue of restrictions than the specific corporeal anomalies we tend to consider ‘disabled’. Above all, disability entails a complication of personal and political boundaries whose most dire consequence is a redefined notion of the ‘self ’ as an artificial (‘orthopedic’) amalgamation. The individual is no longer a whole larger than the sum of its parts; it is just parts. Bodies politic are also ‘orthopedic’. The mirror stage’s endless currency in cultural studies derives from the way in which texts build reflective surfaces where individuals and their larger political structures assume images of themselves —to paraphrase Lacan’s own take on “identification”. In these mirror images, self and community sublimate their fractures and inconsistencies into a solidified vision that replaces fragmentation with wholeness. But how exactly does a human community look in a mirror? What kind of gestalt arises from their collective instantiation? And what kind of cohesive “armor” is imposed on them within a specific imperialist context? Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation-state as an “imagined community”: a fiction that gains traction through the wheels of the print-capitalism machinery (2006: 6-7, 36). Popularized forms of communal representation lead to the corporeal metaphor of the body politic, which translates institutional hierarchies, foundational myths and supremacist ideologies into visible and tangible form. The national body politic, then, unfolds as a synchronized mirror stage of its citizens. Taking a shared cue from Anderson and Lacan, we can rethink nation and empire as “imagined communities” that build and enlarge their respective gestalts through cultural artifacts working as mirrors. These collective instances of identification foster the analogy between disabled bodies and bodies politic. Like the body politic, the disabled body —not to be confused with the impaired one— is also a metaphorical body, one that is socially constructed through the mirror stage in accordance with dominant social values. Therefore, disabled bodies share with the figurative construct of the body politic a capacity to incarnate collective desires, phobias and tensions. Because they need urgent repair, disabled bodies contribute ready-made referents to national and imperial quests for consolidation and hegemony. Thus, disability acts as a cable ferry that bounces back and forth between the parallel shores of the colonized body and the imperial body politic. The fascinating paradox is how, when devoid of their signifying potential, disabled persons travel from the center of national identification to its abject margins. Amidst the constant reformulations of the us body politic, its members have traditionally sought stability by differentiating their own
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 38 manuel herrero puertas corporeal form against its deviant variations. Re-establishing the centrality of disability in Lacan’s thought, we realize that disability, like racial and sexual difference, adds to the negative space of the national mirror image. Against this no-zone, our psyche projects a normative ‘armor’ that converts the body from an imagos into a gestalt. In this negative space of national identification, disability has traditionally performed a double task as both the marker of a discriminated minority —people with disabilities— and a pseudo- scientific vehicle to undermine the humanity of subaltern groups. us culture ostracized ‘cripples’ at the same time it used the social stigma of disability to ‘cripple’ women, African Americans and homosexuals (Thomson 1997: 5; Baynton 2001: 34). Lacan’s theory offers a toolkit to interpret the relays between material bodies and allegorical bodies politic. In such relays, the body no longer functions as a fleshly reality but a metaphorical vehicle that signifies a given community. The mirror stage can explain, first, the individual self as a gestalt agglutination of scattered imagos and, second, the body politic as a gestalt agglutination of individual selves apt for citizenship. As I am about to show, Irving unveils, via Ichabod’s body and body politic, the totalizing fictions supporting such constructs.
4. Ichabod’s hunger If the mirror stage enables our grasp of a whole body/body politic, Irving upends this sequence, moving from corporeal wholeness into scattered imagos and eventually into a disembodied form, tapping into widespread fears about the deficient enclosures of ableism, nationalism and imperialism. In a brief scene charged with Lacanian overtones, Ichabod gets ready for an evening gathering at the Van Tassels’ farm by “arranging his looks by a bit of broken looking-glass” (Irving 1996b: 305). Arranging one’s looks denotes a more complicated process than just looking at one’s self in the mirror. The fractured image that Ichabod beholds also stands for the different impressions he intends to awake in the community, arranging the way he looks but also anticipating —and responding to— his neighbors’ gazes. The implications of this shattered self-image become painfully obvious in the dance sequence in which the schoolmaster aims to win Katrina’s favor. Ichabod “fatally prided himself upon his dancing as much as upon his vocal powers” (1996b: 308). His fatal mistake is precisely to disregard the Cartesian split and freely interchange mind and body. This flawed judgment provides a common denominator to his overall frustrations; namely, his inability to materialize his grandiloquent imagination into physical form. Ichabod’s actual performance could well stand as a paradigmatic scene in Irving’s catalogue of bodily disorganizations: “Not a limb, not a fiber about him was idle; and to have seen his loosely hung frame in full motion, and clattering about the room, you would have thought Saint Vitus himself . . . was figuring before you in person” (1996b: 309). Not only that, Ichabod’s spasmodic hop also awakens “the admiration of all the negroes; who, having gathered, of all ages and sizes, from the farm and the neighborhood, stood forming a pyramid of shining black faces at every door and window, gazing with delight at the scene, rolling their white eyeballs and showing grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear”
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(1996b: 309). Ironically enough, Ichabod’s body resonates with the corporeal eccentricities with which African Americans were perceived in us soil: “amusingly long or bowed legs, grotesquely big feet, bad posture” (Baynton 2001: 40). Irving depicts the dancing Ichabod through minstrel stereotypes traditionally imposed on African Americans, which explains the sympathy nexus arising in the dance scene. Although it is not my goal to reconcile Irving’s politics into a sustained and coherent project, the marginal presence of African Americans in the story suggests that Irving’s skeptical anti-imperialism was not exempt from a racialist frame of mind. We first encounter the disturbing presence of blackness in the institutional space of the schoolhouse or, as the narrator calls it, Ichabod’s “little empire” (1996b: 295). In fact, the schoolmaster adheres to the axiom “[s]pare the rod and spoil the child”, deploying physical punishment and combining violence and paternalism in the formation of new citizen subjects (1996b: 294). One afternoon, Ichabod’s lesson is “suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a negro, in tow-cloth jacket and trowsers, a round-crowned fragment of a hat, like the cap of Mercury, and mounted on the back of a ragged, wild, half-broken colt” (1996b: 304). Irving portrays the black messenger in parodical fashion. To his fake crown vaguely resembling “the cap of Mercury”, the writer adds the pompous air with which the anonymous visitor does his errand: “having delivered his message with that air of importance, and effort at fine language, which a negro is apt to display on petty embassies of this kind, he dashed over the brook . . . full of the importance and hurry of his mission” (1996b: 304). Irving’s mockery of the pretentious African American betrays the author’s embrace of the racist infantilization of African Americans. Through their stereotypical presentation, black characters in ‘Sleepy Hollow’ constitute marginal figures whose exclusion from public spaces of government and education contrasts with their menial service as messengers, connecting a community that has excluded them. The story’s racial landscape accurately echoes the broader historical configuration of the Hudson Valley. Already by 1625, coffles of slaves brought to New Netherland by the Dutch West India Company operated as “municipal workers, building and repairing fortifications, roads, warehouses, and other structures of the corporate state” (Moore 2005: 37). The equation between Ichabod, a “Connecticut Yankee” paving the road for American progress, and the subaltern black audience that enjoys his dance anticipates the story’s dichotomous ending. Before activating the definite split between Ichabod’s corporeal presence and his spectral absence, Irving orchestrates the dance sequence at the Van Tassel’s in such a way that Ichabod resides both at the center of the respectable, white, land-owning community of Tarry Town and at the nearly invisible margins populated by African slaves —slavery remained legal in New York until 1827.2 In addition to the
2 Irving’s published and unpublished works lack any profound meditation on slavery. At most, he jotted down undeveloped portraits of slaves and free blacks in his travel journals across the South. Burstein comments that Irving “was not above making racist remarks” in his personal and public writings, but “neither was he interested in making excuses for slave owners” (2007: 80, 260-61). Neither an abolitionist, nor an apologist for the peculiar institution, Irving’s ambivalence toward the slave question is best felt through the marginal appearances of black characters in his
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“broken glass”, Irving’s blackening of Ichabod provides another specular identification that shows the protagonist as a fragmentary entity and upends the mirror stage’s sequence of addition and completion. Irving characterizes Ichabod’s bodily discontents and expansionist thrust through a triple front of hunger: physiological, sexual and cultural. Like a bag with a hole, Ichabod is never full. A “huge feeder” who, “though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda”, Ichabod’s elastic framework symbolizes a specific type of expansionist body politic, for Ichabod cannot stop eating and, yet, his body always deflates back to its original shape (1996b: 295). Hunger also becomes a sexual trope. As already mentioned, Irving depicts Katrina Van Tassel through gastro-erotic metaphors: “She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge, ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father’s peaches” (1996b: 298). The fertile landscape of the Van Tassels farm awakens Ichabod’s culinary yearnings. While the protagonist contemplates “the fat meadow- lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat” (1996b: 299), Irving halts his narrative and captures Ichabod’s rapture in extended catalogues. Through these plethoric ecstasies, Irving depicts Ichabod as a believer in the quintessential American promise of opportunity and wealth. Therefore, the schoolmaster does not yearn only at the fruits of the land but the land itself, configuring a vision of domesticity —“pots and kettles” in his pioneer’s wagon— and endless natural resources, a vision guaranteed by westward movement and annexation. Far from a mere physiological pulsion, Ichabod’s hunger visualizes future consolidation and growth. His desire to settle the land of “Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where” with his offspring overlaps with a nationwide impetus to territorialize America. Ichabod’s “devouring mind’s eye” contemplates “every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth”. Beholding such prospect, “his imagination expanded with the idea” (1996b: 299). Like Emerson’s “transparent eyeball”, Ichabod’s insatiable “mind’s eye” also intends to comprehend the landscape. Of course, the underlying anxiety is that the encroaching moves of the mind’s eye/transparent eyeball take place only as figments of the imagination. Only imagination and vision expand. Ichabod remains a “pioneer for the mind”: his westbound movement can only be fulfilled as a possibility countered by his demise. Similarly, Emerson’s transparent eyeball has to compete in patriotic zeal with all those muscular bodies “tilling” and “mining” the soil. Ichabod’s anaconda-like body does not follow his mental powers of expansion. His unrestrained imagination —like Emerson’s unifying eye— is not followed by a subsequent growth of body and body politic. Like the us national contours mapped by the Missouri Compromise, Ichabod’s “whole frame [was] most loosely hung together”. His anti-normative body is not obviously fragmented, like the Headless Horseman’s; it rather constitutes an effeminate body that also defies the gender norms of its time —best fiction. As Judith Richardson puts it, Irving’s Hudson Valley resonates with “the obscuring of the African American past redoubling that of the Dutch” (2003: 54-55).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 27–45· issn 0210-6124 “pioneers for the mind” 41 embodied by Brom Bones’s “great powers of limb”— and can correlate only to the three- fifths of humanity allowed to African Americans (1996b: 301). In the same manner as images of disability and racial otherness upset the normative construction of individual and social bodies, Ichabod’s incapacity to govern his body connects him with African Americans, racial inferiors whose staple representations often endowed them with grotesque physiognomies and puerile minds. Ichabod’s distorted anatomy hinders his insatiable fantasies of aggrandizement and expansion. On the other end of the spectrum, Brom Bones’s “Herculean frame” counternarrates Ichabod’s frail constitution (1996b: 301). Irving confronts their personal politics through their antagonistic anatomies. Since both aspire to marry Katrina and inherit the Van Tassel property, their rivalry also symbolizes the broader debates about the future of the US. In stark opposition to Ichabod’s gluttony for land and progress, Bones does not want to go anywhere. Bones’ static and wholesome form concretizes the body politic intended by the signers of the Missouri Compromise; Ichabod’s unreliable shape and grotesque appetite parody the imperial hunger of the Monroe-Doctrine supporters. We can use Irving’s tale to disarticulate the ideological platform behind the Monroe Doctrine and its arrogant hemispheric appropriation. Chased away by the Headless Horseman, Ichabod tastes his own medicine, for he is not facing the history of the Revolution in embodied form as much as a ghostly derivation, a projection rooted in his frustrated self-image as much as in his skewed understanding of the national past. This excised embodiment of the national body ushers Ichabod’s third kind of appetite: cultural demand for foundational myths of community. Ichabod’s manifestations of hunger —physiological, sexual— correlate with his gullibility for national mythos. Irving compares Ichabod’s culinary cravings with the “capacious swallow” with which he embraces tall-tales about the past: “His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell- bound region” (1996b: 296). But his search for foundational narratives is mythical, not historical. He supports state-sponsored amnesia through religious destinarianism and heavy-handed allusions to Cotton Mather. His appetite for the supernatural jeopardizes the national future by subjecting it to legend instead of history. Like Emerson, Ichabod embraces a mythical —and disembodied— version of history that seems far more exciting —and guilt-free— than the actual historical record. In this sense, it should not surprise us that, of all the mirror images encountered by the schoolmaster, the Headless Horseman proves the most terrifying and the one that propels the plot toward its ambiguous denouement. Adopting the disguise of the beheaded Hessian soldier, Bones deliberately disrupts his muscular, symmetrical physique and confronts Ichabod with a repressed mirror image of the schoolmaster’s self. Through the figure of the Headless Horseman, deployed as Ichabod’s mirror image, Irving explores the crisis of national identity at the core of this simultaneous celebration and ejection of the pre- national past. The Headless Horseman conforms to an image of anxious independence, a political symbol whose head was lost with the excision of the ties between the United
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States and the British motherland. Gaping at the Headless Horseman, Ichabod undergoes a reversal process of the mirror stage and contemplates the dissolution of the national self. Such a fatal vision engenders Irving’s ambiguous ending, in which we cannot tell if Ichabod survives this incident as a body or as a spirit. By undoing his body, Bones reflects Ichabod’s corporeal frustration. As I have indicated, the schoolmaster’s frustration derives from being unable to materialize his dreams of personal and political expansion into actual form. His body’s resilience to growth goes hand in hand with the trivial impact he has on the community. Ichabod first perceives the Horseman as “something huge, misshapen, black and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveler” (1996b: 314-15). For starters, it seems impossible for the frightened schoolmaster to distinguish this monstrous figure from its background. The rider’s difficult demarcation, which temporarily hides his headless condition, parallels the challenges the disabled body faces in front of the mirror as well as the body politic of empire with every new incorporation and redefinition of its frontiers.
5. Conclusion: de-hallucinating American empire Somewhat naysaying gothic fiction’s typical cycles of doom and haunting, ‘Sleepy Hollow’ ends with its protagonist transmuted both into a ghost who haunts the Tarry Town wilderness and a successful legislator in “a distant part of the country”. The town rumors so have it. For that reason, Irving portrays Sleepy Hollow less as a haunted place and more as a hallucinated empire. The author highlights historical distortion as an endemic feature of Sleepy Hollow. Ever since the place was discovered by Hendrick Hudson, this Dutch settlement “still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie” (1996b: 292). The town’s hallucinogenic vapors preserve Sleepy Hollow in an ahistorical limbo in which “population, manners, and customs, remain fixed” (1996b: 295). Honoring its name, Sleepy Hollow makes its citizens sleepy and “subject to trances and visions” (1996b: 292). Yet, the racial hierarchy operative in Sleepy Hollow also makes it concurrent to the national scuffles over slavery and the ethics of annexation unfolding during the time of the story’s publication. The sporadic but determinant contributions of African Americans to the plot confirm that the inhabitants of Tarry Town have failed to hallucinate their way entirely out of history. This incomplete detachment from reality echoes Lacan’s and Davis’s thesis that the hallucination of corporeal wholeness is meant to compensate for the subject’s realization that such wholeness is an ignis fatuus, that he or she remains dependent on the outside world. The etymology of the term hallucination remits to the Latin verb alucinari, which originally stood for “to wander in mind” (oed). This emphasis on motion permeates Irving’s moments of border crossing, in which the mind, like the body, accesses an unprecedented plane; but, more significantly, it confirms the despondent Ichabod’s status as a “pioneer for the mind”.
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Even if the term hallucination crops up in the works of important psychoanalytic theorists, they tend to use it lightly without any definitional gesture. Such is the case of Freud and Lacan, at least. Otherwise, the closest one can get to a working definition of hallucination in this context appears in the Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis as “sensations or perceptions attributed to the sense organs which are erroneously experienced as if they were caused by external objects” (Eidelberg 1968: 172). Like the critical paradigm of the mirror stage, hallucination also prompts a traumatic confusion of subject-object boundaries. Mirror images, as theorized by Lacan and some critics of disability, catalyzed Irving’s reversal between reality and illusion. Transitioning from one to the other, Irving’s characters fall prey to hallucinations that unleash a chaotic upending of cultural norms. Unlike the hallucination of the mirror stage, Irving’s delusions are retroactive, mobilizing the hallucinating characters into a pre-mirror stage scenario in which they confront their monolithic understandings of the able body and body politic. Like the broken mirror that fails to return a coherent self-image, Irving’s prose underscores those moments in which Ichabod’s body revolts against himself. The resultant confusion bears important political consequences. Whereas a ‘haunted’ place directs attention toward a legendary past reenacted in the present; a ‘hallucinated’ site emerges as a present fiction and highlights its unreliable foundation for any futurity. This shift in temporality —from ‘haunted’ past to ‘hallucinated’ present— is best seen in the tale’s narrative shift from the spellbinding legends of the Headless Horseman and Major André’s tree toward the future itself as quintessentially spectral —Ichabod’s ghostly pioneering. The ultimate effect of this shift is for us to de-hallucinate the national future. To de-hallucinate does not mean to return to reality after a temporary flight of our imagination. De-hallucination places us one inch further than the reality from which we originally departed. If reality sustains our fictional configuration of the body as a whole and the nation as a coherent entity, then the de-hallucination of that reality undoes the mirror stage operations out of which these fictions emerge and are consolidated. In this process of de-hallucination, body and nation come out as faulty containers.
Works Cited Anderson, Benedict 2006 (1983): Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Baynton, Douglas 2001: ‘Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History’. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds. The New Disability History: American Perspectives. New York: New York up. 33-52. Brickhouse, Anna 2004: Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP. Burstein, Andrew 2007: The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic. Davis, Lennard 1995: Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. New York: Verso.
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Eidelberg, Ludwig 1968: Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis. New York: Free. Emerson, Ralph Waldo 2007 (1836): ‘Nature’. Robert Richardson Jr., ed. Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems. New York: Bantam. 15-58. —1983 (1844): ‘The Young American. A Lecture before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, February 7, 1884’. Joel Porte, ed. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America. 213-30. Fiedler, Leslie 2003 (1960): Love and Death in the American Novel. Philadelphia: Dalkey. Freud, Sigmund 1962 (1930): Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. ‘Hallucination’. Oxford English Dictionary. 2011. Oxford: Oxford UP. ‹http://www.oed. com› (Accessed 7 Dec, 2011) Hoffman, Daniel 1993: ‘Prefigurations: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”’. James Tuttleton, ed. Washington Irving, The Critical Reaction. New York: Ams. 85-93. Homer, Sean 2005: Jacques Lacan. New York: Routledge. Horsman, Reginald 1981: Race and Manifest Destiny. The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Irving, Washington 1996a (1820-1821): The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Oxford and New York: Oxford up. —1996b (1820-1821): ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. 291-318. —1996c (1820-1821): ‘Rip Van Winkle’. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Oxford and New York: Oxford up. 33-49. Lacan, Jacques 2002 (1977): Ecrits. A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. London: Norton. Lincoln, Abraham 1922: ‘Peoria Speech’. J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed. Selections from the Writings of Abraham Lincoln. Chicago: Scott. 82-130. Moore, Christopher 2005: ‘A World of Possibilities: Slavery and Freedom in Dutch New Amsterdam’. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Slavery in New York. New York: New. 29-56. Monroe, James 2004: ‘State of the Union Address (December 2, 1823)’. James D. Richardson, ed. James Monroe: A Compilation of the Papers and Messages of the Presidents. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. 276-90. Murphy, Gretchen 2005: Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of u.s. Empire. Durham and London: Duke UP. Pease, Donald 1987: Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writers in Cultural Context. Madison: U of Wisconsin P. Richardson, Judith 2003: Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Rowe, John Carlos 2000: Literary Culture and u.s. Imperialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Siebers, Tobin 2008: Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.
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Stephanson, Anders 1996: Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang. Russell, Emily 2011: Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative and the Body Politic. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland 1997: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP. Whitman, Walt 2002: Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton.
Received 16 November 2011 Accepted 2 March 2012
Manuel Herrero-Puertas is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, where he also works as a teaching assistant, writing-center instructor and coordinator of the Americanist Speaker Series. His research examines the intersections between nineteenth-century discourses of disability in the Americas and the corporeal allegories of nation and empire that crop up in the literature of that period.
Address: University of Wisconsin-Madison. Department of English. 7195 Helen C. White, 600 N Park Street. Madison, WI, 53706 (usa). Tel: +1 608-263-3760. Fax: +1 608-263-3709.
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A Mestiza in the Borderlands: Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’ Puppet
Ana María Manzanas Calvo Universidad de Salamanca [email protected]
The article explores the formal and conceptual complexities of a novella that has so far escaped wide critical attention even though it tackles similar issues to Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. Like Anzaldúa’s mestiza, Cota-Cárdenas’ narrator finds herself floundering in uncertain territory, for she has also discovered that she cannot hold concepts or ideas within rigid boundaries. That state of dissolution of traditional formations is what Cota-Cárdenas situates at the center of the narrative. Mestizaje in Puppet does not appear as a comfortable and privileged locus, but as a painful ideological repositioning, a third space or element that works against totalizing narratives. The article illustrates how Cota-Cárdenas foregrounds the powerful identitary revision Anzaldúa would carry out in Borderlands, and contributes to the understanding of the self, of culture and the nation from the point of view of borderland subjectivities.
Keywords: mestizaje; hybridity; Chicano literature; borderlands; nomad
. . .
Una mestiza en la frontera: Puppet, de Margarita Cota-Cárdenas
El artículo explora la complejidad formal y conceptual de una novela breve que en gran medida ha pasado inadvertida para la crítica a pesar de centrarse en aspectos similares a los que Anzaldúa aborda en Borderlands. Como la mestiza que describe Anzaldúa, la narradora de Cota-Cárdenas está situada en un territorio incierto, puesto que ha descubierto que no puede encorsetar ni conceptos ni ideas. Ése es el estado de disolución que Cota-Cárdenas sitúa en el centro de la narración. El mestizaje que ilustra Puppet no se presenta como un lugar cómodo o privilegiado, sino como un reposicionamiento ideológico, como un tercer espacio que se enfrenta a las narrativas totalizadoras. El artículo ejemplifica cómo Cota-Cárdenas anticipa la revisión identitaria que Anzaldúa lleva a cabo en Borderlands y contribuye, así, a la exploración del yo y de la nación desde el punto de vista de una subjetividad de frontera.
Palabras clave: mestizaje; hibridismo; literatura chicana; frontera; nómada
—47— 48 ana maría manzanas calvo
1. Introduction
Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
What changes, for example, when culture is understood in terms of material hybridity, not purity? How is the imagined community of the nation —to use Benedict Anderson’s (1983) term— disrupted and customized by materially hybrid US-Mexico borderland subjectivities? José David Saldívar, Border Matters
Saldívar’s words in Border Matters (1997) posit a radical invitation to consider national and, implicitly, personal identities as inevitably relational. Saldívar, like Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera (1987), moves beyond nationalist positions that seek to secure and define an identity untainted by Anglo influence to articulate an impure and mestiza consciousness that arises from various cultural traditions and in cross-cultural exchange (Hames-García 2000: 109). The process has been previously addressed, among others, by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large (1996), where he focuses on the setting into motion of images and viewers, now in constant and simultaneous circulation and transformation in the midst of mass-migrations, migratory flows, and the crossing of borders. As a result of the changes produced by these processes, “ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (however large), has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders” (Appadurai 1996: 41). The questions I would like to tackle are what kind of self emerges through these cracks and borders, and what kind of identitary repositioning becomes involved in the process. It is well known in Chicano criticism that Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands addresses these issues as the writer fashions the widely discussed mestiza consciousness. However, as this article suggests, it is possible to identify very similar concerns in Margarita Cota- Cárdenas’ underground classic Puppet, a novella published in 1985. The writer articulates a half-breed consciousness across multiple cracks and fault lines to create a highly experimental narrative that comprises a multiplicity of voices, excerpts, conversations and accounts. This is the slippery ground upon which Cota-Cárdenas resituates the articulation of the self and its location. Anchors, referents and ties constantly shift in this collection of micronarratives that fashion a nomadic consciousness akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation in A Thousand Plateaus; a consciousness based on becoming and heterogeneity (1987: 361). This formally fragmented and constantly interrupted discourse foregrounds what Pérez Torres calls “the aesthetic and formal hybridity of Chicano artistic formation” (2002: 165). The multilingual prose or half-breed writing becomes a way “to articulate subjectivity outside dominant paradigms of identity” (Torres 2002: 166). As she fashions this self in motion, Petra, the protagonist, finds out that she has to shift out
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 a mestiza in the borderlands: margarita cota-cárdenas’ puppet 49 of the habitual formations, those parameters safely (b)ordering the self. The result of this repositioning is not a comfortable and privileged locus, but a third space or element that works against different manifestations of totalizing narratives, be they political or religious. In forging this nomadic consciousness, the article argues that Cota-Cárdenas anticipates the powerful revision of mestizaje Anzaldúa would carry out in Borderlands. Like Anzaldúa, Cota-Cárdenas fleshes out the cultural collisions, the discomfort and the struggle that characterize the borderlands (Hames-García 2000: 119). It is this constant shifting that, to answer José David Saldívar’s question, contributes to changing the way we understand culture, as well as the self and the imagined community of the nation. The article responds to Saldívar’s query in another way, for in analyzing Cota-Cárdenas’ novella from voices outside Chicano criticism, it performatively hybridizes this critical discourse and makes it more dialectical.
2. Puppet: a hybrid voice
The polylingual voices of the multi-located subjects of the global nomadic, diasporic, hybrid diversity are producing concretely grounded micro-narratives that call for a joyful kind of dissonance. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions
Originally published in Spanish in 1985, Puppet was reprinted in a bilingual edition by the University of New Mexico Press in 2000.1 Both Spanish and English versions, however, are constantly contaminated by the two languages, thus underscoring the impossibility of a pure language and culture. Instead, Cota-Cárdenas offers a multilingual text that includes formal Spanish and English, Mexican Spanish, Chicano/a Spanish slang and Spanglish (Martín 2008: 93).2 Even if published in the mid-eighties, however, this polylingual narrative makes Puppet read more like a post-Borderlands novella than as a narrative that predates Anzaldúa’s text by two years. For the issues Cota-Cárdenas tackles in Puppet strongly remind the reader of that in-between space, always sliding, always in motion, where la mestiza is located. The issues of fragmentation, of discontinuity and of a nomad consciousness poised between self and other, past and present, which Anzaldúa will refashion in Borderlands, take center stage in Puppet. This discontinuous consciousness is formally articulated through a multiplicity of voices, excerpts, conversations, micronarratives and accounts that create a postmodern tapestry without one focal, univocal narrative axis. As Rebolledo writes in the introduction to the 2000 edition,
1 All references to the novel will appear parenthetically in the text. I am using the English translation since this article is written in English. 2 Martín’s is the only published critical article devoted to Puppet so far. The critic is successful in extricating the novella from the pattern of bilingualism and situating it in a multilingual arena.
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“the different registers that are present in the novel combine to create a cacophony of narration” (xviii) or dissonance, to use Braidotti’s term, that is constantly interrupted by the “bringgg” of the phone. Together with the phone, the vision of Puppet on the night news, lying in a pool of blood, “a body that looked like a doll, one of those ones with strings and wood, all angular, one leg here, one there” (15), constitutes the recurrent image that punctuates the fifteen sketches of the novella. The portrait of Puppet as a divided self or persona with one leg here, one leg there becomes a permanent afterimage that aptly describes both the narrative object and the narrative subject, the self and the other. But the image of the puppet is central in other ways as well. Cota-Cárdenas moves from the body of the puppet, disjointed and a-centred, to a text which bears similar features, and to an ideological terrain which is always in transit. If the first person narrative could give the impression of a hierarchical organization of the multiple vectors which circulate through the narration, Cota-Cárdenas dispels such a dream of order, for she has split the first person narrative into two personas, the I and the you, which constantly collide in the telling of events. The traditional binary self/other is thus complicated by a third element, the you, thus upsetting the idea of a unified self and its relationship with the other. The I is ‘narrativized’ through another voice that addresses her as “you” and constantly curtails her fictional —read romantic— excesses with phrases such as “you were always such a daydreamer/panic button romanticaca” (9). These ideological and narrative splits make Puppet an apt example of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of hybridity, as developed in The Dialogic Imagination (1992).3 For Bakhtin, hybridity is ever-present in language, especially in novelistic discourse, but also within a single sentence or even a term. In Bakhtin’s theory, hybridization is used to describe the ability of one voice to ironize and unmask the other within the same utterance. The hybrid in language implies a double-voiced, double-styled speech, by definition irreducible to one or the other voice. Bakhtin states that “[i]t frequently happens that even one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction —and consequently, the word has two contradictory meanings, two accents” (1992: 305). This is the linguistic and ideological dissonance we find in Puppet. The hybrid text becomes the site of contacts, encounters and collisions between and among different discourses, as Bakhtin explains in his definition of hybridization:
What is hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor. (1992: 358)
3 See Ana María Manzanas and Jesús Benito’s Intercultural Mediations: Hybridity and Mimesis in American Literatures (2003: 66-74) for a reading of hybridity in ethnic American literature.
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This collision within the same utterance is obvious in the way Cota-Cárdenas alternates Spanish, English and Spanglish, among other variants; in the way the writer splits the narrative voice into the first and the second person narrators; in the way she brings into the text the received and prescribed versions of reality with her own explorations and experiences. The sets of contacts, interactions and collisions emerging from these encounters on the written page go beyond what Bakhtin terms “organic hybridity”, which is unconscious, unintentional and a by-product of lingusitic contacts (1992: 358), illustrating what Bakhtin conceptualizes as “intentional hybridity”, which is deliberately self-reflexive, contestatory and politicized. This kind of hybridity implies a dialectical articulation, instead of gradually blending into a new form. In the consciously hybrid discourse, “two points of view are not mixed, but set against each other dialogically” (1992: 360). Against the homogenizing move towards assimilation, intentional hybridity requires that two linguistic consciousnesses and two voices remain present but distinct, “fight[ing] it out within the territory of the utterance” (1992: 360) or the text. The emphasis, as Bakhtin himself indicates, is placed not so much on the activity of mixing as in “the collision between different points of view on the world” (1992: 360). The two elements integrated in the hybrid utterance are dialogically confronted, thus refusing closure and stasis. Hybridity encourages the disarticulation of authority, in the form of a refusal of the monologue of power and its capacity to fix and perpetuate categories or false syntheses. The real ideological work of hybridization is done in this political, intentional version, when one voice, such as the voice of the you in Cota-Cárdenas’ text, is used to unmask the other, the I or when the voice of authority and its multiple forms (political, religious, personal) is undermined by the other. This is the narrative and ideological dynamics the writer unfolds in the novella as Pat (Petra), the protagonist, sees herself split between blending her experiences into an organic whole and the constant collision of a dialectical articulation. This is the ideological and narrative doubleness that Petra will bring into her writing of Puppet’s life.
3. Conflicting textualizations But what is Puppet? As Rebolledo has pointed out, Puppet is a detective novel, a social novel and a historical narrative; also, I would add, a confessional novel or pseudo- autobiography. Based on the actual killing of a nineteen-year-old Chicano youngster (who Cota-Cárdenas immortalizes in the poem ‘Lápida para Puppet’), Puppet unravels the youngster’s fate in an unfair world. It is Memo, one of the workers at the contractor’s company, who calls Petra to tell her that Puppet has been killed by the police in obscure circumstances. In an attempt to clarify Puppet’s death, Petra starts to write his story as she collects her own memories as well as the bits of information Memo —significantly an abbreviation for memory— tells her over the phone. Yet the writing of Puppet’s life, as well as the unraveling of the strings of his existence, is intricately connected to, and interwoven with, the writing of the self. If the narrative of Puppet’s murder that Petra
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 52 ana maría manzanas calvo sends to the papers soon reveals itself as potentially dangerous to her safety, the other fragmentary pieces Petra scatters and interperses throughout the narrative prove even more destabilizing, for they entail the constant exploration of the self, its anchors, its ellipses, as well as the borders which delimit it. Petra becomes transposed, as she finds herself in the midst of an intertextual and cross-boundary transfer.4 Despite these crossings, the writing itself —in English— has a conventional start: “puppet was born seventeen years ago in the barrio, in Southwest City. His father supported what became a family of six children on and off again by odd-jobbing it around town, and eventually they all became wards of the State” (20). Cota-Cárdenas situates the reader in the writing process as the narrator questions the very terms used in the passage: “Qué es eso, ‘wards of the Steit?’” (20). The constant queries interrupt the narrative, thus dispelling the possibility of a conventionally linear narration, for they weigh and ponder on the very vocabulary that needs to be translated. Through Petra, Cota-Cárdenas directly addresses the disappearing of Spanish as a written language. As Memo acknowledges, “yo no sé leyer I don’t know how to read in Spanish” (20); writing in Spanish, as the narrator admits to herself, is difficult for her as well “for… many reasons” (21) that she reveals as she describes a school system where Spanish is prohibited during school hours: “And if they caught you, pos zas! A slap wherever the ticher gottya… No, not real hard, pero pues, we didn’t like it all the same although I’ll tell you it was very democratic because they hit all of us the same” (23). Without transition, without warning, the narrator starts her own fragmented autobiography, her past, her present, her fears and her (lack of ) political commitment, thus hybridizing Puppet’s story with her own. However, Cota-Cárdenas does not allow the narration to crystallize in a bifurcated text that reveals Puppet and Petra’s lives, but allows us glimpses into an interpersonal story. Some of the stories she tells, like Wimpy’s velorio and her first intimation of death, are swiftly unwritten by the narrator with a blunt: “That wasn’t you, I know you already and it just couldn’t have been you… Where’d ya get that story from, you romanticizing liar” (31). And the narrator has to acquiesce: “From a magazine, one of those that they say is from the Left” (31). What makes up, then, the narrative texture? The writing of Puppet’s life involves the telling of Petra’s story. Cota- Cárdenas creates a narrative space in which categories and meanings exceed their original limits. Writing about the other implies writing about the self, just as writing about the self takes on a collective and interpersonal valence. The pre-existing definitions of the self and the other are therefore interrogated in order to be exceeded. If self and other constantly shift on this uncertain ground, so do temporal categories. Puppet’s death is echoed and amplified as the narrator reads through the headlines:
4 I am adapting the term from Rosi Braidotti’s Transpositions: “The term ‘transpositions’ has a double source of inspiration: from music and from genetics. It indicates an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities” (2006: 5).
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mexican nationals suffocate in butane trank/truck. arrest made in tragic deaths of illegal aliens being transported by u.s. train hits truck transporting braceros to fields. mexican american resident of farm labor camp dies in auto accident. tragedy blamed on defective brakes. (28-29)
The private and the public, the present and the past collapse their tenuous borders as Puppet’s life/death is refracted in a series of instances and in Petra’s classes at the university. As one of her students remarks, there is, indeed, a “preoccupation” with death in Mexican and Chicano and Spanish literature (37). Beyond the literary answer Petra offers the student, the presence of death as a universal theme that goes back to the medieval dance with death, the narrator delves into the myriad of circumstances that explain the omnipresence of the theme. These constant transpositions or refractions complicate the narrativizing of Puppet’s death into a monological and authoritative utterance.5 Significantly, when the narrator ponders on what kind of form would be suitable to chronicle Puppet’s death, she rejects chronological order. The fact that linearity is not an option is significant. As Hayden White argues in The Content of the Form, among other works, narrativity presupposes the existence of a legal system against which or on behalf of which the typical agents of a narrative account militate (1987: 13). There is, therefore, a system of law in relation to which an account is constructed. What Petra faces is precisely the narration of a historical sequence which represents and chronicles the collapse of that very system for the Chicano. Small wonder, then, that as a narrator, Petra is at a loss for the proper form. Petra’s —and the community’s— reservations about the authoritative police report do determine the shape of the narration itself, for, as White indicates, “[w] here there is ambiguity or ambivalence regarding the status of the legal system, which is the form in which the subject encounters most immediately the social system in which he is enjoined to achieve a full humanity, the ground on which any closure of a story one might wish to tell about a past, whether it be a public or a private past, is lacking” (1987: 14). This lack of closure is evident as the narrator starts another version of Puppet’s life to confirm her uncertainties: “You start but you don’t finish because you don’t know where” (37). The issue, then, is to establish where the past stops. Significantly, when the narrator discards the chronological sequence, she looks at the calendar: “[I]t is November 2...” (37), she notices, as she starts writing. The suspension points, however, are not followed by a journal or chronicle entry about Puppet’s or the narrator’s life, but by a reference to the colonial city of Guanajuato and its cemetery of mummies. Although the narrative is discontinued through this leap into colonial times, Petra is able to integrate these flashbacks as part of
5 I am using the term in Bakhtin’s sense as described in The Dialogic Imagination: “authoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. It centers our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority —with political power, an institution, a person— and it stands and falls together with that authority” (1992: 243).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 54 ana maría manzanas calvo an intersectional continuum, the trace of blood from colonial times to the present. This intersectionality is key, for it allows Petra to deal with different occurrences simultaneously and to analyze them interactively. These are part of the narrator’s transgressions; for if the fear of the migra constantly surfaces in the narration, Petra constantly crosses the borders between the past and the present, between the self and the other, to create a borderless narrative that cuts across geographical and ideological delimitations. Hence the impossibility of creating a chronologically ordered sequence, for once the barriers between the past and the present have been collapsed, the question is: where does the sequence start? Formulated in such terms, the query seeks a foundation —a beginning— which is not amenable to the vision of constant movement, of interbeing or intermezzo, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (1992: 25), the novel deploys. Those who disappeared in the past, like those who disappear in the present, are just part of that trace of violence (of “Blood, Like It Was Just Yesterday”, as the title chapter reads), which constitutes the nightmare of history, the only historical continuity Petra is able to construct in the midst of fragmentation, as she explains to Memo: “Oh… Todo esto pasó entre nosotros, this is what happened to us, Memo… Todo esto lo vimos… we saw it all happen… gone… Puppet, Félix, Nacho, todos… a thread of… charcos pools of… hundreds of ages, Memo” (80). The narrator implicitly and explicitly mixes the past, the missing Native Americans —absences at the ancient ruins— and the missing Mexicans, Argentinians, Nicaraguans, or Chicanos, either due to police brutality, as in Puppet’s case, or to the bloodless killings perpetrated by drug pushers, as in Félix’s case. This exceeding of categories is possible because Petra does not “border patrol” the spatial and temporal demarcations of the narration; hence her “confusing, agitated thoughts” (80). They are (con)fusing inasmuch as they blend past and present, the violence within and the violence without into a discursive collision course that refuses closure. But the narrator goes a step further as her agitated thoughts link the desaparecidos or missing in Argentina or Mexico with the victims of police brutality, such as Puppet, and with those sought out by the migra:
todos everyone you’re coming down from the hills the road becomes long quién es who is it they’re following you vienen they come at night in the morning but I believe in the police it was two cops but the immigration has a job to do la migra ai viene its coming ay ay ay eyes full of confusion sparksflecksofhopecanpriestsgetmarried nononononono. (81)
The implications for the narrator, as this quote exemplifies, are clear: just as there are no safe grounds from the migra, there is no sanctuary from violence in this constant state of fear that goes from colonial times to the present. For Petra, Puppet’s story is just another version of the “conquered perspective” (119), even if the connection goes misunderstood by the student in his class. Cota-Cárdenas thus equates the colonization of the Mexican under Spanish rule with the neocolonization of the Chicano in the United States. In this nonsynchronous and transversal vision of oppression, identity markers such as “American-born”, as flaunted by the very same student, reveal themselves to be empty and vacuous. The border in Puppet is not
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 a mestiza in the borderlands: margarita cota-cárdenas’ puppet 55 restricted to a geographical location, or a declaration of citizenship, but is deterritorialized to mark the “color line”, as Du Bois would put it, that crisscrosses the Americas. The quasi historical narrative Petra puts together thus reveals a world that is infinitely unfinished, ready to be revised, open to reconsideration and intervention. For Petra, reality does not wear the mask of an integral and closed meaning. As opposed to the narrative closure the police impose on Puppet’s death, one which, we can assume, asserts the parameters of a very definite social system, Petra’s story has no end. Not in vain, when the narrator finally constructs “What It Was That Night”, in Chapter 13, she writes a poetic account of Puppet’s end as if he were followed and caught by the migra:
you there stop! Pos we didn’t know who It was and we ran ay ay it was when I turned ’round and saw many little lights there Were lights and then we realized What they were ayyyyyyy. (124-25)
There is, however, a kind of closure as the police and Puppet’s uncle reach a settlement; the uncle is paid off to avoid any future legal dealings, and the police, in turn, admit that “perhaps” it was a mistake, to conclude with a definitive “[y] se acabó, that was it, it was all over” (138). It is not all over. Petra’s story cannot end like a well-rounded story, one which, according to Hayden White’s reasoning, would reflect the coherence, integrity, and fullness of an ideal, imaginary life. Puppet, caught by the migra-police, does not stop, and together with his story, he becomes the ever-present furtive border-crosser. The narrator does not let Puppet stop either, but his death is repeated in different manners and with a diversity of manifestations. The lines reinforced by themigra are thus textually, thematically and ideologically crossed in the hybrid text.
4. A resolution for the self? The títere-half-breed-Malinche discourse
Philosophical nomadism addresses in both a critical and creative manner the role of the former ‘centre’ in redefining power relations. Margins and centre shift and destabilize each other in parallel, albeit dissymmetrical, movements. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions
Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
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Like the furtive Puppet who refuses to stop, Petra settles on the self-in-motion, or on a restless discontinuity akin to Braidotti’s concept of philosophical nomadism. Moreover, Puppet and his recurrent description, “like a marionette one leg here and one leg there they were pools of blood” (113), provide Petra with the vivid image of division and conflictive identity. Significantly, this representation of the split self, astride between both sides of a dividing line, anticipates the description of the mestiza which is at the heart of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands:
Because I, a mestiza Continually walk out of one culture And into another, Because I am in all cultures at the same time, Alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, Me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan Simultáneamente. (77)
Yet what for Anzaldúa seems fruitful movement (the walking out of one culture into another), for Puppet feels like painful stasis. In contrast to the celebratory tone of Anzaldúa’s mestiza, Cota-Cárdenas introduces the importance of class as a defining element in the configuration of Puppet. As Petra explains in her written version of the youngster’s life, he and his brothers suffered from a bone disease that crippled them and resulted in a “bobbing rhythm to their walk” (25), making them look like puppets. To be between cultures, a position that crystallizes in the image of the puppet, is inextricably linked to poverty and deprivation. Like Du Bois, Cota-Cárdenas tackles the issue of the bifurcation of the self and its crippling effects for the individual. For, as Du Bois argues, “This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand people . . . and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves” (1989: 4). Cota-Cárdenas thus anticipates the powerful corrections that later critics would bestow on Andaldúa’s conceptualization of the borderlands. Critical voices such as David E. Johnson and Scott Michaelsen in Border Theory, for example, explain how borderlands tend to be celebrated as a place “of politically exciting hybridity” (1997: 3). In a similar vein, Russ Castronovo indicates that, supposedly, voices and identities situated in the in-between of a hybrid land carve out spaces laden with possibilities of liberation (1997: 198). Yet hybridity cannot be taken as a stable, unquestionable syncretic liberal locus, but rather as a contested ground. For Walter Mignolo this middle ground cannot be understood as a new form of syncretism, but rather as an “intense battlefield” 2000 ( : 12). Interestingly, Mignolo transforms Marie Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” (1992: 373) into what can be renamed as a “battle zone” of splits, cuttings and divisions where pain reigns supreme. As María, Petra’s daughter, writes in a poem, to
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 a mestiza in the borderlands: margarita cota-cárdenas’ puppet 57 be a “half-breed” is to experience the distressing feeling of a split self. “To be half-breed . . . is dolor” (64), she declares as she expresses her linguistic and cultural doubleness. And yet, as if to temper the pain of division implicit in her question “quién soy… who am I?”, María is able to offer an inclusive answer: “Soy las dos I’m the two of them… I’m neither the one… nor the other… soy yo… half-breed… and only under stress I accept… /this mind- split imposed on me” (64). The half-breed incorporates the previous elements as part of an unfinished, hyphenated state. The poem might be corny, as the narrator comments, but it is also a refashioning of the double consciousness Du Bois enunciated in The Souls of Black Folk, which also anticipates the mestiza consciousness Anzaldúa articulates in Borderlands. The half-breed who emerges out of this process of self-creation, like Anzaldúa’smestiza , exchanges the certainties of a well-defined past and reality, as well as the borders of the self, for the ambiguities and contradictions that are concomitant to the re-construction of a self in process. The narrator of Puppet, already bifurcated between the I/you, seems skeptical of closure in narrative and ideological terms, and has been inoculated against the construction of a self-complacent, unified and unquestionable I. Like Anzaldúa’s mestiza, Cota-Cárdenas’ narrator finds herself floundering in uncertain territory, for she has also discovered that she cannot hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries (Anzaldúa 1987:79). Petra finds out that she has to shift out of the habitual formations, those parameters (b) ordering the self: “Romanticism. Idealism. Believing in ARGR… or Alguien, Someone, written in big capital letters. Escapism? Extremism? Fuckism? Pa’llá vamos, we’re getting there, I’m getting there (ha, ha, eeeeepaaaa… ha, ha)” (45). Like Anzaldúa’s mestiza, Cota- Cárdenas’ half-breed experiences what Anzaldúa calls “homophobia”, which she redefines as “the fear of going home” (1987: 20). Homes, like ideologies and like self-complacent selves, have been painfully cast off like a mass of dead tissue, for they also respond to the divisive logic of the border.6 Throughout the writing of Puppet’s life, the narrator questions not only the props and mainstays of law and legality as represented by the police, but also explores the lines within the community —as represented by the pushers who ended up murdering Félix. More importantly, as the narrator writes towards the end of the novella, she has also interrogated her cultural and ideological safeguards as Chicana: “Every time I deal with the case again I get scared of death de la chota de la cia de movimiento de mis ‘amigos’ and most of all I’m afraid of those fake comprometido friends because in them I was able to begin seeing something good, something new, a possibility and they turned around” (138). Cota-Cárdenas’ revisionary project is skeptical of closure and of fixed signifiers, and crosses the sacrosanct boundaries of el Movimiento to expose some of its inner workings and to question traditional nationalist categories such as authentic/ inauthentic. The imaginary of an officially secure land, safely patrolled by the police and the migra collapses in Cota-Cárdenas’ narration, but so does the official imaginary of an impeccable raza and of an ideal Aztlán.
6 See Rosemary Maragoly George in The Politics of Homewhen she claims that the notion of the home is built as “a pattern of select inclusions and exclusions. Home is a way of establishing difference” (1999: 2).
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The self that emerges in the novella is aptly described in Norma Alarcón’s words about Anzaldúa’s mestiza as “[a] self that becomes a crossroads, a collision course, a clearinghouse, an endless alterity who . . . appears as a tireless peregrine collecting all the parts that will never make her whole” (2001: 53). And yet Cota-Cárdenas illustrates through Petra a more radical revisionary project that reveals the constant discursive and ideological clashes within the self. Self-idealization, self-complacency and victimization are immediately dismissed as “romantic-crap”. The bifurcation of the narrative voice allows the writer to reveal the silences of the narration, those ellipses that are the basis of the autobiographical account. Petra, as I mentioned earlier, is a victim of a fully undemocratic school system which declared Spanish an “illegal” language, but is also responsible for not teaching it to María, for not passing on key rites of passage such as the “quinceañera party”, and for concealing her ambivalent position during historical events such as César Chavez’s march, which her daughter now studies at the university. The passiveness and the silences are revealed in the recriminating remarks of the narrator, who addresses Petra in terms such as: “Sí, so loving of ‘mi raza’ here, and ‘mi raza’ there, as if it was a samba, samba . . . Pero you have never done anything” (35). This double conciousness that Cota-Cárdenas situates at the core of the narrative voice explains why Petra intercalates her life and her name with those of La Malinche as the paradigmatic figure who embodies duality and existence between worlds. As Anzaldúa would do in Borderlands, Cota-Cárdenas revises the myth of La Malinche in an effort to repossess one of the bad words which, as Anzaldúa says, passes a dozen times a day from the lips of Chicanos (1987: 22). Like Anzaldúa, the narrator also puts mythology through a sieve in order to reappropriate La Malinche as the paradigmatic figure of in-betweenness who inevitably redraws the boundaries between the authentic and the spurious, or between “the chinga-doer and el/la chinga-dee” (96). Cota-Cárdenas’ revision presents Malinchismo as another protective shield, as another -ism that has been successfully bought and sold throughout time. Malinche cautions:
You know what, you know a lot about –isms and –acies but I advise you, my children, to look for the answers inside and to look further than the labels implanted and thrown out in reaction hate violence…. What’s wrong is that we’re very smart, very bright, and we learn certain things very well that frankly keep on being the same pyramidal funeral hierarchical structure. (95)
Petra does not let the stigmatization of La Malinche rest in colonial times, but contextualizes the process in the present. Not in vain, Petra places La Malinche’s discourse in the midst of those movements which imply the revision and rupture of the pervading pyramid. The feminist movement, as the narrator learns from one student, is felt as another instance of betrayal and Malinchismo, and is consequently offered as a latter day propitiatory victim. One of Petra’s students comments: “I think… that all this stuff about women’s liberation is just bourgeois women’s junk, those women that have idle time to write and to draw and to . . . discombulate themselves” (97). Petra does appear as one of
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 a mestiza in the borderlands: margarita cota-cárdenas’ puppet 59 those women who have idle time to write, to draw and “discombulate” themselves. As her psychologist concludes, she also feels she might have sold out at some point. Further, as a divorced woman, she is considered by some as an aberration to her tribe. Petra, like Anzaldúa’s mestiza, “surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar” (1987: 83), as she acts according to La Malinche’s discourse and her admonitions: “break the ties to your myths”; “make shreds of the cordons to your” (96). What Cota-Cárdenas explores through Petra is precisely the arena that opens as she cuts the ties to beginnings and ends; Petra moves into that inter-being after she makes shreds of her cordons to culture, to the movement, and/or to the religion which have fashioned her life. In short, after she stops being everybody’s puppet.
5. ‘One and One Are Three’
Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Hybridity is itself an example of hybridity, of a doubleness that both brings together, fuses, but also maintains separation. Robert Young, Colonial Desire
What today is border culture, tomorrow is institutional art. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika
As she dwells in this intermezzo, already untethered from a variety of puppeteers, the protagonist opens another logic symbolically expressed in the title of the penultimate sketch, ‘One and One Are Three’. The sentence may be interpreted as the formula that captures the chaos and dissolution of the protagonist’s life, but also as another way of seeing and perceiving that ruptures a given logic. The resulting third element might be arithmetically incorrect, but can be viewed as consistent with the third step of the dialectical movement. Seen from this perspective, the three breaks down the subject- object duality, for it opens a new space, the nomad terrain of the mestiza. This third element is also akin to Homi Bhabha’s formulation of the third space. In Bhabha’s words, the third space “displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” (1998: 211). As Petra breaks the ties to beginnings and ends, we can say that she does away with received identities and wisdom to create her own structures of authority and meaning. The new Petra Cota-Cárdenas introduces at the end of Puppet seems to be over that anxiety which, as her rubio psychiatrist diagnoses, “can make one lose awareness of who one is” (21). Unlike the opening of the narration, it is Petra that calls Memo to
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 60 ana maría manzanas calvo express her confidence in only one line of action: “only with the force of our writing and our words can we change anything and do much more… and maybe better” (144). As in other contemporary semi-autobiographical texts, such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, words become actions and actions become words; words are the tools to set up new political initiatives which escape the boundaries of received reason and wisdom. The new Petra who looks at her self in the mirror —also in the mirror of her writing— sees herself as something other:
you see yourself in the mirror your eyes los ojos their eyes otro modo another way to be in their eyes and it’s no longer your face in the espejo it’s puppet’s face the face of a young girl and now there’s no need to over explain it, you have to go on seguir adelante con valor con humor with balls-ovaries with all you’ve got which was you and with determination. (145)
The constant code-switching from English to Spanish echoes the intercalation of Petra and Puppet; for Petra’s face in the mirror is Puppet’s. It is a vivid image of how the self has incorporated the other —or is, in fact, the other. Through Puppet the writer constructs a powerful mestizaje which is dominated by the flat logic of conjunction; it is a nos/otros, where, to quote from Anzaldúa’s words, “the nos is us/we/me/the subject; the otras is them/they/the object, and in nos/otras we are them and they are us and we’re contaminated by each other” (2002: b11). Puppet thus evolves from a “romanticaca” to a hybrid consciousness. Cota-Cárdenas articulates a powerful mestizaje that not only breaks apart the idea of a univocal self, but also threads together fragmentary lives and narratives. The writer thus anticipates Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands and the mestiza consciousness in a number of ways. Puppet offers an ideological repositioning, a third space or element, which works against a Western and nationalistic consciousness based on totality —what the fractured narrator would rename “romanticaca/romanticrap”. What happens, then, when as José David Saldívar questions, we understand culture in terms of material hybridity, not purity, and the nation is customized by borderlands subjectivity? The location of culture, to use Homi Bhabha’s phrase, radically shifts not to claim a different arena of stable ideological parameters, but to undo the ties that tether the individual to prescribed versions of reality. If we assume Walter Mignolo’s definition of “border thinking” as “the moments when the imaginary of the modern world systematically cracks” (2000: 23), it is possible to argue that in Puppet Cota-Cárdenas offers border thinking, an inter-being that refuses to settle onto a single dominant meaning, and severs the ties that hold the puppet together. However, if one reads Bakhtin’s concept of intentional hybridity into this final state of Petra’s development, we do find that the protagonist’s personae seem to coalesce into a threeness. This kind of resolution, however, runs the risk of congealing into another stable demarcation that may stop movement. The nerve fibers of the puppet, to return to Deleuze and Guattari, need to be fully activated; otherwise, hybridity may become another prescriptive form, another puppeteer that tethers the individual to new stable ideological formations. Hybridity, to echo Robert
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Young’s words, requires hybridizing itself or it becomes another manifestation of what Gómez-Peña calls institutional art.
Works Cited Alarcón, Norma 2001 (1996): ‘Anzaldúa’s Frontera: Inscribing Gynetics’. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds. Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Durham: Duke UP. 41-53. Anzaldúa, Gloria 1987: Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. —2002: ‘Beyond Traditional Notions of Identity’. The Chronicle of Higher Education 49.7: b11-b13. Appadurai, Arjun 1996: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1992 (1981): The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Michael Holquist, ed. Austin: U of Texas P. Bhabha, Homi 1998: ‘The Third Space, Interview with Homi Bhabha’. Jonathan Rutherford, ed. Identity, Community, Culture and Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 207-21. Braidotti, Rosi 2006: Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Malden, MA: Polity. Castronovo, Russ 1997: ‘Compromised Narratives along the Border’. David E. Johnson and Scott Michaelson, eds. Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 195-220. Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita 2000 (1985): Puppet: A Chicano Novel. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 1992 (1987): A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London and New York: Continuum. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1989 (1904): The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam. George, Rosemary Maragoly 1999: The Politics of Home. Berkeley: U of California P. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 1993: Warrior for Gringostroika. Saint Paul: Graywolf. Hames-García, Michael 2000: ‘How to Tell a Mestizo from an Enchirito: Colonialism and National Culture in the Borderlands’. Diacritics 30.4: 102-22. Johnson, David E. and Scott Michaelsen 1997: ‘Border Secrets: An Introduction’. David E. Johnson and Scott Michaelson, eds. Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Kingston, Maxine Hong 1977: The Woman Warrior. London: Picador. Manzanas Calvo, Ana María and Jesús Benito 2003: Intercultural Mediations: Hybridity and Mimesis in American Literatures. Münster: Verlag. Martín, Desirée A. 2008: ‘Multilingual Aesthetics and the Limits of Chicano/a Identity in Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’ Puppet’. melus 33.3: 91-109. Mignolo, Walter 2002: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP.
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Pérez-Torres, Rafael 2002: ‘Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice’. Monica Kaup and Debra Rosenthal, eds. Mixing Race, Mixing Culture. Austin: U of Texas P. 163-84. Pratt, Mary Louise 1992: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rebolledo, Tey Diana 2000: ‘Foreword’. Puppet: A Chicano Novel. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P. Saldívar, José David 1997: Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P. White, Hayden 1987: The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Young, Robert 1995: Colonial Desire. London: Routledge.
Received 22 October 2011 Revised version accepted 15 February 2012
Ana M.ª Manzanas teaches American Literature and Culture at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. Her research centers on American Literature, a field she approaches from a comparative, intercultural perspective. Her publications include Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film (Routledge 2011), and Intercultural Mediations: Mimesis and Hybridity in American Literatures (lit Verlag 2003), with J. Benito.
Address: Universidad de Salamanca. Departamento de Inglés. Facultad de Filología. Plaza de Anaya. 37008, Salamanca, Spain. Tel.: +34 923 294400. Ext. 1751.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 47–62· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79 issn 0210-6124
9/11 and the Psychic Trauma Novel: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
Sonia Baelo-Allué Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected]
Although Don Delillo’s Falling Man (2007) has been one of the most influential 9/11 novels written to this day, it did not meet the expectations of reviewers when it was published. It is necessary to bear in mind that 9/11 can be understood both as a psychic/personal trauma and a cultural/collective one since it was a wound not only in the mind of those directly affected by the tragedy but also in the nation’s sense of identity. Despite DeLillo’s previous interest in cultural issues, he chose to write a 9/11 psychic —rather than cultural— trauma novel. This paper analyses the literary techniques and means of representation used in the novel to reflect the effects of traumatic memory and ponders the advantages and shortcomings of psychic trauma novels in the representation of traumas that affect society at large.
Keywords: trauma studies; Falling Man; Don DeLillo; trauma fiction; 9/11 fiction; contemporary American literature . . .
El 11 de septiembre y la novela de trauma psicológico: Falling Man, de Don DeLillo
A pesar de que la novela de Don DeLillo Falling Man (2007) ha sido una de las novelas del 11-s más influyentes hasta la actualidad, no estuvo a la altura de las expectativas de los críticos cuando se publicó. Hay que tener en cuenta que el 11-s se puede entender tanto como un trauma psicológico/personal como un trauma cultural/colectivo, puesto que fue una herida no sólo en la mente de los afectados directamente por la tragedia, sino también en el sentido de identidad de la nación. A pesar del interés previo de DeLillo por los temas culturales, el autor eligió escribir una novela de trauma psicológico y no de trauma cultural. Este artículo analiza las técnicas literarias y los modos de representación utilizados en la novela para reflejar los efectos de la memoria traumática y considera las ventajas y desventajas de las novelas de trauma psicológico en la representación de traumas que afectan a la sociedad en general.
Palabras clave: estudios de trauma; Falling Man; Don DeLillo; ficción de trauma; ficción del11 de septiembre; literatura norteamericana contemporánea
—63— 64 sonia baelo-allué
1. Introduction Out of the growing list of fictional works dealing directly or indirectly with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) has emerged as one of the most well- known and most anticipated trauma novels written in the last ten years.1 Since DeLillo had previously written about global capitalism, terrorism, conspiracies, death and the media, some readers and critics expected him to write an epic, panoramic, political novel that would illuminate the cultural zeitgeist following 9/11. However, Falling Man deals with the domestic and intimate rather than the panoramic and public. It is not the cultural trauma novel that some critics expected. In this sense, Richard Gray’s position is representative since he believes that Falling Man “adds next to nothing to our understanding of the trauma at the heart of the action. In fact, it evades that trauma, it suppresses its urgency and disguises its difference by inserting it in a series of familiar tropes” (2011: 28). Much of the disappointment expressed by critics like Gray stems from a misconception about the concept of trauma and about the basic differences between psychic trauma novels that capture the effect of suffering on the mind of the individual and cultural trauma novels that focus on the social and cultural consequences of the events. To understand the difference between these two types of trauma novels we need to take into account that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States can be considered both a cultural trauma that shattered the nation’s sense of identity and a psychic trauma that specifically affected many individual people and their sense of being. Cultural trauma occurs when members of a community feel they have been subjected to a dreadful event that affects their group consciousness to the extent that it marks their memories and changes their future identity in fundamental ways (Alexander 2004: 1). Cultural trauma is socially mediated and power structures and social agents play a very important role in the process of its construction: there is a painful injury to the collectivity, victims are established and responsibility is attributed (22). As a result of this type of trauma the community’s sense of identity may either solidify or be disrupted. However, 9/11 was not just a symbolic cultural trauma for the nation; it was also a psychic trauma for many people in New York City. According to Cathy Caruth, psychic trauma is a wound inflicted upon the mind that breaks the victim’s experience of time, self and the world and that causes great emotional anguish in the individual (1996: 3-4). In the case of 9/11 the degree of traumatic psychic response was different for those that watched it on TV, those that witnessed it live outside the towers and those who were inside the towers. It is important to bear in mind that personal/psychic trauma and collective/cultural trauma work in different ways and have different effects. Whereas psychic trauma is a wound on the mind, cultural trauma is a wound on group consciousness as a whole. The distinction between cultural and psychic trauma is important because the response to them also differs. Survivors of personal traumatic experiences may suffer
1 The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of a project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (micinn) and the European Regional Fund (erfd) (code hum 2007-61035). The author is also grateful for the support of the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (esf) (code h05).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 9/11 and the psychic trauma novel: don delillo’s falling man 65 from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (ptsd), which is a delayed response that takes the form of repeated hallucinations, nightmares, flashbacks, somatic reactions, behaviours stemming from the event and general numbing (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 173). By contrast, the repression of cultural trauma is more complex, mainly due to its public nature, although mass denial may take place at some stage. As Neil J. Smelser has claimed, the temporal amnesia and the belated return of the trauma experience through hallucinations, nightmares and flashbacks which the victims of personal, psychic trauma experience in their minds can be compared to the way different groups in the public arena may defend mass forgetting, or may want to keep the event in the public consciousness for ideological reasons (2004: 53). The same event can be experienced in a direct and personal way as an individual trauma and also as a collective trauma when the victim’s sense of collective identity is affected. Many people experienced 9/11 as both individual and cultural trauma and, in the aftermath, the difference between these two types of trauma was blurred. Marc Redfield has also introduced a third term, ‘virtual trauma’, to refer to the September 11 attacks as mediated events. Unlike other culturally traumatic occasions, 9/11 was a singular event of miniscule material damage on a national scale but, nevertheless, it entered representation “as reproducible, fungible, displaced, split off from itself ” (2009: 4). As a mediated event it was traumatic in a symbolic way, not so much for the actual damage it caused but for what it represented. Don DeLillo has dealt with all these types of trauma during his career. For example, in Underworld (1997) we see the combination of Nick Shay’s psychic trauma caused by his accidental killing of one of his friends and the cultural trauma of the Cold War in the United States. In the case of 9/11 DeLillo has also dealt with both types of trauma but has used different genres to express the cultural and the psychic consequences of the events. In his essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, written just three months after 9/11, he focuses on the cultural consequences of the event on the nation, whereas in his novel Falling Man he deals instead with the psychological consequences and traumatic effects of the attacks on a few individuals. The aim of this essay is to explore DeLillo’s choice of a psychic trauma novel rather than the ambitious great American novel everybody expected him to write after the publication of his essay and in the face of his previous novels. I will also discuss the literary techniques and means of representation that allow the author to offer a perspective that only a trauma novel of this type can provide.
2. Non-fiction and the shortcomings of psychic trauma fiction When writers first tried to represent 9/11 in literature they focused mainly on psychic trauma and the domestic, disregarding the political and cultural consequences of the tragedy. This is the case of novels like Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2004), Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the Wall (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Reynolds Price’s The Good Priest’s Son (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Julia Glass’s The Whole World
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Over (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), and Helen Schulman’s A Day on the Beach (2007), among others. However, cultural critics and newspaper reviewers expected to see in this fiction the consequences of the cultural and collective trauma of 9/11. The failure to distinguish between psychic and cultural trauma led to the impossibility of meeting the critics’ expectations. Psychic trauma is anti-narrative since victims cannot put into words what happened to them. Thus, some writers sought ways to represent the experience of 9/11 through experimental literary techniques and the introduction of images to capture the horror of the traumatic experience without simplifying it. On the other hand, cultural critics expected political or historical novels that would contain/ address the trauma experience of the nation as a whole. Even Don DeLillo in his essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ suggested that literature had the power to create a collective narrative of 9/11, a counternarrative capable of opposing the official narrative and those that simplify the events (2001).2 This had already been demanded from the 9/11 Commission Report that, according to Craig A. Warren, illustrated “the public’s hunger for literature as a means of shaping national identity” (2007: 534). However, this thirst for a great 9/11 American novel that shows the implications of and the social changes following from the events does not as yet seem to have been quenched by literature. This is a failure that various voices have denounced profusely in recent years (Rothberg 2009; Randall 2011; Gray 2009, 2011). DeLillo’s choice of psychic, personal trauma has to do with a more general question about the role of literature and what it can offer in terms of understanding and relating to the enormity of the events. As Paula Martín Salván argues, through his books DeLillo has defended the independence of literature from history and the power literature has to follow different rules and to even be a consolation or an alternative to history (2009: 208). Lianne, one of the characters in Falling Man, claims in the aftermath of the attacks: “‘People read poems. People I know, they read poetry to ease the shock and pain, give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language,’ she said, ‘to bring comfort or composure. I don’t read poems. I read newspapers. I put my head in the pages and get angry and crazy’” (2007: 42). Lianne chooses non-fiction (newspapers) over art (poems). However, the choice is not as easy as it seems since on several occasions Lianne is drawn towards two paintings her mother owns, two of Giorgio Morandi’s still lives, in which she sees the towers in the long bottle and dark objects in the composition. Unlike newspapers, art may not provide answers but Lianne still needs art to come to terms with the images that haunt her mind and that are freed through Morandi’s paintings. In the same way, she tries to interpret the meaning behind the performance of an artist that re-enacts the falling of people from the Twin Towers on 9/11. As Ann Kaplan has pointed out, trauma can be ‘translated’ and understood via art in order to work through the pain it causes while the wound is still open in society (2005: 19). In spite of her preference for newspapers, Lianne uses the painting and the performance as mediators of her own pain.
2 For a thorough analysis of DeLillo’s essay see Kauffman (2008: 353).
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Lianne’s ambiguous attitude towards art parallels the choice that many writers had to make between political novels and novels of psychic trauma when representing 9/11. This division seems to have also marked the way literary critics have reviewed 9/11 fiction. For example, Richard Gray divides this fiction into two types of novels: those that have failed to come up with an adequate answer to the event and those that “get it right” (2011: 17). 3 The former represent a retreat into domesticity and family and “dissolve public crisis in the comforts of the personal” (17), whereas the latter resist silence and have a transnational context that overcomes opposition. It is always difficult to decide when a novel ‘gets it right’. In fact to talk in such terms is already suspicious, even though both types of novels exist and offer different things to readers. We cannot forget that, unlike journalism, the value of the novel does not just lie in its power to provide context, immediacy and information. The initial reception of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man is especially interesting because the author’s previous fiction indicated that he seemed destined to write about 9/11 as a cultural and political event of social consequences, that he would ‘get it right’, in Gray’s words. Some reviewers of Falling Man analysed the subject of DeLillo’s previous books in connection with 9/11 and found, for example, terrorism at the heart of Player (1977), The Names (1982), Mao II (1991); communal dread in White Noise; dying in full public view and conspiracy in Libra (Begley 2007; Birkerts 2007; Kakutani 2007). Prescient enough, the original cover of Underworld (1997) was a photograph of the World Trade Centre surrounded by clouds. There was even a looming bird which resembled a plane in the distance. In the original cover of Falling Man the towers seem to have disappeared since we see the view above the clouds.4 All these connections led reviewers to hyperbolic claims. According to Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post: “Nobody bothered to think about it at the time, but from the moment the first airplane hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, one thing was inevitable: Don DeLillo would write a novel about it” (2007). Andrew O’Hagan stated in The New York Review of Books that “[i]f the twin towers could be said to have stood in wait for the Mohamed Attas of the world, then the Mohamed Attas of the world were standing in wait for DeLillo” (2007). The fact that DeLillo seemed the right author to write the ultimate 9/11 great American novel and the fact that 9/11 became a media event, led many reviewers to
3 Richard Gray includes in the first category novels that he believes domesticate the crisis into the realm of the familiar such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2004), Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). Within the second group that ‘gets it right’ Gray deals mainly with Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes (2007), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of the Last Days (2008). John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec reject Gray’s extreme classification in their introduction to the special issue on 9/11 of Modern Fiction Studies, and underline Gray’s failure to include in his list other more nuanced, political novels like Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006) and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) (2011: 385-93). 4 The cover to the first edition ofUnderworld can be accessed online at ‹http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ en/6/6a/Underworld.jpeg› (Accessed 26 April, 2012). The cover to the first edition of Falling Man can also be accessed online at ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fallingman.jpg› (Accessed 26 April, 2012).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 68 sonia baelo-allué expect from the novel what they would expect from a piece of journalism. Fiction was judged by the standard of non-fiction and, as a result, Falling Man did not meet some reviewers’ expectations. For example, Jeff O’Keefe (2007) complained that the novel offered no new information and Andrew O’Hagan claimed that next toFalling Man “the 9/11 Commission Report reads serenely and beautifully. Open that report at any page and you will find a breathtaking second-by-second account of that morning, and of the hijackers’ backgrounds, that will make DeLillo’s novel seem merely incapacitated” (2007). Obviously, a novel cannot compete with the information an official report may provide, but should not have to. Moreover, a 9/11 novel does not have to represent the enormity of the events or provide answers or help us understand. Michiko Kakutani complained in the New York Times that the novel felt small, unsatisfying and inadequate. She seemed angry at DeLillo’s choice of Keith, the main character, “a pathetic, adolescent-minded creature . . . [who] decided to spend his foreseeable future playing stupid card games in the Nevada desert” (2007), rather than other more deserving people. She also disliked the fact that the novel did not illuminate “the zeitgeist in which 9/11 occurred or the shell- shocked world it left in its wake” (2007).5 In this sense, Sven Cveck has more recently analysed Falling Man as “a representation of a specific social process that we could call depoliticization through traumatization” (2011: 197), in which the terrorist’s actions are explained through private pathologies rather than strategic global socio-economic issues, and which leads to the substitution of the political by the psychological and individual. There is certainly a danger that focusing on individual/psychological perspectives may blur the historical and social context. In psychic trauma novels facts are often separated from their causes, which constitutes a problem since, as Judith Butler has claimed: “Isolating the individuals involved absolves us of the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for events” (2004: 5). Taking these initial reviews into account one wonders if Falling Man is really a failed novel: a novel that cannot articulate the effects of 9/11 on the country and that cannot provide information that may soothe the pain of those who experienced the event. Of course, to push the debate in this direction is to assume that this is what all novels should offer; that all novels should be political and that characters should stand for whole communities; that novels should help us understand the historical/ cultural significance of events. One may wonder whether non-fiction, journalism and the media are more appropriate for such an aim, and what fiction can offer instead.
3. The representation of psychic trauma What DeLillo does is offer something journalism and the media cannot provide, it re- enacts the traumatic effects of the events in the mind of the survivors and the traumatic
5 Kakutani was envisioning a type of 9/11 novel that would take longer to be published. More in the line of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 9/11 and the psychic trauma novel: don delillo’s falling man 69 consequences of the attack in its aftermath. For survivors to overcome their individual trauma they need to assimilate traumatic memories in their existing mental schemes and turn them into narrative memory, they need to be able to put into words what happened to them. In Falling Man we find several traumatised characters who try to turn their traumatic memory into narrative memory as they struggle between their urge to know and their need to deny. Moreover, the whole book becomes a representation of how characters have to struggle with the memory of what happened inside the towers since the unassimilated event is beyond the bounds of language and haunts not just the characters but the narrative itself. Therefore, DeLillo does not present trauma as cultural subject matter or as an issue to ponder and reflect upon. Instead, he re-enacts the workings of traumatic memory in the victims’ mind through different stylistic choices and through the trauma novel genre. This genre emerged in the late1980 s and 1990s; according to Roger Luckhurst, it opened with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and includes some of the novels of well-known authors like Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Anne Michaels, Binjamin Wilkomirski and W. G. Sebald, among others (2008: 87). There are earlier texts that can be considered trauma novels but it was the clinical elaboration of ptsd in the 1980s that fostered public interest in trauma, the development of trauma studies and its reflection in the literary field.6 There is a particular trauma aesthetic and formal radicalism shared by these novels which is based on the paradox or contradiction that traumatic experiences resist language or representation. As Anne Whitehead explains in her seminal book Trauma Fiction, this contradiction causes the rejection of the linear representation of traumatic events in trauma fiction and the use of unsettling temporal structures and different modes of referentiality, figuration and indirection. Obviously, none of these aesthetic techniques are new since “trauma fiction arises out of and is inextricable from three interrelated backgrounds or contexts: postmodernism, postcolonialism and a postwar legacy or consciousness” (2004: 81).7 The literary techniques that tend to recur in trauma narratives mirror, at a formal level, the effects of trauma and include intertextuality, repetition and fragmentation. According to Laurie Vickroy, who has also studied trauma fiction in depth, these narratives present trauma by internalising “the rhythms, processes and uncertainties of traumatic experience within their underlying sensibilities and structures” (2002: 4). The chaotic aspects of trauma are underlined through shifts in time and memory, a variety of voices and subject positioning, visual images, textual gaps, repetitions and shifting
6 It is important to acknowledge that there were novels dealing with trauma through formal radicalism and aesthetic experimentation before Beloved. See Collado-Rodríguez (2011) for an analysis of the use of experimental strategies to reproduce the effects of trauma in Kurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse-Five (1969). 7 This aesthetic experimentation has also been associated with Modernist literature, and more specifically with the traumatic effects of the First World War, which, according to Tim Armstrong, marks the introduction of trauma into western consciousness as temporal dislocation and anamnesis: “What is produced in the post-war world is, then, a disrupted temporality in which the dynamic relation between past, present and future which we saw as intrinsic to modernity is forced to co-exist with elements of ‘frozen’ time: a lost past; a traumatic present; a blighted future” (2005: 19).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 70 sonia baelo-allué viewpoints. In this way, readers are able to feel the disorienting positions of characters going through traumatic experiences. Falling Man is narrated in the third person and the point of view shifts mostly between Keith and Lianne, but also includes Hammad —one of the terrorists— and Florence, another survivor. There are three main parts, each named after a character in the story: Bill Lawton, Ernst Hechinger and David Janiak.8 In each of these parts there is a cross-cutting of the perspectives, actions and thoughts of the main characters in the days, months and years after the attacks. These fragmented vignettes produce constant chronological disruptions, especially in the Hammad sections that take place before 9/11 and that close each of the three parts. The narrative is almost circular: it starts with a dazed Keith Neudecker walking away from the towers just after the collapse of the first tower and ends at the moment just before the opening scene when Keith comes out onto the street in his escape from the burning tower. These narrative disruptions become the equivalent of Keith’s state of mind, which is described in the novel in these terms: “He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience” (66). The traumatised minds of the main characters shape the fragmented narrative and its pace. DeLillo rejects a more traditional mode of representation which seems inadequate when trying to show what psychic trauma feels like. In fact, Falling Man is a novel of ‘acting out’ rather than ‘working through’. Historian Dominick LaCapra has taken these two concepts from Freud and psychoanalysis and developed them in the context of trauma and historical studies. Acting out is the tendency to relive the past through flashbacks, nightmares, compulsively repeated words and images. It is a compulsive repetition or re-enactment of trauma. Working through is the process by which the person tries to gain critical distance from the trauma, becomes able to distinguish between past, present and future and assume responsibility (LaCapra 2001: 141-53). This is what Keith seems unable to do. Time and space seem to have collapsed in the opening pages where we see how Keith, a lawyer who has worked in the north tower for a decade, has just escaped and is running through the smoke and debris. The opening sentence expresses this temporal collapse: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night” (3). All temporal references in the novel are connected with that day: life unfolds six, ten, fifteen, thirty-six days, three years after the planes hit the towers (34, 44, 69, 170, 229). As the narrator states: “These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after” (138). Lianne is Keith’s ex-wife and lives with their son Justin, who is also traumatised by
8 The choice of these names has been studied in detail by Joseph M. Conte who claims that they share the attribute of metonomasia since each name has been altered to fit some purpose (2011: 569). Bill Lawton is an anglicised name for Osama bin Laden; Ernst Hechinger is the real name of Martin Ridnour, a former German radical activist member of Kommune 1; and David Janiak is the real name of a performance artist known as Falling Man. In the world of Falling Man identity becomes fluid as solid beliefs tend to disappear in the aftermath of the tragedy.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 9/11 and the psychic trauma novel: don delillo’s falling man 71 the events. She feels that her perception of time has been deeply altered by the terrorist attacks: “Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago, they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid. Too late now” (10). As a result, Keith and Lianne act out their trauma, unable to distinguish between past, present and future, and the narrative criss-crossing of their stories contributes to the readers’ feeling of their trauma. As Vickroy highlights, re-enactment, repetition, symbolization and suffering bodies may replace memory in trauma fiction 2002( : 30-33). Repetitions are very important in the novel, especially for Keith and Lianne. For example, Keith has to follow a program of exercises for his postsurgical wrist. He raises his hand without lifting his forearm four times a day, ten times on each occasion, for five seconds each time. It is restorative for him and helps him control the unconnected images that come to his mind like “the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke” 40( ). He still repeats the exercises once his wrist is fine, two or three times a day as it becomes a form of therapy for him: “He would need an offsetting discipline, a form of controlled behavior, voluntary, that kept him from shambling into the house hating everybody” (143). Three years after the attacks, in Las Vegas, he still does the old exercises, the rehabilitation program and the wrist extension twice a day, counting the number of times each day, the repetitions and the five seconds, as he also counts the days after the collapse of the Twin Towers. Lianne has memory lapses and fears she might develop Alzheimer’s like her father, but her brain is normal for her age. In hospital the doctor asks her to count down from one hundred by sevens and since the repetitions bring her comfort she keeps counting at home: “It made her feel good, the counting down, and she did it sometimes in the day’s familiar drift, walking down a street, riding in a taxi. It was her form of lyric verse, subjective and unrhymed, a little songlike but with a rigor, a tradition of fixed order, only backwards, to test the presence of another kind of reversal, which a doctor nicely named retrogenesis” (188). These repetitions provide Keith and Lianne with some structure in their chaotic thoughts.
4. Images and trauma Images play an important role in the trauma process and in its representation in trauma novels. Luckhurst even claims that it is probably in the image that “the psychic registration of trauma truly resides” (2008: 147). Traumatised people see intrusive images and have recurrent dreams and nightmares, which replace narrative memory in a traumatised mind. Some 9/11 novels, like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, have images literally inserted in their pages. After seeing so many photographs and videos of9 /11, Falling Man opens with well-known images of the event:
It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to
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their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars. (3)
There is smoke and ash, office paper flashing past, shoes discarded in the street, paper cups..., the focus is on visual images, rather than narrative, which is the way traumatic memory works since traumatised individuals are possessed by images. One such image is that of a shirt that comes down out of the smoke. It is first mentioned on page four but it keeps returning (88, 246) as a substitute for what Keith really saw but could not integrate in his mind: a falling person. Keith’s own description seems taken from a well-known photograph of a man covered in ash who is described in the novel in these terms:9 “He wore a suit and carried a briefcase. There was glass in his hair and face, marbled bolls of blood and light” (3). The truck driver who picks him up sees “a man scaled in ash, in pulverized matter” (6). Lianne describes Keith the first time she sees him: “Like gray soot head to toe, I don’t know, like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes” (8). Those reviewers that claimed that DeLillo had nothing to offer that we had not already seen in the media were right; however, it is the incorporation of the visual images we recognize that makes the narration especially powerful. Jonathan Yardley complained in The Washington Post that the only emotions in the novel came from pictures on television (2007). However, it could also be said that the fact that they come to life in the novel renders them more powerful. At the beginning they are only loose images that return and haunt Keith, only at the end are they integrated into the narrative of the events. Adam Begley in The New York Observer captures the effect perfectly: “Reading the virtuoso first pages of his novel, we see the catastrophe anew — smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it— as if that September morning had dawned again, fresh and bright” (2007). DeLillo returns on different occasions to those images that are in everybody’s minds when recalling 9/11. Even Hammad, one of the terrorists, watches TV in a bar near the flight school that he attends and likes to imagine himself “appearing on the screen, a videotaped figure walking through the gatelike detector on his way to the plane” (173). Obviously, this is a reference to the famous series of photographs taken from a security camera at Portland Airport in Maine on September 11, 2001 in which we can see Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz Al-Omari passing through security.10 The main recurring image in the novel is of course that of the falling man. It makes reference to the photograph known as ‘The Falling Man’, taken by Richard Drew and
9 The original Associated Press photograph of a man covered in ash appeared on the cover ofFortune , on October 1, 2001 to illustrate the consequences of 9/11 for Wall Street. The image can be accessed online: ‹http://foliolit.com/ wp3/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Fortune_OCT8_01.jpg›. 10 The image can be accessed online: ‹http://www.britannica.com/bps/media-view/159422/1/0/0›.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 9/11 and the psychic trauma novel: don delillo’s falling man 73 published on page seven of The New York Times on September 12, 2001. The photograph was further reproduced in hundreds of newspapers all over the world in the wake of 9/11. It shows one of the many people that jumped from the World Trade Center; upside-down, one knee bent. Its publication caused a powerful controversy in the United States since it was considered exploitative and voyeuristic. These responses, together with the fear of being disrespectful to the dead, led to its disappearance from the us media.11 The power of this image is that it symbolises what trauma really means. The fact that the man is frozen in free fall is like a traumatic memory frozen in the brain which cannot be integrated into memory: it lacks a frame of reference or narrative. DeLillo uses the reference to the image in a similar way. Since the novel re-enacts the workings of a traumatised mind, that image cannot be processed and cannot be integrated with other experiences. Thus, the falling man in the novel refers to the safer substitute image of a performance artist who, with the help of a safety harness, suspends himself upside down. Like the man in the famous photograph, the performance artist in Falling Man “keels forward, body rigid, and falls full-length, headfirst . . . The jolting end of the fall left him upside-down, secured to the harness, twenty feet above the pavement . . . There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and limbs, his signature stroke. But the worst of it was the stillness itself and her nearness to the man, her position here, with no one closer to him than she was” (168). Lianne is especially haunted by this image as she comes across the artist on several occasions. In the same way as Tom Junod tried to find out the real identity of the falling man in the Richard Drew photograph, Lianne also ends up finding out who the performance artist is. She finds an obituary and learns that his name was David Janiak and that he suffered from a heart ailment and high blood pressure. His jumps with a safety harness but without pulleys, cables or wires had been very painful and worsened his condition. She still cannot understand the reasons behind his acts but she at least finds a framing narrative for his performances. This performance artist especially affects Lianne because she is traumatised by her father’s suicide and the idea of people jumping from the towers brings forth the image of her father shooting himself. In fact, both the performance artist and the sentence “Died by his own hand” return to her mind on repeated occasions in the way that experiences that resist assimilation may also return belatedly. Curiously, since the 9/11 attacks there have been various artists that have performed similar jumps and re-enacted similar iconic photographs. For example, Brooklyn photographer Kerry Skarbakka,12 who staged a number of jumps from the roof of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on June 14,
11 The image did reappear in the us media two years later in an attempt to explain the efforts to find who the man in the photo was and, thus, find the framing narrative it lacked. See Tom Junod ‘The Falling Man’, in Esquire, September 2003, 177-81, 198-99 and the 2006 documentary film9 /11: The Falling Man, by American filmmaker Henry Singer and filmed by Richard Numeroff. The image can be accessed online: ‹http://www.esquire.com/features/ ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN›. 12 His series of photographs ‘The Struggle to Right Oneself ’ in which the artist stages himself in scenes of falling can be viewed online: ‹http://www.skarbakka.com/portfolios/struggle.htm›. The images taken at the Chicago
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2005, or the series of photographs called ‘La Chute’, made by French artist Denis Darzacq and inspired by the French riots of 2005.13 Falling is a key image in the novel: falling through space, time and memory. The initial image of falling ash gives way to Keith’s own disintegration as a person. He cannot voice his feelings as he turns in on himself, and when Lianne tells him that they need to talk and that she needs to know if he is going to stay, Keith’s answer is: “We’re ready to sink into our little lives” (75). In fact, Keith’s life enters a downward spiral in the last part of the novel when he decides to spend most of his time in Las Vegas, playing in poker tournaments and losing track of time. Although he likes the anonymity that Las Vegas provides and the way the game helps him forget what has happened to him, images of the tragedy still return in flashes: “These were the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness” (230). According to Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, traumatic memory is not fixed on a linguistic level but on a somatosensory, iconic level. It becomes non-verbal, context-free, non-narrative memory (1995: 160-63). This is the type of memory that trauma novels try to reflect through images and fragmented episodes. In the novel, Keith seems unable to turn his traumatic memory into coherent narrative memory as flashes of unrelated images cross his mind. The traumatic event cannot be assimilated into a coherently organised narrative of the past.
5. Traumatic memory and narrative memory Lianne tries to escape her trauma by leading a writing group for early-stage Alzheimer’s patients in East Harlem. They write about a variety of subjects as they struggle to find their narratives in an attempt to keep their life memories. Curiously, working through trauma involves trying to recover memories that cannot be integrated into narrative language. Lianne’s patients undergo the reverse process: they lose the memories which have made up their lives and have given them a sense of identity. What they do is similar to scriptotherapy when patients write about traumas they have endured in order to heal and soften the symptoms. Alzheimer’s patients write to keep their memories, trauma patients to recover them, all of them looking for a narrative to provide structure to their lives. Lianne is especially obsessed with a woman called Rosellen who is becoming “less combative over time, less clearly defined, speech beginning to drag” (125). The result is
Museum of Contemporary Art are part of his photo series ‘Life Goes On’ and can also be viewed online on the website of the artist at http://www.skarbakka.com/portfolios/lifegoeson.htm. 13 The photographs are available on the webpage of the artist: ‹http://www.denis-darzacq.com/chute-vignettes. htm›. The image of falling people in photographs, sculptures, cut-outs or performances has met with discomfort from some audiences, who have interpreted these artistic representations as a useless reminder of the tragedy. For a thorough analysis of the ways different artists have incorporated the idea of falling in art and literature after9 /11, see Laura Frost (2007).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 9/11 and the psychic trauma novel: don delillo’s falling man 75 her loss of memory, personality and identity which might also be seen as a description of Keith’s erratic behaviour after failing to retrieve his memories of the attacks. Florence is the only character in the novel who seems to find the narrative they all seek. When Keith returns to Lianne’s apartment he realises he is holding a briefcase that does not belong to him. He returns it to its owner, a light-skinned black woman named Florence Givens, another survivor who also escaped from the North tower in time, who he begins a short-lived affair with and who tells him her story of escape whilst he listens. As professor of psychiatry Dori Laub claims, victims need to tell their stories in order to survive: “The testimony is, therefore, the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness or a listener inside himself . . . repossessing one’s life story through giving testimony is itself a form of action, of change, which one has to actually pass through, in order to continue and complete the process of survival after liberation” (1995: 70). Florence tells Keith her story, remembering it as she speaks and seeing it all again. Keith’s role is to bear witness: “She was going through it again and he was ready to listen again. He listened carefully, noting every detail, trying to find himself in the crowd” (59) but he is unable to tell his story in return. Both Lianne and Keith are looking for structure, for a plot to shape their lives. Keith only finds it in poker, which has “structure, guiding principles, sweet and easy interludes of dream logic” (211-12). Lianne goes to church two or three times a week where she finds other regular congregants: “They’d established a pattern, these three, or nearly so, and then others entered and the mass began” (234). Strangely, the only life that seems to have a purpose and a clear structure is that of Hammad, one of the terrorists that hijacked the plane that crashed into Keith’s tower. He has a jihad narrative to follow: “there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined” (83). In a way, Hammad’s jihad narrative is placed on the same level as Keith’s obsession with poker and Lianne’s regular mass attendance. Hammad, Keith and Lianne share their need for patterns, rules and structures. Lianne’s need to establish clear niches and escape blurred boundaries is also seen in her attack on Elena, her Greek neighbour. Elena is listening to music that Lianne cannot locate but that she defines as Islamic: “But the music wasn’t Greek. She was hearing another set of traditions, Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music located in Islamic tradition” (67). Unable to place the music, Lianne later calls it “noise” (68). Her choice of the adjective “Islamic” also brings negative associations to her mind but sets the music in a frame of reference where she feels entitled to reject it. Lianne’s son and his two best friends also need to incorporate what has happened into their understanding of life. For the children, Osama bin Laden becomes Bill Lawton, a name they can pronounce and that they use in their conversations. They even establish a list of characteristics that define Bill Lawton, shaping the unknown and the unfamiliar into familiar structures. Maybe because boundaries are so clearly established, albeit through the different narrative voices, it is especially shocking when in the final pages of Falling Man the lives of Hammad and Keith cross on 9/11. Starting from Hammad’s point of view, the third
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 76 sonia baelo-allué person narrator tells us about the situation inside the hijacked plane in the seconds before the actual crash. DeLillo offers here a masterful sentence that links Hammad and Keith in the same second in a single narrative structure:
A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he [Hammad] watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. (239)
This is the final moment in the working through process. The narrative voice leaves Hammad and returns to Keith as the main focalizer. The opening pages in the novel show the moments after Keith leaves the towers; the final pages are the moments just before: we finally bear witness to all those traumatic memories that Keith has been unable to retrieve. We learn that Keith’s best friend, Rumsey, died in his arms while he saw someone fall: “He could not stop seeing it, twenty feet away, an instant of something sideways, going past the window, white shirt, hand up, falling before he saw it” (242). The blood that Lianne noticed on Keith’s clothes was actually Rumsey’s. We also learn how he ended up taking a briefcase that belonged to Florence, an action he will not remember later. Apparently, Keith saw several people fall but the final image that remains with him is that of an empty shirt coming down out of the sky: “He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life” (246), the same shirt that he sees at the beginning of the novel and that keeps retuning to his mind. We learn that the shirt has been a safe substitute in a mind that could not incorporate the image of falling men in its normal narrative processes, an image that has caused Keith’s cognitive and emotional paralysis throughout the novel.
6. Conclusion DeLillo’s Falling Man is a psychic trauma novel that reproduces fragmented traumatic memory and that follows many of the conventions of the genre. For Kristiaan Versluys the endless reenactment of the trauma in the novel prevents accommodation or resolution (2009: 20). In this same vein, Martin Randall has also mentioned the overwhelming mood of melancholia in the novel (2011:121), and Richard Gray has complained that the novel is “immured in the melancholic state, offering a verbal equivalent of immobility, that it is symptoms rather than diagnosis” (2011: 28). In a more ambiguous interpretation, Conte sees the Falling Man image not as a figure of death but as “The Hanged Man”, the twelfth Major Arcana card in traditional Tarot decks, which is Lianne’s own interpretation, and which is regarded “as a figure of suspension, not termination. It signifies time of trial or mediation and evokes selflessness and sacrifice” (2011: 580). This is a vulnerable figure of contemplation and reflection on what has happened. The ending of Falling Man reflects these ambiguities and shows an atmosphere of suspension rather than termination. We
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 63-79· issn 0210-6124 9/11 and the psychic trauma novel: don delillo’s falling man 77 have to distinguish between Keith’s undeniable state of melancholia and lack of narrative memory of 9/11 and the ending of Falling Man, where there is working through and a chronological narrative retelling of the events. In fact, Keith’s immobility seems at odds with the final pages of the novel, whose effect cannot be ignored. It is unclear if these final pages are Keith’s incorporation and acceptance of his traumatic memories to his present (his working-through process) or, more likely, a narrative strategy to make readers witness and understand his trauma (our own working-through process). As readers we finally have access to narrative memory, since, for the first time and in a chronological way, we learn of the events that took place inside the towers. It is a return to what happened before the opening of the book when we first meet Keith outside the towers, walking in the dust. However, this narrative memory does not come from Keith himself but from a third-person narrator that focalises on Keith. Keith does not seem to transform his traumatic memory of the event into narrative memory; he never assimilates his trauma into a coherently organised narrative of the past. However, it is undeniable that the novel closes with this figurative assimilation and reconstruction of events that Keith lacks and which seeks to engage readers in the whole process. In the same way as Falling Man comes full circle, I also want to finish this paper by returning to the beginning. When facing a mediated and extremely well documented cultural trauma like 9/11, what can fiction offer? Falling Man does not focus on the cultural trauma and its transnational consequences but on the victims and their psychic trauma. Although the novel cannot offer answers, it does provide a first view into the aftermath, when the event still needs to be assimilated or understood. WhileFalling Man does show us the effects of the cultural trauma on the minds of its victims, it does not deal with the cultural trauma itself. Traumatic memory is full of gaps, unconnected images, repetitions and breaks in linear time, which themselves become literary techniques in DeLillo’s narrative. He gives voice to the unspeakable, acts out trauma in order to help readers work through it by turning them into witnesses of the full process.
Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C.2004 : ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka, eds. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P. 1-30. Armstrong, Tim 2005: Modernism. Cambridge: Polity. Begley, Adam 2007: ‘DeLillo’s 9/11 Resists Gravity: Lean and Nervous Novel Focuses On Aftermath’. The Observer 8 May. ‹http://www.observer.com/2007/delillo-s-9-11- resists-gravity› (Accessed 6 December, 2011). Birkerts, Sven 2007: ‘In a Darker Place’. Los Angeles Times 13 May. ‹http://articles. latimes.com/2007/may/13/books/bk-birkerts13› (Accessed 6 December, 2011). Butler, Judith 2004: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.
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Caruth, Cathy 1996: Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP. Collado-Rodríguez, Francisco 2011: ‘Experimental Fiction and Trauma Studies: the Case of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five’. Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué, eds. Between the Urge to Know and the Need to Deny: Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and American Literature. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 129-44. Conte, Joseph M. 2011: ‘Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror’. mfs Modern Fiction Studies 57.3: 559-83. Cvek, Sven 2011: Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Darzacq, Denis 2005: ‘La Chute’. ‹http://www.denis-darzacq.com/chute-vignettes. htm›. (Accessed 9 December, 2011) DeLillo, Don 1997: Underworld. New York: Scribner. —2001: ‘In the Ruins of the Future’. The Guardian 22 December. First published in Harper’s Magazine December: 33-40. ‹http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ generalfiction/story/0,,623732,00.html› (Accessed 6 December, 2011) —2007: Falling Man. London: Picador. Duvall, John N. and Robert P. Marzec 2011: ‘Narrating 9/11’. mfs Modern Fiction Studies 57.3: 381-400. Fortune 1 October 2001. ‹http://foliolit.com/wp3/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ Fortune_OCT8_01.jpg› (Accessed 9 December, 2011) Frost, Laura 2008: ‘Still Life: 9/11’s Falling Bodies’. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds. Literature after 9/11. New York and London: Routledge. 180-206. Gray, Richard 2009: ‘Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis’. American Literary History 21.1: 128-51. —2011: After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Junod, Tom 2003: ‘The Falling Man’.Esquire September: 177-81, 198-99. Kakutani, Michiko 2007: ‘A Man, a Woman and a Day of Terror’. The New York Times 9 May. ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/books/09kaku.html› (Accessed 6 December, 2011) Kaplan, E. Ann 2005: Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. Kauffman, Linda S. 2008: ‘The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” “Baader-Meinhof,” and Falling Man’. mfs Modern Fiction Studies 54.2: 353-77. LaCapra, Dominick 2001: Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP. Laub, Dori 1995: ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’. Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP. 61-75. Luckhurst, Roger 2008: The Trauma Question. New York and London: Routledge. Martín Salván, Paula 2009: Don DeLillo: Tropologías de la Postmodernidad. Córdoba: U de Córdoba.
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O’Hagan, Andrew 2007: ‘Racing Against Reality’. The New York Review of Books 54.11. 28 June. ‹http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20310› (Accessed 6 December, 2011) O’Keefe, Jeff 2007: ‘Fumbling Men’. Open Letters Monthly: An Arts and Literature Review 29 May. ‹http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/fumbling-men/› (Accessed 6 December, 2011) Randall, Martin 2011: 9/11 and the Literature of Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Redfield, Marc 2009: The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror. New York: Fordham UP. Rothberg, Michael 2009: ‘A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray’. American Literary History 21.1: 152-58. Skarbakka, Kerry 2005a: ‘Life Goes On’. ‹http://www.skarbakka.com/portfolios/ lifegoeson.htm› (Accessed 9 December, 2011) —2005b: ‘The Struggle to Right Oneself ’. ‹http://www.skarbakka.com/portfolios/ struggle.htm› (Accessed 9 December, 2011) Smelser, Neil J. 2004: ‘Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma’. Jeffrey C Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka, eds. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P. 31-59. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Onno van der Hart 1995: ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’. Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP. 158-82. Versluys, Kristiaan 2009: Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP. Vickroy, Laurie 2002: Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P. Warren, Craig A. 2007: ‘“It Reads like a Novel”: The 9/11 Commission Report and the American Reading Public’. Journal of American Studies 41.3: 533-56. Whitehead, Anne 2004: Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Yardley, Jonathan 2007: ‘Survivors of 9/11 Struggle to Live in a Changed World’. The Washington Post 13 May. ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2007/05/11/AR2007051100018.html› (Accessed 6 December, 2011)
Received 9 December 2011 Revised version accepted 27 April 2012
Sonia Baelo-Allué is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, where she teaches us literature. Her research centres on trauma studies and 9/11 fiction. She has published the book Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction (2011) and co-edited with Dolores Herrero The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond (2011) and Between the Urge to Know and the Need to Deny: Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and American Literature (2011).
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana. Universidad de Zaragoza. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. c/ Pedro Cerbuna, 12. 50009 Zaragoza, Spain. Tel: +34 976761531.
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Literary and Historical Discourse in Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq
N.S. Gundur Tumkur University [email protected]
Self-reflexivity has been identified by many critics as a distinctive feature of Girish Karnad’s dramatic texts. Accordingly, some of his plays, such as Tughlaq, Naga-Mandala and The Fire and the Rain, reflect on the nature of art and literature. They say something, overtly and at times covertly, about literature —poetry, playwriting and storytelling, drama and ritual. Hence, these plays can be read not only as literature but also as inquiries into the nature of literature itself. The present study reads a sub-text of Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq as a site which constructs a discourse on historical thinking and literature. Deploying the post-structuralist theory of textuality, especially that of Roland Barthes, it is argued here that a sub-text of the play, while creating the categories of poetic and historical, validates the literary by juxtaposing history and poetry dialectics. Reading the Tughlaq-Barani connection as more than that of a king and a historian —i.e. finding a poet in Tughlaq and a historical discourse in the interaction between Tughlaq, the king, and Barani, his confidant— the present study views Tughlaq as a critique of historical writing. A close reading, especially of Tughlaq’s and Barani’s speech, forms the substance of this analysis.
Keywords: Tughlaq; Karnad; post-structuralism; self-reflexivity; literary discourse; Indian theatre . . .
El discurso literario e histórico en Tughlaq, de Girish Karnad
La auto-reflexividad ha sido considerada por muchos críticos como un rasgo distintivo de los textos dramáticos de Girish Karnad. Algunas de sus obras, como Tughlaq, Naga-Mandala y The Fire and the Rain, llevan a cabo una reflexión sobre la naturaleza del arte y la literatura. Comentan, de manera abierta o encubierta, cuestiones literarias: cuestiones poéticas, teatrales o narrativas, o aluden a la dramaturgia y el ritual. Así pues, estas obras no sólo pueden leerse como literatura, sino también como indagaciones en la naturaleza de la literatura misma. El presente estudio propone una lectura de un sub-texto de Tughlaq, de Girish Karnad, como un espacio que construye un discurso sobre el pensamiento histórico y la literatura. A través de la teoría post-estructuralista de la textualidad, en especial la de Roland Barthes, se argumenta
—81— 82 n.s. gundur
aquí que un sub-texto de la obra, al tiempo que crea las categorías de lo poético y lo histórico, valida lo literario mediante la yuxtaposición de la dialéctica de la historia y la poesía. Tomando la conexión Tughlaq-Barani como algo más que la de un rey y un historiador —es decir, al considerar a Tughlaq un poeta y un discurso histórico a la interacción entre Tughlaq, el rey, y Barani, su confidente— este estudio ve en Tughlaq una crítica de la escritura histórica. La base del análisis es la lectura atenta de los discursos de Tughlaq y Barani.
Palabras clave: Tughlaq; Karnad; post-estructuralismo; discurso literario; teatro indio
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“All reading is misreading” Paul de Man
1. Introduction Girish Karnad has been in the forefront of modern Indian theatre since the spectacular success of his much celebrated play Tughlaq, written in the Kannada language and translated into English by the author himself in 1972.1 One of the twenty-three official languages of India, Kannada belongs to the family of Dravidian languages. It is estimated as being spoken by sixty million speakers in India alone, and by a further nine million as a second language. It is the state language of Karnataka and is one of the modern languages of India. Girish Karnad was born in 1938 at Matheran in Maharashtra state, India. He completed his schooling in Sirsi (Karnataka) and took a ba (Mathematics and Statistics) at Karnatak College, Dharwad, India. Later he went as a Rhodes Scholar (1960-63) to Oxford University to pursue his post-graduation (Philosophy, Political Science and Economics). In addition to being a bilingual writer, Karnad is also a renowned filmmaker, director and actor, whose autobiography has recently been released (2011). If his directing and acting have earned him some twelve awards, his career as a playwright has bestowed upon him Jnyanapeeth, India’s highest literary award, and he has received further recognition from various institutions.
2. The plot of Tughlaq The play centres on the historical figure of Mohammed-bin-Tughlaq, a Muslim king of the Tughlaq dynasty who ruled from Delhi over large parts of Northern and Central India during the period 1325 to 1351. The play aptly fuses history and fiction. History, in the form of the political career of Tughlaq, forms the main plot; fiction forms the subplot of the play in the creation of the pair Aziz and Azam, a dhobi (washerman), and a pickpocket, respectively. If the main plot enacts the fall of an ambitious autocrat in Tughlaq, the subplot presents an ordinary dhobi manipulating for his own benefit the schemes introduced by the king. The play fashions the character of Tughlaq as an ambitious king who wants to build a grand empire and manoeuvre his citizens to think as he does. To that end he devises the grand schemes of transferring his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad, and introduces a new currency system. A lover of the game of chess, Tughlaq symbolically moves his political pawns without ethics or morality. Manipulation and cruelty combine together in him to serve his delusions. Tughlaq attempts to make a show of the prevalence of justice in his
1 I would like to thank Dr G.S. Amur, Dr C.N. Ramachandran and Prof. (Mrs) Shyamala Narayan, for making valuable suggestions. I am grateful to certain anonymous reviewers for their advice and help. I also would like to thank my colleagues and students at Ahmednagar College (University of Pune, India), where the idea of this paper came to life.
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2 There are many studies in Kannada on Karnad in general; among the most important are: K. Marulasiddappa and Krishnamurthy Hanuru (eds.) Girish Karnadara Natakagalu: Kannadada Pratikriye (2010), a collection of many important articles on Karnad’s plays; Kirthinath Kurtkoti’s many articles, which are also available in their English translation in Basavaraj Donur (ed.) New Perspectives on Girish Karnad’s Plays (2009); G.S. Amur’s Girish Karnad haagu Bharatiya Rangabhumi (2008); Krishnamurthy Chandar’s Girish Karnad: A Life History and Works (2004); Krishnamurthy Chandar (ed.) Girish Karnadara Natakagalu (2000).
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Aside from the full-length works on Karnad’s dramatic oeuvre, such as those by Jaydeep Sinh Dodiya (1999), Tutun Mukherjee (2006), Basavaraj Donur (2009) and Pradeep Trikha (2009), there are important studies on Tughlaq in English: Naik (1987), Ramamoorthi’s (1988) reading of Tughlaq as an actor, Gomez (1994), Dharwadkar (2006) and Bhat (forthcoming), among others. “Yet no critical examination of the play”, as U.R. Anantha Murthy aptly remarks, “can easily exhaust its total meaning for the reader, because the play has, finally, an elusive and haunting quality” (1975: viii). The present paper, while endorsing Murthy’s observation, offers a different reading of Tughlaq, contending that the play constructs a discourse on the categories of literary and historical. It tries to show how the poetic and the historical are constructed in meaningful ways such that, when speaking about the historical, the text is also speaking about the identity and characteristics of the poetic. The comparison may be unspoken but it is always present.
3. Theoretical framework My understanding of the play in this framework is based on three assumptions. First, Karnad’s dramatic texts are essentially what Roland Barthes (1974) calls writerly texts (scriptible),3 which allow “bi- or multilateral and pluri-dimensional” readings (Mukherjee 2006: 22). As they lend themselves to different interpretations, it is possible to read some sub-texts of Karnad’s plays as constituting literary discourse; they have something to say about poetry, playwriting and storytelling. Karnad, although a student of Statistics and Mathematics, has first and foremost shown an inclination towards art and literature. As he has often, and perhaps too emphatically, declared, his ambition as a student was to write poetry.4 His artistic career is not only the result of his dramatic genius but is also shaped by his reflections on literary aesthetics. As an actor and dramatist, or in general as an artist, he deliberates on the role of art, aesthetics and drama in contemporary society. Some of his plays, especially Tughlaq (1972), Naga-Mandala (1990) and The Fire and the Rain (1998), engage in constructing an aesthetic discourse on different genres of literature, while also dealing with universal themes of betrayal, ambition, power, adultery or revenge. Theatre is an “artistic statement” for Karnad (1989: 331) and his plays can be read as meta-theatre. If The Fire and the Rain constructs literary discourse in relation to drama and the Yajna ritual (it enacts how drama and Yajna have similar structures and functions), Naga-Mandala situates that discourse within the literary space itself —drama-story
3 Roland Barthes’ notion of readerly and writerly texts (in French, lisible and scriptible) is quite similar to Umberto Eco’s open and closed texts. As I understand it, in the former the interpretation is restrictive and in the latter there is a range of possibilities of interpretation; the reader writes the text. However, Eco’s concept of open and closed text is often used in a sense that is quite the reverse. In his formulation, aclosed text is one that is moderately ‘open’ to every possible interpretation. See Barthes (1974) and Umberto Eco(1979). 4 After the “Girish Karnad Theatre Festival” at Dharwad (Karnataka) in 2000, Karnad mentioned this in his interaction with the audience.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 81-95· issn 0210-6124 86 n.s. gundur interaction (narrating and displaying). In Tughlaq, as the present study intends to show, literary discourse is implicated in the history-poetry dialectics of the play. Second, my understanding of Tughlaq, in terms of the history-poetry dynamics, is partly based on Roland Barthes’ theory of textuality and partly on post-structuralist ways of reading. If meanings in a text, as Derrida and others have tried to show, are unstable, there is room for multiple interpretations, one of them being that the text reflects upon its own processes and provides an allegory of reading itself (see de Man 1979). As Barthes puts it, the text “accomplishes the very plural of the meaning” (1977: 159). A text encapsulates many (sub-) texts and it is the polysemy of a text that makes the reading of sub-texts possible. A sub-text is always latent and it is our interpretation that creates its meaning. Therefore, each reading, which creates its own sub-text, depends on the experiences, knowledge, beliefs, opinions, attitudes and values of what Stanley Fish (1980) calls the interpretive community. The construction of a sub-text is possible because of the signification of the text, which is “held in the language” (Barthes1977 : 157). The reading of a sub-text implies unearthing “a hidden level of meaning that surfaces slowly through character interaction and subtleties of language” (Vena 1988: 174). The present reading of Tughlaq makes use of the multiplicity of meanings generated in Karnad’s portrayal of the interaction between the characters and the subtleties of their dialogues. If we take the political career of Tughlaq in the play as the main text, the history-poetry dialectics embedded in the interaction between Tughlaq and Barani can be read as a sub-text. On the surface, it appears that the Tughlaq-Barani relation is that of a king and a historian, but it is also possible to read that relation —on the basis of the dialogues, especially by Tughlaq, and those between Tughlaq and Barani— in terms of a poet and a historian. Third, while analyzing the utterances of Karnad’s characters, I use the term discourse, with its linguistic implications —how the speech acts of certain characters disseminate an assortment of meanings and subtly construct literary discourse within the texture of the play. At the same time, while positing how Karnad’s characters construct literary discourse, I use the concept of discourse in the Foucauldian sense, that is, a “large group of statements” and in the Bakhtinian sense of “a method of using words that presume a type of authority” (Hawthorn 1998). What I mean by literary and historical discourse in the present paper is that certain aspects of the text make authoritative statements on historical thinking, its nature and function; while constructing certain suppositions about historical thinking, the text indirectly talks about literature, especially poetry. The phrase literary discourse is used here in its broadest sense: poetic, performance, figurative and special uses of language, literary tropes. Karnad borrows materials for his plots from history, myth and folklore, but the relevant question is what does he do with his sources? One could answer that he simply creates theatre out of them. The literary merit of his theatre, by and large, rests on his ability to invent speech for his characters. As he himself acknowledges in an interview, his theatre is all about “speech” (Rajendran: 78). His theatre gives priority to dialogue, a characteristic feature of theatre as literature, and his characters breathe their lives through
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 81-95· issn 0210-6124 literary and historical discourse in girish karnad’s tughlaq 87 their idiolects, marked by speech acts, implicatures and polyphonic utterances. They are quotable and arresting to the ear of the spectators. This makes Karnad’s texts intenselyoral in their dramatic representation. The textual property I chiefly make use of for the analysis of the history-poetry interface in the present paper resides in the speech and speech acts of Tughlaq and Barani. Many critics, for example Ramamoorthi (1988) and Ramachandran (2008), have remarked on the self-reflexive nature of Karnad’s plays. Tughlaq not only exhibits a historical consciousness but also constructs a historical discourse. The play has its own historicity. What led Karnad to write a play on Mohammad-bin-Tughlaq was “a comment by Kirtinath Kurtkoti that there were only costume plays and no historical plays in Kannada which could appeal to modern sensibilities”, and Karnad felt “why not give history a try as a tool to interpret our life and times?” (Mukherjee 2006: 35). The very act of writing a historical play, howsoever the play is motivated by the contemporary political consciousness, implies the history-playwriting dynamics, the history-literature interface. In this context, the play is not only a response to “the existing tradition of historical play writing”, but also a way of facing up to historical writings. The following sections deal with this aspect in terms of the history-poetry dialectics.
4. Tughlaq as poet Before discussing the Tughlaq-Barani role in the framework of the history-poetry interface, let me establish the poet in Tughlaq, since the play’s views on poetry are demonstrated through the very creation of the poetic protagonist. He is the locus of the play and holds our attention through his speech. He dominates others not because he is the king but because of his rhetoric. His speeches are longer and more persuasive than those of other characters in the play. In fact, he is a poet capable of using poetry for his political ends, too; through his deft handling of language, he convinces Sheik Imam-ud-din to negotiate with Ain-ul-Mulk. One of the features of Tughlaq’s idiolect is that it is marked by literary tropes — figurative language, metaphors, alliterations, rhyme and rhythm. He utters everything obliquely and often means more than he utters. He also infers pragmatic meaning in the utterances of others even though they do not intend it. His first speech on the announcement of the transfer of his capital is not only a fine example of political rhetoric but also a poetic piece.5 To quote:
May this moment burn bright and light up our path towards greater justice, progress and peace — not just peace but more purposeful life. (i: 3)
5 Terry Eagleton (2007) considers the connection between rhetoric and poetry while discussing the literariness and language of poetry.
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In a similar way, what Tughlaq narrates in scene II, when his step-mother asks him what he does all night, can be read as a soliloquy:
I pray to the Almighty to save me from sleep. All day long I have to worry about tomorrow but it’s only when the night falls that I can step beyond all that. I look at the Pleiades and I think of Ibn-ul-Mottazz who thought it was an ostrich egg and Dur-rumma who thought it was a swallow. And then I want to go back to their poetry and sink myself in their words. Then again I want to climb up, up to the top of the tallest tree in the world, and call out to my people: ‘Come, my people, I am waiting for you. Confide in me your worries. Let me share your joys. Let’s laugh and cry together and then, let’s pray. Let’s pray till our bodies melt and flow and our blood turns into air. History is ours to play with — ours now! Let’s be the light and cover the earth with greenery. Let’s be darkness and cover up the boundaries of nations. Come! I am waiting to embrace you all!’ But then how can I spread my branches in the stars while the roots have yet to find their hold in the earth? I wish I could believe in recurring births like the Hindu but I have only one life, one body and my hopes, my people, my God are all fighting for it. Tell me, how dare I waste my time by sleeping? And don’t tell me to go and get married and breed a family because I won’t sleep. (II: 10; emphasis added)
The poetic expression of Tughlaq’s ambitious dream is marked by the poetic register, animal imagery, symbolism, rhetorical questions and suggestiveness. After this lengthy speech, the step-mother responds, “I can’t ask you a simple question without your giving a royal performance” (II: 10-11). Zia-ud-din Barani’s Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi attests that the arts of calligraphy, metaphor, poetry and science were among (historical) Tughlaq’s accomplishments (Dharwadkar 2006: 104). As a poet, Tughlaq’s ideals are the classical Persian poets Rumi and Sadi. Like their works, his poetry is dream poetry. He wants every rose in the garden to be a poem. The long dramatic monologue Tughlaq sings, when he meets a young sentry on the fort of Daulatabad, is an example of romantic poetry:
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Nineteen. Nice age! An age when you think you can clasp the whole world in your palm like a rare diamond. I was twenty-one when I came to Daulatabad first, and built this fort. I supervised the placing of every brick in it and I said to myself, one day I shall build my own history like this, brick by brick. One night I was standing on the ramparts of the old Fort here. There was a torch near me flapping its wild wings and scattering golden feathers on everything in sight. There was a half-built gate nearby trying to contain the sky within its cleft. Suddenly something happened — as though someone had cast a spell. The torch, the gate, the fort and the sky — all melted and merged and flowed in my blood stream with the darkness of the night. The moment shed its symbols, its questions and answers, and stood naked and calm where the stars throbbed in my veins. I was the earth, was the grass, was the smoke, was the sky. Suddenly a sentry called from afar: ‘Attention!’ ‘Attention!’ and to that challenge the half-burnt torch and the half-built gate fell apart. No, young man, I don’t envy you, your youth. All that you have to face and suffer is still ahead of you, look at me. I have searched for that moment since then and here I am still searching for it. But in the last four years, I have seen only the woods clinging to the earth, heard only the howl of wild wolves and the answering bay of street dogs. Another twenty years and you will be as old as me. I might be lying under those woods there. Do you think you’ll remember me then? (VIII: 53; emphasis added)
This dramatic monologue, characterized by poetic diction and a wealth of symbols, animal imagery, rhetorical questions and figures of speech, is delivered rhythmically. Of all Karnad’s characters, Tughlaq is drawn as intensely poetic, so much so that he has been realized more poetically than Devadatta, who is a declared poet in Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971, English 1975). The portrayal of Tughlaq as a poet is conspicuous in the play. However, what is particularly relevant is that the poetic in the play is constructed not only through Tughlaq’s poetic vein but also through historical discourse.
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5. Historical discourse Although a historical play, Tughlaq very subtly circulates the modernist conception of historical thinking by means of a sub-text which makes discursive statements on history and historical writings, and also through the identity of Barani, the historian-character. We often come across such discursive statements: “[s]urely a historian doesn’t need an invitation to watch history take place” (II: 13), or “History is not made in statecraft” VIII( : 55). Apart from the oblique references to historical discourse, the play makes more than five explicit statements on history as a craft. For example, Muhammad’s comment that “Barani is a historian —he is only interested in playing chess with the shadows of the dead” (II: 12; emphasis added) can be read as a statement that what history is capable of is dealing with shadows, not even of the living, but of the dead; because history-writing,6 essentially in the construction of the past with a claim to objective truth, largely depends on sources where objectivity and truth, in the Nietzschean and the Foucauldian sense, are a myth, whereas literature (drama here), though it owes a great deal to history, deals with living characters. True to its belief, the character of Tughlaq in the play is intensely alive and “realized in great psychological depth” (Murthy 1975: viii) compared to Tughlaq in historical writings. In addition, we can make a close reading of the phrase playing chess, which connotes the interpretative and imaginative (White 1976, 1982) work of the historian in constructing the past. Now the question is, in what way is Karnad’s text different from historical narratives? Though Karnad’s text is a tissue, as Barthes would have called 7 it, a cross-section of a variety of discourses, mainly in literary and historical registers, it constructs the human image of Tughlaq: archetypal, at the same time highly individualized, contemporary and a poet-politician. The history of Tughlaq’s regime that the play constructs is markedly different from what historical writings narrate.8 For instance, the play very subtly stages the absence of trust in the affairs of Tughlaq’s transaction as a cause for his doom, whereas the historical narratives cite political reasons. There are innumerable examples in the text where Tughlaq’s citizens exhibit distrust of their king, to the extent that suspicion permeates the whole atmosphere of the play. Hence, Karnad’s play, as generally observed in the history-creative writing interface, implicates the human problem in the affairs of the Sultan, whereas the historical narratives interpret the political problem. Above all, Karnad’s success is an artistic discovery of Tughlaq, who is rendered poetically.
6 See Alun Munslow’s Deconstructing History (2008), which assesses the claims of history as a form of “truthful explanation” and examines history-writing from the post-structuralist perspective. 7 Barthes’s notion of literary text is composed of “multiple writings”; according to him, “The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas”(1977: 160; emphasis in original). Barthes’ theory is quite similar to Set Theory in Mathematics. 8 For the historical accounts on Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq, see Elliot and Dowson (1971). Published in London, the eight volumes are the translations of medieval Muslim chronicles. See also other historical narratives, such as Barani (1953); Haq (1959); Hardy (1960); Hussain (1963); Habibullah (1967); Nigam (1968); Defremery and Sanguinetti (1986); and Rizvi (1993).
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The sub-text creates historical thinking through the identity of Barani. Its polemics on history as a craft are all convincing, because they are used in relation to Barani. For example, after realizing the futility of the transfer of his capital city and the subsequent chaos in the kingdom, Tughlaq asks, “You are a historian, Barani, you are the man to prescribe remedies for this . . . What should I do, Barani? What would you prescribe for this honeycomb of disease?” (VIII: 54-55). Accordingly, the play upholds the assumption that the main function of history is to suggest remedies for contemporary problems. This is the task we have traditionally assigned to historical writings: that history repeats itself, hence it is worth studying. In this respect, it is quite clear that Karnad’s text looks at history through the lens of the present. That “the past is for the present” (Karnad 1972) was a typically modernist conception of history very much prevalent in the Indian academe during the time of the composition of the play. In the final scene, when Barani wants to abandon Tughlaq during the chaos in the kingdom, Tughlaq challenges him: “You wanted to see history formed in front of your eyes”, to which Barani replies, “I have spent seven years here and the greatest historians of the world would have given half their lives to see a year in it” (XIII: 78; emphasis added). This is a rare comment from Barani on historical discourse in the play. History, in this context, is not simply a chronicle of past events. It is a complex and bewildering phenomenon which historians take pains to construe: so much has happened in the reign of the Sultan within a short span of time that it is difficult for historians to interpret it. If scrutinized closely, Barani’s presence in the play offers a contrast to the poetic side of Tughlaq. Karnad’s primary historical source for the writing of the play was Zia-ud-din Barani’s Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi (1357), a historical narrative which chronicled the reigns of certain Delhi Sultanates ruling the Indian subcontinent during the medieval period (Dharwadkar 2006: 98). In this respect, Barani’s presence in the play is very significant. However, it is remarkable that all other characters are involved in the development of the plot, either contributing to the tension or resolving it, all of them act, but no single act is performed by Barani. From the viewpoint of plot development, Tughlaq could still be Tughlaq without the character of Barani. So what function does Barani perform? As a confidant of the king he simply observes “history taking place”, and as a historian-character he lends historical consciousness to the play. Readers are reminded of the relevant figure of the confidant as a theatrical convention, in general, and in Indian drama, in particular. But this observation may prove to be too simplistic. More than an agent of historical consciousness, Barani is necessary for the text, as the (sub-) text attempts to validate the literary by juxtaposing the historical. Hence, it can be argued that the poetic in Tughlaq is constructed not only through the distinct language he uses but also by contrast to Barani. Tughlaq embodies the literary and Barani the historical. If Tughlaq stands for the poetic, imaginative sensibility or feeling, Barani stands for the historical, referential, matter-of-fact observance and sobriety. This relational aspect is suggested in the observation of the stepmother, who says that Tughlaq is impulsive and gets into his moods, whereas Barani is sober, level-headed and honest (II: 17), a
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 81-95· issn 0210-6124 92 n.s. gundur description which befits their archetypes as poet and historian, and helps us understand the history-poetry dialectics the sub-text builds.
6. History-poetry dialectics The most striking comparison between history and poetry comes to the fore when Tughlaq, after becoming aware of the chaos in his kingdom, asks Barani, “What should I do, Barani?” Barani replies directly but humbly: “Your Majesty, you are known the world over for your knowledge of philosophy and poetry. History is not made only in statecraft; its lasting results are produced in the ranks of learned men. That’s where you belong, Your Majesty, in the company of learned men. Not in the market of corpses”. At this point Tughlaq’s comment on the rhetorical device of Barani’s speech helps us interpret the history-poetry dialectics the play poses; Tughlaq says, “You want me to retire from my throne? (Laughs) Barani, if you were capable of irony, I would have thought you were laughing at me. But as usual you mean it” (viii: 55; emphasis added). One way of reading this dialogue is as if poetry were challenging history in that the historical register cannot be ironical, whereas poetry can. History communicates directly, while poetry is indirect and suggestive in constructing a reality through the use of tropes such as irony. Tughlaq, the poet, is aware of the fact that his is the language of poetry. If Barani plays chess with the shadow and Najib as a politician “wants pawns of flesh and blood”, Tughlaq, as a poet, the text asserts, can “breathe life into these bones” (ii: 12). While making statements on history and politics, the illocutionary speech act of Tughlaq’s dialogue implicates the literary discourse. It is as much a statement on his own language as on the language of the historian. In this respect, Tughlaq’s language is what Terry Eagleton calls “verbally inventive” (2007: 41).
7. Conclusion Literature dealing with its own genre, glorifying or ridiculing or critiquing itself, is not a recent development. Works such as Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Sheridan’s The Critic, Molière’s L’impromptu de Versailles, Luigi Pirandello’s Sei Personaggi in Cerca d’Autore (see Ramachandran 2008: 41), among many others, are plays about plays and writers; they critique the category called literature. As Wallace Stevens says, poetry itself is the subject matter of poetry (Jaaware: 2001: 38). In this respect, Karnad’s dealing with literary discourse is not remarkable. However, analysis of this play contributes to the understanding of how literature has viewed itself in different historical eras and in what ways we may read it differently. In this study, I have tried to show how Karnad’s Tughlaq implicates literary discourse by utilizing historical discourse to validate its own position. While seemingly writing a historical play, the playwright has not merely tried to fill the lacuna in the tradition of historical plays in Kannada but has also responded to historical writings on Tughlaq. As a critique of such writings, the play artistically reveals the Sultan in terms of human implications. An ambitious play, it subtly constructs a sub-text that deals with its
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 81-95· issn 0210-6124 literary and historical discourse in girish karnad’s tughlaq 93 literary and historical discourses and is the result of the portrayal of Tughlaq as a poet who knows history well, who comments on and tries to theorize history. In addition, Barani is created in the play to present a contrast to the poetic side of the king. The interplay between Tughlaq and Barani is thus a classic example of the construction of a sub-text.
Works Cited Amur G.S. 2008: Girish Karnad haagu Bharatiya Rangabhumi. Dharwad: Manohar Grantha Mala. Barani, Ziya-ud-Din 1953: Tarik-i-Firuz Shahi. Trans. Henry Elliott. Calcutta: Gupta. Bhat, Kamalakar, forthcoming: ‘Postcolonial Modern in Tughlaq’. V. Raghavan, ed. Theatres of Destiny: Interventionist Drama in Post-Independence India. Barthes, Roland 1974: S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. —1977: ‘From Work to Text’. Stephen Heath, ed. Image Music Text. London: Fontana. 155-64. Chandar, Krishnamurthy 2004: Girish Karnad: A Life History and Works. Bangalore: Karnataka Sahitya Akademi. — ed. 2000: Girish Karnadara Natakagalu. Bangalore: Sapna. Defremery C., B.R. Sanguinetti and H.A.R. Gibb 1986: The Travels of Ibn Baòtòtåuòta A.D. 1325-1354. Millwood: Kraus. de Man, Paul 1979: Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust. New Heaven: Yale UP. Dharwadkar, Aparna 2006: ‘Historical Fictions and Postcolonial Representations: Reading Tughlaq’. Tutun Mukherjee, ed. Girish Karnad’s Plays: Performance and Critical Perspectives. Delhi: Pencraft.96 -123. Dodiya, Jaydeep Sinh 1999: The Plays of Girish Karnad: Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Prestige. Donur, Basavaraj, ed. 2009: New Perspectives on Girish Karnad’s Plays. Bangalore: Kanva Prakashan. Eagleton, Terry 2007: How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell. Eco, Umberto 1979: The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Elliott, Sir Henry and John Dowson 1871 (1867-1877): The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. The Muhammadan Period. Vols 1-8. London: Trübner. Fish, Stanley 1980: Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, mas: Harvard UP. Gomez, Christine 1994: ‘Karnad’s Tughlaq as an Alienated Protagonist’. Sudhakar Pandey and Freya Barua, eds. New Directions in Indian Drama. New Delhi: Prestige. 137-53. Habibullah, A.B.M. 1967: The Foundations of Muslim Rule in India: History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi: 1200-1290 A.D. Allahabad: Central Book Depot.
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Haq, S.M. 1959: Barani’s History of the Tughluqs. Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society. Hardy, P. 1960: Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical Writing. London: Luzac. Heninger S.K. 1994: Sub-text of Form in English: The English Rennaissance. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP. Hawthorn, Jeremy 1998: A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. London: Arnold. Hussain, Mahdi 1963: Tughluq Dynasty. Calcutta: Thaker. Jaaware, Aniket 2001: Simplification: An Introduction to Structuralism and Post- Structuralism. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Karnad, Girish 1971: Hayavadana. New Delhi: Oxford UP. —1972: ‘Tughlaq’. Enact 65: 50-53. —1975: Tughlaq. Delhi: Oxford UP. —1989: ‘Theatre in India’.Daedalus 118.04: 331-52. —1990: Naga-Mandala: Play with a Cobra. New Delhi: Oxford UP. —1998: The Fire and the Rain. New Delhi: Oxford UP. —2011: Aadaadtha Aaayushya: Memoirs in Kannada. Dharwad: Manohar Grantha Mala. Marulasiddappa, K. and Krishnamurthy Hanuru 2010: Girish Karnadara Natakagalu: Kannadada Pratikriye. Mysore: Samvahana. Mukherjee, Tutun 2006: ‘Text and Performance: Girish Karnad’s Plays’. Tutun Mukherjee, ed. Girish Karnad’s Plays: Performance and Critical Perspectives. Delhi: Pencraft.13 -26. Munslow, Alun 2008: Deconstructing History. New York: Routledge. Murthy, U.R. Ananth 1975: ‘Introduction’. Tughlaq, by Girish Karnad. Delhi: Oxford UP. vii-xx. Naik, M.K. 1987: ‘The Limits of Human Power: A Comparative Study of Tughlaq and Caligula’. M.K. Naik, ed. Studies in Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sterling. 136-44. Nayak G.H. 1984: ‘Karnadara Tughlaq: Vastu Vishleshane’. Nirapeksha. Sagara: Akshara Prakashana. 139-53. Nigam, S.B.P. 1968: Nobility under the Sultans of Delhi. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Rajendran, K. n.d. ‘An Interview with Girish Karnad’. D.R. Subramanian, ed. The Plays of Girish Karnad: A Critical Assessment. Madurai: Gokula Radhika. 78-96. Ramachandran, C.N. 2008: Girish Karnad mattu Avar Muru Charitrika Natakagalu. Bangalore: Sapna. Ramamoorthi, P. 1988: ‘He that Playeth the Sultan: A Study of Tughlaq’. Journal of the Karnatak University. Humanities 32: 56-61. Rizvi, S.A.A. 1993: Wonder that was India. New Delhi: Rupa. Trikha, Pradeep 2009: Multiple Celebrations, Celebrating Multiplicity: Girish Karnad. Ajmer: A.R.A.W. LII. Vena, Gary 1988: How to Read and Write about Drama. New York: Arco. White, Hayden 1976: ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’. Angus Fletcher, ed. The Literature of Fact. New York: Columbia UP. 21-44. —1982: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
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Received 30 September 2010 Revised version accepted 3 December 2011
Dr N.S. Gundur initially taught English at the National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla, Pune (India). His areas of interest are Indian Literature, Linguistics, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies. He has worked on the ugc (University Grants Commission) Minor Research project on English for Military Purposes. He is now working as Associate Professor at Tumkur University, India.
Address: Department of Studies and Research in English. Tumkur University. Tumkur 572103. Karnataka, India.
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Reconsidering Coduction: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the Spanish Lay Reader in Intercultural Dialogue
Terri Ochiagha Universidad de Alicante [email protected]
According to Wayne Booth, coduction involves an initial and private discovery of the text and the endeavour of proclaiming this interpretation to other readers. Through this reflexive methodology, Booth expects readers to intuitively reach ethically useful value judgements and redress former prejudices. However, there are no guarantees that conversations with others will do more than expand on a particular reader’s miscellaneous interests or move in directions unrelated to the text’s potentially ‘exploitable’ core message. In this article, I examine how a reviewed application of Booth’s concept of coduction furnishes us with a potential model for a positive understanding of ‘Otherness’, as can be seen in the response of a group of Spanish lay readers to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart while operating within a three-phased project based on a revision of Booth’s concept. I argue that evaluating readers’ cultural background, probing their minds with a specially designed questionnaire that initiates an ‘ethical conversation’ without influencing the outcome of the coduction and encouraging a written presentation of their response can indeed facilitate the kind of intercultural dialogue that is conspicuously absent from Spanish renditions of the African image.
Keywords: Chinua Achebe; Things Fall Apart; Wayne Booth; coduction; ethical criticism; lay readers . . .
Reconsiderar la coducción: Todo se derrumba, de Chinua Achebe, y el lector lego español en el diálogo intercultural
Según Wayne Booth, la coducción conlleva el descubrimiento privado de un texto y el esfuerzo de proclamar esta interpretación preliminar a otros lectores. A través de esta metodología reflexiva, Booth espera que los lectores perciban valores éticos implícitos en el texto y enmienden antiguos prejuicios intuitivamente. Sin embargo, no se garantiza que las conversaciones con otros vayan a pasar de ampliar los intereses misceláneos del lector o tomen otros derroteros desvinculados del mensaje ético potencial de la obra. En este artículo analizo la forma en la que una aplicación revisada del concepto de coducción nos provee de un modelo potencial para el entendimiento
—97— 98 terri ochiagha
positivo de la ‘Otredad’ a través de la respuesta de un grupo de lectores legos españoles a la novela de Chinua Achebe Todo se derrumba mientras operaban dentro de un proyecto trifásico basado en el concepto de Booth. Expongo que la evaluación del bagaje cultural de los lectores, la estimulación mediante cuestionarios diseñados específicamente para iniciar una ‘conversación ética’ sin influir el resultado de su coducción y la narración por escrito (por parte de los lectores) de su respuesta facilita un diálogo intercultural actualmente ausente de las representaciones españolas de la imagen africana.
Palabras clave: Chinua Achebe; Todo se derrumba; Wayne Booth; coducción; crítica ética; lectores legos
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1. Africa and the Spanish mindscape The proliferation of black immigration and the negative coverage given to Black African countries in the media is responsible for the formation of a negative image of Africa and its inhabitants in the minds of a sector of the Spanish population. Not only are the ‘miseries’ of such countries given the meagre space allotted to the continent in the press, but it is rare to see portrayals of African history and culture, or any mode of positive attention. This, along with the socio-economic implications of the migratory influx, has led to a cultural clash of sorts, with an overwhelming augmentation of racism in the past years (Corkell 2005; Balfour and Quiroga 2007; Flesler 2008; Cornejo et al. 2009; Miampika and García de Vinuesa 2009).1 Beyond the media coverage and popular stereotypes disseminated within, what are the dominant societal perceptions of black Africans as literary subjects? The Equato-Guinean writer Donato Ndongo answers:
I have lived in Spain for more than thirty years and no one has paid any attention [to my oeuvre]. In contrast, some Spanish writers go to Africa for three weeks, write a book and succeed commercially. The same thing happens in other fields: the intent [of the European] is to exclude the African from the issues that affect him. (qtd. in García Las Palmas: 2007)2
Ndongo’s claims echo Chinua Achebe’s contention that books written by European ‘experts’ and correspondents about Africa are one of the evasions used “to replace and simulate dialogue to [the European’s] satisfaction” (1990a: 25) through the exclusion of the African voice from the narrative of the continent. This exclusion has historically resulted in a particular representation of the African in the cultural imagery of the West: the perfect canvas on which to project phobias or forbidden fantasies, a savage bereft of rationality and morality, fit only for subjection or charitable aid. Obviously, this image, proffered by colonial discourse, has undergone a series of ‘positive’ permutations, especially in countries more accustomed to receiving erstwhile colonial subjects into their midst. Spain has barely had that chance at integration and image restoration. It is important here to establish the link between colonial discourse and the language employed in the articulation of immigrant ‘Otherness’. This connection is particularly tenuous in Spain, because in contrast to Britain, for instance, the idea of Empire is mostly absent from the collective imagery of present-day Spaniards (Santaolalla 2002: 66-67). The same is not true of the historical struggle to remove Arabs from Spain, which shapes to some extent contemporary responses to Moroccan immigration. Spanish colonialism in its sole sub-Saharan colony, Equatorial Guinea, is all but forgotten, probably because in its heyday General Francisco Franco precluded the conceptualization of the relationship
1 I wish to take this opportunity to acknowledge with gratitude the criticism and suggestions of Dr Asunción López Varela, who read early drafts of this article. 2 All translations from Spanish are my own.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 100 terri ochiagha between both countries as colonial: “España no es ni ha sido nunca colonialista, sino civilizadora y creadora de pueblos, que es cosa bien distinta” (‘Spain is not and has never been colonialist, but a civilizer of peoples, which is a very different thing’) (qtd. in Lewis 2007: 2). The terms in which he framed the ‘special’ relationship with the African country, however, replicated the colonial manichean allegory: the superiority of the civilized (and implicit savagery of the Equato-Guinean population), and the paternalist role of creating something where there was ‘none’. Sub-Saharan African immigrants in Spain are not primarily from Equatorial Guinea; therefore the postcolonial implication of their presence in the country is not registered in popular perception. However, the binary oppositions of colonial discourse amplify the verbalization of the incompatibility of a fixed national identity with the arrival of the African ‘Other’. As Brian Jenkins and Spyros Sophos have led us to see, while immigration is not a straightforward reproduction of colonial structures, racism and xenophobia result from the collision between “the legacy of those [colonial] structures, and then on the other, the postcolonial migration of people and products” (2005: 42). While it would be a gross misstatement to say that the perception of Africans in Spain has remained constant from colonial times, it is not farfetched to note that many of the tropes and topoi recreated in media texts are inherited from colonial discourse.3 Intercultural dialogue is conspicuously absent from Spanish renditions of Africans, and this absence is compounded by the fact that most African literary works and their translations systematically go out of print due to limited editorial promotion. These ancillary issues are some of the motivations of the present study. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is Africa’s most famous novel (Lindfors 1991: ix; Gikandi 2006: ix; Nnomerele 2010: 39). Set in the early years of the twentieth century, it was the first Nigerian novel to present the disintegrating effects of the colonial incursion on traditional village life. The novel revolves around Okonkwo, a proud and brave warrior whose determination leads him to the highest echelons of his clan, Umuofia. Fiercely traditional and hot-tempered, Okonkwo loathes how the society he loves begins to crumble at the arrival of the Europeans. After his denigration at the hands of the District Officer, and in an attempt to defend the integrity of his village, he kills a court messenger and commits suicide rather than face the noose of the white man’s rope. Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than thirty languages, and has sold over ten million copies. Notwithstanding the canonical status of Achebe’s opera prima, Spain has not fallen under its charm. In the university, Things Fall Apart smolders in some of the few active Commonwealth literature courses (see Miampika and García de Vinuesa 2009: 39). To an overwhelming proportion of the country’s lay readership, it is simply inexistent. This particular situation might be only transitory, as Random House-Mondadori published renewed translations of Achebe’s five novels in the course of 2010. Anticipating this
3 For the purposes of this article, I define colonial as referring to the military, cultural and religious domination of South American, African, Asian and Caribbean territories by European powers for economic exploitation, justified by a discourse of African moral and intellectual inferiority.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 reconsidering coduction: chinua achebe’s things fall apart 101 increased availability, a question begs to be asked: how can a lay reader connect with the text and its function as counter-discourse to the many prejudiced images of Africans disseminated through literary and media texts? My study of the responses of a group of Spanish lay readers operating within a three- phased project shows that certain reading practices can indeed facilitate intercultural dialogue through a triggered appreciation of the political nuances of texts like Things Fall Apart. The reading practice I propose is a potential model for a positive understanding of ‘Otherness’, based on a revised application of Wayne Booth’s concept of coduction and its mode of impressing the ethical benefits of a literary work on readers. This project arose from my assessment of an isolated response to the text, which suggested that appraising readers’ cultural background, probing their minds with detailed questions on the text and encouraging a written presentation of their response facilitated a personal reassessment of first impressions and a firmer grasp on the text’s complexity and function as anti-colonial contestation.4
2. Why Things Fall Apart? To answer this question correctly, it will be necessary to recall Chinua Achebe’s authorial intentions. To put it succinctly, Achebe, like other Anglophone African writers of his generation, first encountered ‘novels of the Empire’, like Rudyard Kipling’sKim and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, at secondary school. At this point, he did not take notice of the misrepresentations of Africans they purveyed and even “took sides with the white men against the savages” (Achebe 1991: 9). At university, Achebe came under further intellectual and political influences; his encounter with Joyce Cary’s Mr. Johnson as an undergraduate was not as acquiescent. Like his classmates, he realized that “at the slightest chance, a contagion of distaste, hatred and mockery breaks through to poison his [Cary’s] tale” (Achebe 2003: 24). Further encounters with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ‘African’ novels of Graham Greene, and colonial ethnographic writings like G.T. Basden’s Niger Ibos and C.K. Meek’s Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe alerted him that Africa and its inhabitants were under attack and had to be defended against “the colonization of one people’s story by another” (Achebe 2003: 43). Conrad’s novel later became the subject of a highly controversial essay, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Heart of Darkness’, which partly theorizes Achebe’s creative work. In the essay, Achebe complains about the textual and stylistic strategies through which Conrad portrays Africa as “the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are
4 The research on which this article is based is the first phase of a much larger project. This academic year, I have taken the step of adapting my neo-coductive method in the university as a means of introducing minority literatures in mainstream courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. I am currently heading a project, funded by my institution’s Institute of Educational Sciences and Pedagogy and involving scholars at the University of Alicante, Complutense University, Madrid, and the Autonomous University of Madrid for this purpose, and will continue to refine and expand my work with the neo-coductive methodology in the near future.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 102 terri ochiagha finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (1990b: 3). In Achebe’s opinion, the racist views expressed in Heart of Darkness deprive it of the status of a work of art because it is “a book which parodies in the most vulgar fashion prejudices from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and places today . . . a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question” (1990b: 15), for Africans were “not angels, but not rudimentary souls either, just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society” (1990b: 18). But Achebe’s authorial intention in his novels and short stories on the colonial theme was not restricted to ‘writing back’ to flawed renditions of Africanness. At the heart of his narrative was the desire to redress the psychological effects that colonial education —as the vehicle of the colonial myth of ‘darkest Africa’— had on the mind of the colonized, as he advocated in yet another essay:
I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past —with all its implications— was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. (1990c: 45)
3. Coduction as composed representation of reader response Wayne Booth first introduced coduction in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) as a central concept to his theories on the ethical criticism of books, which he claims should be conducted, “not by a laying down of ethical axioms and a timeless deduction of consequences, but by a ‘coduction’ that tests our actual responses in conversation” (Booth 1988: x). The term is actually a neologism, coming from the fusion of co ‘together’ and ducere ‘to lead, to draw out, bring out’ and is defined as the act of proclaiming to the world or preparing ourselves to say
of the works of this general kind I have experienced, my comparing experience with other more or less qualified observers, this one seems to me among the better (or weaker ones) or the best (or worst). Here are my reasons . . . every such statement calls for a continuing conversation: “How does my coduction compare with yours?” (1988: 73; emphasis in original)
Coduction as a reflexive reading methodology involves an initial and private discovery of the text, whereby the reader makes individual “inferences of quality” (Booth 1988: 71) and the endeavour of proclaiming this interpretation to other readers in a debate in which “neither side [offers] decisive logical proof ” (Booth 1998: 373). It also involves a comparative dimension: the first reading of the text is realized against the backdrop of earlier life and literary experiences. The other readers with whom this reader will debate about that text will bring into the picture their own reading and life experiences as well. According to Booth, the exact way in which this process triggers the ethical response of
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 reconsidering coduction: chinua achebe’s things fall apart 103 the reader cannot be determined: “No strictly speaking scientific study will ever prove that a given story has been the cause of a given change in any one reader” (1998: 368). The moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum borrowed Booth’s theoretical lens of coduction in her Poetic Justice (1995) as a necessary step in her own literary didactic project, based on Adam Smith’s belief that “fellow feeling” is necessary for liberal-democratic society. Nussbaum is concerned with the dialectical impact of literature in imparting this brand of empathy, and promulgates novels that allow readers to put their ‘privileged’ Selves in the shoes of marginal Others by developing the capacity of “fancy” (1995: 36). For Nussbaum, coduction is the way that readers come to agree on the interpretation of a given novel. She defines it as “a nondeductive comparative type of practical reasoning that is carried on in cooperation with others. In the process of coduction, our intuitions about a literary work will be refined by the criticisms of ethical theory and of friendly advice, and thus may greatly alter the emotional experience that we are able to have as readers” (1995: 76). The difference with Booth’s formulation is that for Nussbaum, the end of coduction is to reach an agreement on the proper interpretation of a given novel as opposed to a personal reassessment after hearing the responses of other readers to the text and to our claims. Nussbaum draws a linear correlation between a particular text and its outcome: in her book, she identifies novels (Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Richard Wright’s Native Son and E.M. Forster’s Maurice) and their virtues, but remains tacit about the process whereby this occurs (1995: 45, 75). On the other hand, Booth expects any reader to intuitively reach ethically useful value judgements. He sidesteps the fact that there are no guarantees that conversations with others will do more than expand on a particular reader’s miscellaneous interests or move in directions unrelated to the text’s potentially ‘exploitable’ core message. Booth himself admits that the process of ethical improvement is difficult to place because “our evidence will always consist mainly of anecdotes —most often memories or responses to stories in our early, more malleable years” (1998: 368). My research shows that coduction offers a reflexive method that, with the necessary adjustments, can lead to a demonstrable ethical engagement with the ideological thrust of such texts as Things Fall Apart. In my reconsideration of the theoretical construct, I focus on a salient aspect of coduction. Booth emphasizes that “when we are working as we should, the very effort to describe accurately ‘the facts’ before us requires a closer look, which in turn modifies the evaluation, and that is further modified as we converse with others about the values we claim to have seen” (1988:74). Furthermore, when a reader “takes seriously the task of explaining his initial appraisal, he enters a process that is not a mere argument for views already established but a conversation, a kind of re-reading that is an essential part of what will be a continually shifting evaluation” (Booth1988 : 75; emphasis added). I propose the substitution of “the exchange among readers about their ethical responses in conversation” (1988: 372) with a solipsistic coduction: as in Booth’s model, readers try to understand the text (through an initial, isolated reading) before situating themselves around its ethical centre. But rather than diving into a ‘random’ discussion of
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 104 terri ochiagha the text with other readers, they indulge in a post-reading task which submerges them in the dialectical power of literature through a specially designed questionnaire that initiates the ‘ethical conversation’ by pointing out areas of attention in the text. In doing so, I am aware that my approach isolates the readers through the way they respond to questions. Nevertheless, there is a community of text and reader nurtured by the critic, and coduction still operates in the lay reader’s reevaluation of the issues posed by the said critic. The effort of presenting their responses to someone else for inspection and possible assessment warrants a level of reflection that an arbitrary comment from another lay reader cannot possibly elicit, as we will see later in the paper. For now, we will focus on this renewed formulation of coduction with a focus on reading Things Fall Apart as counter-discourse to reductive narrations of Africanness.
4. Methodology I used the questionnaire method to collect data from eight subjects in the early months of 2008. Questionnaire participants were recruited through advertisements posted in bookshops and civic centres, and the final sample comprised six males and two female participants whose ages ranged from thirty-one to eighty-two years. Participants came from both urban and rural backgrounds (Madrid and Villaseca de la Sagra, a small village near the ancient city of Toledo) and included a judge, a driver, a gardener, an I.T. technician, a factory worker, a retired accountant and three shop assistants. Apart from the judge, none of the participants had a degree; four were secondary school graduates, one of the men had attended a technical college, and the rest had stopped at elementary schooling. There was no ethnic variation —participants were required to be white Spaniards due to the scope of the project. I wish to stress the discovery-oriented nature of this inquiry, which anticipates further and more elaborate work in relation to these preliminary findings. For the present purposes, the small sample was sufficient to establish the viability of coduction as reflexive composition.5 Moreover, as we will see, there was a ‘control experiment’ involving ten more participants. At the inception of the project, participants were informed of the objectives and methodology to be followed: the first questionnaire was designed to gauge the general notions of Africa, its history, literature and the cultural representations and experiences
5 There are no set rules about the choice of sample size in qualitative research design. Eight participants fall within the minimum sample size recommendations compiled by A.J. Onwuegbuzie and K.M.T. Collins (2007) in their article ‘A Typology of Mixed Methods Sampling Designs in Social Science Research’, and echoed in such reference books as the Sage Handbook of Mixed Research Methods (2010). I started out with the ten participants, two of whom dropped out due to personal and work commitments. I tested my sample size with one of the principal standards used in qualitative analysis: saturation. This is achieved when questionnaire results become repetitive and no additional invariant themes are discovered (Lincoln and Guba 1985; Boyaltzis 1998; Patton 2002). Despite the reduced number of participants and the diversity in professional, social, and educational backgrounds, new themes did not emerge. This was somehow predictable, as themes were not only generated inductively from questionnaire responses but also generated deductively from the kind of questions posed.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 reconsidering coduction: chinua achebe’s things fall apart 105 that participants would bring to their reading. Moreover, the questionnaire was devised to detect negative preconceptions that might be redressed by the reading activity. The second phase involved a personal and isolated reading of the text. Participants were handed a copy of Fernando Santos’ translation of Things Fall Apart —Todo se derrumba— and asked not to discuss the novel nor consult secondary sources until the project’s conclusion.6 However, they were encouraged to write down their doubts and observations as they progressed through the novel. The ultimate aim was to assess their unadulterated response to the text. In the third phase, participants had to respond to a second questionnaire designed to reach the core of the text’s ethical thrust. Coduction here involved a reappraisal of a possibly curtailed first reading, the comparison with previous literary/cultural experiences and the composed presentation of the participants’ meditated answers to the questions posed in the questionnaire. Participants had to answer the detailed questions independently and submit them afterwards. I translated, coded and analyzed the data thematically through a manual procedure. It was particularly important to ensure that the data was translated in a way that did not compromise the original meaning expressed by each participant, so the translations were vetted by two external reviewers. I closely read and annotated the questionnaires, highlighted and labeled them. I did not test the main questionnaire, as most of the questions are based on those posed by eminent scholars of African literature in their classes (as featured in Lindfors 1991).
5. Results Thematic analysis of participants’ responses to the text yielded results concerning perceptions of the following three areas: (1) The definition of the European Self in relation to the African Other, (2) the makings of colonial discourse and (3) missionary intervention. As it is impossible in the space of this article to reproduce every individual
6 None of the participants had the necessary proficiency in English to face the tasks proposed in this reading practice. Following Itamar Even-Zohar’s article ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’ (1978), literature in translation is a literary system that facilitates the infiltration of literatures in peripheral positions (such as Nigerian literature in this case) into the national (Spanish) polysystem. This intercultural mediation perfectly fits the aims of my reading project. The very distinction between source text and translation is fundamental to understanding Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a novel with a marked bilingual base. The use of English in Achebe’s novel conveys a different worldview, sensibility, and way of life that does not bear any direct relation to those of the colonizer. In the same way, and using Lawrence Venuti’s phraseology, Fernando Santos’ translation preserves the peculiar ‘strangeness’ of the text and does not ‘domesticate’ it, eschewing the use of footnotes and explanatory paraphrases and creating a unique hybridism with Igbo lexis, accomplishing, in concordance with the register analysis of Halliday, McIntosh and Stevens (1964), Achebe’s notable linguistic feat: “a successful, hybrid accommodation between two sets of cultural assumptions, achieving maximum communicative force while respecting the intranslatability of certain local terms” (Punter 2000: 18). My understanding of the linguistic complexities of African literatures in translation is heavily indebted to conversations and e-mail communication with Dr Maya García de Vinuesa.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 106 terri ochiagha response to the second questionnaire, I will excerpt the most representative and significant answers as related to each of the thematic areas.
5.1. The definition of the European Self in relation to the African Other The main motivation for involvement in the project —expressed in the pre-reading questionnaire and reaffirmed after the initial reading and reappraisal of the text— was participants’ previous lack of exposure to African culture, history and literature. Sagrario, one of the most enthusiastic readers, considered this “unavailable knowledge” necessary to comprehend the continent’s “present circumstances”. Thus, involvement in the project reaffirmed the need of the Self to understand a hitherto ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’ Other. There were three tendencies in the participants’ expressions on Igbo Otherness as depicted in the text. The first was to point out similarities between Spanish/European and Igbo/African cultures and worldviews, and to insist on the universality of some of the situations that occur in the book. The second was to emphasize cultural differences while pointing out that disparities are not necessarily negative and need not imply cultural superiority/inferiority. The third tendency, and the least common, was to define indigenous character and traditions as distinctly opposite and irreconcilable to those of the West. The reader does not seek to bridge the distance between cultures, but reiterates the need for colonial intervention. For an example of the first tendency, let us consider the answer of Fernando, a factory worker, to the block of questions “What is the fundamental theme of Things Fall Apart? What is it exactly about? What did Achebe want to tell us in 1958 through a story about the disintegration of the Igbo society in Nigeria?”: “I think that he wanted us to make a comparison with European civilization, and maybe to make us reflect on past eras and realize the similarities between both societies”. Fernando’s responses to the second questionnaire consistently highlighted the tenuousness of the opposition between Self and Other prevalent in popular perception. Elsewhere, he insisted that all the characters of the novel are “normal people”, and that they had virtues and defects “like all of us”. He traced links between Spanish rural spoken tradition and Igbo orature and considered the tales and proverbs of the villagers “very wise and very similar to those we have over here: a form of wisdom transmitted generationally when subsistence depends exclusively on nature”. On the latter, David agreed: “The tales and proverbs are what I most liked. They are full of wisdom and easily adapted to any society. They are a very graphic example of these people’s worldview”. These participants’ connection between indigenous orature and wisdom is important, as most participants viewed Igbo traditions and customs through a veil of exoticism that does not often facilitate the comprehension of the text’s ethical thrust, as we will see. Abelardo’s comments on Okonkwo’s representative role in Things Fall Apart are notable considering some of his other answers to the questionnaire: “Okonkwo, despite his tragically flawed character, is the representative of pride in pertaining to a particular society; with all its implications, good and bad . . . you cannot respect or
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 reconsidering coduction: chinua achebe’s things fall apart 107 value other cultures if you do not appreciate or defend yours”. Abelardo considers this a universal theme and fully empathizes with Okonkwo’s anti-colonial struggle: “I love my country, my village, my religion, our customs, and get upset at anything that disparages or undervalues them”. The second tendency is the most widespread and is exemplified in varying degrees by Carlos, Mario, Sagrario, César, Cristina, and in some instances by David, as we will see in succeeding sections. Most of Isidro’s responses to both questionnaires typified the third tendency. For instance, in responding to the questions, “Do you identify with Okonkwo? Can you sympathize with him?”, he stressed (emphasis added) “I am a European and cannot identify with Okonkwo, although in some cases, I sympathize with him”. His persistence on Christian and Western cultural supremacy is further discussed in succeeding sections. Other participants, like Abelardo, dabbled intermittently in this tendency, but many of his responses tended to subvert sporadic shows of chauvinism. For example, he felt that “some of the customs of the peoples of Africa are incompatible with culture and Christian morals”. While his answer might be understood to purport the superiority of Western Christian civilization, in responses to other questions he vindicated pride in tradition and the defense of one’s own culture against foreign intervention.
5.2. The makings of colonial discourse One of the most important questions of the second questionnaire revolved around the novel’s memorable ending, in which the British District Commissioner ponders on his intended book: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. Participants were asked to evaluate the aptness of the title, the kind of discourse likely to appear in the book and the accuracy of its contents. With only one exception, participants agreed that the title of the District Commissioner’s book was improper and that its rendition of events in the novel would look down on indigenous religion and culture. The sole participant to dissent was Abelardo, who misunderstood the import of the question and subordinated his reading to the authorial figure by claiming that it was impossible to “know what the author meant by that ending” or to “get into the District Commissioner’s head”. This was probably caused by the introduction of the figure of the author in the first question. After all, “it is the singular encounter between reader and text-as-other, soliciting a singularly just response on the reader’s part that is at stake in ‘ethics and literature’” (Eskin 2004: 560). In their answers to the questions on The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, and without any previous reference to binary oppositions, participants were able to pinpoint the common tropes of African Otherness and the use of such in Western renditions of Africa. Carlos, for example, stated that “the title [of the District Commissioner’s Book] suffices to perceive that the book’s contents will not be an exact rendition of facts. Instead it will say that they [the villagers] have no culture, religion, or justice i.e. savages”. Fernando’s statement was very similar and also referred to the “manipulation” inherent in the depiction of villagers as “violent savages . . . unfeeling people dominated by useless
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 108 terri ochiagha beliefs”. Cristina referred to the self-image of Europe as “saviour of lost and wayward souls in a primitive state, which should be educated and civilized”. Mario insisted that “the vision given in Western culture in general and in European culture in particular is that African tribes are made up of uncivilised savages, with no morals and principles. As this book demonstrates, that vision of Africa is mistaken and that Europeans simply did not understand the philosophy of the tribes”, an opinion shared by the rest of the participants, including Isidro, who referred to the fact that the villagers portrayed in Things Fall Apart were mostly content with their way of life, did not need to be ‘pacified’ and that the District Commissioner’s judgement of their actions would be necessarily biased.
5.3. Missionary intervention Although there were specific questions on the representation of missionary work in the text, comments on religion seemed to permeate most of the written coductions of the participants. The most relevant observations concerned the validity of Christianity and/or the traditional pieties. For example, when asked to differentiate between Christianity and indigenous religion in Things Fall Apart participants indicated the polytheistic nature of the religion of Umuofia (while most participants called the deities “gods”, it is noteworthy that Isidro called them idols). César, Mario and Sagrario preferred traditional religion to Christianity. The latter praised the fact that: “[It] is based on their interpretation of nature. They believe in the earth goddess, the purveyor of life, whom they respect and venerate. Christianity is based on imposed beliefs with no real explanation”. Despite this condemnation, she did admit that “at least” Reverend Brown attempted to be more understanding. For Fernando, a practising Catholic, both Christianity and indigenous religions form the foundation of African and European societies and are a valid option in the quest of peace and well-being. David’s opinion was similar albeit more judgemental: “both religions are exactly the same, a series of beliefs and rituals transmitted to indoctrinate and subjugate people under the fear of God’s wrath”. In their answers to the question “What weaknesses inherent in Umuofia allowed its society to ‘fall apart’ at the colonial attack?”, four participants, Carlos, David, Mario and Cristina pointed out the stringent dimensions of the traditional pieties. Cristina used the word “superstition” to describe indigenous beliefs and referred to “a widespread lack of compassion”. Most participants considered the arrival of Christianity the principal source of conflict and yet an escape from the more constrictive aspects of traditional religion and culture. In this sense, all participants supported voluntary conversion to Christianity.
6. A control experiment: the Villaseca de la Sagra book group After the project, one of the most enthusiastic readers, Mario, proposed to includeThings Fall Apart on his village’s book group reading list. This unexpected development was a valuable opportunity to compare and contrast the efficacy of coduction as theorized by Booth and the revised notion of written coduction. After a meeting with the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 reconsidering coduction: chinua achebe’s things fall apart 109 coordinators of the group, they agreed to introduce the novel to their list on their terms (no questionnaires involved). A month later, the group held a session on Achebe’s novel. The book group was composed at the time of eleven women: an adult education officer (the moderator), a grocer, a librarian, a school teacher and seven housewives. The moderator asked each member to comment briefly on the book. Nine out of the eleven members found the book “interesting” and “informative”, while two found it boring. Like most of the participants of the ‘written’ coduction project, all the members complained bitterly about cultural aspects such as human sacrifice, twin murder and sexism. They were brief in their appraisals and seemed uncomfortable with my presence. Taking note of their reticence and overall perception of the text as a repository of (negative) cultural trivia, I decided to talk about aesthetic features of Things Fall Apart such as orature, parody, intertextuality and the use of symbol. I also discussed the makings of colonial discourse and compared some of the ‘horrors’ of traditional religion to equally bloody biblical incidents, highlighting that while there is no question about the execrable nature of human sacrifice, it is essential to understand the cultural and religious milieu in which it takes place. At the end of the ‘debate’ —by now an impromptu presentation— the members of the club admitted to having reached a greater understanding of the novel and declared that they had not realized the novel’s complexity for, as one of the members put it, they were “shocked” by its more “negative” events. At the end of the session, seven members of the club declared that they would like to read more African novels, bearing what they had learnt at the day’s session in mind.
7. Implications and conclusion The intention of the project was not to turn readers into devoted afrophiles, but rather to enable a serious deliberation on the makings of European discourse on African Otherness through their encounter with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart so as to overturn some of the widespread commonplaces linked to racist attitudes. The preliminary findings suggest that the proto-project was a success. The interest aroused by the anthropological details of the text might be unpalatable to postcolonial critics, but we have to consider the fact that we are dealing with lay readers. According to James Procter, “we still need to take seriously the fact that for the book groups [and by extension other lay readers] reading Things Fall Apart what is important is ‘it helped us see’, where for professional readers, the novel obscures or denies perspective in ways that unsettle the vicarious pleasures of the text” (2009: 190). Furthermore, “reader assumptions about the book’s locality, and the disconnected traditions of reading within and outside the academy means that the online readers do not carry the baggage of ‘lit crit’, and therefore cannot be accused of ‘echoing’ earlier institutional positions on African literature” (Procter 2009: 193). It is only natural that lay readers should be fascinated by distant realities. The problem lies in foregrounding them as evidence of cultural or racial inferiority. This occurred very rarely in this project.
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Different readers will of course respond differently to a postcolonial text like Things Fall Apart. In this project, varying degrees of enthusiasm and comprehension among participants were not determined by educational level, religious affiliation, political leanings or geographical location. I wish to highlight that these readings are not representative of a Spanish readership (even though the cultural imperatives of the Spanish nation were the fulcrum on which the entire project was based), but I concur with Procter that to assume a particular kind of response as representative of a particular location, culture or ethnicity, there is a need for “a much more comprehensive, quantitative study (or realistically, series of studies) of audiences globally” (2009: 181). Expectedly, the three practising Christians that participated in the project did not openly criticize any aspect of missionary intervention, but were mostly predisposed to voluntary conversion rather than the enforced indoctrination practiced by Mr. Smith. Isidro —who had initially agreed that the African past “was one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” in the first questionnaire— maintained an inflexible stance on the need for evangelization. While he did become conscious of the reductionism inherent in colonial renditions of Africa as embodied in the short paragraph devoted to Okonkwo’s story in The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, he insisted on the West’s prerogative to eliminate customs like ‘idol’ worship, polygamy and human sacrifice. This particular participant, eighty-one years old at the time, had spent his youth under the right-wing and ultra-conservative dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, and this may in some ways account for the cultural imperialism that permeated most of his answers. Abelardo was thirty-six at the time of the project and sympathized with General Franco’s regime. He adopted a reading that while consistent with Isidro’s avowal of religious superiority also helped him empathise with the despondency a traditionalist feels when the cultural and social substratum is endangered. His compassion for Okonkwo’s plight thereby led him to condemn colonial violence and reductionist discourse and to reconsider some of his views on Africans and their adherence to ‘inscrutable’ beliefs and customs. Three other participants (César, Sagrario and Cristina) were young adults during Spain’s transition to democracy in the late seventies, a period when fully embracing other cultures and lifestyles became a liberating gesture. Both Sagrario and César identify strongly with left- wing political values. This idiosyncrasy pervades the first two participants’ aversion to the instances of military, religious and discursive colonialism. Cristina already held firm views on the colonial enterprise and through the text discovered some of its other aspects. In her case, further knowledge did not subvert earlier points of view on the supposed sexist, superstitious, and even violent nature of pre-colonial societies, but rather reinforced them. Carlos, Mario, David, Fernando and Abelardo (all of whom had varied political ideologies) had not reflected previously on colonialism or image gestation, but through this reading activity attained and further explored fresh perspectives on colonialism and colonial discourse. A comparison of their first and second questionnaires shows that their reading evidences this process of ethical reassessment.
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To put it succinctly, the reading praxis proposed by this proto-project had more effect on general perceptions and previously assimilated generalizations on Africans than on strongly held opinions based on intense or life-long reflection. The ethical power of literature does not consist in uprooting deeply seated ideological views on such political issues as colonialism or immigration. And while the extent of these modifications, as Booth observed in relation to his own theoretical construct, cannot be placed or quantified, the responses garnered through the present method did point to an indirect, and not for this reason less important, modification: participants questioned received images, indirectly subverting the prejudices resulting from received tropes and topoi in image creation. What is important here is that the novel and the reading methodology propounded elicited a deliberation on the makings of a discourse that is still being used to subjugate the Other in our midst. This was the one lesson that all the participants, irrespective of other factors, were able to appreciate through the reviewed application of Booth’s coduction. The book group session proved that a discussion among independent readers unused to the nuances of high literature is likely to focus on anthropological details and even replicate predominant discourse on an enigmatic African ‘Otherness’. The inability of the moderator of the Things Fall Apart session at the Villaseca de la Sagra book group to guide the discussion towards the text’s portrayal of the African experience and its usurpation in Western discourse would have failed to instigate any mode of intercultural engagement with the text. My intervention helped to explicate issues that Booth presupposes would have happened in the act of discussing the text, but this intrusion was unnecessarily leading and impractical as a part of an ethically-oriented reading praxis. Responding to a questionnaire such as the one supplied in the project allows readers to revise previous conceptions prompted by critical inexperience. I do believe that recording a posterior conversation among readers in order to register possible changes in outlook following written coduction would have had further advantages. This was the project’s main methodological flaw. It would be interesting to study the effects that setting up a website in which an ‘ethical critic’ as guide would synchronize the different phases of the activity and where participants, in anonymity, would be able to read each other’s second coductions, and then debate among themselves in a forum habilitated for the purpose, a modified form of the transnational online chat hosted by the British Council’s encompass culture website, with book groups in Scotland, England and Nigeria within the framework of The Developing Diasporas Project.7 This would indeed spark off significant intercultural communication between the text as ‘Other’ and the reader, and
7 The Developing Diasporas is an ahrc-funded project (2006-2010) exploring the way in which readers in different places respond to postcolonial and diasporic fiction (‹http://www.developingdiasporas.com/›). For more on this project, see Procter (2009). The earliest draft of this article was presented at the Things Fall Apart at 50 Conference, celebrated at the Institute of English Studies, University of London in October 2008. Although my research was not inspired by the Developing Diasporas project, Dr Procter was chair of my panel and his own presentation alerted me to his project, which partly converges with my own research interests. I am indebted to Dr Procter for sending me this article and drawing my attention to the work of John Guillory. The reception area of
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 112 terri ochiagha between readers as political citizens. The anonymity offered by the Internet also facilitates discussion on polemical subjects. While I have focused my own proto-experience on the first major novel to write back to the Empire, other texts that reflect social injustice or the experience of marginalised Others can also be read in the same way. Coduction is in no way dismissive of book groups, and could also be adapted for use in such associations. If efficiently organized, it would possibly prompt Spanish publishing houses to publish, promote and translate not just African literatures, but African-authored books on African history and culture. This would be further facilitated if the Eurocentric confines of most universities were broken down, and every literature instructor realized the ethical and artistic potential of ‘Other’ literatures. Effective coduction involves more complexities than can be adequately discussed in the scope of this essay. And yet I would argue that through the process involved in writing responses to a set of questions designed to underscore the potential of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for intercultural dialogue, a group of lay Spanish readers was able to query the image of Africa that promotes an attitude of patronizing paternalism at its best and incensed incomprehension and rejection at its worst. This is significant in a society where racism rears its ugly head with alarming frequency.
Works Cited Achebe, Chinua 2006 (1958): Things Fall Apart: Expanded Edition. London: Heinemann. —1976a: ‘Africa and her Writers’. Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York: Anchor. 19-30. —1976b: ‘What do African Intellectuals Read?’ Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York: Anchor. 40-41. —1986 (1958): Todo se derrumba (Things Fall Apart). Trans. Fernando Santos. Madrid: Alfaguara. —1990a: ‘Impediments to Dialogue between North and South’. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor. 21-30. —1990b: ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor. 1-21. —1990c: ‘The Novelist as Teacher’. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor. 40-47. —1991: ‘African Literature as Restoration of Celebration’. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford, eds. Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Oxford: Heinemann. 1-10. —2003: ‘My Home under Imperial Fire’. Home and Exile. Edinburgh: Canongate. 1-37. Balfour, Sebastian and Alejandro Quiroga 2007: The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy. Oxford: Oxford UP. the project website in which readers discussed their readings of Things Fall Apart can be accessed at ‹http://www. devolvingdiasporas.com/reception.htm›.
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Booth, Wayne 1988: The Company we Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: California UP. —1998: ‘Why Banning Ethical Criticism is a Serious Mistake’. Philosophy and Literature 22: 366-93. Boyaltzis, Richard E. 1998: Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code Development. London: Sage. Corkell, David 2005: ‘Multiple National Identities: Immigration and Racism in Spain and Portugal’. Brian Jenkins and Soyros A. Sofos, eds. Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe. London and New York: Routledge. 145-61. Cornejo, Enrique et al. 2009: Inmigración, integración, mediación intercultural y participación ciudadana. Alicante: Club Universitario. Even-Zohar, Itamar 2009 (1978): ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’. David Damrosch et al., eds. The Princeton Source Book in Comparative Literature. New Jersey: Princeton UP. 240-59. Eskin, Michael 2004: ‘Introduction: The Double “Turn” to Ethics and Literature’.Poetics Today 25: 557-72. Flesler, Daniela 2008: The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration. West Lafayette: Purdue UP. García Las Palmas, Ayoze 2007: ‘“Mis novelas son una propuesta de acción”: Donato Ndongo – Escritor’. ABC 22 nov. ‹http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/histori co-22-11-2007/abc/Canarias/mis-novelas-son-una-propuesta-de-accion-donato- ndongo-_-escritor_1641397706708.html› (Accessed 25 June, 2008) Gikandi, Simon 2006: ‘Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature’. Chinua Achebe. Simon Gikandi, ed. Things Fall Apart: Expanded Edition. London: Heinemann. ix-xix. Guillory, John 2002: ‘The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading’. Marjorie Garber et al., eds. The Turn to Ethics. New York: Routledge: 29-47. Halliday, M.A.K., A. Mcintosh and P. Strevens 1964: The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longman. Jenkins, Brian and Soyros A. Sofos 2005: ‘Languages of Racism within Contemporary Europe: A Claim to Respect Theoretical Perspective’. Brian Jenkins and Soyros A. Sofos, eds. Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe. London: Routledge. 7-30. Lewis, Marvin 2007: An Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea: Between Colonialism and Dictatorship. Columbia: Missouri UP. Lincoln, S. Yvonna and Egon G. Guba 1985: Naturalistic Inquiry. London: Sage. Lindfors, Bernth 1990: ‘Introduction’. Bernth Lindfors, ed. Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. New York: MLA. 15-20. Miampika, Landry-Wilfried and Maya García de Vinuesa 2009: ‘Migration, Racism and Postcolonial Studies in Spain’. Graham Huggan and Idil Law, eds. Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. 92-102.
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Nnomerele, Patrick C. 2010: ‘The Plight of a Hero in Achebe’sThings Fall Apart’. Harold Bloom, ed. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Infobase. 39-51. Nussbaum, Martha Craven 1995: Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon. Onwuegbuzie, A.J. and K.M.T. Collins 2007: ‘A Typology of Mixed Methods Sampling Designs in Social Science Research’. The Qualitative Report 12.2: 281-316. Patton, Michael Quinn 2002: Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. London: Sage. Procter, James 2009: ‘Reading, Taste, and Postcolonial Studies: Professional and Lay Readers of Things Fall Apart’. Interventions 11.2: 180-98. Punter, David 2000: Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Santaolalla, Isabel 2002: ‘Ethnic and Racial Configurations in Contemporary Spanish Culture’. Jo Labanyi, ed. Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice. Oxford: Oxford UP. 55-72. Venuti, Lawrence 1995: The Translator’s Invisibility. London: Routledge.
Received 19 May 2011 Revised version accepted 16 February 2012
Dr Terri Ochiagha lectures at the University of Alicante and has been elected Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College (University of Oxford), where she will work toward the completion of her book manuscript, merging her interests in Nigerian first-generation writing and colonial historiography. She has published her work in international journals and volumes such as Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture and the Dictionary of African Biography (Oxford UP).
Address: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Universidad de Alicante. Ap. de Correos 99. 03080, Alicante, Spain.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 97–114· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32 issn 0210-6124
A Constructional Account of Advising: Construal Operations and Social Conventions
Nuria Del Campo Martínez Universidad de La Rioja [email protected]
The present paper explores the constructional composition of illocutionary meaning from the perspective of the Lexical Constructional Model or lcm propounded by Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza and Ricardo Mairal. In the lcm, illocutionary meaning is either the result of filling in constructional variables or of affording metonymic access to high-level situational cognitive models. In this study I examine the cognitive grounding of constructions carrying an advising value. It is my contention that the constructional realization of advising is based upon linguistic mechanisms that exhibit instantiation potential for relevant parts of the corresponding semantic structure in relation to the context of situation. The resulting account seeks to unveil the idiosyncrasies of the act of advising based on the interplay between different kinds of construal operations and general cultural conventions captured in the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model.
Keywords: illocutionary meaning; illocutionary constructions; Lexical-Constructional Model; advising; conventionalization; Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model . . . Un enfoque construccional de los consejos: operaciones construales y convenciones sociales
El presente artículo examina la composición construccional del significado ilocutivo desde la perspectiva del Modelo Léxico Construccional o mlc desarrollado por Ruiz de Mendoza y Mairal. En el mlc, el significado ilocutivo deriva o bien de la realización de los elementos variables de las construcciones o bien de la activación metonímica de modelos cognitivos situacionales de alto nivel. Este estudio explora la motivación cognitiva de construcciones ilocutivas con valor de aconsejar. Es mi objetivo demostrar que la realización construccional de aconsejar está basada en procedimientos lingüísticos capaces de activar partes relevantes de su estructura semántica de acuerdo con el contexto de situación. Los resultados de este análisis tratan de desvelar las idiosincrasias propias del acto de habla de aconsejar que resultan de la interacción entre operaciones de construcción lingüística y convenciones culturales definidas en el Modelo Cognitivo de Coste-Beneficio.
Palabras clave: ilocución; construcciones ilocutivas; Modelo Léxico Construccional; aconsejar; convencionalización; Modelo Cognitivo de Coste-Beneficio
—115— 116 nuria del campo martínez
1. Introduction The study of illocution has deserved the attention of a significant number of researchers within the most diverse fields and frameworks. Traditional theories of speech acts, however, lack an explanation on the relative weight of codification and inference in illocutionary production. Some theories, such as Searle’s convention rules (1969), the systemic-functional approach (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), and Dik’s functional account (1989, 1997) give priority to the role of codification. Others emphasize the role of inference (Bach and Harnish 1979, Leech 1983; Levinson 1983). Those accounts which give priority to the role of inference hold that illocutionary interpretation is always the output of inferential activity. Those approaches in which codification occupies a central position claim that inference is not enough to explain illocutionary interpretation, and that basic speech acts are interpreted without the need of inference by means of the three universal sentence types. The remaining speech act types need to be inferred from the literal meaning on the basis of contextual information (Searle 1975; Sperber and Wilson 1995) or can be codified in terms of grammatical conversions (Dik 1989, 1997) corresponding to one of the general functions of language (Halliday 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Both theories are fraught with difficulties and neither on its own is capable of accounting for all aspects involved in illocution. Inferential theories, on the one hand, overlook the existence of the three sentence types in most languages and the codification of speech act meaning in realizational resources with an illocutionary force which can be easily identified. Theories based on codification, on the other hand, do not account for the motivation and constraints of illocutionary meaning. The flaws of these theories call for an integrated approach that considers both codification and inference and takes into account the motivation and constraints of illocution.1 The development of Cognitive Linguistics offers plausible solutions to these shortcomings with the consideration of the cognitive processes that take place in speech act production. Within Cognitive Linguistics, illocutionary meaning is regarded as a matter of metonymic operations that apply to specific kinds of cognitive models labeled illocutionary scenarios (Panther and Thornburg 1998, 2004) or high-level situational models (Ruiz de Mendoza 2007). More recently, cognitive studies have supplied evidence of the existence and functionality of conventional speech acts and illocutionary constructions, defined as linguistic configurations consisting of fixed and variable elements which are highly specialized to convey specific illocutionary values (Pérez 2001; Pérez and Ruiz de Mendoza 2002; Stefanowitsch 2003; Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi 2007; Brdar- Szabó 2009; Baicchi and Ruiz de Mendoza 2011). Such insights into the constructional composition of speech acts have paved the way for the incorporation of illocution into
1 I would like to express gratitude to Dr Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (Universidad de La Rioja) for his comments on previous versions of this paper. I am also grateful to my anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions. Any inaccuracies and mistakes that may remain are my own responsibility. Financial support for this research has been provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, grant reference ffi 2010-17610/filo.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 a constructional account of advising 117 a meaning construction model of language called the Lexical Constructional Model or lcm (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2008, 2011; Mairal and Ruiz de Mendoza, 2009). The lcm, which is heavily grounded in Cognitive Semantics and Construction Grammar, is concerned with developing a comprehensive theory of meaning construction that accounts for all facets of the process. The model is structured around four levels of description: level 1 deals with argument structure representations; level 2 captures implicated and explicated meaning captured by low-level situational cognitive models; level 3 deals with implicated and explicated illocutionary meaning; and level 4 handles discourse structure and relations. Each of the levels is either subsumed into a higher configuration or acts as a cue for the activation of relevant conceptual structure that yields meaning derivation. Two methodological assumptions guide the lcm approach. The first has to do with the idea that all levels of linguistic description may make use of the same or at least comparable cognitive processes. The second assumption relates to the existence of a continuum between linguistic categories. Both assumptions attempt to comply with adequacy criteria of the type discussed in Butler (2009).2 The present contribution is a case study of the category of advising and of the illocutionary constructions for this category within the lcm. The type of illocutionary constructions that will be examined consist of a specification of linguistic realizations and a number of meaning conditions structured in the form of a high-level cognitive model. The formal part of the constructions includes a wide range of linguistic properties such as sentence types, lexical items and suprasegmental patterns. The semantic part includes the knowledge of the semantic features that characterize an illocutionary act. Based on real data drawn from electronic corpora, this study carries out a description of the most conventional realizations of advising. I explore the grounding and realization of constructions carrying advising values by focusing on the relationship between their form and their meaning. I contend that the realization of advising is based on linguistic mechanisms that exhibit different degrees of instantiation potential for relevant parts of the corresponding cognitive model. It is shown that the higher the number of parameters of the cognitive model which are instantiated through a construction, the higher its degree of codification for the performance of advising. I finally argue that the lcm develops adequate tools for the development of an integrated account of illocution. The remainder of the present paper is structured in the following way: section 2 provides an overview of the main assumptions held within the lcm approach; section 3 puts forward a description of the semantic grounding and the conventions associated with the act of advising and the formulation of a high-level cognitive model for this speech act type; section 4 focuses on the analysis of constructions for advising, exploring their motivation and constraints. This study supports the lcm approach to illocution and
2 For further information on the lcm, I refer the reader to the Lexicom group research webpage: ‹http://www. lexicom.es›.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 118 nuria del campo martínez provides evidence of its explanatory power. Finally, section 5 summarizes the essential proposals of this paper and suggests some possible lines for further research.
2. The Lexical Constructional Model approach to illocution The constructions postulated in the lcm capture different layers of meaning in a highly conventionalized way. The semantic component of the lcm distinguishes four different levels of construction types. At level 1, constructions are described as argument non- idiomatic representations containing elements of syntactically relevant semantic interpretation. Argument structure constructions are based on the Goldbergian approach (1995, 2006) to construction types (i.e. ditransitive, caused motion, resultative, etc.). Non-argument structure constructions signal different levels of non-argumental meaning. Level 2 or implicational constructions capture inferential meaning that arises from cases of everyday interaction in terms of low-level cognitive models. Level 3 constructions deal with conventionalized illocutionary meaning that results from the way speakers interact on the basis of high-level inferencing. Level 4 deal with discourse aspects, including cohesion and coherence phenomena. In contrast to argument structure constructions, constructions belonging to levels 2, 3 and 4 display higher degrees of idiomaticity, as they combine more complex patterns. The present work is concerned with the description of level 3, or illocutionary constructions. In the lcm, illocutionary meaning is treated as the result of affording metonymic access to high-level situational cognitive models by means of activating one relevant part in them. These models are constructed on the basis of generalizations over cases of everyday interaction where people attempt to satisfy their desires or other people’s desires or express their feelings about them. Everyday social interaction is captured by low-level situational models, such as taking a taxi or going to a restaurant, which constitute the base for implicational meaning (see Ruiz de Mendoza 2007). While the access to low-level models yields implicated meaning, the activation of high-level models produces illocutionary meaning, which can become conventionalized and associated with a constructional characterization (Ruiz de Mendoza and Gonzálvez-García 2011). For instance, the utterance What have you been doing in my room? at level 2 exploits a low-level model about intrusive behavior. The same utterance at level3 conveys the additional value of a complaint. This value is obtained by activating high-level knowledge about people’s reactions in undesired situations. If some state of affairs is presented as negative to us, we often expect other people not to bring it about. This is possible because high-level situational cognitive models capture cultural generalizations that are part of our knowledge of the world. These generalizations carry different types of pragmatic information like power, politeness, optionality and cost-benefit variables (Pérez and Ruiz de Mendoza2002 ). The constructional conventionalization of illocutionary meaning results from the interplay between construal operations (i.e. high-level inferencing) and general socio-cultural conventions specifying the principles of interaction. Such socio-cultural conventions are
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 a constructional account of advising 119 articulated in a cognitive model called the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, first proposed by Pérez and Ruiz de Mendoza (2002) and later developed by Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi (2007) and Baicchi and Ruiz de Mendoza (2011). The Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model is described as a high level cognitive model that stipulates that speakers are culturally bound to help other people if it is within their range of abilities and is presented as lying at the root of linguistic expressions used to convey speech act meaning. The conventions of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model are part of our knowledge about the world and because of this they are included in high-level representations of interactional meaning. This is the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model as originally postulated by Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi (2007: 111-12):
(a) If it is manifest to A that a particular state of affairs is not beneficial to B, and if A has the capacity to change that state of affairs, then A should do so. (b) If it is manifest to A that a potential state of affairs is not beneficial to B, then A is not expected to bring it about. (c) If it is manifest to A that a potential state of affairs is beneficial to B, then A is expected to bring it about provided he has the capacity to do so. (d) If it is manifest to A that it is not manifest to B that a potential state of affairs is (regarded as) beneficial for A, A is expected to make this manifest to B. (e) If it is manifest to A that it is not manifest to B that a potential state of affairs is beneficial for B, A is expected to make this manifest to B. (f ) If it is manifest to A that a state of affairs is beneficial to B and B has brought it about, A should feel pleased about it and make this feeling manifest to B. (g) If it is manifest to B that A has changed a state of affairs to B’s benefit, B should feel grateful about A’s action and make this feeling manifest to B. (h) If it is manifest to A that A has not acted as directed by parts (a), (b) and (c) of the ‘cost- benefit’ model, A should feel regretful about this situation and make this feeling manifest to B. (i) If it is manifest to B that A has not acted as directed by parts (a), (b) and (c) of the ‘cost- benefit’ model and A has made his regret manifest to B, B should feel forgiveness for A’s inaction and make it manifest to A. (j) If it is manifest to A and B that a particular state of affairs is not beneficial to B but A has no power to change it to B’s benefit, A should still feel sympathy for B over the non-beneficial state of affairs and make this manifest to B. (k) If it is manifest to A that A is responsible for a certain state of affairs to be to A’s benefit, A may feel proud about this situation and make it manifest to B.
From this perspective, speech act meaning arises from the metonymic activation of the conventions that provide the semantic base of illocutionary categories. For example, an utterance like I am thirsty functions as a request based on the socio-cultural convention that abides to help others when they make it manifest that they are affected by a negative state
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 120 nuria del campo martínez of affairs. Illocutionary constructions are linguistic resources capable of providing relevant points of access to high-level situational cognitive models within the context of situation. The degree of explicitness of constructions depends on the speaker’s communicative purpose or the availability of contextual information. The utteranceI am thirsty clearly indicates that the speaker is affected negatively by the state of affairs, which produces a straightforward request interpretation. In more implicit cases, that information needs to be derived from the context. A case in point is the interpretation of the utterance I am alone as a request, which requires contextual information indicating that the speaker does not want to be alone. Contextual parameters contribute to specifying the intended meaning and allow deriving the implicit part by means of a reasoning schema along the following lines: if the speaker is alone and he does not want to be alone, then he is asking the addressee to stay with him or to find someone who bears his company. The linguistic expression supplies the condition part of the schema, but the consequence needs to be accessed metonymically. The inference results from the metonymic activation of the part of the high-level model of requesting that is relevant for illocutionary interpretation. This part of the high-level model of requesting is based on part (a) of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, which stipulates that we have to bring about those states of affairs which are beneficial to other people. The frequent use of expressions originally involved in the selection of points of access to a high- level model conventionalizes the illocutionary force conveyed and gives rise to entrenched constructions. This is the case of constructions such asCan You XVP?, Will You XVP? or Would You XNP?, whose request value was initially inferred by activating the addressee’s ability and willingness to act. The request meaning of these constructions has eventually become conventionalized therefore making it unnecessary to work out the reasoning schema. As may be expected, those constructions with an entrenched illocutionary meaning represent optimal devices in the performance of a speech act category due to their ability to produce a default interpretation. Conversely, those which are not conventionalized, require inferential activity to convey their illocutionary meaning. TheI Need XP, I Want XP or I Wish XP sequences are examples of constructions which require a specific context to produce a request. Thus, in theLCM approach, the conventionalization of illocution in sequences that produce default meaning values is compatible with inferential activity from the context. Conventionalized constructions range from full codification to different degrees of conventionalization. Codified constructions activate the defining parameters of the high-level cognitive model of a speech act type. Their use produces an easy illocutionary interpretation which can be cancelled out contextually. For example, constructions based on performative predicates are capable of instantiating the full high-level cognitive model. Conventionalization occurs with the usage of a construction in a given context. In broad terms, conventionalized constructions originally produced inferred illocutionary meaning which became entrenched. This view of illocutionary performance provides an explanation for the reasons which make certain constructions more appropriate than others for the expression of a speech act category. The higher the degree of codification of a construction, the easier it is to grasp the illocutionary value conveyed. By contrast,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 a constructional account of advising 121 if a construction is implicit but still has instantiation potential for a high-level cognitive model, it is likely to become conventionalized for an illocutionary value. This research takes sides with the notion of illocutionary constructions put forward in the lcm and with the formulation of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model as the semantic base of speech act categories. The analysis of constructions carried out in the next section explores the theoretical implications of the lcm approach to illocution in relation to a broad range of instances of advising.
3. The semantics of advising Advising is used to offer people a recommendation about how they should act if they are involved in a negative situation. Acts of advising are grounded in the socio-cultural convention according to which we have to bring about those states of affairs that are beneficial for others. This convention forms part of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model and reads as follows:
If it is manifest to A that a potential state of affairs is beneficial to B, then A is expected to bring it about provided he has the capacity to do so. (Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi 2007: 111)
The act of advising is characterized by the benefit that it intends to involve for the addressee. It may be argued that all the other features of advising depend on the benefit component. As far as the optionality associated with advising is concerned, it is determined by the fact that the addressee is both the person who carries out the action and the beneficiary. Given that advising involves a benefit to the addressee, it offers a high degree of optionality. In orders, the addressee’s optionality is restricted by the speaker’s power. In requests, the addressee’s optionality is constrained by the workings of politeness conventions. In opposition to this, in advising the addressee’s optionality is not constrained by any principles. Since the outcome of the addressee’s decision only affects him, he has freedom to decide upon the realization of the action. Something similar occurs with the type of power that characterizes advising. In advising, speakers prototypically have what I shall refer to as knowledge power or authority over their addressees that stems from their greater understanding of a situation (Verschueren 1985). In contrast to the power that is characteristic of orders, the kind of knowledge authority related to advising does not reduce the addressee’s optionality, but merely entitles him to attempt to influence the addressee’s future actions. The degree of mitigation of acts of advising is also related with the dimension of benefit. Because advising can be perceived as an imposing act, a certain amount of mitigation should be expected, in order to make it clear that the speaker wishes to show the addressee a potential course of action rather than to impose it onto him. In this it resembles requests, although the use of mitigation responds to different motivations in each case. A request is mitigated to minimize the cost that the performance of the proposed action involves for the addressee. Advising seeks the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 122 nuria del campo martínez addressee’s benefit, and there is thus no cost that needs to be reduced in the realization of this act. This motivates consideration of the benefit parameter in explaining the nature of its associated characteristics of advising. For this reason, the semantic structure of advising proposed in this study and which takes the form of a high-level cognitive model is based on the benefit dimension. The high-level cognitive model —or generic structure— of advising generalizes over cases of interaction where people tell others what they should do in order to bring about a state of affairs that is beneficial for them. Some possible low-level cognitive models of advising may be the following:
(a) B appears to be involved in a negative situation. A believes that a course of action would help B to change the negative situation. A makes B aware of such a course of action. B may take the course of action proposed. (b) B appears to be involved in a negative situation. A believes that a course of action would help B to change the negative situation. A makes B aware of the potential benefit of such a course of action. B may be willing to obtain the benefit. B may take the course of action proposed. (c) B makes A aware that he is involved in a negative situation. A believes that a course of action would help B to change the negative situation. A makes B aware of such a course of action. B may take the course of action proposed. (d) B asks A’s opinion about what he should do to change a negative situation in which he is involved. A thinks about a course of action that would help B to change the negative situation into one that is beneficial. A makes B aware of such a course of action. B may take the course of action proposed.
These low-level models of advising have generic structure in common upon which the high-level cognitive model is constructed. This generic structure captures the semantics of advising:
(e) B appears to be involved in a negative situation. (f ) A believes that a course of action would help B to change the negative situation. (g) A makes B aware of such a course of action. (h) A makes B aware of the potential benefit of such a course of action. (i) B may be willing to obtain the benefit. (j) B may take the course of action proposed.
This generic structure is realized through a number of constructional realizations with instantiation potential for one or more of its parameters. Some of the most common constructional realizations of the generic structure of advising are illustrated in the utterances below:
(1) You’re just lonely, Hank. Take some pills. You need to sleep. (Coca) (2) You should eat salad every day. (Bnc)
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 a constructional account of advising 123
(3) How about some music? (Coca) (4) When you come back, you can show me your treasures. It will do you good to have a bit of a distraction. (Coca) (5) It may be a good idea to exercise with a qualified exercise professional for at least your first couple of sessions. (Coca) (6) If you are a serious writer who can’t find a publisher, I would advise you to wait until the right editor comes along. (Coca)
Each of these utterances activates a different part of the generic structure and can be interpreted as a piece of advice in the appropriate context. Utterance (1) instantiates the part of the generic structure which presents the addressee as involved in a negative situation. Utterance (2) points to the part of the generic structure in which the speaker considers a course of action that could help the addressee to change the negative situation. Utterance (3) spells out the part of the generic structure that requests the addressee’s consideration about bringing about a state of affairs that is beneficial for him. The use of the interrogative sentence type secures the addressee’s optionality to decide, which makes the act of advising more explicit. Utterance (4) activates the part of the generic structure in which the speaker makes the addressee aware of the potential benefits that the realization of the proposed action would report to him. The same meaning condition is expressed in utterance (5). Finally, utterance (6), which displays the highest degree of codification for advising, manages to instantiate the full generic structure through the use of a performative verb. The next section shows that these constructions exhibit peculiarities that are motivated by the context of situation.
4. The realization of advising 4.1. Imperative advising constructions Imperative constructions do not seem to be a very explicit way of performing the act of advising. This is due to the fact that the inherent imposition conveyed by the imperative form clashes with the optionality that is proper of advising. It is possible, however, to reduce the imposition of the imperative sentence type by means of linguistic devices like the adverb please, hedges and conditional expressions. In so doing, the variables of optionality and mitigation that characterize advising are activated, and the act is made more explicit. Let us see how these devices increase the degree of codification of imperative constructions for advising:
(7) Consider XVP Consider getting a housekeeper twice monthly if the budget allows. (Coca)
This construction requests the addressee’s consideration about the situation he has to change to his benefit. Because the speaker simply asks the addressee to evaluate the potential
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 124 nuria del campo martínez benefits of performing an action, the construction is not felt as impositive. In utterance 7( ) above, the addressee’s optionality is further communicated through a conditional sentence. The hypothetical dimension implied by the conditional, together with the fact that it is up to the addressee to decide if the condition holds, increases the optionality of the act, and consequently, makes it more appropriate. The adverb please is also an excellent means for increasing the addressee’s optionality towards the piece of advice. Here is one example:
(8) Please consider volunteering. (Coca)
The use of adverb please in (8) makes it explicit that the piece of advice is given only because it is the speaker’s belief that the action will be beneficial for the addressee and that the addressee is free to decide whether or not to carry out the action. The use of a persuasive device of this type indicates that the speaker acknowledges the addressee’s freedom to decide upon his course of action. This increases the degree of optionality, which in turn softens the imposition of the imperative, mitigating the force of the act.
(9) Think About XVP Think about buying an apartment, a condominium unit or a cooperative residence. (Coca)
The reasoning schema behind this construction is the same as in the previous case, with the difference that the verb used here requests a less careful evaluation by the addressee. The use of this verb brings about a different form of parametrizing the advising meaning of the construction. As can be noticed in (9) above, the explicitness of the construction produces a default interpretation of the utterance as a piece of advice. This constructional type can also admit the use of a mitigator in order to decrease the force of the imperative. The adverb please is once again a common resource which can be used in this respect. Consider the communicative effects of this lexical item in the following utterance:
(10) Please think about providing blue bags half the size of the ones we buy now so that old ladies can carry their old newspapers out to the garbage. (Coca)
The use of please in these constructional realizations appeals to the addressee’s rationality. The adverb attempts to persuade the addressee to carry out an action that is presented as reporting benefit to him. In this way, this persuasive device acknowledges his freedom and therefore activates the variables of optionality and mitigating. However, the adverb please may also signal some authoritative insistence on the part of the speaker, which would be motivated by his desire to get the addressee to follow the advice. In contexts of intimacy between the participants, the speaker would persuade the addressee to do what he believes is beneficial to him, and mitigating devices such as please would be felt as impositive mechanisms aimed at moving the addressee into performing the action.
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4.2. Declarative advising constructions The declarative form is the most unspecified in meaning of the three sentence types (Risselada 1993). Declarative sentences only involve the presentation of a future state of affairs. This makes the declarative form compatible with the expression of most speech acts, but at the same time, it also makes them less specified for the performance of a particular illocution. It is therefore necessary to consider the use of other linguistic mechanisms with instantiation potential for relevant parts of the generic structure. The use of these devices manages to produce highly specialized declarative constructions for advising:
(11) I Advise You XVP Well, I advise you to work hard, and not to look back into your past. (Bnc)
The advising meaning can be made explicit by using a performative. verb 3 The interpretation of constructions like the one illustrated above is cued by the explicit use of the performative verb. The example in (11) activates the full generic structure, thereby giving rise to a straightforward advising reading. At the same time, the performative verb endows the piece of advice with a forceful impact, which is justified by the need to make clear the speaker’s desire to help. As expected, the variable element of the construction must denote an addressee-controllable activity in order to yield an advising reading. The constituent element can be further mitigated by using a conditional form:
(12) I would advise you to start getting in touch with your lawyer now. (Coca)
The conditional form in (12) suggests that the speaker is not actually giving advice but merely pondering what his advice would be if the addressee was involved in a negative situation. This allows the addressee to decide whether or not to carry out the action when the condition described applies. A further type of realization for the act of advising that makes use of the conditional tense is illustrated in the example below:
(13) If I Were You I Would XVP If I were you, I’d take the money and run. (Coca)
3 The term “performative verb” was first introduced by Austin (1962) in the early times of speech act theory. Performative utterances refer to those speech acts which make explicit their illocutionary force by means of a verb. The Dikkian (1989, 1997) approach to illocution is compatible with Austin’s description of performative utterances. In FG, the illocutionary value of explicit performative utterances is obtained derivationally from a basic sentence type through the use of an explicit performative verb (e.g. the offer verb inMay I offer a cup of coffee? transforms the question into an offer). In opposition to theFG account, the perspective adopted by the LCM maintains that the fact that certain explicit illocutionary values cannot be predicted from grammatical forms calls for a non-derivational perspective and proposes that illocutionary meaning is obtained through conventionalized constructions or inferential activity based on high-level situational cognitive models.
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This construction, which is one of the most conventional for advising, consists of a fixed conditional expression (i.e. if I were you) and a sentence in the first person singular subject. The meaning value is simple to grasp. The speaker describes a hypothetical situation that is negative for the addressee and how he would act if he were the addressee. Because everybody seeks the best for themselves, it is implicit that the specified action is beneficial in nature. Furthermore, the conditional sentence indicates that the speaker is not really considering performing the action, but merely thinking what his course of action would be for the addressee’s sake. This activates the benefit component of advising, since, if the action described in the predication is performed by the addressee, it will be beneficial for him. The degree of conventionalization of this constructional realization is such that the conditional expression can be left out without hindering its interpretation as a piece of advice:
(14) I would take the amber leather suitcase out of the closet. (Coca)
This constructional variant may not seem explicit for the realization of advising, given that it does not point to the addressee as the person who is to perform the action. Nevertheless, it is such implicitness that instantiates the variables of optionality and mitigation characteristic of advising. Since the addressee is not presented as the agent of the action, his optionality is considerably increased, and so is the degree of mitigation conveyed.
(15) You Must XVP You must rest. (Bnc)
One of the most recurring ways of specifying the declarative sentence type to produce codified pieces of advice is by means of modality markers. For Dik (1989), objective modality signals all those linguistic resources that express the speaker’s evaluation of the likelihood of occurrence of a state of affairs. In advising, modality markers denote that the performance of the proposed action is not only recommendable but also preferable — nearly obligatory— according to a certain norm. This obligation is grounded on the socio- cultural convention underlying the conceptual representation of advising. In application of part (c) of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, speakers should make their addressees aware of what is beneficial for them if we believe they are unaware of it. The metonymic activation of this convention gives easy access to the generic structure of advising. Since everybody wants the best for themselves, the addressee would be expected to perform the proposed action, knowing that it is beneficial for him. But the addressee should be given enough freedom to decide against the proposal. Because of this, the type of marker used may be perceived as rather impositive. This operator therefore has to be accompanied by other linguistic elements which mitigate its force so that it loses its impositive character and becomes appropriate. The lack of mitigating devices can only fit in contexts where the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 a constructional account of advising 127 social distance between the participants is small and the speaker’s willingness to get the addressee to follow his advice is high. We have a similar situation in (16):
(16) You Have Got To XVP Look, you can’t do this. You have got to come to terms with your son. (Coca)
The metonymic inference schema specified for the previous construction is the same in this case but the marker have to is not as impositive. However, the imposition conveyed is still high and the construction needs to make use of other linguistic means to guarantee the addressee’s optionality. Consider now:
(17) You Should XVP To develop an understanding of what survey research is actually like, you should read studies in the original. (Bnc)
This type of realization expresses the same meaning value as the previous ones. Through the activation of part (c) of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, the speaker reminds the addressee that he is expected to carry out an action that is beneficial for him. Unlike previous constructions, the degree of imposition conveyed by the type of marker is lower, which makes it much more adapted for the expression of advising.
(18) You Can XVP You know, you can scream at him, you can send him pictures, you can write to him. (Coca)
Inherent modality is yet another realization procedure that codifies declarative sentences for the performance of advising. According to Dik (1989: 205), inherent modality distinctions define the relations between a participant and the state of affairs in which he is involved. One of these distinctions relates to the ability of a participant to perform an action. The advising reading of the construction is grounded in the assumption that people are expected to bring about those states of affairs that may report benefits to them if they have the ability to do so. Note that the rationale behind this interpretation of the construction works only if the verb in the variable part denotes an action that is proposed to the addressee in order to change a negative situation to one that is beneficial for him. It also needs to be understood that the addressee is intended as the person who is going to perform the action and that the action seeks the addressee’s benefit. Otherwise the construction could be interpreted as an order (e.g. You can wash the dishes) or as an offer (e.g.You can have some more tea).
(19) You Need XVP You need to ask yourself what you want, and what you can realistically expect. (Bnc)
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Inherent modality distinctions can also relate to the addressee’s need to perform an action. Expressing certainty about the addressee’s necessity to act in a particular way represents an implicit means of making manifest the speaker’s belief that the action, if carried out by the addressee, will be beneficial to him. Again in this construction the advising reading depends to a large extent on realization of the variable element by a verb involving benefit to the addressee and on contextual information. Utterance (19) above can be interpreted as a piece of advice only if it is used in a context where it is manifest that the addressee is pondering on diverse courses of action to change a negative situation that is affecting him.
(20) XVP Is A Good Idea Starting a part-time gig is a good idea. (Coca)
The analysis of the constructions for advising has evidenced the relevance of the part of the generic structure that refers to the benefit that the realization of the proposed action intends to cause to the addressee. The linguistic resources used to codify the advising value in the declarative form are all related to the benefit component. The construction under consideration is not an exception. Here, the advising meaning results from the manifestness of the speaker’s belief that an action can be beneficial for the addressee. The recommendation of only one course of action may, however, bring about a reduction in the addressee’s optionality that needs to be mitigated:
(21) It may be a good idea to buy two copies. (Coca) (22) It might be a good idea to start thinking about adoption. (Bnc)
In these two utterances, the force of the construction is mitigated by modality markers of possibility. The resulting instances are more tentative and the addressee’s optionality is noticeably increased.
4.3. Interrogative advising constructions Interrogative constructions are the least specialized means for the performance of advising. The open nature of the interrogative form instantiates the optionality component. Because of this, the interrogative sentence type is adapted for illocutionary acts like requesting which feature a high degree of the addressee’s optionality. In requests, the speaker’s purpose to obtain benefit from the addressee’s action has to be compensated by increasing the addressee’s optionality, which finds in interrogative constructions an excellent vehicle of expression. In advising, the benefit of the action is to the addressee and the carrying out of the action is only his decision, which makes it unnecessary to increase the degree of optionality conveyed. This is the reason why only a small number of advising constructions are based on the interrogative sentence type. However, the fact that there is no need to increase the addressee’s optionality does not mean that it is not possible
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 a constructional account of advising 129 to use interrogative constructions that instantiate this variable of advising. The following constructions illustrate how the optionality element is activated through the use of the interrogative sentence type:
(23) Why Not XVP? Why not take the chance? (Coca)
The advising reading of this constructional type results from the instantiation of part (c) of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, according to which we must not do anything negative to other people. Asking about the reason for not doing whatever is beneficial to someone functions as a means of persuading the addressee into assent. Because there is no reason why the proposed action should not be carried out, the addressee should follow the piece of advice so that he can obtain benefit from it. The use of the interrogative form further indicates the speaker’s acknowledgement of the addressee’s state of mind to decide. This activates the optionality component that characterizes advising, thereby making the act more explicit.
(24) How About XVP? How about making something out of the cockroaches in your room? (Coca)
This construction is based on a reasoning schema that is based on the convention that provides the socio-cultural background for advising and which binds us to make it manifest to others that a state of affairs is beneficial for them if it is not manifest to them. In this construction the speaker indicates a possibility that seems to be a good option for the addressee, leaving him freedom to decide. Since the speaker tells the addressee to perform the action only if he wants to, the degree of optionality conveyed is increased, and so is the degree of mitigation. Observe that, originally, the non-abbreviated expression
How would you feel about XVP? was possibly aimed at getting the addressee to explore his feelings about following the course of action proposed by the speaker.
5. Conclusion The present research represents a preliminary case study of illocutionary constructions associated with a speech act category within the LCM. The results of the analysis show that the LCM provides us with an explanatorily adequate framework that allows us to account for the characterization of illocutionary acts and their constructional realization. The LCM develops a constructional account of illocution that explains the motivation and the constraints of speech act meaning, as well as the socio-cultural generalizations taking part in illocutionary production and understanding. In the LCM, illocutionary meaning is realized through conventionalized constructions consisting of fixed and modifiable elements that result from the interplay between construal operations and general conventions specifying the principles of interaction. Illocutionary constructions
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 115–32· issn 0210-6124 130 nuria del campo martínez exhibit varying degrees of instantiation potential for the conceptual representation of an illocutionary category. Those unable to provide relevant points of access require inferential to yield an illocutionary value, which is regulated through metonymic operations that apply to high-level cognitive models that are based on the stipulations of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, and can become entrenched as inferential shortcuts through frequent use in conversation. Those with a high instantiation potential produce an illocutionary force that is easily recognized. This analysis develops the approach to illocution of the LCM based on a large number of instances of advising. After describing the high-level cognitive model of the act of advising, I have identified the illocutionary constructions that activate the parameters of the cognitive model. I have then examined how these constructions are used in the realization of advising depending on their degree of instantiation potential for each of the parameters that make up the cognitive model. Imperative constructions, though capable of instantiating central parameters of the cognitive model, appear rather impositive, which makes them a poor vehicle for the expression of advising. Declarative constructions only partially instantiate the cognitive model and their interpretation as pieces of advice is largely dependent on their use of specific linguistic mechanisms such as modality markers, conditional expressions or intonation patterns. At the end of the codification scale, interrogative constructions are the least specified due to their low instantiation potential for the optionality component, which is one of the most relevant ones in the act of advising. The results of the analysis seem to point to the convenience of approaching illocution from a constructional perspective that takes both codification and inference into account and considers conventionalized structures in speech act production. However, future research is needed in order to determine the applicability of the LCM tools for the description of other speech act categories.
Works Cited Austin, John Langshaw 1962: How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon. Bach, Ken and Richard Harnish 1979: Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Baicchi, Annalisa and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza 2011: ‘The Cognitive Grounding of Illocutionary Constructions within the Theoretical Perspective of the Lexical- Constructional Model’. Textus: English Studies in Italy 23.3: 543-63. Brdar-Szabó, Rita 2009: ‘Metonymy in Indirect Directives: Stand-alone Conditional in English, German, Hungarian, and Croatian’. Klaus-Uwe Panther, Linda Thornburg and Antonio Barcelona, eds. Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 323-38. Butler, Christopher Stuart 2009: ‘The Lexical Constructional Model: Genesis, Strengths and Challenges’. Christopher Butler and Javier Martín Arista, eds. Deconstructing Constructions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 117-52.
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Dik, Simon Cornelis 1989: The Theory of Functional Grammar. The Structure of the Clause. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. —1997: The Theory of Functional Grammar. Complex and Derived Constructions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Goldberg, Adele Eva 1995: Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago UP. —2006: Constructions at Work: the Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford UP. Halliday, Michael and Alexander Kirkwood 1994: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, Michael, Alexander Kirkwood and Christian Matthiessen 2004: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Hodder Arnold. Leech, Geoffrey 1983: Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Levinson, Stephen 1983: Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lexicom. ‹http://www.lexicom.es› (Accessed 5 November, 2011) Mairal Usón, Ricardo and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza 2009: ‘Levels of Description and Explanation in Meaning Construction’. Christopher Butler and Javier Martín Arista, eds. Deconstructing Constructions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 153-98. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda Thornburg1998 : ‘A Cognitive Approach to Inferencing in Conversation’. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755-69. —2004: ‘The Role of Conceptual Metonymy in Meaning Construction’. Metaphorik.de 6: 91-111. Pérez Hernández, Lorena 2001: Illocution and Cognition: A Constructional Approach. La Rioja: U of La Rioja P. Pérez Hernández, Lorena and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza 2002: ‘Grounding, Semantic Motivation, and Conceptual Interaction in Indirect Directive Speech Acts’. Journal of Pragmatics 34.3: 259-84. Risselada, Rodie 1993: Imperatives and Other Directive Expressions in Latin: A Study in the Pragmatics of a Dead Language. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José 2007: ‘High-level Cognitive Models: In Search of a Unified Framework for Inferential and Grammatical Behavior’. Krzysztof Kosecki, ed. Perspectives on Metonymy. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. 11-30. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José and Annalisa Baicchi 2007: ‘Illocutionary Constructions: Cognitive Motivation and Linguistic Realization’. Itsvan Kecskes and Laurence Horn, eds. Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Intercultural Aspects. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 95-128. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco José and Francisco Gonzálvez-García 2011: ‘Illocutionary Meaning Revisited: Subjective-Transitive Constructions in the Lexical-Constructional Model’. Piotr Stalmaszczyk, ed. Turning Points in the Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. 65-77.
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Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José and Ricardo Mairal 2008: ‘Levels of Description and Constraining Factors in Meaning Construction: An Introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model’. Folia Linguistica 42: 355-400. —2011: ‘Constraints on Syntactic Alternation: Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in the Lexical-Constructional Model’. Pilar Guerrero, ed. Morphosyntactic Alternations in English. Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London/Oakville ct: Equinox. 62-82. Searle, John 1969: Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. —1975: ‘Indirect Speech Acts’. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, eds. Syntax and Semantics 3. New York: Academic. 59-82. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1995: Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stefanowitsch, Anatol 2003: ‘A Construction-based Approach to Indirect Speech Acts’. Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg, eds. Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 105-26. Verschueren, Jef 1985: What People Say They Do with Words. Prolegomena to an Empirical-Conceptual Approach to Linguistic Action. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Received 11 November 2011 Revised version accepted 8 March 2012
Nuria Del Campo Martínez is a research fellow at the University of La Rioja and has recently obtained her PhD under the supervision of Professors Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza and Lorena Pérez. Her research focuses on the constructional nature of illocution and those cognitive operations underlying the production and understanding of speech act meaning. She has recently authored papers in the Review of Cognitive Linguistics and the Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics.
Address: Universidad de La Rioja. Departamento de Filologías Modernas. c/ San José de Calasanz, 33. 26004, Logroño (La Rioja), Spain. Tel.: +34 941299416. Fax: +34 941299419.
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“The Official Language of Telefónica is English”: Problematising the Construction of English as a Lingua Franca in the Spanish Telecommunications Sector
Maria Sabaté i Dalmau Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected]
This article investigates the contradictions around the construction of English as a democratising lingua franca for intercultural communication and business in the Spanish telecommunications sector. From a critical sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective, I claim that this crucial segment of the market has embraced and mobilized a rhetoric through which, by presenting this language as an unproblematised added-value resource for everyone, multinationals make claims of modernity and ‘civic’ entrepreneurial relationships to target lucrative economic niches, particularly multilingual transnational customers. However, these neoliberal celebratory discursive tropes on the efficiency and inclusiveness of global English contrast with the actual public language practices of the sector. English has become a pragmatic cover-up term for making claims of ‘multilingual competence’, but it is actually unsystematically offered only by key multinationals in specific spaces —usually call centres— and far less so by start-up operators. Overall, the sociolinguistic regime of the Spanish telecommunications sector fosters a Spanish- regimented market where English ends up serving the needs of an already connected dominant technoliterate elite, while those who do not have access to English or Spanish, basically non- literate migrant ict users, remain underserved and are forced to navigate society through these institutionalised language barriers.
Keywords: English as a lingua franca; multilingualism; linguistic instrumentalism; language barriers; the new economy; telecommunications
. . .
“La lengua oficial de Telefónica es el inglés”: Una mirada crítica a la construcción del inglés como lingua franca en el sector de las telecomunicaciones español
Este artículo analiza las contradicciones en torno a la construcción del inglés como una lingua franca para la democratización de la comunicación intercultural y del comercio en el sector de las
—133— 134 maria sabaté i dalmau
telecomunicaciones español. Desde la sociolingüística crítica de base etnográfica, analizo cómo este segmento del mercado ha movilizado la construcción del inglés como un valor añadido instrumental con el fin de presentarse como una entidad moderna y ‘cívica’ y poder así captar los nichos comerciales más lucrativos, en particular los clientes transnacionales multilingües. Sin embargo, esta retórica neoliberal sobre la eficiencia y la internacionalización de las comunicaciones a través del inglés global contrasta con las prácticas lingüísticas públicas reales del sector: esta lengua se utiliza para auto-atribuirse un alto grado de ‘competencia multilingüe’, pero de hecho se ofrece de manera no sistemática y sólo por parte de las multinacionales —y de algunas operadoras start-up— en espacios delimitados, básicamente en centros de llamada. De este modo, el régimen sociolingüístico del sector de las telecomunicaciones promueve un mercado unificado en español donde el inglés sólo cubre las necesidades comunicativas de una élite ya inmersa en la alfabetización tecnológica, mientras que los clientes sin acceso al inglés o al español, en particular los migrantes no alfabetizados usuarios de las TIC, se ven forzados a navegar entre estas barreras lingüísticas institucionalizadas.
Palabras clave: inglés como lingua franca; multilingüismo; instrumentalismo lingüístico; barreras lingüísticas; la nueva economía; telecomunicaciones
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1. Introduction The globalised new economy, increasingly based on the services and information and communication technologies (ict) sectors (Harvey 2005; Castells 2009), has placed language and communication at the epicentre of economic processes (Heller 2003, 2010; Pujolar 2007a).1 Simultaneously, the new ways of organising business on the part of leading multinationals have put the management of linguistic diversity at the forefront of international competition for the targeting of new economic niches (Duchêne 2009), noticeably, multilingual mobile citizens, including transnational migrants. This is particularly so in the Catalan context in Spain, where migrants now account for 15.7% of a total population of 7,535,251 people (Idescat 2011) and show a remarkably higher connectivity rate when compared to non-migrant clients (Castells et al. 2007: 52-53). Migrants aged between 15 and 29, for instance, actually make twice as many calls, SMS and Internet connections as non-migrant youth (Robledo 2008), which may explain why the private sector has started to realise that, as Vegas, head of the ‘immigrant’ customer department of Orange, puts it, “immigration in Spain is the most important emerging market”(Ciberp@ís 2007: 1).2 In Spain, the telecommunications sector is one of the most powerful segments of the private market targeting migrant customers and managing the linguistic diversity that they bring with them. This sector today presents English as a lingua franca, frequently ideologised as an enabling tool, with an added value for, on the one hand, intercultural communication in a growingly multilingual society, and, on the other, business within the global marketplace in times of serious economic crisis. In this paper, I investigate the contradictions around this construction of English as an equalising or instrumental lingua franca in the Spanish telecommunications sector, and describe and analyse the sociolinguistic regime of this market in order to link it to situations of linguistic difference and marginalisation, particularly among unconnected migrants. In the next section, I briefly describe the theoretical underpinnings that informed my analysis, as well as the types of data that I collected and the methodology that I employed in order to have a consistent linguistic landscape of this segment of the private sector. In the third section, I analyse the entrepreneurial discourses which present the use of English as a form of democratising linguistic capitals in order to connect the unconnected. More specifically, I unveil ‘globalisation-cum-development’ discourses on the English language (Pennycook 1998, 2007) which contribute to the reproduction of given sociolinguistic orders and linguistic regimes that rest upon the politico-economic interests of a Western-literate elite, to the exclusion of most non-literate clients.
1 This project was partly funded by grants hum2007-61864/filo and hum2010-26964/filo (micinn), PIF 429-01-1/07 (UAB) and 2009 BE1 00362 (Catalan Government). The data gathered belong to a much larger ethnography of a migrant-tailored call shop (a locutorio) which investigates the management of multilingualism by the Spanish telecommunications sector and the migrants’ networking practices from a critical sociolinguistic perspective (see Sabaté i Dalmau 2010). I’m grateful to the c.i.e.n. research group for their support. Any shortcomings are, of course, mine. 2 Original quote: “La inmigración es en España el mercado emergente más importante”.
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In the fourth section, I show how the presumed provision of services in English indexes a high degree of ‘multilingual competence’ and of technological leadership on the part of multinationals trying to find their place in an already saturated Spanish ict marketplace.3 This self-attributed multilingual competence, however, is simply an entrepreneurial tool, a marketing leitmotif. An in-depth analysis of the language practices of the 30 mobile phone companies operating in Spain at the time of fieldwork in their call centres, official websites and advertising campaigns shows that ‘being multilingual’ and publicising a post-modern “multilinguistic model” (Tan and Rubdy 2008: 2) basically means offering, unsystematically, an English alternative to the services massively circulated in and through Spanish, disregarding the migrant customers’ non- elite allochthonous languages. In the face of this linguistic regime, in the conclusion I argue that the Spanish telecommunications sector participates in the neoliberal discourse on welcoming linguistic diversity and in presenting English as the pragmatic ‘everybody’s’ language of intercultural communication. While English is mobilised in discourse for the sake of gaining a space in the global stage through an inclusive façade, the actual practices show that this lingua franca, in fact, operates within the constraints of a Spanish-monolingual framework. Consequently, those who do not have access to Spanish or who expect to be able to mobilise their capitals in English remain underserved and, in fact, find themselves navigating through these linguistic constraints and language barriers from the apparently multilingual Spanish telecommunications sector.
2. A critical sociolinguistic approach to global English: theory, methods and data This article approaches issues around global English and multilingualism in the telecommunications sector from a critical sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective (Heller 2006). This means that I understand social life as orchestrated by, through and inlanguage , a key powerful resource —that is, material and symbolic capital— which is constitutive of our everyday life (Bourdieu 1990, 1991; Duranti 1997). Discourse is also seen as social practice —or social action— and as an indicator in social contestation, reproduction and change. That is, discourse is the terrain where the competition for resources is played out and where the investments in given sociolinguistic orders unfold and can be empirically observed in the here and now (see Duchêne and Heller 2007). Linguistic ideologies are indices of the norms, attitudes, judgements, thoughts and interests which govern both institutional —corporate/entrepreneurial— and individual sociolinguistic behaviours. They are the mediating link between social forms and ways of
3 In February 2009, 51,263,388 mobile phone lines were registered in Spain, an average of 111.1 lines per 100 registered citizens —3% more than in February 2008 (CMT 2009: 6-7). In Catalonia the penetration rate was even higher. In Barcelona city, for instance, there were 2.3 mobiles per household in 2008 (L’hiperbòlic 2008: 12-13).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 133–51· issn 0210-6124 the official language of telefónica is english 137 talking which plays a crucial role in the social construction of meaning (see, for example, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity 1998 and Blommaert 1999). Finally, multilingualism is here approached as both theory and practice (Heller 2007); that is, as a set of empirically graspable ideologies and discourses surrounding issues of language, as well as analysable real language practices which are messy, hybrid, multi-valued and ever-changing. The data presented in this article include an in-depth ethnographic analysis of the management of linguistic diversity and the construction and treatment of multilingualism by the Spanish telecommunications sector, with a particular emphasis on the English language. This includes an exhaustive and systematised analysis of my record of the public language practices by the 30 ict ventures operating in Spain at the time of fieldwork, over a span of two years (2007-2009): three key multinationals (Movistar, Orange and Vodafone), 20 ict ventures and Spanish-based start-up businesses,4 and, finally, seven more recently launched migrant-oriented operators which exclusively target migrant populations (Happy Móvil, Lebara Móviles, Talkout Móvil, MundiMóvil, Hong Da Mobile, Digi.mobil and LlamaYa, all of which set up between 2006 and 2009). Following pioneering studies on the role of language in the market and on the workings of commercial multilingualism in private ict-related domains (see Kelly-Holmes and Mautner 2010; Duchêne 2011), I analysed the languages that each of these companies employed in (1) their call centres, (2) official websites and (3) advertising campaigns. I will place the main focus on the first research space, the call centres. During the data collection process I called each company on at least three occasions, established a record of the languages spoken by the agents working there, and maintained contact via email as well. Simultaneously, I coded the languages used by each company in their websites and checked the systematised linguistic patterns that emerged from those pieces of data. Finally, I also gathered the leaflets issued during advertising campaigns, and visited several of their phone shops in the Barcelona area to gather written information when this was available. I contrasted the languages chosen and offered to the general public —and particularly, to migrant populations— in these three different domains, and was thus able to provide an empirical, consistent and broad picture of the linguistic landscape of the Spanish telecommunications world in Catalonia. I complemented the information gathered on the 30 ict ventures’ language practices with participant observation in key ict events where I could observe and approach ict specialists onsite, like the Mobile World Congress (14-18 February, 2008), the biggest event of its kind, or the 7th Telecommunications Day (30 September, 2008), organised by the Official Association of Telecommunications Engineers in Catalonia(coettc). These were crucial social spaces of the telecommunications sector which proved highly useful for contextualising the approach to linguistic diversity by the ict world and its agents.
4 These were: Yoigo, MásMóvil, Carrefour Móvil, Día Móvil, Euskaltel, R Móvil, Eroski Móvil, Pepephone, Simyo, Bankinter, BT Móvil, Jazztel Móvil, XL Móvil, Telecable, Blau, Hits Mobile, Vuelingmóvil, RACC Mòbil, FonYou, and Sweno.
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For the purposes of this article I also include three excerpts of the several semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted with linguistic engineers, mobile phone operator agents and automatic translation specialists working for multinational companies like Movistar, whose discourses and ideologies complemented my quantitative records. I contacted most of them at the Mobile World Congress and later interviewed them in their workplaces, between 2007 and 2008. Finally, I also draw on institutional documents from the Spanish Government’s State Secretary of Telecommunications and the Information Society (setsi), the Secretariat for Telecommunications and the Information Society in Catalonia (stsi) and the Observatory for the Information Society of Catalonia Foundation (fobsic), as well as other census and, above all, linguistic data from the telecommunications sector relevant for the analysis.
3. Global English, a democratising lingua franca? Until recently, critical sociolinguistic research had not paid much attention to the language practices and the management of multilingualism by the telecommunications sector, less so in the Spanish territory. This is so because the private sector, as opposed to the public and the non-for-profit sectors, has traditionally been seen as external to such management and, consequently, it has largely been left unexplored. By contrast, the management of multilingualism in public administration offices, in public schools or in ngos, for instance, is well documented in Catalonia and in Spain (see, respectively, Codó 2008; Martín-Rojo 2010; Garrido 2010). And yet, the private sector and in particular the ict market plays a key role in the creation of ideological constructs —language ideologies— about what gets defined as ‘communication’ and what counts as ‘multilingualism’. In particular, I claim that the telecommunications sector has unquestioningly constructed and promoted the use of global English as the widespread dominant language of the world’s telecommunicative system, the commercial currency of the globalised new economy. In this social field, the use of English as a lingua franca is seen as a way to overcome communication barriers and to preserve the unicity of the market in what is otherwise pejoratively depicted by some entrepreneurs and language economists as a messy ‘tower of Babel’ (see similar discourses on the need to ‘unify’ linguistic resources in the commercial realm in García Delgado, Alonso and Jiménez 2007, working for Movistar, formerly Telefónica).5 The emphasis on the economic value of English, which is circulated through the mobilisation of the discourse of profits (Heller 2010), and the notion of ‘usefulness’ and ‘pragmatism’ of given codes understood as economic assets (Krzyzanowski and Wodak 2011) are an example of what Wee calls linguistic instrumentalism; that is, “a view of language that justifies its existence . . . in terms of its usefulness in achieving specific utilitarian goals such
5 Language Economy is a field of study which, broadly speaking, investigates the ways in which linguistic and economic variables influence one another (Kamwangamalu 2008).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 133–51· issn 0210-6124 the official language of telefónica is english 139 as access to economic development or social mobility” (2008: 32). Thus, global English has been constructed as a modernising tool or ‘skill’ that democratises access to technology and bridges the digital divide between technology-haves and technology-have-nots. This type of proselytising discourse is illustrated in Example 1, where two ict designers (Mobile Interaction Design specialists) recommend the use of English software with marginalised populations in Africa as a resource for advancement, upward mobility and ‘development’.
Example 1: Linguistic instrumentalism and the discursive construction of ‘global English’ as an added value
In some developing countries . . . using English software allows them to practice their English and may provide an opportunity to gain better employment in another country. (Jones and Marsden 2006: 323)
Against the fetish of ‘English-as-empowerment’ found in such discourses, I suggest that the global ict system is directed towards an already connected technoliterate elite who fully navigates within the multimodal culture of the information and communication age,6 and that it in fact benefits the politico-economic interests of a global elite, reinforced, in turn, by the existing socio-political structures governing the new economy. That is, the vast majority of icts are geared by and towards the needs of populations socialised into a Western written culture (as shown in Cameron 2000; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Chipchase 2008). This means that, against common thought, these icts do not readily provide access to technology and communication to those who are non-literate in one of the Western alphabets —for example, the Roman script— or in one of the European nation-state majority languages, or those who are non-numerate or unfamiliar with the alphanumeric system and the semiotic language nested in the Northern Hemisphere. In short, what these discourses hide is that the global ict system ultimately incapacitates those populations who are non-technoliterate, and that setting English as the global standard lingua franca also brings about new global illiteracies, particularly to already marginalised populations such as migrants. Consequently, these have started to seek increasingly successful alternative spaces to access communication technology and overcome linguistic barriers outside institutional realms in informal migrant-run call shops such as the locutorios, in the Catalan case (see Sabaté i Dalmau 2010; forthcoming). If the mobilisation of these discourses has a politico-economic agenda, it is not coincidental that the entities which constitute the world’s telecommunicative core are English-speaking countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, followed by Germany, France and Canada (Barnett 2001). These are all key members of the International Telecommunication Union (itu), the United Nations agency which sets
6 Technoliteracy is defined as the command of a complex set of Western visual, auditory, iconic, digital, informational, technological and computer literacies (see Area, Gros and Marzal 2008 for further details).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 133–51· issn 0210-6124 140 maria sabaté i dalmau the worldwide standards for communication and which coordinates the global use of the radio spectrum and the World Summit on the Information Society (itu 2011). These entities, which have a direct influence on the market, tend to share a politico-economic investment in the English language, as explained by Tan and Rubdy, who claim that
[t]he high status accorded to English, especially Standard English, has been reinforced by the significance it has assumed in the global cultural economy. English now represents the preferred language medium in which most transactions take place within transnational business organizations, as well as in political or economic encounters such as those that characterise the World Trade Organization, World Bank and Monetary Fund ensembles. (2008: 6-7)
Spain is also one of these information-rich states, since it joined the itu —then called International Telegraph Union— in 1865 (Paetsch 1993: 99) and acquired membership of the World Trade Organization and the World Bank —also basically run in and through English— on 1 January 1995 and 15 September 1958, respectively (World Trade Organisation 2011; World Bank 2011). Thus, it is not coincidental that at macro ict events in Spain English is the taken-for-granted language of technology, homogenising ict designs and dominating the circuits of commercialisation regulated by an elite expert polity, as the chief staff manager of the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona in2008 explains in Example 2.7
Example 2: ‘Global English’ as the language of the technoliterate elite
@Location: 12 February 2008. Mobile World Congress. Chief staff manager’s room. Barcelona.8 @Bck: The researcher RES( ) asks the chief staff manager STA( ) about the languages being employed at the Mobile World Congress. 1 *sta: preguntan por Telefónica # preguntan mucho también por Google # um por Voda- fone # bueno las grandes. %tra: they ask about Telefónica # many ask about Google a lot too # um about Vodafone # well the big ones. 2 *res: las grandes # vale # eh y: normalmente ‹en qué lenguas lo preguntan› [?]. %tra: the big ones # ok # eh a:nd normally ‹in what languages do they ask about them› [?]. → 3 *sta: inglés. %tra: English. 4 *res: inglés? %tra: English?
7 For confidentiality reasons, no real names of start-up companies or individual language workers are used, as agreed with the Ethics Committee at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ceeah, file 725H). The project also benefits from the advice of the cooperative of lawyersCol·lectiu Ronda. 8 Interactions were transcribed following a slightly modified version of the childes transcription system (MacWhinney 2000) suggested by Codó (2008: xi-xiii). In [%com] (comment) the context and the participants in the interaction are briefly described. In [%tra] (translation) free translations of the exchanges presented in the main tier uttered in languages other than English are provided —Spanish, if the typeface is plain, or Catalan, if it is in italics. All exchanges are reproduced verbatim, including non-standard talk, and were translated by the author.
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→ 5 *sta: inglés # el noventa por ciento de las preguntas son en inglés. %tra: English # ninety percent of the questions are in English. 6 *res: sí? %tra: really? → 7 *sta: sí # en inglés y si no castellano # pero es raro. %tra: yes # in English and if not then in Castilian # but this is unusual.
Apart from commercial entities, the overarching power of English —highlighted in lines 3, 5 and 7 in Example 2— was also mobilised in Spanish territory by the Spanish and Catalan Governments, two important technopolitical entities of the information era, in that very same Congress.9 The “Spanish Pavilion”, sponsored by the Spanish Government, for instance, was presented through the internationalising motto “España, technology for life” —in English. The “Catalan Pavilion”, sponsored by the Catalan Government through the Secretariat for Telecommunications and the Information Society (stsi), similarly took pride in its technological power to boost the Catalan economy through mobile communications, and it did so in English, as reproduced verbatim in Example 3.
Example 3: ‘Global English’ as an index of modernity and international leadership
Catalonia boasts highly developed business-services; nearly 250 professional and business associations, more than 2,500 consulting and assessment companies, and more than 500 financial and insurance companies. Speed, reliability, technical assistance and personalised treatment are just some of the characteristics of Catalan business-services companies. (Generalitat de Catalunya 2008)
Thus, the gizmos and gadgets in Spanish territory have entered the ict world in and through English, too, to become the unquestioned language of business and of ict knowledge trade orchestrated by the aforementioned telecommunications think-tank. Global English is also the default model language on which to try out new technological developments. This is true not only for multinational companies outside Spain (just to mention an example, Samsung, lg and Philips are moving towards an English-only policy; Tan and Rubdy 2008: 1) but also for well-established ventures with a strong commercial power in Spain. For example, the latest Orange voice assistant for persons with mobility difficulties launched in Spain was first commercialised in English, later in French and finally in Spanish (Connectta’t2008 ). The same occurs with the vast majority of translation and voice recognition programs, which are developed in English and later transcoded into other languages (Translation and Interpretation Studies professor working for ibm, 7th Telecommunications Day in Catalonia, 30 September, 2008, Barcelona, personal communication).
9 See Inda (2006) for the role of governments as technopolitical entities crucially managing both technology and ICT-mediated communications and establishing contacts and partnerships with the ICT sector.
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In short, I argue that rather than an ‘everybody’s’ lingua franca, the English language in the Spanish telecommunications world is constructed as a form of economic capital and as a ‘neutral’ resource for entering the international arena to compete in the globalised ict marketplace. This construction is fostered by the mobilisation of the ideology of linguistic instrumentalism on the part of a global technoliterate elite, currently invested, whether economically and/or politically, in having privileged access to the realm of technology. In fact, though, as will be unfolded in the following section, English is neither offered systematically by all ict ventures nor made available to all end-users —particularly, mobile phone clients— and, therefore, in reality does not serve the function of being the empowering tool that bridges language divides.
4. ‘Multilingual competence’, a linguistic fetish Today, Movistar call centres in Barcelona can help users in Catalan, Spanish, English, German, French, Polish and Romanian, among others. Vodafone agents can speak Arabic, Basque and Galician. The Orange website offers an online automatic ‘translator’ which includes English, German, French and Russian. Lebara Móviles sponsors its discount plans in 12 languages, including Dutch, Italian, Polish and Urdu, and the recently launched migrant-oriented operator MundiMóvil circulates its motto “Calling yours never was so easy [sic]” in Romanian, Hindi, and Greek, among others (see MundiMóvil 2011). In short, ICT operators in Spain, regardless of whether they are multinationals, smaller start-up enterprises or migrant-oriented operators, pride themselves on their ‘multilingual customer services’ whereby they can help clients “in their language” (Movistar 2008). It seems, therefore, that they have become highly multilingual. But what does this multilingualism consist of? What place and what role does English occupy in the sociolinguistic hierarchy of the Spanish telecommunications sector, in relation to the aforementioned array of languages? What does this tell us about the real management of linguistic diversity by the private market? Multilingual competency today is a resource in and of itself, a strategic managerial tool for enterprises that want to reach transnational customer segments. The offering of a presumably wide variety of services in several languages has also come to signal a high degree of innovation, know-how and efficiency, which providesict ventures with an image of economic competitiveness and modernity at both local and global levels (Duchêne 2009, 2011). Thus, the sector in Spain has fully embraced the ‘multilingualism-as-added-value’ rhetoric, and it has done so as a kind of corporate acknowledgement of a general, abstract or loosely defined (“empty”, Krzyzanowski and Wodak 2011: 126) linguistic diversity. This fashionable floating label indexes Europeanism and post-nationality and allows for companies to self-attribute the democratisation of a truly global information era, where language barriers are overcome. In Example 4, I illustrate these claims with the remarks around multilingual competence made by a Telefónica services and solutions consultant whom I interviewed at the Mobile World Congress in 2008.
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Example 4: ‘Global English’ as a cover-up term for ‘multilingual competence’
@Location: 12 February, 2008. Mobile World Congress. Telefónica stand. Barcelona. @Bck: A Telefónica services and solutions consultant (CON) tells the researcher (RES) about the company’s corporate commitment to offering multilingual services. 1 *con: somos multilingües ## la convergencia también obliga,, ‹no› [?] obliga a abrir una plataforma multilingüe # los servicios van a tener que tener la posibilidad de ser mul- tilingües porque si no a lo mejor no voy a poder comunicarme con alguien que está al otro lado. %tra: we are multilingual # convergence obliges,, ‹right› [?] it obliges [us] to open a multi- lingual platform # the services will have to have the possibility of being multilingual because otherwise perhaps I won’t be able to communicate with someone who is on the other side. 2 *res: ah. → 3 *con: con el inglés va a ser más posible,, ‹no› [?] porque tanto el inglés como el español son idiomas potentes son fuertes # extendidos en muchos países ## además el idioma ofi- cial de Telefónica es el inglés. %tra: with English this will be more plausible,, ‹right› [?] because both English and Spanish are powerful languages they are strong # spread in many countries ## besides the offi- cial language of Telefónica is English.
Example 4 also shows that in Spain many ventures present themselves as multilingual simply because they promote the use of English and Spanish as the two ‘strong’, ‘powerful’, linguae francae of worldwide interconnection (line 3). In fact, multilingualism is interestingly —and explicitly— equated with the use of English, which has become a cover-up term for claiming ‘multilingual competence’. That is, it has become a mobiliser of prestige, as seen in the consultant’s final remark: “the official language of Telefónica is English” (line 3). However, the actual language practices of the 30 mobile phone operators, as observed in their call centres, official websites and advertisement campaigns, provide another picture. An in-depth analysis of each company demonstrates that all of them offer their services in Spanish as the only or as the default language, as detailed in Table 1, which is a summary of the linguistic landscape of the Spanish telecommunications sector in the Barcelona area and its call centre customer services provision in (1) Spanish, (2) other dominant European languages, (3) the migrants’ languages, (4) the co-official language in Catalonia, Catalan, and, finally, (5) English, the object of this study. As can be inferred from Table 1, in the Spanish telecommunications world Spanish has become the norm. In fact, it is the first language offered by29 out of the 30 companies —the exception being Digi.mobil, which targets Romanian migrants in Romanian as the default language, along with Spanish. Dominant European languages other than English (basically French, German and some Dutch) are unsystematically offered, mostly by the three multinationals (Movistar, Vodafone and Orange), by two (out of 20) smaller start- ups and by two (out of seven) migrant-oriented operators.
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Company Languages offered Company Languages offered Movistar Spanish, English, Catalan, XL Móvil Spanish German, French, Polish, Romanian, Arabic Orange Spanish, English, Catalan, Telecable Spanish Romanian, Arabic, Galician, Basque Vodafone Spanish, English, Catalan, Blau Spanish German Yoigo Spanish Hits Mobile, Spanish, English, Dutch MásMóvil Spanish, English, German Vuelingmóvil Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Italian, Catalan Carrefour Spanish, English RACC Mòbil Spanish, Catalan Móvil Día Móvil Spanish, English FonYou Spanish Euskaltel Spanish, Basque Sweno Not operational R Móvil Spanish, Galician Happy Móvil Spanish, Russian, Romanian, French, (English), (Arabic) Eroski Móvil Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Lebara Móviles Spanish, English, French, Basque Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Dutch, Polish Pepephone Spanish, English, Catalan Talkout Móvil Spanish, English Simyo Spanish MundiMóvil Spanish, English Bankinter Spanish, English, German, Hong Da Mobile Not operational Catalan BT Móvil Spanish Digi.mobil Romanian, Spanish Jazztel Móvil Spanish, (English) LlamaYa Spanish, English Table 1: The linguistic landscape of the Spanish telecommunications sector. Call centre customer services provision (2007-2009)
Allochthonous minority codes are not included in the three spaces observed, with the noticeable exception of Arabic and Romanian, offered by two multinationals and by a few migrant-oriented operators in their call centres, like Lebara or, as already pointed out, Digi.mobil. The rest of migrant-oriented operators provide these two languages unsystematically and, at times, as an ad hoc exception or as a way to sort out communication problems —the migrant-oriented operator Happy Móvil, for instance, offers Arabic only at the weekends from 16:00 until 21:00 hours, when the Arabic-speaking agent is available. In short, then, the migrants’ languages are token or absent altogether and can only be found in a few mottos circulated in majority nation-state languages —for instance, they are very occasionally circulated in Urdu instead of Panjabi, or in Modern Standard Arabic instead of Tamazight, more often than not only during advertisement campaigns, not in call centres. In addition, these mottos, as I have already exemplified with the case of “calling yours never was so easy [sic]”, are often conducted via automatic translation, which, unsurprisingly, with this unrealistic, haphazard language, at times renders the services inaccessible to non-literate migrant users of minority languages.
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In order to investigate the reasons provided by the telecommunications sector for this lack of minority language resources and their patchy approach to them, I interviewed the ceo of an international, pioneering Catalonia-based ict venture which offers text and image translation via mobile phones in a variety of languages. At the time of the interview this enterprise was working on assembling an automatic Spanish-Arabic translator for Movistar, which, in the end, did not get commercialised, as explained in Example 5.
Example 5: The lack of minority language resources in the ict world
@Location: 29 April, 2009. Company’s office in the country of the Vallès Occidental, Barcelona. @Bck: The CEO of a leading ICT venture summarises his experience in trying to assemble a Spanish-Arabic translator for Movistar, which in the end was scrapped. 1 *ceo: bueno‹què passa› [?] que traduir a castellà # en aquest cas era castellà àrab àrab castellà. %tra: well‹what’s the matter› [?] that translating into Castilian # in this case it was Castilian Arabic Arabic Castilian. 2 *res: aha. → 3 *ceo: és difícil # llavors es pensaven que el nostre traductor ho faria perfecte i clar no ho fa perfecte perquè és un traductor automàtic i llavores‹li› [/] li van passar precisament a una persona de: una empresa‹de› [/] de telecomunicacions al Marroc. %tra: it’s difficult # then they thought that our translator would do the job perfectly and of course it doesn’t do it perfectly because it is an automatic translator and so then they passed ‹it› [/] it on precisely to a person fro:m a telecommunications company ‹in› [/] in Morocco. 4 *res: sí. %tra: yes. → 5 *ceo: i clar no s’ajustava ben bé a l’origen real de les frases i dius +”/. %tra: and of course it didn’t adapt well to the real origin of the sentences and you say +”/. 6 *ceo: +”clar # lògic. %tra: +” of course # logical. → 7 *ceo: per això ‹hauríem de›[/] hauríem de fer això que estem fent ara,, ‹no› [?] aportar un producte específic adaptat a aquelles necessitats llavors això sí que es pot garantir la qualitat però així si vols un traductor genèric per resoldre dubtes tràmits per exemple burocràtics pels immigrants # hem de muntar un traductor específic per allò. %tra: to get this ‹we would have to›[/] we would have to do what we are doing right now,, ‹right› [?] to provide a specific product which is well suited to those needs and then quality can indeed be guaranteed but if you want a generic translator to answer bureau- cratic questions procedures for instance for immigrants # we need to create a specific translator for that. 8 *res: clar. %tra: of course. → 9 *ceo: llavors funcionarà molt bé # no t’hauràs de: limitar a una manera de dir les frases o així # sinó serà lliure ## funcionarà bé per allò però clar has d’invertir uns recursos ## va quedar allà no vam insistir més perquè -, ‹i› [/] i ells no insisteixen # és a dir jo crec que això lo que demostra és‹la› [/] la falta de necessitat real d’això,, ‹no› [?]. %tra: then it will work really well # you won’t have to: limit it to one way of saying the sen- tences or whatnot # rather it will be free ## it will work well for that but then look you have to invest some resources ## we left it there we didn’t persist any longer because -, ‹and› [/] and they don’t persist # that’s I think that what this demonstrates is ‹the›
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[/] the lack of a real need for this,, ‹right› [?]. 10 *res: clar. %tra: sure. → 11 *CEO: o la falta de preocupació pels operadors per aquest tipus de gent pues potser perquè per aquest tipus de negoci pel volum que genera és poc. %tra: or the lack of concern about these sort of people by operators maybe because for this type of business the turnover it generates is small.
The first trial of the Spanish-Arabic automatic translator, as the executive officer explains, was taken to a telecommunications enterprise in Morocco (line 3), where they realised that it did not adapt well to “the real origin of the sentences” (line 5). He states that a generic translator will not cover the specific needs of migrants, such as dealing with administrative questions or procedures (line 7). For this reason, there is the need to create a “free human quality translator” (as automatic translation agents and linguistic engineers call it), one that specifically suits the migrants’ communicative needs in given specific contexts. He believes that his company has the technological means to design it, but it would increase the costs significantly. The first trial did not succeed and the negotiations with Movistar ended in deadlock. According to him, there are three possible explanations for this. The first one is that Movistar does not have a real need for it in order to keep targeting Arabic-using migrant customers (line 9) —which implies that the multinational has thus far been able to capitalise on this specific migrant niche through Spanish, using only generic translators. The second explanation he provides is that the multinational is simply not concerned about this particular customer niche and is perhaps more interested in Spanish-using Latin Americans; note that this particular company has established businesses in 13 Latin American countries. This explanation might seem contradictory, as Movistar is indeed investing resources in studying how to include Arabic in its repertoire —at least in automatic translation— and because it claims to offer Arabic in its call centres; Arabic was the last language in the hierarchy offered to me by a Movistar agent in a call centre. The last, and to me most plausible, explanation is that Movistar has estimated that the turnover generated by the Arabic-using clientele is not worth an investment beyond the generic Spanish-Arabic translator (line 11). In all of these cases, the multinational is fostering the illusion that services in non-elite allochthonous minority languages are being offered, for example through mass advertising campaigns circulating single-sentence slogans in Arabic, whereas in fact the Arabic-using customers for whom such services were originally intended are being simultaneously underserved. The co-official language of Catalonia, Catalan, has gained a position in the language hierarchy of the Spanish telecommunications sector, although, when it is offered, it is usually relegated to a place after Spanish. For example, handset designers such as Sharp, Samsung, lg, Nokia and hp do not offer the Catalan option in all the mobiles they sell in Spain, according to a 2007 study by the Observatory for the Information Society of Catalonia Foundation (fobsic 2007). Movistar, Orange and Vodafone at that time did
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 133–51· issn 0210-6124 the official language of telefónica is english 147 not offer their official websites in Catalan, and start-up and ict operators such as Jazztel Móvil, XL Móvil, Blau, Hits Mobile, FonYou, Carrefour Móvil, Día Móvil, Happy Móvil and BT Móvil did not offer customer services in Catalan. In short, only seven out of 30 mobile phone operators offer Catalan in their call centres, infringing the customers’ language rights as found in the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, which states that customers have the right to obtain services in Catalan in Catalonia, and companies the obligation to offer them (Generalitat de Catalunya2006 ). Tellingly, in 2009 none of the seven migrant- oriented operators offered customer services in Catalan, the institutional linguistic ideology behind this corporate distribution of linguistic resources being that migrants will —or should— enter the technological era in and through Spanish. Overall, these data on the real management of linguistic diversity by the Spanish telecommunications sectors provide further arguments to claim that it works within a linguistic regime which fosters a monoglossic Spanish-regimented market. English, then, navigates within the constraints of this institutionalised unicity by becoming a local additional language which, boosted by its largely unquestioned international weight in the global linguistic hierarchy, unsystematically complements some of the services. The data show that it is not the lingua franca of the sector: only 14 out of 30 operators offer their services also in English —apart from Spanish— and these are basically multinationals, not Spanish-based ventures or start-ups; of these, only eight out of 20 offer English in their call centres. The multinationals which offer it do so mostly in call centres only: Movistar and Orange, for instance, launched their websites strictly in Spanish, and today they do not offer English versions. Moreover, many of these English services are only offered to the elite transnational entrepreneurial class: the company Jazztel, for example, only offers English to Jazztel investors, not to all clients. Finally, only four of the seven migrant-oriented operators offer some services in English (Happy Móvil, for instance, offers it only after 16:00 hours), which further points to the fact that in reality it has not become an instrumental language for intercultural communication to be employed with transnational mobile citizens.
5. Conclusions: linguistic inequality in a Spanish-regimented sector In this paper I have argued that the private market plays a pivotal role in the management of linguistic diversity in current network societies, and that the telecommunications sector epitomises this era of “multilingualisation” (Duchêne 2009: 28), where multilingual competence is a marketing product, a commercial tool that in Spain deserves further detailed sociolinguistic analysis. My research has also shown that the non-natural, manipulative puzzle of languages offered in this capitalist culture demonstrates that multilingualism, at least for this segment of the private market, is a linguistic fetish (Kelly-Holmes 2005), that is, a promotional façade which reproduces the power structures of global economics and does not suit the needs of transnational end-users, particularly those who are non-literate or non-socialised in the Western multimodal culture or in the alphanumeric system upon which the icts are based.
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The linguistic hierarchies that are being played out in this specific social domain show that the technoliterate elite doing business with and through the icts in this Spanish economy fosters a monoglossic map. An analysis of the language practices of the 30 operators in the Spanish telecommunications sector shows that linguistic diversity is managed through a Spanish-regimented market. Thus, Spanish as a global and a local lingua franca is the unquestioned language of intercultural communication and business, to the detriment of other European languages such as English, French or German, and to the exclusion of non-elite allochthonous minority codes with increasingly growing presence in Spain and Catalonia —such as Arabic, Wu or Punjabi— and to the detriment, as well, of co-official languages like Catalan in Catalonia. This confirms Pujolar’s2007 ( b) claims that Spanish has retained an important position as a public language in the private sector. The data presented here in fact show that the private sector tends to treat and to welcome transnational citizens —like migrants— and the Catalan consumer groups as two segments of a linguistically unified Spanish-only marketplace. And again, this is justified as a necessary “economisation” of linguistic resources (Duchêne 2011: 102) based on the emphasis on the economic advantages of establishing Spanish as the lingua franca for the politically strategic protection of the Spanish-speaking ‘condominium’ against English (see García Delgado, Alonso and Jiménez 2007). In this institutionalised unicity, English is constructed as the language of technology and global ict-mediated networks through the mobilisation of a rhetoric around linguistic instrumentalism —or, to put it bluntly, around the argument that it is cash. As such, global English in this market embodies a series of contradictions, since it becomes not the idealised lingua franca but a ‘safety crutch’: paradoxically, a resource facilitator of ict business and exchange for an already connected global technopolitical elite; a cover- up term with economic legitimacy employed to index openness, prestige and innovation by companies; and, finally, a scarce, unsystematically provided resource for some Western- literate users, notably the upper-middle transnational business or the tourist classes. Overall, the lack of real multilingual resources and the haphazard treatment of the languages of migration by the Spanish telecommunications sector bear witness to the fact that the sector does not fully understand the migrants’ linguistic practices, nor does it fulfil many of their communicative needs. Those clients who do not have access to Spanish or, occasionally, English, remain underserved and are forced to navigate through these institutionalised structural language barriers. The frequently called digital divide, then, is also a language divide, one which speaks not only of technological development but also of linguistic marginalisation and therefore, social difference and social exclusion through language in the information and communication age.
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Barnett, George A. 2001: ‘A Longitudinal Analysis of the International Telecommunication Network, 1978-1996’. American Behavioral Scientist 44.19: 1638-55. Blommaert, Jan, ed. 1999: Language Ideological Debates. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bourdieu, Pierre 1990: The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford UP. —1991: Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard UP. Cameron, Deborah 2000: Good to Talk? Living and Working in a Communication Culture. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Castells, Manuel 2009: Communication Power. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho and Meritxell Roca 2007: La Transició a la Societat Xarxa. Barcelona: Ariel. Chipchase, Jan 2008: ‘Reducing Illiteracy as a Barrier to Mobile Communication’. James E. Katz, ed. Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. Cambridge, ma: mit. 79-89. CiberP@ís 2007: ‘El africano llama cada día, mientras que el latino lo hace en fin de semana’. El País Semanal 477, 18 oct.: 1-6. CMT 2009: ‘Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones. Nota mensual febrero 2009’ ‹http://www.cmt.es/› (Accessed 26 June, 2009) Codó, Eva 2008: Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Language Practices in the Public Administration. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Connectta’t 2008: ‘Connectta’t a les Telecomunicacions de Catalunya’. 18. Duchêne, Alexandre 2009: ‘Marketing, Management and Performance: Multilingualism as Commodity in a Tourist Call Centre’. Language Policy 8: 27-50. —2011: ‘Néolibéralisme, Inégalités Sociales et Plurilinguisme: L’Exploitation des Ressources Langagières et des Locuteurs’. Langage et Société 136: 81-106. Duchêne, Alexandre and Monica Heller, eds. 2007: Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum. Duranti, Alessandro 1997: Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. fobsic 2007: Estudi sobre la Telefonia Mòbil a Catalunya. Estudi sobre la Presència de la Llengua Catalana en el Sector de la Telefonia Mòbil, des del Punt de Vista dels Usuaris i Usuàries. Plataforma per la Llengua and fobsic ‹http://www.fobsic.net/› (Accessed 24 March, 2009) García Delgado, José Luis, José Antonio Alonso and Juan Carlos Jiménez 2007: Economía del español. Una introducción. Barcelona: Ariel; Madrid: Fundación Telefónica. Garrido, Maria Rosa 2010: ‘Tensions Ideològiques sobre “la Llengua d’Acollida” en un Projecte Residencial per a Migrants’. Llengua, Societat i Comunicació 8: 9-26. Generalitat de Catalunya 2006: Estatut d’Autonomia de Catalunya. Barcelona: eadop. —2008: ‘Catalan, a Business Opportunity’. Ministry of Governance and Public Administration, Secretariat for Telecommunications and the Information Society. Catalan Government. B-8017-2008.
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Harvey, David 2005: A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Heller, Monica 2003: ‘Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7.4: 473-92. —2006 [1999]: Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. London: Continuum. —, ed. 2007: Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan. —2010: ‘Language as Resource in the Globalised New Economy’. Nik Coupland, ed. Handbook of Language and Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. 349-65. Idescat 2011: ‘Population According to Nationality’. Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya, Catalan Government ‹http://www.idescat.cat/› (Accessed 22 August, 2011) Inda, Jonathan Xavier 2006: Targeting Immigrants. Government, Technology and Ethics. Malden: Blackwell. itu 2011: ‘About itu’ ‹http://www.itu.int/› (Accessed 15 April, 2011) Jones, Matt and Gary Marsden 2006: Mobile Interaction Design. Chichester: John Wiley. Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M. 2008: ‘Language Policy, Vernacular Education and Language Economics in Postcolonial Africa’. Peter K. W. Tan and Rani Rubdy, eds. Language as Commodity. Global Structures, Local Marketplaces. London and New York: Continuum. 171-86. Kelly-Holmes, Helen 2005: Advertising as Multilingual Communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly-Holmes, Helen and Gerlinde Mautner, eds. 2010: Language and the Market. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kress, Gunter and Theo van Leeuwen 2006 [1996]: Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York: Routledge. Krzyzanowski, Michal and Ruth Wodak 2011: ‘Political Strategies and Language Policies: The European Union Lisbon Strategy and its Implications for the EU’s Language and Multilingualism Policy’. Language Policy 10.2: 115-36. L’hiperbòlic 2008: ‘El telèfon mòbil supera el fix’. 61, April. 12-13. MacWhinney, Brian 2000 [1991]: The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Martín-Rojo, Luisa 2010: Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Movistar 2008: ‘Opciones de ahorro. Atención al cliente’ ‹http://www.movistar.es/› (Accessed 10 November, 2008) MundiMóvil 2011: ‘Imágenes del producto Smarty Pack’ ‹http://mundimovil.es/› (Accessed 12 May, 2011). Paetsch, Michael 1993: Mobile Communications in the us and Europe: Regulation, Technology, and Markets. Boston and London: Artech. Pennycook, Alastair 1998: English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge. —2007: Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London and New York: Routledge.
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Pujolar, Joan 2007a: ‘Bilingualism and the Nation-State in the Post-National Era’. Monica Heller, ed. Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 71- 95. —2007b: ‘The Future of Catalan: Language Endangerment and Nationalist Discourses in Catalonia’. Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller, eds. Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum. 121-48. Robledo, Juanjo 2008: ‘Generación-i. La transición multicultural’. El País Semanal ‹http://juanjorobledotangarife.blogspot.com/2011/03/generacion-i-la-transicion. html› (Accessed 5 June, 2009) Sabaté i Dalmau, Maria 2010: “Voices from a Locutorio”: Telecommunications and Migrant Networking. Unpublished PhD thesis. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. —Forthcoming: ‘Fighting Exclusion from the Margins: Locutorios as Sites of Social Agency and Resistance for Migrants’. Alexandre Duchêne, Melissa G. Moyer and Celia Roberts, eds. Language, Migration and Social Inequalities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn A. Woolard and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. 1998: Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Tan, Peter K. W. and Rani Rubdy, eds. 2008: Language as Commodity. Global Structures, Local Marketplaces. London and New York: Continuum. Wee, Lionel 2008: ‘Linguistic Instrumentalism in Singapore’. Peter K.W. Tan and Rani Rubdy, eds. Language as Commodity. Global Structures, Local Marketplaces. London and New York: Continuum. 31-43. World Bank 2011: ‘Member Countries’ ‹http://www.worldbank.org/› (Accessed 11 May, 2011) World Trade Organisation 2011: ‘Members’ ‹http://www.wto.org/› (Accessed 11 May, 2011)
Received 16 May 2011 Accepted 20 Feburary 2012
Maria Sabaté i Dalmau (ma Linguistic Anthropology, U of Toronto; PhD English Studies, uab) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research interests include language practices and ideologies in multilingual, migration and language minority contexts, within the field of critical sociolinguistics.
Address: b11-152, Departament de Filologia Anglesa. Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. 08193, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès). Tel.: +34 93 581 1776.
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REVIEWS
RESEÑAS
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Christopher S. Butler and Javier Martín Arista, eds. 2009. Deconstructing Constructions. Studies in Language Companion Series 107. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Juan Gabriel Vázquez González Universidad de Huelva [email protected]
This collective volume originated in a workshop Deconstructing— Constructions— held at the University of La Rioja and organized by the Functional Grammars Research Group in 2006. Consequently, it reflects the research interests of the Group, and particularly those of Javier Martín Arista and Christopher S. Butler, who have devoted more than half a lifetime to the analysis of functionalism and of the benefits of quantitative methodology respectively. The book also epitomizes the current interaction among different schools of linguistics, particularly between the functionalist and cognitivist domains, where linguistic solipsism is gradually giving way to mutual influencing. reviews The dialogue that is proposed here is enhanced by the incorporation of linguistic typology, discourse, corpus-based and contrastive approaches of various kinds, but it is nevertheless the impact of Adele Goldberg’s Constructions (1996, 2005) on the linguistics scene that shapes the contributions included. Constructionist approaches in general and the notion of construction in particular always find their way to the surface in this volume, modifying earlier cognitivist proposals and maximizing functionalist models, although they are also sometimes alluded to in critical terms. Part i, ‘Theoretical Issues’, comprises four contributions of diverse linguistic background. It starts with Daniel García Velasco’s ‘Innovative Coinage. Its Place in the Grammar’ (3-23), which focuses on the usage-based conception of language. This paper utilizes a theory of discourse that profiles the crucial role of context. Velasco focuses his attention on the study of proper nouns in verbal contexts —eponyms— and proposes Functional Discourse Grammar (henceforward fdg) as a model ideally suited for the analysis of lexical creation. Verbal eponyms of the type He’s Beckhamed it fall under the category of contextuals, are characterized by showing not sense but reference, and may be variously interpreted out of context and from one context to another. García Velasco points at the similarities shared by eponym conversion and coercion, but also makes clear that eponyms do not comply with the override principle because they are meaningless referential constructs. He proposes an fdg account based on the integration of the grammatical, conceptual and contextual components. It is in the listener’s conceptual component that the interpretation finally takes place according to Clark and Gerrig’s sequence of hierarchical constraints:
—155— 156 juan gabriel vázquez gonzález identity of the eponym, acts by the eponym, relevant act and the type of act referred to. In sum, García Velasco not only underscores the inability of Construction Grammar (henceforward CxG) to tackle the issue of verbal eponyms, but also develops to the full the discourse dimension of a theory that, despite its communicative import from the very beginning, had been primarily restricted to the formalized analysis of argument structure during the Dikkian period. In ‘The Construction of Macro-events. A Typological Perspective’ (25-62), Johan Pedersen takes Leonard Talmy’s cognitive semantics typology of macro-events to firmer, CxG ground. Pedersen convincingly argues that the famous distinction between satellite- framed (Germanic) and verb-framed (Romance) languages as regards the expression of motion is noticeably weakened when further extended to state change, aspect, co-activity and resultatives. He argues that the figure-ground alignment that allegedly lies at the core of macro-event structure is inadequate because of a lack of potential alternations which are vaguely assumed to show up in other language types. Instead, Pedersen proposes regarding the cited macro-events as deeply entrenched, usage-based constructions found in the grammar. These specify information structure in pairs of Main and Supportive Information that in turn crystalize into constructions of different degrees of specificity: schematic and lexical. Accordingly, his reanalysis of motion, resultative and perception macro-events portrays a combination of schematic Main Information Constructions and lexical Supportive Information Constructions in satellite-framed Germanic languages like English and Danish while verb-framed Romance languages seem to opt for a reverse lexical mic- schematic sic. As regards aspect, the proposed analysis —schematic mic/lexical sic for the two languages cited above— differs radically from Talmy’s proposal. By means of a computerized version of H.C. Andersen’s short story The Snowman in Danish, English, German, Spanish, French and Italian, he then portrays a relatively complex picture with macro-event alternations in each of the languages involved. He rounds off his contribution by suggesting further typological validation in this respect. The contributions of Beatriz Martínez Fernández and Javier Martín Arista benefit from the more central role that the functionalist Role and Reference Grammar (henceforward rrg) has accorded to constructions in the latest version of this theory (Van Valin 2005). In ‘Constructions, Co-composition and Merge’ (63-84), Martínez Fernández foregrounds the limitations in the scope of the concept of construction á la Goldberg: a meaning-form pairing in which the semantics of the constituent group cannot be interpreted as just the sum of its parts. She argues convincingly in favour of the existence of some cases that are excluded from CxG because these merge structures, as she calls them, retain part of their verbal semantic input. This is so with the caused-motion construction when containing break verbs of pure change of state: the resulting merge acquires the semantics of motion but at the same time retains the semantics of change of state. Martínez Fernández adjusts the rrg syntax-to-semantics and semantics-to-syntax linking algorithm to Pustejovsky’s theory of the Generative Lexicon (1995). The four levels
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 155–61· issn 0210-6124 reviews 157 of representation proposed —Argument Structure, Qualia Structure, Event Structure and Lexical Inheritance Structure— may be linked by co-composition, a device that makes a verb and a prepositional phrase co-occurring in the syntax combine their representations to move away from state into active accomplishment in event structure terms. She proves that Pustejovsky’s formalized account of co-composition through formal and agentive Qualia may also be used to explain merge. She draws her discussion to a close by suggesting that other directional prepositions for path and origin may also participate in similar merges. In an ingenious and elegant manner, Martínez Fernández implements the formalized RRG analysis and at the same time opens up a new direction for future research. Javier Martín Arista’s compelling contribution, ‘A Typology of Morphological Constructions’ (85-114), develops a theory of morphology in the RRG domain. His proposal is in accordance with the incorporation of constructional schemas into the latest version of RRG theory and the reinterpretation of the rrg semantics-to-syntax syntax-to- semantics linking algorithm and its constituents in language-specific constructivist terms. In line with the Layered Structure of the Clause (henforward lsc), he develops the Layered Structure of the Word (lsw), which is made up of a modified set of semantic-syntactic domains arranged bottom-to-top: Nucleus, Core, Word and Complex Word. Each layer shows its own semantic operators. The difference between a Simplex and a Complex Word lies, he argues, in the absence or presence of lexical constituents along with the Nucleus and the related derivational and inflectional operators. In the Complex Word, the type of constituent projection devised here sets up a continuum between compounding and derivation; the operator projection, in turn, allows for the unification of inflection and derivation. This is, in our opinion, where the value of this formalized proposal lies, setting it apart from other contributions in similar functionalist terms. Martín Arista’s projectionist analysis also tackles the account of the position of (Complex) Word constituents in constructivist terms. Language-specific morphological templates are made the basis of the author’s own typology of Constructional Schemas: continuous and discontinuous, synthetic and analytic and recursive and non-recursive. These schemas can combine mutually and instantiate the two major types of morphological constructions of language-generic nature advanced in this work: endocentric and exocentric constructions. Markedness accounts for the differences between these. This allows Martín Arista’s functionalist proposal to dispense with the traditional and unsatisfactory class membership distinction between derivation and compounding on free/bound form grounds. He finally proceeds in section four to validate his rrg constructionist proposal by studying the morphology of Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara, an Australian aboriginal language. In sum, Martín Arista’s paper not only develops a fully fledgedrrg theory of morphology of highly constructivist import, but also paves the way for its typological validation. Part II is devoted to The Lexical Constructional Model (henceforward lcm). Two contributions are found here: one on the genesis of the model, the other on its description. To these, and for the sake of consistency, we have added a third from Part III that is actually a case study.
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In ‘The Lexical Constructional Model. Genesis, Strengths and Challenges’ (117-51), Christopher S. Butler develops a thorough-searching study of the genesis of the lcm and of the cluster of mutually compatible linguistic theories gathered around it and situated in functional-cognitive space. He traces the history of this model back to Martín Mingorance’s Functional-Lexematic Model (henceforward flm). This late1980 s and early 1990s theory enriched the fg analysis of predicate frames by incorporating a parallel semantic architecture in terms of lexical fields which later became prototype domains mutually interconnected by means of a semantic macronet (Faber and Mairal Usón 1999). Subsequently, this theory embraced the typologically tested benefits of RRG. Predicate frames were thus replaced by lexical templates (lts) and language-specific stepwise lexical decomposition gave way to a rrg-based abstract metalanguage. By means of the Lexical Template Modeling Process, Levin’s lexical alternations were also incorporated. The new version also included the study of word formation and a new ontological dimension revolving around Wierzbicka’s semantic primes and Melčuk’s lexical functions. The final stage in this process involved the postulation of the lcm itself, which is appropriately defined by Butler as the bringing together of CxG and Metaphor/Metonymy theory. Butler concludes his excellent contribution by summarizing the strengths of the lcm and pinpointing its future challenges. It is interesting to observe (‹http://www. lexicom.es/drupal/publications›) how, through the years, the lcm has substantially gained solidity in all the four levels of analysis proposed and complied with most of the criteria of adequacy propounded for functional theories here. In ‘Levels of Description and Explanation in Meaning Construction’ (153-98), Ricardo Mairal Usón and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez provide a detailed account of the four levels of description in the lcm and of their interrelation by means of two alternating mechanisms: subsumption and cueing. In Level 1, the core-grammar module, the authors develop an inventory of argument constructions but move theoretically away from CxG in the representional format selected, which incorporates the cited rrg abstract semantic metalanguage. Their proposal frames lts into Lexical Constructional Templates (lcts) in this module. In turn, Levels 2, 3 and 4 incorporate the pragmatics and discourse dimension. The non-argumental constructions of Level 2 are implicational, while Level 3 covers high-level illocutionary constructions and frames verbal predicates in the world of social norm and acceptable behavior. Finally, Level 4 discourse constructions express the ways in which the speaker connects his propositions. Mairal Usón and Ruiz de Mendoza treat cueing and subsumption in section seven. Cued inferencing is economical in essence and works at all levels. They present examples for sense completers, modal or phasal aspect constructions or even minor clauses relating to Level 1. We find metonymy operating in the examples provided in Levels2 and 3 for traditional implicatures and illocutionary force, and, in higher levels of implicated meaning, the authors postulate complex cognitive constructs like the Cost-Benefit Idealized Cognitive Model. The second process, subsumption, is defined as a mechanism that makes it possible
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 155–61· issn 0210-6124 reviews 159 for lower levels of semantic structure to form part of higher levels of syntactically oriented structure. It is mediated by internal and external constraints. The first operate at Level 1 and facilitate/block the merging of lexical items and their corresponding templates into lcts. External constraints relate to shifts in the category ascription of a verbal item when this becomes part of a construction. This contribution thus offers the description of a model that can turn the fuzziness of CxG coercion effects into a systematic account of the process of subsumption and that, by incorporating the discourse dimension of language, gains theoretical strength. In sum, the lcm may be said to keep the best of the functionalist approach to argument structure whilst, at the same time, it undergoes a more decidedly cognitivist turn at all levels of linguistic analysis. In ‘The Inchoative Construction. Semantic Representation and Unification Constraints’ (247-70), Francisco J. Cortés Rodríguez performs an analysis of the inchoative construction in line with the internal and external constraints in the process of subsumption. He also effects the integration of Pustejovsky’s qualia structure into the semantic module for lts in the lcm and reassesses the role of rrg logical structures since they fail in capturing the semantic, non-aspectual nuances of predicates. The format also looks different, with semantically enriched rrg logical structures anticipating qualia structure. Cortés Rodríguez starts by providing an overview of the semantics of inchoative structures, where a telic event that is modified by the lexical function cause is said to express change of state or position with or without a locative adverbial, and later focuses on coercion and on the constraints on event and argument structure. Among the first, result state and telicity block pure state and activity verbs respectively. Telic causality is at the basis of inchoatives. This explains the causative/inchoative alternation, which is grounded in a Process for action metonymy. The Unification between causative verbs and the inchoative template is effected through coercional subevent selection. Among the argument constraints involved, he points at the central role of effectors and postulates the agent-causer blocking constraint —improving Levin’s proposal— and the cause expletivization constraint, by which inchoatives participating in the causative/inchoative alternation retain part of their causative value. In sum, Cortés Rodríguez restructures the format for lts and provides a comprehensive analysis of the insertion/blocking of various verb classes into/from the inchoative construction that depicts what is, in my opinion, a decidedly alternational turn in the lcm. Part III, studies of specific constructions, integrates the corpus-based and contrastive dimensions into this volume. In ‘Measuring out Reflexivity in Secondary Predication in English and Spanish. Evidence from Cognition Verbs’ (201-45), Francisco Gonzálvez García offers an insightful corpus-based account of the reflexive evaluative subjective transitive and the self-descriptive subjective-transitive constructions in English and Spanish from a CxG perspective that captures the differences between these and also frames them in the transitive reflexive-intransitive/middlecontinuum . Gonzálvez García focuses on constructional configurations such as I find myself incredulous/Me encuentro muy atractivo and James found himself a virtual prisoner /me
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 155–61· issn 0210-6124 160 juan gabriel vázquez gonzález encontré en el paro, with find/encontrar followed by a reflexive pronoun and an obligatory object-related complement. After an overview of the higher-level reflexive construction, he proceeds to analyze the reflexive-subjective transitive construction, which also displays the semantic nuance of self-judgement/perception and shows restrictions involving a human subject and a complement holding an evaluative relation with the reflexive. The author then turns to the self-descriptive subjective-transitive construction, which shows a non-agentive, non-volitional human main clause subject, an unexpected and probably negative state of affairs/process/action, a stage-level predicate and a reflexive complement with informational salience. He then proceeds to contrast his corpus-based findings in both languages. In spite of the inherent language-specificity involved, he also detects some collocational affinities as regards the realization of the reflexive complement. He concludes by framing the construction in the reflexivitycontinuum and proposing further lines of research. In sum, it is in the contrastive turn that CxG takes here and in Gonzálvez’s capacity for making the best possible use of corpora that we considerer the value of this contribution to lie. Pilar Guerrero Medina’s ‘Semantic and Pragmatic Constraints on the English Get- passive’ (271-94) is a corpus-based analysis of five verbal classes which effects a shift in the lexical approach to get-passives towards their understanding in CxG terms. After reviewing five semantico-pragmatic features traditionally associated with this structure, she points out that these are neither fully satisfactory nor equally relevant for the get –ed construction, except for those expressing partial agentivity and resultative state. She then proceeds to make her own selection of verb classes: affect, giving, motion (send and steal), corporeal (eat and dine) and annoying (Dixon 2005). These verb classes are then traced in the get –ed construction in the bnc, the results obtained rating agentless giving highest (58.92%) and corporeal lowest (2.32%). She posits two major subconstructions: the causative and spontaneous get-passives. The first is found with affect, corporeal and annoying verbs, profiles the responsible Patient role and is predominantly agentless. It also shows the y is caused to receive z from x and y is caused to have/not to have z subtypes for giving and motion respectively. The spontaneous subconstruction or y becomes z shows a nonvolitional patient and a “cut” effector, appears with change of state stretch and break verbs and may be thought of as inchoative. She completes her contribution by listing the properties of these two subconstructions in detail. Guerrero Medina’s sound methodology thus proves the inadequacies of most of the earlier proposals and opens up a new path in the analysis of get –ed structures in CxG terms. The volume as a whole is coherently organized, moving from several proposals for combining theories to the more corpus-based, quantitative studies of the final section in a neat and principled way. As has already been suggested, Cortés Rodríguez’s paper might have been better suited for Part II. Indeed, one would have also liked to see more contributions from the theoretical domains of fdg and from the Belgian type of Systemic Functional Grammar that fuses with cognitivist/constructionist ideas and is referred to
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 155–61· issn 0210-6124 reviews 161 in the introduction. However, this would have caused this book to be unnecessarily long for a volume that effectively synthesizes —or, in the editors’ words, deconstructs— the common avenues of functionalism and constructivism.
Works Cited Dixon, R.M.W. 2005 (1991): A Semantic Approach to English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford UP. Goldberg, Adele 1995: Constructions (A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure). Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. —2006: Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford UP. Faber, Pamela and Ricardo Mairal Usón 1999: Constructing a Lexicon of English Verbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pustejovsky, James 1995: The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, ma: mit. Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. 2005: Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Received 27 October 2011 Revised version accepted 17 April 2012
Juan Gabriel Vázquez González is a lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics and Old English at the Department of English Philology, University of Huelva (Spain). His research interests focus on functional-cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics from a historical perspective, with current attention to the study of natural semantic primes and the vocabulary of emotions in Old English.
Address: Universidad de Huelva. Facultad de Humanidades. Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Avda. Tres de Marzo s/n. Campus de El Carmen. 21071, Huelva, Spain. Tel: +34 959219142. Fax: +34 959219143.
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Hans Boas, ed. 2010: Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar. Amsterdam/ Philadephia: John Benjamins. vii + 244 pp. isbn 978 90 272 0432 5
Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected]
This book, published within the Benjamins series devoted to Constructional Approaches to Languages, is a collection of eight papers on Construction Grammar(s) and their possible application to contrastive studies, edited by Hans Boas, one of the first researchers to apply this framework to languages other than English (Boas 2003).1 The book, as the editor suggests (15-16), has two main goals: (1) to offer the first steps for a future methodology on how to carry out contrastive analysis within Construction Grammar, and (2) to show that the notion of construction is a useful tool for typological/cross-linguistic research. In the first chapter, ‘Comparing Constructions across Languages’, after a brief review on previous studies on Construction Grammar, Boas suggests that there are two reasons for the lack of contrastive construction grammar studies, one historical and one internal. The former goes back to the traditional methodology which used to focus on just one single language, usually English, in order to provide in-depth analyses and then apply these results to study different languages individually; the latter is related to the claim by researchers, such as Croft (2001), that constructions cannot be but language-specific. In order to overcome these setbacks, Boas proposes a bottom-up framework that starts with the creation of a ‘constructicon’ —an inventory of constructions— in each given language, then goes on with the contrastive analysis of similar forms and meanings in two languages, only to end up with a whole set of possible candidates for serious typological constructional generalisations. This framework builds up on two main premises: the need to use semantic frames (Fillmore 1982, 1985) as a tertium comparationis to describe conceptual spaces, and the requirement to develop constructional inventories at different levels of abstraction for each language. The chapter finishes with an overview of the remaining papers —which are divided into three sections according to the languages they contrast: English and Indo-European, English and non-Indo-European, and a large-scale group of languages— and general results from the book. The next chapter is Martin Hilpert’s ‘Comparing Comparatives. A Corpus-based Study of Comparative Constructions in English and Swedish’. As the title suggests, the author
1 Financial support for the preparation of this review has been provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. FFI2010-14903).
—163— 164 iraide ibarretxe antuñano offers a detailed analysis on comparative constructions in these two languages based on a careful analysis of data from the British National Corpus and the parole corpus. His main argument is that, although these constructions are structurally very similar —both languages have two typical structures, one morphological with a comparative suffix er(- , -are) and one periphrastic with a comparative element (more, mer)— there are significant linguistic and usage differences that are worth taking into account and that only a constructional approach can reveal. For example, as far as the phonology is concerned, the number of syllables in the adjective in Swedish is not a key factor to determine the choice of a morphological or periphrastic comparative, as it is in English. Similarly, the tendency to use the periphrastic form in monosyllabic adjectives ending in /-l/ in English is not shared in Swedish. Morphologically, there is a different case assignment for the standard of comparison. Swedish prefers the nominative case (taller than I), whereas English largely prefers the accusative case (taller than me). Syntactically, English only marginally accepts the use of non-referring what in sentences that denote a standard of comparison as in taller than what I am, whereas this construction is widely accepted in Swedish (vä ‘what’). Morphological comparisons in Swedish, contrary to English, which tends to favour periphrastic comparisons, show higher tolerance to both longer adjectives and infinitive complement clauses followingän ‘than’. From a pragmatic point of view, Hilpert argues that, although both morphological and periphrastic comparison constructions exhibit the same behaviour in both languages, the former is more salient in Swedish, as it is the preferred means to express increasing intensity. He concludes that these particular constructional properties in each language call for a more language-based constructional analysis that complements a more general study. Chapter 3, by Gonzálvez-García, focuses on the differences between English and Spanish Accusative cum Infinitive (AcI) constructions with cognition and communication verbs. The main claim is that these constructions in English and Spanish are different on the basis of their inherent semantic properties, especially those related to subjectivity, as well as on their discourse characteristics, namely, focus and topic. Based on an examination of extensive synchronic and diachronic data from corpora (Survey of English Usage, lob, Brown Corpus of American English, International Corpus of English, bnc, Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual), Gonzálvez-García offers a detailed and well-documented Goldberian analysis of the subjective-within-objective transitive —defined as “X NP ( 1) expresses an other-initiated, mediated, tentative involvement towards Y (NP2 XPCOMP)” (55)— and of the subjective-transitive —which refers to “X (NP1) expresses a forceful, direct and personal involvement towards Y (NP2 XPCOMP)” (48)— constructions in these two languages. He demonstrates that, despite some similarities, the distribution and the productivity of these constructions depend on different factors in each language. While the Spanish subjective-within-objective transitive construction gives preference to information structure factors and topicalisation, the English counterpart favours semantic factors. Gonzálvez-García also claims that, from a diachronic viewpoint, this construction does not only evolve on the basis of subjectification, but also on further restrictions on syntactic
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 163–69· issn 0210-6124 reviews 165 productivity, e.g. tense and aspect marking, types of infinites, etc. As a consequence, the construction is less productive and integrated into the grammar of Spanish than that of English. In chapter 4, Gurevich examines conditional constructions in English and Russian. This author argues that the basic constructions are functionally very similar, despite morphological differences. In both languages, the protasis starts with a particle if( , esli ‘if ’) and the apodosis has an optional element (then, to ‘then’). However, there are differences in predictive and counterfactual conditionals. In the former, the protasis and the apodosis are in the same tense in Russian, but the apodosis is usually backshifted in English. In the latter, protasis and apodosis are marked with the conditional by in Russian, but in English the protasis is backshifted and the apodosis is marked with would. Bringing together insights from both Construction Grammar and previous analyses on conditionals within the Mental Spaces theory (Dancygier and Sweetser 2005), Gurevich shows that Russian and English conditionals differ on the grammatical encoding of pragmatic and discourse factors, such as viewpoint and epistemic distance. Whereas English counterfactual conditionals can express different degrees of epistemic distance by means of past-tense morphology, Russian is unable to reflect these levels since all counterfactual conditionals have to be construed with the particle by and the past tense. On the other hand, the two types of Russian conditionals, imperative and non-imperative, are chosen on the basis of viewpoint. If the speaker emphasises a specific viewpoint, the former is chosen. This distinction is not present in the corresponding English conditional constructions. In the following chapter, ‘Results, Cases, and Constructions. Argument Structure Constructions in English and Finnish’, Leino discusses the differences and similarities in ditransitive, caused-motion and resultative constructions in Finnish and English. While the morpho-syntactic characteristics of these languages are remarkably different due to typological factors (case marking vs. prepositions, agglutinating vs. isolating morphology), Leino argues that these constructions share semantic and pragmatic correlations. A major point in this paper is the notion of ‘construction correspondence’, i.e. semantic as well as formal, structural and morpho-syntactic similarity. According to Leino’s analysis, these three constructions are unarguably different and independent in English, but the situation is different in Finnish; the ditransitive and the caused-motion constructions in this language cannot be treated separately. Stemming from these results, Leino concludes that constructions are language-specific, mainly due to typological, information structure and cultural factors, but that they are perceived as similar when they are used to describe “humanly relevant scenes: situation types which occur in an essentially similar form across language communities and cultures” (131; emphasis in original). He proposes that construction correspondence is a matter of degree, and cannot be judged in absolute terms, because correspondence is not based on one feature similarity, but on a cluster “of similarities in different domains and respects” (132). Chapter 6, by Timyam and Bergen, also focuses on argument structure constructions and contrasts the caused-motion and ditransitive constructions in English and Thai. Based
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 163–69· issn 0210-6124 166 iraide ibarretxe antuñano on both experimental and corpus data, Timyan and Bergen show that these constructions are functionally different in the two languages. Both caused-motion and ditransitive constructions denote transfer of possession in Thai. In English, on the other hand, it is only the latter that suggests this meaning, whereas the former activates the reading of forced motion along the path. As a consequence, the group of verbs selected in English is different for each construction, while it is the same in Thai. Another difference is that the ditransitive construction in Thai is less productive than in English, and in terms of cognitive processing, Thai speakers tend to interpret the construction as caused-motion whenever the post-verbal NP constituents are heavy. Although the analysis of English and Thai suggests that constructions are language-specific, these authors also argue that there is a set of underlying universal characteristics shared by all grammatical constructions e.g. meaning and distribution relationship, argument structure associated with certain verbs, choice of construction based on pragmatic strategies that allow cross-linguistic analysis. In the next chapter, Hasegawa et al. offer a contrastive study on measurement and comparison constructions in English and Japanese. These authors show that constructions with a scalar adjective plus a measurement phrase behave differently in Japanese and English. In Japanese, the value of the scalar adjective is always evaluative, and, as a result, the construction is interpreted as a comparison. In English, on the other hand, this interpretation is not possible because the scalar adjective is not evaluative, and, as a consequence, this construction “merely evokes a relevant scale on which the measured valued is located” (198). Data constructions and examples in this paper are drawn from the English FrameNet project (Fillmore et al. 2003), and due to these mismatches in the interpretation of Japanese measurement constructions, Hasegawa et al. conclude that FrameNet should be complemented with tools from Sign-based construction grammar (Sag forthcoming) in order to account for these differences, and therefore, offer a consistent and uniform analysis of these constructions. The last chapter, by Croft et al., is a proposal to revise Talmy’s (1985, 1991) theory of lexicalization patterns, or as the authors call it “the typological classification of complex event constructions” (201). They propose to basically keep Talmy’s typology but expanding it to account for symmetric constructions such as serial verbs, compounding and coordination constructions, that pose problems from Talmy’s original two-way typology. They also argue that the typology, instead of comparing languages as a whole, should use as “the basic unit of comparison and contrast . . . each construction that is used to express an equivalent state of affairs” (202). Based on some examples from five languages —English, Dutch, Bulgarian, Icelandic, and Japanese— they claim that each language employs different encoding strategies for different event types and propose an implicational universal that explains the relation that exists between event types and encoding strategies. They also suggest two grammaticalisation paths from coordination to verb-satellite fusion and from coordination to verbal compounding that result “in a single morphologically bound predicate form” (231), that is, in morpho-syntactically more integrated event-encoding constructions.
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Perhaps the main achievement of this book is that it demonstrates that Construction Grammar can be successfully applied to compare and contrast languages. Furthermore, it shows that this framework can even provide possible typological syntactic tools universals? for typology. All chapters in this book prove that constructions in different languages can indeed be contrasted on the basis of some general functional principles, but that this analysis also requires the fine-grained examination of language- specific constructional properties in order to achieve a full-fledged tool for cross-linguistic research. Boas, in his chapter, summarises the results of this book as follows: “constructions are viable descriptive and analytical tools for cross-linguistic comparisons . . . enable linguists to state generalisations across languages at different levels of granularity . . . may be constrained by typological differences between languages . . . [and] allow the researcher to arrive at results involving all levels of grammatical structure across languages” (15). In general, I agree with the editor that this book provides, at least partially, these results. However, there are inherent problems in this collection of papers. One is the overpresence of English throughout the book; every chapter compares English with another (non)- Indo-European language. While it is true that this is the first book of its kind, and that the starting point for all these studies is English, the argument would gain in credibility if there were papers comparing constructions in other languages within the same family e.g. Spanish-French and from different families with totally different morpho- syntactic features e.g. Russian-Japanese. Another issue, which although in itself an interesting line of research, still poses problems for readers, is the juxtaposition of different frameworks in the papers included in this book. The label of Construction Grammar, as happens with that of Cognitive Linguistics, is an umbrella term that subsumes different ‘subtypes’ of constructional models (see Gonzálvez-García 2012, for a review). By far, the most widely-known model is Goldberg’s (1995, 2006) Construction Grammar (CxG) as is demonstrated in this book, since the majority of papers take this model as their main, if not exclusive, theoretical framework (Hilpert, Gonzálvez-García, Gurevich, Leino, Timyam and Bergen). However, there are other subtypes of constructional models that are either hardly represented, e.g. Berkeley Construction Grammar (Fillmore and Kay 1996) in Leino’s paper, Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag forthcoming; Michaelis 2009) in Hasegawa et al.’s paper, or not mentioned at all: Fluid Construction Grammar (Steels and de Beule 2006). The difficulty lies not only in that these models are underrepresented, but also in the fact that the authors do not take the time to explain the basics of these more restrictively used/known approaches. Hasegawa et al.’s paper is an example: the authors propose formalisations to the reader, but little is explained about how to interpret them. While some papers offer ‘pure’ Construction Grammar descriptions (e.g. Gonzálvez-García), others resort to other frameworks to build up their analyses, mostly Fillmore’s (1982, 1985) frame semantics (Boas, Hasegawa), and Fauconnier’s (1997) mental spaces (Gurevich). In general, the idea of picking up theoretical constructs and mechanisms from different approaches in order to produce a more accurate account of a linguistic phenomenon is enriching, and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 163–69· issn 0210-6124 168 iraide ibarretxe antuñano this is also a very positive feature of the book: demonstrating that different approaches, constructional or not, are complementary; however, when the author does not reach this perfect blend and one of the models seems forced, the result is superficial rather than positive, as is the case with Gurevich’s contribution. One final shortcoming in this book is the lack of substantive real data insome chapters, especially in Croft et al.’s paper, where the authors include examples of dubious grammaticality and existence to build up their arguments cf. Spanish example El libro deslizó hasta el suelo (211). Boas himself criticises Croft’s previous work on voice and transitivity on these grounds: “Croft’s results . . . may be perhaps incomplete because of his reliance on relatively small amounts of data from each language” (6). This flaw is still unfortunately lingering there. Most of the chapters, however, draw their examples from well-known corpora in their languages, although the usage of these corpora is somewhat unbalanced. Whereas some chapters deal with a large amount of data and offer quite sophisticated and detailed frequency analyses (Hilpert, Gonzálvez-García, Timyam and Bergen), others make use of a very limited amount of data (Gurevich, Leino, Hasegawa et al.). It is true that in these cases examples are at least real and attested, but still a framework that defends a usage-based approach deserves more careful and detailed treatment of examples. These are not just simple illustrations of constructions, as some papers would suggest (e.g. Hasegawa et al., Croft et al.), but the basis for defending the emergence of constructions per se. All in all, this volume is a successful first step into the new subfield of Contrastive Construction Grammar. It shows that constructions can be used for cross-linguistic comparison, and that there is a whole incipient and promising research area to be explored. The book can be considered a blueprint for this type of analysis and the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Construction Grammar and Contrastive Studies.
Works Cited Boas, Hans C. 2003: A Constructional Approach to Resultatives. Stanford: csli. Croft, William 2001: Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford UP. Dancygier, Barbara and Eve Sweetser 2005: Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Fauconnier, Gilles 1997: Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Fillmore, Charles J. 1982: ‘Frame Semantics’. Linguistics Society of Korea, ed. Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin. 111-38. —1985: ‘Frames and the Semantics of Understanding’. Quaderni di Semantica 6: 222-54. Fillmore, Charles and Paul Kay 1996: Construction Grammar. csli Lecture Notes. Stanford: csli. Fillmore, Charles, Christopher Johnson and Miriam Petruck 2003: ‘Background to FrameNet’. International Journal of Lexicography 16.3: 235-50.
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Goldberg, Adele E. 1995: Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago UP. —2006: Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. New York: Oxford UP. Gonzálvez-García, Francisco 2012: ‘La(s) Gramática(s) de Construcciones’. Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano and Javier Valenzuela, dirs. Lingüística Cognitiva. Barcelona: Anthropos. 238-66. Michaelis, Laura A. 2009: ‘Sign–Based Construction Grammar’. Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford UP. 155–76. Sag, Ivan forthcoming: ‘Sign-based Construction Grammar: An Informal Synopsis’. Hans C. Boas and Ivan Sag, eds. Sign-based Construction Grammars. Stanford: csli. Steels, Luc and Joachim de Beule 2006: ‘A (very) Brief Introduction to Fluid Construction Grammar’. Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding (ScaNaLU 2006). ‹http://arti.vub.ac.be/~joachim/ acl–ny–06–3.pdf› (Accessed 12 August, 2011). Talmy, Leonard 1985: ‘Lexicalization Patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms’. Timothy Shopen, ed. Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 36–149. —1991: ‘Path to Realization: A Typology of Event Conflation’. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 17: 480-519.
Received 19 September 2011 Accepted 29 March 2012
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (PhD, Edinburgh, 1999) is and Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Zaragoza. Her work focuses on cross-linguistic polysemy, constructions, semantic typology, sound symbolism, metaphor, perception, space-motion and Basque. Her most recent publications include Cognitive Linguistics and Translation (2012, with A. Rojo), Lingüística Cognitiva (2012, with J. Valenzuela), Language, Mind, and the Lexicon (2007, with C. Inchaurralde and J.M. Sánchez-García) and Sound Symbolism and Motion in Basque (2006).
Address: Universidad de Zaragoza. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Departamento de Lingüística General e Hispánica. c/ Pedro Cerbuna, 12. 50009, Zaragoza, Spain.
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Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Juan Rafael Zamorano Mansilla 2010: Systemic Functional Grammar of Spanish: A Contrastive Study with English. London: Continuum. xi + 443 pp. isbn: 9781441126009 (paperback); 9780826482952 (hardcover)
Anne McCabe Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus [email protected]
Systemic functional grammar (sfg) has developed immensely in depth and extension over the last fifty years. From groundwork laid first by Bronislaw Malinowski, followed by J.R. Firth, and cultivated by its main architect, M.A.K. Halliday starting in the 1950s, it has become both highly theorized and widely applied. It is especially exciting to see a book such as Systemic Functional Grammar of Spanish: A Contrastive Study with English, by Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús, and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla, appear on the scene, given that, while the bulk of theoretical and applied work in sfg has centred on English, its basic tenets are designed to be applied to all languages. Systemic Functional Grammar of Spanish: A Contrastive Study with English (henceforth sfgs) is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction, including the book’s aims: to add to the growing pool of sfg of descriptions of languages; to show the usefulness of an sfg perspective for discourse analysis in Spanish; and to provide a selection of SF Spanish grammar contrasts with parallel selections from SF English grammar, contrasts which are functional and discourse-oriented. The authors suggest that these aims will appeal to a variety of readers: those familiar with sfg, but not with the lexicogrammar of Spanish, those familiar with both English and Spanish but not with sfg, and those interested in typological comparisons from a functional perspective with an eye to theoretical and practical applications. Most of the chapter is then devoted to introducing key concepts from sfg, beginning with the cline of instantiation, a principle which suggests that all languages consist of, at one end of the cline, the overall system potential which is realized, at the opposite end, by specific instances of text, which in turn serve to construe the system potential. Thus languages can be compared through analysis of specific instances of texts, or moving along the cline, of text types, or further along, of the languages as systems. The chapter introduces the organizing principles of language in the sfg view: system and structure. The concept of system applies to the notion of language as a whole, as well as to individual systems from which structures are derived, a view of system which highlights that languages are sets of paradigmatic options, arranged through syntagmatic patterns of structures. The distinction between system and structure is highly useful when comparing languages, as we can examine the similar/different choices at
—171— 172 anne mccabe the level of system, while structures which realize the systems may differ widely. Indeed, one purpose of sfgs is, as its subtitle indicates, to provide functional contrasts between Spanish and English. An illustration of part of the system network —the standard sfg theoretical representation of paradigmatic choices— for the clause in Spanish is included. The authors explain the data sources used to draw examples from throughout the book, large available corpora in Spanish and in English, as well as the methodology applied in creating the sfg descriptions of Spanish, which is both quantitative and qualitative, with a focus on systemic choice as meaning in context. The remaining chapters centre on various theoretical aspects of sfg, and follow the format of: explanation and illustration in English, descriptions for Spanish illustrated through the corpus data, contrasts between Spanish and English, and a summary. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are drawn from the metafunctions of language; in the sfg view, all languages have developed to serve three broad metafunctional purposes: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The ideational metafunction consists of two sub-metafunctions: the experiential, which refers to the ability of languages to express our experience of the world, whether real or imagined/abstract, and the logical, the ability to express relationships between events. The interpersonal metafunction allows for the establishment/maintenance of relationships with others, as well as for the expression of opinions on propositions, events, etc. The textual metafunction serves to draw the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions together into ordered sequences. Chapter 2 focuses on the logical metafunction, and explains the system for clause complexes in Spanish, which is the same as the English system. There are two simultaneous choices for clauses in entering a complex: the systems of taxis and of logico-semantic type.1 In terms of taxis, clauses are in a relationship based on either hypotaxis (relations of dependency) or on parataxis (relationship of equals). As clauses enter into the system of taxis, they also enter into a logico-semantic relationship with each other, with one clause either projecting or expanding the other. In the case of projection, one clause can project another either as a locution or as an idea. In the case of expansion, clauses can elaborate, extend or enhance other clauses. Each of these logico-semantic relations can be further classified in terms of the types of meaning they provide, in ever more degrees of delicacy. The authors highlight the differences in structures which carry out the various semantic functions; for example, they show that Spanish uses mood choice (indicative/subjunctive) to mark a difference in condition: concessive relations, which English marks through use of the nexus even though (although)/even if. Chapter 3, on the experiential metafunction, begins with the system of transitivity, divided into nuclear transitivity, which refers to the process types and participants in a clause, and circumstantial transitivity, which refers to the circumstances surrounding the events in the clause. Up until this point, SFGS follows ‘standard’ sfg practice as most widely cited from An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Halliday and
1 In SFG, systems are written in small caps.
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Matthiessen 2004; henceforth ifg). It diverges by dividing nuclear transitivity into three simultaneous systems: process types, agency, and causation, and by dividing the system of process types into four: material, mental, verbal and relational; the two further process types from ifg are classified as subcategories: behavioural processes as a subtype of material processes, and existential processes of relational ones; The system of agency exists in many accounts of sfg, including, as is pointed out, sfg descriptions of other languages, and is divided into the choices of middle (Agentless, e.g. The glass broke), and effective (+ Agent). sfgs includes pseudo-effective, where the process extends to something that is not a true participant, e.g. They climbed the mountain. sfgs cites Davidse (1992: 132) who argues “there is no way the transitive and ergative pseudo-effective constructions can be generalized into a single schema” (88), and thus a third overall system under nuclear transitivity is added, the system of causation, which categorizes clauses as either ergative or transitive; ergative processes can be both middle and effective, such as the verb break, while transitive processes realize either one or the other, as, for example, row and pound. In IFG, clauses are analysed using both an ergative model, a general way of analysing the experiential structure of the clause with no participant labels specific to the process type, and a transitive model, in which case the different process types are connected to different sets of participant labels. In thesfgs model, all clauses are either transitive or ergative, and thus the authors include participant labels for the different process types in both the transitive and ergative systems. The chapter then includes a description of the system of circumstantial transitivity, which follows that of ifg. Chapter 4 is devoted to the interpersonal grammar of the clause. An explanation is provided of primary speech functions (questions, commands, offers and statements), which are connected to congruent (e.g. interrogative clauses realize questions) and non- congruent realizations (e.g. a declarative clause realizing a command). The systems of polarity and modality are explained, and their realizations in Spanish analyzed. The point is made that, while in Spanish the imperative mood is realized through verb inflection, the difference between interrogative and indicative moods is realized prototypically through the intonation contour of the clause, which contrasts with mood realization in English through the sequencing of Subject and Finite. Indeed, several points of the chapter highlight the minor role played by the mood element (the Subject- Finite structure) in the Spanish clause; it is never picked up on by the tag element, which is instead more closely related to polarity (e.g. ¿no? or ¿verdad?). The section on interpersonal contrasts focuses on the differences in realizations and in systems, which include, in addition to the differences with respect to the mood element, the possibility in Spanish for more options in the imperative mood, as well as a more delicate set of options to express high probability. Chapter 5 centres on the textual metafunction, which orders the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions into text via two mechanisms, thematic structuring and information structuring. Theme and Rheme are defined from a more standard sfg
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 171–77· issn 0210-6124 174 anne mccabe perspective, with a mention of the polemic surrounding definitions of Theme and the lack of agreement on the element of the transitivity structure of the clause at which an analysis of Theme ends. The sfgs framework for analysis includes the Thematic Field, “a complex functional zone in clause/initial position serving a variety of clausal and discourse functions” (299). The Inner Thematic Field includes the Thematic Head, which functions to signal the most central participant(s), either explicitly through pre-verbal lexicalized Subject or Complement or implicitly through the verbal suffix indicating person, or through Complement expressed as a pre-verbal clitic, as well as to “present some experiential element as most closely aligned with the speaker’s vantage point of view” (300). The Inner Thematic Field also includes thePre-Head , which can be realized by verb stems and any Circumstantial elements occurring before the Subject or person marker. TheOuter Thematic Field includes textual and interpersonal Themes,participial clauses and absolute Themes. Full-length texts are used to illustrate the application of the framework to Spanish. Then the notion of markedness is explained and illustrated through unmarked and marked options in Spanish clauses. In the second part of the chapter information structure is explained, beginning with Halliday’s description of the information unit, which conveys an interactive tension between what is presented as known or predictable, on the one hand, and new or unpredictable on the other, and which is realized in English through intonation. The chapter provides the paradigmatic options and realizations of retrievable information in Spanish, where information focus is “dynamically assigned by the text producer in the construction of discourse by identifying the concept(s) which are most central to the mental processing (the inferences) required by the listener to understand the message, and to follow a coherent progression of information” (337). Also provided are the typical realizations of New Focus (through post-verbal subject or predicated Theme), Contrastive Focus (through marked Theme constructions, post-verbal subject, and special focus markers) and Emphatic Focus (through special focus markers), and the different types of focus and their typical realizations are illustrated. Previously analysed texts are re-analysed to show the interplay of Theme and Focus in Spanish. Chapter 6 outlines the grammar of groups and phrases. After a brief introduction, the experiential structure of the Spanish nominal group is analyzed, and the function of its different elements, Thing, Deictic, Numerative, Epithet and Classifier are explained and illustrated with corpus examples. Also analysed is the logical structure of the nominal group, as are the meanings conveyed by the relative positioning of the experiential elements. The same pattern of explanation and illustration is followed for the verbal group: the experiential structure expresses meanings related to voice, modality, tense and aspect, and the logical structure determines the syntagmatic arrangement. The chapter further illustrates the meanings, functions and structures of adverbial and adjectival groups, as well as of the prepositional phrase. There is no doubt that this book is an important contribution to the theoretical and applied activity of sfg. The descriptions of Spanish are strongly theorized and empirically tested through corpus data, and thus allow for comprehensive and insightful functional
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 171–77· issn 0210-6124 reviews 175 contrasts with English. These insights include: the explanation of differences between conditional and causal meanings and their structural realizations; the positioning of the Subjunctive mood in Spanish in the realm of hypotactic enhancement as well as in some kinds of projection (again allowing for a linking of meaning and structural realization); the interesting observation that the order of elements in the English clause serves textual needs, while in the Spanish clause it serves interpersonal ones; and the clear explanation about the tri-metafunctional interplay, which has to manifest itself differently across the two languages, as in English the more rigid interpersonal order (Subject before Finite) means that a passive structure may be needed to achieve the same experiential arrangement which in Spanish can be achieved via the flexibility of the order of elements in the clause, to mention just a few. The tables and figures which draw meanings and realizations together are highly useful in summarizing the explanations and examples. At the same time, the book is not always easy to follow. Chapters are not uniform in their use of tables and figures; for example, the system network in Chapter 1 (4) uses a bracketing system which, unfortunately, does not distinguish between systems with choices which are entered simultaneously or those for which a single option must be chosen; while Figure 2.1 (11) does show this difference, it is not explained. The type of systems networks which are prevalent in Chapter 3 would be welcome in Chapter 4. While the intended audience of the book is stated as wider, the ideal reader is one who actually knows both sfg and Spanish. Grammatical metaphor is included early on (Chapter 2), mentioned as a familiar concept, and readers are expected to understand what the Mood element is. The reader not familiar with Spanish might benefit from the section on the verbal group (Chapter 6) before reading some of the sections in Chapter 2, which rely on understandings of tense and aspect in construing indicative and subjunctive mood. The section on Theme Markedness in Chapter 5 would be useful before the illustrations of Theme in Spanish. Also, the explanations in some chapters are much less in depth than in others; for example, Chapter 4 provides a very vague sketch of the exchange structure of the clause in Spanish, while, in Chapter 3, the complexity of description via the different sets of labels across processes for transitive and ergative constructions (which definitely does have the advantage of illuminating more subtle similarities and differences between the two languages at a more systemic level in terms of meaning potential and of paradigmatic realizations), has the disadvantage of being highly tangled even for the seasoned SF linguist, as also included is what the authors call a ‘general’ system to be able to compare with ifg’s ergative system, making for a myriad of labelling. Finally, in Chapter 5, the assigning of focus in Spanish is not wholly clear, in part because the realizations overlap across the different focus types, and thus the reader wonders how focus for many of the examples was decided. Also, less canonical applications of sfg theory in the book assume a consensus amongst linguists working on Spanish. As illustrated here, theoretical decisions, such as that related to transitivity as well as that of thematic structure, diverge from ‘standard’ sf theory. This in and of itself is not a problem —within sfg there is not always consensus,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 171–77· issn 0210-6124 176 anne mccabe and it is agreed that testing of the theory on empirical data, followed by suggestions for changes, is an important endeavour. At the same time, debate in the sfg literature usually references others; at times sfgs does so, as in Chapter 3, which draws on Davidse’s (1992) work on transitivity. Yet this addition to the transitivity network needs further discussion. Chapter 4 could have usefully drawn on Quiroz’s (2008) description of the Spanish mood system in furthering the difference with the use of the mood element in English; Quiroz describes the Negotiator (based on SFG descriptions of French) as the central function which realizes mood choices through the verbal group. Also, the sfgs framework for analyzing thematic structure is unlike others in the literature. sfgs aims to provide Theme and Rheme categories as “measurable constructs which can be subject to empirical verification” (298); the sfgs scheme is verified through the functional analysis of text samples, and other researchers could replicate its application. However, other empirical contrastive studies have used an analysis in which Theme is characterized as the first experiential element in the Clause, whether that be a process, participant or a circumstance, notably the process in Spanish, an analysis which is acknowledged and used by the authors in other investigations (e.g. Arús 2010). As long as the characterization of Theme is operationalized in a uniform way, realizations in the different languages can be compared. The authors’ explanation of Theme is thorough, and their inclusion of many definitions of Theme, including Matthiessen’s (1992: 70) “guide to appropriate expansion points” (298) illuminating; however, the reduction of the role of Theme to the introduction of participants suggests that other clausal functions, notably processes and circumstances, do not provide expansion points. The wary reader will want to keep in mind the continuing debate on thematic analysis. The above concerns notwithstanding, sfgs is a valuable resource book for analytical descriptions of Spanish through sfg. The use of corpora to illustrate instances of the language, especially the longer stretches of text in chapter 5, allow the authors to make insightful points about the language system of Spanish and its contrasts with English. The wealth of analysed examples will serve those wishing to apply sfg to their own analysis of the Spanish language in good stead. Systemic Functional Grammar of Spanish: A Contrastive Study with English adds much to the enrichment of sfg through analysis of other languages.
Works Cited Arús, Jorge 2010: ‘On Theme in English and Spanish: A Comparative Study’. Elizabeth Swain, ed. Thresholds and Potentialities of Systemic Functional Linguistics: Multilingual, Multimodal and Other Specialised Discourses. Trieste: EU Trieste. 23-48. ‹http://www. openstarts.units.it/dspace/handle/10077/3597› (Accessed 25 August, 2011) Davidse, Kristin 1992: ‘Transitivity/Ergativity: The Janus-headed Grammar of Actions and Events’. Martin Davies and Louise Ravelli, eds. Advances in Systemic Linguistics: Recent Theory and Practice. London: Pinter. 105-35.
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Halliday, M.A.K. and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessssen 2004: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. London: Arnold. Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 1992: ‘Interpreting the Textual Metafunction’. Martin Davies and Louise Ravelli, eds. Advances in Systemic Linguistics: Recent Theory and Practice. London: Pinter. 37-81. Quiroz, Beatriz 2008: ‘Towards a Systemic Profile of the Spanishmood’ . Linguistics and the Human Sciences 4.1: 31-65.
Received 1 September 2011 Revised version accepted 16 March 2012
Anne McCabe is Chair of the Languages and Literature Division at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus, where she teaches linguistics, ESL and writing pedagogy to undergraduate and graduate students. She has published numerous articles and two edited collections of papers on application of Systemic Functional Linguistics to educational contexts and to discourse analysis, as well as An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies (Equinox, 2011).
Address: Languages and Literature Division. Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus. Avda. del Valle, 34. Madrid, 28003. Tel.: +34 915545858, ext. 237. Fax: +34 915546202.
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Eterio Pajares Infante 2010: La traducción de la novela inglesa del siglo XVIII. Fernando Galván, ed. Vitoria: Portal Editions. xvi + 507 pp. isbn 978-84-937075-4-5
Begoña Lasa Álvarez Universidade da Coruña [email protected]
In 1800, reviewing Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s translation of Hamlet, Cristóbal Cladera stated: “Hace años que nos inunda un diluvio de traducciones en que perece no solo el primor y gallardía de las obras originales, mas también el sentido y verdad de los principios de que tratan” (qtd. in García Garrosa and Lafarga 2004: 344). This text, and others which at the time described translation as a flood, an avalanche, or an inundation, among other terms, illustrate the unrest then caused by the phenomenon of translation and how critics and scholars perceived a change in its practices. The interest stirred up by translations in that period has not prompted similar attention by researchers and scholars today, and very few studies have been published in Spain on eighteenth- century translation (Lafarga 1999; García Garrosa and Lafarga 2004); most of these are chapters in books which examine the history of translation in this country or the history of eighteenth-century translation in Europe. If we focus on eighteenth-century translation from English into Spanish, the scene is even less encouraging. Most of the studies discuss translations from French into Spanish, since in the field of translation, as in many others, the ascendancy of France was unquestionable and the majority of English texts were translated from intermediary French versions. As a consequence, the studies which examine eighteenth-century English translation into Spanish, and particularly that of novels, have been scattered, included in general or specific monographic works and journals (Suárez Lafuente 1979; Aguilar Piñal 1992; Pajares 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1999; Deacon 1999a; Galván 2008), or have deserved a modest space in works devoted to the eighteenth-century Spanish novel (Brown 1955; Montesinos 1980; Ferreras 1987; García Lara 1999; Álvarez Barrientos 1991, 2010). Anyone interested in the translation and reception of the eighteenth-century English novel in Spain will know Eterio Pajares’s work on the subject, the result of a sustained dedication for over twenty-five years, which is reflected in a number of articles and book chapters listed in the volume under scrutiny here (xv-xvi). We agree with the editor of this collection, Fernando Galván, that it is a wise decision to gather those earlier pieces together in this volume, where they are arranged into two main sections, dealing with theoretical framework and practical implementation. These two broad sections compose the core of the work, framed by the editor’s preface and the author’s preliminary words,
—179— 180 begoña lasa álvarez introduction and conclusion; the book also includes a section on the abbreviations used, a bibliography and appendices. In the perceptive Preface which opens the volume, Fernando Galván underlines the relevance of the seventeenth-century Spanish novel in the development of the genre in Europe. He focuses mainly on the influence of Cervantes’s Quixote on the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century, a phenomenon which was not mirrored in Spain, where the novel and the narrative genres did not develop to the same extent. However, he argues, Spain did participate in the European translational interchange of the period, albeit mediated by French culture. This meant that the French admiration towards the English novel, crystallized in numerous translations and imitations, was reproduced to a certain extent in Spain. As Galván states, the main value of this book is to explain “las razones por las que en España hemos prestado tan poca atención a la novela inglesa del siglo xviii, tan cercana, por un lado, a nuestra rica tradición novelística (y de modo singular al Quijote y a la picaresca), y, por otro, tan decisiva en el desarrollo de la novela europea moderna” (viii). In his Preliminary Words, Eterio Pajares explains the circumstances which gave rise to this book —a lifelong interest in the subject and the need to gather the resulting publications together in one volume— before moving on to the first chapter of the book, ‘La novela inglesa desde sus orígenes hasta 1800 y su traducción al español’, where he presents a brief overview of the English and the Spanish novel in the eighteenth century and of the texts translated into Spanish. Part two of the volume, on the theoretical framework, is divided into seven sections. The first, ‘Proceso lector y traducción’, offers a general perspective on the translating process as a specific interpretation of a reader/translator, which makes any translation of the same text unique and dissimilar. In the next section, ‘La teoría de la traducción en el siglo xviii’, Pajares begins the discussion of theoretical issues. Analysing the contributions of critics and authors of the period, he distinguishes two main groups: the classical school and the school of renewal/imitation. The authors in the first category aim at reproducing the original text as faithfully as possible, not only in terms of meaning but also in terms of style; for those in the second category, however, the emphasis lies on the recipient, and consequently the original text is accommodated to the target reader’s taste and habits. This second trend was to achieve its height in the last quarter of the century due to the influence of French translators and their defence of bon goût, as well as the assumption of the role of social educators on the part of the translators. The next section, ‘Manipulación y norma estética en la traducción de la Ilustración’, proposes concepts already discussed, but Pajares examines the influential laws of French bon goût, which determined, along with censorship, the translations of the period:
1. Prohibir todo lo que fuese bajo y ordinario en el idioma y en los hechos. 2. Prohibir la extravagancia en el idioma. 3. Proscribir las escenas demasiado violentas o afectivas. (51)
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The consequence was atraducción tutelada, that is, a supervised or controlled translation. Evidently, the followers of this method changed many aspects of the original texts, as the third part of this volume illustrates, and also received harsh criticism, but as the author coherently states, these translations “hoy deben aceptarse como válidas, ya que forman parte del acervo activo de la tradición” (55). Section four, entitled ‘Identidad nacional y traducción’, focuses more exhaustively on Spanish translations, on idiosyncratic factors determining the translators’ job, particularly censorship (further examined in section six), but also on aspects related to Spanish readers’ taste, which caused the suppression of realistic and minute descriptions and digressions, the softening of certain expressions, or the protection of the audience’s morality, mainly on issues concerning ethics and religion. This last assertion is particularly evident in the differences observed between the English female protagonists and the French and Spanish heroines, who are more submissive and passive. Section five, ‘La traducción tutelada’, tackles a concept referred to in previous sections, a translation determined and conditioned by the French bon goût and Spanish censorship. Pajares here considers further consequences of this supervised translation: the disappearance of any religious, political or social criticism, and the suppression of sexual references in the target text. The next section of this theoretical framework, ‘La censura en el trasvase de la ficción dieciochesca’, explains how Government and religious censorship worked and how it affected writers and translators. Although the power of censorship was intimidating, the author speculates on its influence in relation to the changes observed, since most were the consequence of the intermediary role played by French translators; the practical chapter included later in the book clarifies some of these ambiguities. In the final section, ‘Hacia un método de análisis de la obra literaria’, Pajares approaches the method applied in the analysis of translations in the next chapter, based on the translation quality assessment proposed by Julio-César Santoyo. Part three, concerned with translation practices, is more extensive than the theoretical section, and the author covers a wide range of eighteenth-century authors and novels, particularly those relevant to illustrate the points examined in previous chapters. This effort is commendable; but there are inconsistencies, such as the inclusion of a satire in a volume on the novel, or the presence of a very brief and incomplete study of Fielding’s Amelia based only on a previous analysis by Philip Deacon (1999b). Objections could also be raised to the selection of authors, all of them men, given that among the translations published during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth (Pajares 2006), there are novels by many British women writers (Jaffe 2005; Lorenzo Modia 2006; Lorenzo Modia and Lasa Álvarez 2007; Lasa Álvarez 2009; Establier Pérez 2010). The volume analyses the translations of the following texts: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Clarissa and The History of Sir Charles Grandison; Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Amelia; Jonathan Swift’sGulliver’s Travels; John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull; Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas; and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The method of analysis most consistently used includes: a summarised introduction to the author and the work under scrutiny; a focus on the Spanish translation and translator,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 179–84· issn 0210-6124 182 begoña lasa álvarez together with the censor’s report, if available; an assessment of the translation according to the following parameters: additions, omissions, changes or alterations and mistranslations, all of which are reproduced in tables at the end. This outline varies depending on the relevance of specific aspects in each translation. In the case of Richardson’s novels, the emphasis lies on the omissions, such as those in excerpts of Pamela, referring to married priests or to any sentimental scene with physical connotations; however, the novel most affected by the translator’s changes is The History of Sir Charles Grandisson, where almost half of the text was suppressed and the ending altered. Given that in the translation process there was an intermediary version by a French translator, one may ask who is ultimately responsible for the changes observed in the Spanish translation; unfortunately, Pajares overlooks this issue and opts for an exhaustive analysis of the version of the novel which reached the Spanish audience. Henry Fielding’s novels receive less detailed analysis, although the changes observed are also relevant. The portrayal of women in Tom Jones deserves attention, since “[t]odos los personajes femeninos de las versiones francesa y española de Tom Jones aparecen mucho más sumisos que en el original” (327); the character of Mrs. Western is most affected by this corrective of women’s independent behaviour. The analysis ofGulliver’s Travels follows a different pattern, as Pajares chooses to examine the translation chronologically. He also specifies in this case that most of the changes are the work of the French translator. Some can be understood to obey the rules of bon goût, as is the case of eschatological passages, but others can only be explained by the translator’s choice or haste. Although we do maintain that the analysis of John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull is not pertinent in this volume, we can see some relevance in the fact that the subject of this satire makes it an illogical translation in the period. The political and social viewpoints represented in the text would never have been acepted by Spanish censors, as the negative report included by Pajares demonstrates. Accordingly, we are not offered a study of an extant published translation but the manuscript handed to the censors. The translation of Samuel Johnson’sThe History of Rasselas is of particular relevance, given the fact that it is the only eighteenth-century novel translated directly into Spanish and the singularity that it was authored by a woman, Inés Joyes y Blake. Moreover, this translation does not concur with the belles infidèles method followed by the rest of the translators. The scant attention paid to women writers in the volume is somewhat counterbalanced here, since Pajares decides to dedicate some space to the ‘Apología de las mugeres’, a paratext added by Inés Joyes to her translation and dedicated to her daughters, in which she discusses the role assigned to women in the society of the time. The last section of this chapter focuses on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but it is the analysis of a manuscript, not a publication, since it was probably forbidden by censorship. The interest of this section devoted to Defoe’s emblematic novel lies in the fact that there are two intermediary texts in this case: the Spanish version is a translation of an Italian version, which in turn is a translation of a French imitation. In his conclusion, Pajares draws attention to the scarce anglophilia observed in Spain, as well as the small number of English novels translated into Spanish if compared to the case in France. He highlights the relevance of French culture as intermediary, but also the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 179–84· issn 0210-6124 reviews 183 fact that there was room for idiosyncrasies in the Spanish translations, imposed chiefly by censorship and self-censorship. The presence of the eighteenth-century English novel in Spain was modest, “pero fue un intento que bien valió la pena y que sembró la semilla que posteriormente haría fructificar la novela inglesa en español” (481). The volume provides a very complete examination of the translation of the eighteenth- century English novel into Spanish, approaching it both in terms of its theoretical framework and of its practices, in a documented and didactic manner. As a compendium of previous studies and articles, it inevitably incurs in repetitions and other minimal inconsistencies; however, both the structure and the contents of the volume make it highly readable. This collected work by Eterio Pajares is of undeniable importance for English and Spanish literary studies, as well as for translation studies. It will serve the needs of scholars, researchers, students or readers in general, who are here offered easy and documented access not only to relevant information on the translation of the eighteenth- century English novel into Spanish, but also to many appealing aspects of the literary, cultural, social or political life of this century.
Works Cited Aguilar Piñal, Francisco 1992: ‘La novela que vino del norte’. Ínsula 546: 9-11. Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín 1991: La novela del siglo xviii. Madrid: Júcar. —2010: ‘Panorama general de la novela en la España del siglo xviii’. Aurora Egido and José Enrique Laplana, eds. La luz de la razón. Literatura y cultura del siglo xviii a la memoria de Ernest Lluch. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico (csic). 133-60. Brown, Reginald F. 1955: La novela española 1700-1850. Madrid: Dirección General de Archivos y Bibliotecas. Deacon, Philip 1999a: ‘La novela inglesa en la España del siglo xviii: Fortuna y adversidades’. Fernando García Lara, ed. I Congreso internacional sobre novela del siglo xviii. Almería: U de Almería. 123-40. —1999b: ‘La historia de la traducción española de Amelia de Henry Fielding’. Francisco Lafarga, ed. La traducción en España (1750-1830). Lengua, literatura, cultura. Lleida: U de Lleida. 335-44. Establier Pérez, Helena 2010: ‘La traducción de las escritoras inglesas y la novela española del primer tercio del siglo xix: lo histórico, lo sentimental y lo gótico’. Revista de literatura 72. 143: 95-118. Ferreras, Juan Ignacio 1987: La novela en el siglo xviii. Madrid: Taurus. Galván, Fernando 2008: ‘The Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Its Spanish Heritage and Reception’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 56: 123-43. García Lara, Fernando, ed. 1999. I Congreso internacional sobre novela del siglo xviii. Almería: U de Almería. García Garrosa, María Jesús and Francisco Lafarga 2004: El discurso sobre la traducción en la España del siglo xviii. Estudio y antología. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger.
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Jaffe, Catherine 2005: ‘From The Female Quixote to Don Quijote con faldas: Translation and Transculturation’. Dieciocho 28.2: 120-26. Lafarga, Francisco, ed. 1999: La traducción en España (1750-1830). Lengua, literatura, cultura. Lleida: U de Lleida. Lasa Álvarez, Begoña 2009: ‘La novela inglesa del siglo xviii en España: el caso de Memorias para la historia de la virtud de 1792’. Elena de Lorenzo Álvarez, ed. La época de Carlos iv (1788-1808). Oviedo: Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo xviii. 677-86. Lorenzo Modia, María Jesús 2006: ‘Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote into Spanish: A Gender-Biased Translation’. The Yearbook of English Studies 36.1: 103-14. Lorenzo Modia, María Jesús and Begoña Lasa Álvarez 2007: ‘From Britain to Spain via France: Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter’. Gillian Dow, ed. Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900. Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang. 129-41. Montesinos, José F. 1980: Introducción a una historia de la novela en España en el siglo xix. Seguida de un esbozo de una bibliografía española de traducciones de novelas (1800- 1850). 4th ed. Madrid: Castalia. Pajares, Eterio 1994: ‘La traducción inglés-español en el siglo xviii: ¿Manipulación o norma estética?’ Federico Eguiluz et al., eds. Transvases culturales: literatura, cine y traducción. Vitoria: U del País Vasco. 385-94. —1996a: ‘La teoría de la traducción en el siglo xviii’. Livius 8: 165-74. —1996b: ‘Traducción inglés-español en el siglo xviii: la “traducción tutelada”’. El mundo hispánico en el Siglo de las Luces II. Madrid: Ed. Complutense. 991-1000. —1999: ‘Censura y nacionalidad en la traducción de la novela inglesa’. Francisco Lafarga, ed. La traducción en España (1750-1830). Lengua, literatura, cultura. Lleida: U de Lleida. 345-52. —2006: La novela inglesa en traducción al español durante los siglos XVIII y XIX: Aproximación bibliográfica. Barcelona: PPU. Suárez Lafuente, María Socorro 1979: ‘La novela inglesa en España. (Últimas décadas del siglo xviii y primeras del xix)’. Actas del II Congreso de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos (aedean). Valencia: U de Valencia. 67-72.
Received 28 June 2011 Revised version accepted 29 April 2012
Begoña Lasa Álvarez holds two BAs in English and Spanish Studies and obtained her PhD with a dissertation on the Spanish reception of eighteenth-century English novels by women. She was a full-time research assistant at the University of A Coruña, and in the Modern Languages Centre at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She currently teaches in a Secondary School in Ourense. Her academic interests are eighteenth-century women writers and the reception of English literature in Spain, her main area of publication.
Address: Universidade da Coruña. Facultade de Filología. Campus da Zapateira, s/n. 15071, A Coruña, Spain.
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Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, eds. 2009: A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance 10. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. xiv + 209 pp. isbn 9781843841920
Jordi Sánchez-Martí University of Alicante [email protected]
For the better part of the twentieth century the literary corpus formed by the Middle English verse romances did not receive as much scholarly attention as other medieval genres.1 While these texts remained of interest to historical linguists and textual scholars alike, they suffered general neglect from literary critics, with the notable exception of the more refined Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Such bias, however, was gradually corrected during the last quarter of the century, through studies such as those by Mehl (1968) and Wittig (1978), and notably, through the publication of selected papers from the conferences on Romance in Medieval Britain organized biennially since 1988. In addition to the momentum provided by these volumes, three other collections of essays have promoted the interest of literary scholars in this medieval genre, namely, the books edited by Aertsen and MacDonald (1990), Putter and Gilbert (2000) and McDonald (2004). More recently we find volumes devoted to individual romances, as in the case of Bevis of Hampton (Fellows and Djordjevic 2008) and Guy of Warwick (Wiggins and Field 2007). Thus, more than twenty years since the first meeting of the Romance Conference at the University of Wales in 1988, it seems that popular romances have finally come of age for literary studies, as attested by the large body of scholarship they have given rise to. In order to identify fruitful approaches to and discourses around the English romances, the Companion under review is organized in chapters “intended as comprehensive reviews of the state of play in the field, as well as pointers to areas that need further attention” (9). The first chapter, ‘Popular Romance: The Material and the Problems’, is authored by Rosalind Field and examines the following aspects illustrating the underlying complexities of the genre: “assumptions about popularity, the procedures of the long romance and the critical search for meaning and contexts in the romance of the family and the romance of the popular hero” (11). The Anglo-Norman Boeve de Hauntoun demonstrates characteristics most commonly identified with the popular romances, yet it was associated
1 This review is part of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. FFI 2008-02165), whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
—185— 186 jordi sánchez-martí with and appealed to the higher classes in post-Conquest England, thus challenging, on the one hand, “the unexamined class-based assumption according to which aristocrats . . . have refined literary tastes” (12), and, on the other, the supposed exclusiveness of the Anglo-Norman vernacular. One of the assumed impediments to popular access to the Anglo-Norman romances was their length, a disadvantage that Field argues was offset by the episodic organization of narratives such as Gui de Warewic. The remainder of the chapter presents problematized readings of two Breton lays (Sir Orfeo and Emaré), a divided family romance (Octavian), a courtship romance (Floris and Blancheflour), and two heroic romances (Havelok and Gamelyn). In fact, the main difficulty —and main virtue too— seems to lie in the genre’s elusiveness, in spite of all the conventionalisms that sustain it, and all the unconventional solutions adopted: “We find something of a kaleidoscopic effect by which each work throws a new light and different perspective onto the others . . . ; the very size and categoric slipperiness . . . become part of its [i.e., the genre’s] particular quality” (28). Raluca Radulescu addresses the definition of the genre in chapter two by offering an historical and thematic reassessment of the term romance, although there is no conclusive evidence for the use of such a descriptor for our textual corpus in medieval times. What is more, “a broad range of narratives modern critics consider to be under the umbrella of romance were seen by medieval authors and scribes as ‘lives’, ‘histories’, ‘treatises’ or ‘jests’” (33). The diversity of alternative models and descriptors is attributable to the genre’s protean nature, with texts that are permeable, elastic and capable of adapting to the thematic exigencies of various manuscript contexts. Radulescu suggests that Middle English romances’ resistance to any kind of definition and categorization goes back to their French antecedents, which are themselves derived from different genres. Consequently, critics such as Laura Hibbard (Loomis) in 1924 and Dieter Mehl in 1967 chose to compare the French models and the English translations, and systematically analyze their metrical and thematic features. All attempts to identify characteristics common to the entire corpus, in fact, seem to obscure the object of study, since they overlook that “a distinct feature of popular romances appears to be the deliberate difference or deviation from the norm” (39). In view of this, Radulescu discusses three significant romance features that in various ways shape these texts’ generic identity. First, one of the differences between some Middle English romances and their French sources lies in the adoption of hagiographic discourse in order to address social concerns relevant to the contemporary audience, as in the case of Sir Gowther, Sir Isumbras and Amis and Amiloun. The second characteristic has to do with the presence of powerful, independent female characters who clearly influence the development of the hero, as the Fere does in the case of Ipomadon A. Lastly, Radulescu refers to the romance’s narrative self-consciousness, understood as a desire to explore the limits of the genre by assessing chivalric values (e.g., Sir Amadace) and courtly ones (e.g., The King of Tars). The third chapter considers ‘The Manuscripts of Popular Romance’ and is divided into two sections: in the first Maldwyn Mills deals with medieval manuscripts, while
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 185–92· issn 0210-6124 reviews 187 in the second Gillian Rogers examines the famous Percy Folio manuscript (BL MS Additional 27879). Mills has a tough assignment to carry out, since he has only eight pages to present a conspectus of the morphology of the over 90 manuscripts containing Middle English romances (cf. Guddat-Figge 1976). He decides to investigate how various meanings of the word popular in the Oxford English Dictionary apply to medieval romance manuscripts so that the reader becomes aware of the variety of codicological presentations of the genre. For her part, Rogers presents a useful analysis of the Percy Folio, with a codicological description and a discussion of the reception of its contents by one particular reader, namely, the manuscript’s compiler himself. Transcribed ca. 1640- 50, the Percy manuscript is an eclectic compilation combining an antiquarian interest in the past with a concern over contemporary affairs. Although no overall principles of organization occur, a few thematic clusters are discernible, like the seven Robin Hood ballads and the grouping of Arthurian texts that come immediately after. Regarding the romance material in particular, the Percy Folio contains six texts derived directly from medieval sources with manuscript and/or print antecedents. Note, however, that Valentine and Orson was published by Wynkyn de Worde not in 1502, as Rogers states (63), but ca. 1510 (cf. stc 24571.3). The next chapter treats the ‘Printed Romance in the Sixteenth Century’, a topic too large to be done justice in only twelve pages. Aware that only a partial overview is possible, its author, Jennifer Fellows, has narrowed the article to “a textual characterization of the post-medieval [print] versions of the five romances in Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38” (67), namely, Eglamour, Tryamowre, Bevis, Guy and Degaré. In Fellows’ opinion, Wynkyn de Worde and William Copland were “[t]he giants among the sixteenth-century printers of romance” (68), although this statement may give an incorrect impression about their involvement in the publication of romance texts. While De Worde was a romance pioneer who produced the first edition of at least eight such texts, Copland’s work was notoriously derivative since he simply reproduced “the most chronologically adjacent edition for his text” (Edwards 2002: 142). Deserving of greater recognition is Richard Pynson, who probably from 1497 fought against De Worde for the market niche of the printed romances and up until 1510 produced the first edition of four —or maybe five— romance titles.2 Fellows analyzes the textual tradition of the printed versions of each one of the romances in the cul manuscript. In the case of Eglamour, Fellows states, “There are no substantial narrative differences between the manuscript and the printed versions” (69), contrary to what happens with Bevis (73), whereas in the case of Guy she mentions the indiscriminate abridgement of the printed version. About Tryamour we learn that the “two manuscripts are closer to each other than either is to the prints” (71), and Fellows finds the stability of Degaré’s
2 According to the BMC (90, 97), De Worde and Pynson printed separate editions of Guy of Warwick probably in 1497. If we accept this date, we can no longer maintain, as Fellows does, that De Worde was “the first to print ‘popular’ romances” (68).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 185–92· issn 0210-6124 188 jordi sánchez-martí printed tradition remarkable (76). In discussing the illustrations of the romances, the chapter contains one material inaccuracy when Fellows states that the woodcut used by De Worde in Degaré “on sig. Bir is identical to that on sig. Kiir of Richard Pynson’s edition (c. 1503) of Bevis” (76), when in fact both these illustrations are extremely similar but different.3 In the next chapter Thomas H. Crofts and Robert A. Rouse explore how the Middle English romances were used to articulate the nationalist discourse of Englishness. Crofts and Rouse point out that English identity in the late Middle Ages was not homogeneous, but was instead “complicated by ties between England and the continent, regionalisms within England itself, and even worrying similarities with the Saracen Other” (82), as they demonstrate in their perceptive discussion of Guy and Bevis. Then they consider whether this nationalist sentiment translated into hostility against all things French in the Charlemagne romances, as one would expect. This anti-French sentiment, however, is conspicuous by its absence, a fact traditionally explained by the “Christian militancy shared by England and France” (87). Yet, the authors of the article offer an alternative explanation, namely, the value of chivalry as a shaping force of aristocratic identity, of greater significance than the supposed national differences and religious loyalties previously adduced. In ‘Gender Identity in the Popular Romance’, Joanne Charbonneau and Désirée Cromwell focus on two issues: how the domestic sphere affects gender, and how masculine identity is constructed outside the family environment. It is common in romance narratives to find female characters that are defined “in relation to men or as objects of exchange between men” (100), although Charbonneau and Cromwell argue that there is not one stable model of ideal female behaviour. The absence of such an identifiable archetype makes it possible for female characters to play the gamut of roles “from the pious and innocent to stereotypes from the misogynistic tradition” (100–101). Thus, the English romances offer the image of women not necessarily submissive to men’s wishes, but instead as agents that have an impact on the narrative and are, therefore, perceived as a potential threat to the established norm. This situation is best illustrated by Bone Florence of Rome, Guy and Ipomadon A, where women determine the identity of their male counterparts, in addition to influencing the narrative course of events. The masculinity of those male characters is shaped in topographies other than domesticity and is realized in the figure of the chivalric knight. Knights are often prevented from achieving the supposed ideal of masculinity because they all have their faults, including excess of liberality, violence against women and failure of trust. Yet, the chivalric knight is not the only model of masculinity available, as on other occasions they opt for spiritual values —Robert of Cisyle— or standards of conduct outside sanctioned gendered roles, like the male bonding in Amis and Amiloun. As the chapter aptly concludes, the romance genre “defies generalities and allows multiplicities of vision and conflicting perspectives on gender” (110).
3 For facsimile reproductions of these images, see figs. 6 and 14 in Sánchez-Martí (2011: 93, 96).
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Ad Putter, in ‘The Metres and Stanza Forms of Popular Romance’, tackles a topic that, as he admits, is seen as technical and arid by literary scholars. Yet Putter insists on the literary relevance of correctly interpreting a text’s metrical features, since they reveal “the poet’s sense of belonging —his ideas about the kind of work he was writing and the performance he envisaged” (111), in addition to helping establish the text’s date of composition and provenance. Prior to discussing the metrical forms of the English romances, Putter refers to the genre’s resistance to abandon verse as a means of expression, as English romances in prose appeared only towards the middle of the fifteenth century, that is, more than two centuries later than in the case of the French romances. One decisive factor that explains the change to prose has to do precisely with the genre’s protracted use of verse, as a result of which “the traditional forms of versification . . . had come to seem outmoded and lowbrow in the eyes of a growing audience of readers” (112). Putter starts his metrical overview with couplets, a form popularized in post-Conquest England in imitation of the French octosyllabic rhyming couplet. The couplet readily met the needs of romance narratives, as shown for the first time by the poet of Havelok, one of the earliest romances, although with a certain degree of Anglicization. Next, Putter approaches the stanzaic arrangement in Sir Tristrem, composed by an octave in alternating rhyme followed by a bob and wheel, the latter familiar for its use in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Just from the verse form we learn that Sir Tristrem was produced in the north of England, rather than in Scotland, and was meant to be performed with a musical instrument. The tail-rhyme stanza, the form most commonly associated with the popular romances, has its origins in the liturgical sequence and the septenary, and was used initially for lyrical compositions and later for narrative purposes. Romancers were partial to this stanza because it was suitable for singing, while “[t]he direct line of descent from saints’ lives to tail-rhyme also . . . explains the close thematic connections between the two genres” (123). Although tail-lines have been neglected because of their poor narrative relevance, Putter argues that we cannot overlook their phatic function of inviting the audience’s engagement. The chapter closes with a discussion on rhyme and makes a brief comment about three other verse forms, namely, the abababab stanza, the sixteen-line tail-rhyme stanza and the rhymed alliterative tradition. Putter’s is a masterly contribution that contrives to highlight the importance of understanding the literary implications of any given romance verse form. As he states, “[t]he subject is much too important to be left to the metrists” (131). In ‘Orality and Performance’, Karl Reichl foregrounds that romancers envisaged primarily an oral/aural delivery for their texts without ruling out other forms of reception, such as reading in private from a manuscript either silently or aloud. In any event, the Middle English romances were suitable for public performances by a minstrel with or without musical accompaniment, although we do not know whether they were sung or not. But what evidence do we have for the oral transmission of these texts? For a long while it was thought that the so-called holster books, like Bodleian MS Ashmole 61, were meant for professional entertainers, their compact size providing for
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 185–92· issn 0210-6124 190 jordi sánchez-martí easy handling and transportation. Reichl, however, admits: “[i]t is difficult to prove the use of a manuscript by an English minstrel” (143). The other source of evidence comes from the romances themselves, whose oral-memorial transmission has resulted in textual variations not attributable to scribal practices, as in the case of Sir Degarre. Nonetheless, here Reichl takes an extremely positivist stance when stating, “it is difficult to point to an incontestable instance of memorial transmission . . . [which] must remain hypothetical, though perhaps in some cases the best hypothesis for accounting for textual variation” (144). Finally Reichl addresses the issue of composition and contends that in spite of the prevalence of formulaic diction, there is no evidence suggesting that the romances were composed orally. In contrast, the existence of French antecedents for the majority of popular romances is the best indication that they were composed in writing, thus placing the genre in “a literate/oral tradition” (149). In chapter 9, Phillipa Hardman builds a case in favour of considering young readers “among the potential target audience of Middle English romance” (152) and regrets that youngsters have not received scholarly attention comparable to that afforded to the female audience of romance. This situation, in Hardman’s opinion, should be redressed “in view of the fact that not only are many Middle English romances concerned with families . . . but that a large number have a child protagonist” (152). Her suggestion, however, is not without problems. That a text concerns family issues or that it relates events in the protagonist’s childhood does not necessarily mean that it was composed with a young readership in mind. Likewise, that a romance appears in a household miscellany is no indication that it was intended for the younger readers of the family, as Hardman suggests in the case of the Auchinleck MS. Neither is it convincing to argue that the English translation of Anglo-Norman romances was part of “a programme of making available to younger readers the traditionally valued narratives of their cultural heritage” (155). It seems reasonable to consider that the topics of romance were of interest to the younger generation, and Hardman offers numerous examples. It seems equally reasonable to assume that children and young people were part of the genre’s audience, mainly in public performances but also —although more rarely— in some manuscript contexts, as for instance in the Heege MS. But Hardman provides no textual or historical evidence that a given romance was composed for an implied or intended audience made up of young readers.4 The volume closes with the chapter ‘Modern and Academic Reception of the Popular Romance’, by Cory J. Rushton. He argues that although the genre has survived mainly in academic contexts, its influence has extended to other modern and popular cultural expressions, such as films and video games “based on the idea of the quest in which an individual leaves civilization, encountering the strange and marvellous on the way, and often returns with a firmer sense of his or her own identity” (167).
4 For the concepts of implied and intended audience, see Strohm (1983).
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In the introduction to the companion the editors state that it “aims to provide a much needed guide to issues pertinent to the student and researcher of popular romance” (2). Since most chapters provide an overview of various scholarly discourses and approaches, it seems that the book will prove more valuable to students and researchers who are new to the field. In any event, this volume is a welcome contribution to, as well as testimony of, the scholarly conversation around the English popular romance.
Works Cited Aertsen, Henk and Alasdair A. MacDonald, eds. 1990: Companion to Middle English Romance. Amsterdam: VU UP. BMC = Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century now in the British Library, pt. 11, England. ’t Goy-Houten: Hes and De Graaf, 2007. Edwards, A. S. G. 2002: ‘William Copland and the Identity of Printed Middle English Romance’. Phillipa Hardman, ed. The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 139–47. Fellows, Jennifer and Ivana Djordjevic, eds. 2008: “Sir Bevis of Hampton” in Literary Tradition. Studies in Medieval Romance 8. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Guddat-Figge, Gisela 1976: Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances. Munich: W. Fink. Hibbard (Loomis), Laura 1924: Mediæval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances. New York: Oxford UP. McDonald, Nicola, ed. 2004: Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance. Manchester: Manchester UP. Mehl, Dieter 1968 [1967]: The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. London: Routledge. Putter, Ad and Jane Gilbert, eds. 2000: The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance. Harlow: Longman. Sánchez-Martí, Jordi 2011: ‘Illustrating the Printed Middle English Verse Romances, c.1500–c.1535’. Word & Image 27: 90–102. STC = A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, first compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged, begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, with a chronological index by Philip R. Rider. London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91. 3 vols. Strohm, Paul 1983: ‘Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual’. Chaucer Review 18: 137–64. Wiggins, Alison and Rosalind Field, eds. 2007: Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor. Studies in Medieval Romance 4. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Wittig, Susan 1978: Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances. Austin, TX.: U of Texas P.
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Received 7 October 2011 Revised version accepted 21 March 2012
Jordi Sánchez-Martí, BA (Jaume I), MA (Bristol), Phd (Cornell), is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Philology and Vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alicante. He has published articles on medieval literature, particularly on Middle English romance, including ‘The Printed History of the Middle English Verse Romances’, Modern Philology 107 (2009): 1–31.
Address: Departmento de Filología Inglesa. Universidad de Alicante. 03080, Alicante, Spain. Tels.: +34 965903438, +34 965903400, ext. 2575. Fax (+34) 965 90 3800.
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Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, eds. 2010: Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Possessing the Past. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. xxvi + 197 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-20557-4
Margarita Estévez Saá Universidad de Santiago de Compostela [email protected]
Ghosts, ghost stories and the tropes of haunting and spectrality are recurrent topics in contemporary literature and criticism. In 2010, the year of the book under review, we witnessed the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s The English Ghost. Spectres through Time; Shane McCorristine’s Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920, and Andrew Smith’s The Ghost Story,1840 -1920. A Cultural History, as well as the collection of essays edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. Similarly, proof of scholarly interest in Neo-Victorian studies is found in the proliferation of critical volumes on the topic, which, in the same year, 2010, included: Marie-Louise Kohlke’s and Christian Gutleben’s Neo- Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering; Louisa Hadley’s Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us; Kate Mitchell’s History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages; and Ann Heilman and Mark Llewellyn’s Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009. Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, in Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Possessing the Past, have successfully combined these trends by bringing together, in the eight chapters of their volume, scholars who apply a variety of perspectives on the trope of the ghost, and on the notions of haunting and spectrality, to the study of Neo-Victorian texts. Haunting and spectrality were not only recurrent notions in Victorian fiction but intrinsic aspects of the socio-cultural atmosphere of the times, as Julian Wolfreys demonstrated in his influential Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2001). It is not therefore surprising that they have become inherent components in Neo-Victorian fiction. As was the case in nineteenth-century literature, ghosts and spectres proliferate in Neo-Victorian texts; furthermore, the very essence of these writings is or implies a spectral structure in the sense that they invoke the haunting effect of history and of the past on the present. Ghosts, spectrality and haunting are tropes that have been approached from different theoretical perspectives. In a highly illuminating introduction, the editors of the volume review theories of spectrality, highlighting the usefulness of Sigmund Freud’s concept
—193— 194 margarita estévez saá of the “uncanny”, and revising Jacques Derrida’s writings on “hauntology” in Spectres of Marx (1994), as well as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s “concept of the phantom”, as delineated in The Shell and Kernel (1994). The editors carefully elucidate the different perceived functions of the trope: while according to Derrida we should learn to invoke and engage actively with the ghost, in Abram and Torok’s view the spectre and the transgenerational trauma it conveys need to be exorcised. These theoretical reflections are subsequently evoked, employed or challenged in the different essays of the volume. The book is divided into four sections, ‘Histories and Hauntings’, ‘Spectral Women’, ‘Sensing the Past’, and ‘Ghosts in the City’. This division seems appropriate, given that the trope of the ghost is especially useful when revising and destabilising traditional conceptions of time (‘Sensing the Past’) and space (‘Ghosts in the City’), and that ghosts and spectres have been literally and metaphorically invoked in relation to women’s slippery identity and liminal condition (‘Spectral Women’), as well as in detecting historical traces and erasures (‘Histories and Hauntings’). Neo-Victorian novels can be considered, among other things, as an attempt at exorcising the past, as well as a reflection on its continuity in the present and/or a way of projecting the future. Therefore, they overtly play with the ‘spectre’ of time. Each of the contributors to Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction, despite the subtitle of the volume (Possessing the Past), has chosen to emphasize one of these temporal dimensions and to study the different uses of time in Neo-Victorian novels. A reading of the collection as a whole leaves us with the impression that it is precisely this potential destabilisation of temporal markers that endows the Neo-Victorian text with its spectral quality. Francis O’Gorman inaugurates the section of the book on ‘Histories and Hauntings’ with his chapter ‘Salley Vickers, Venice, and the Victorians’. Through his study of Vickers’s novel Miss Garnet’s Angel (2000), he contends that Neo-Victorian fiction in particular, and contemporary novels in general, convey a celebration of the past —the nineteenth- century, the Victorian and the historical— as well as of the present, or rather “a belief in the continuing vibrancy, the living ambiance of the past” (20). Of particular interest is O’Gorman’s study of the connection between the evocation of Ruskin, and of his writings on angels, and the study of the ghostly presence of these figures in Vickers’s novel. In the second chapter of the volume, ‘Spectrality, S(p)ecularity, and Textuality: Or, Some Reflections in the Glass’, Mark Llewellyn analyses John Harwood’s books The Ghost Writer (2004) and The Séance (2008), Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999), Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002), and Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999), demonstrating that Neo-Victorian fiction and metahistorical novels in general are as much concerned with the present historical moment as they are with the nineteenth century (40). His intention is to “provide a reflection on our sense of belatedness and the need to write out or exorcize our Victorian spirits in the contemporary sphere” (24). Llevellyn’s essay takes into account Derrida’s thinking and the influence of psychoanalysis but it is also sustained by the work of prestigious Victorian scholars such as Isobel Amstrong and Julian Wolfreys.
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The section of the book devoted to ‘Spectral Women’ opens with Agnieszka Golda- Derejczyk’s chapter ‘Repetition and Eternity: The Spectral and Textual Continuity in Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen’. This reading emphasizes the bond between writing and living, and the life-preserving potential of writing, thus joining, in the Kristevan sense of monumental temporality, past and present, and pointing to a future in which women will be endowed with the history, or histories, that they have traditionally been deprived of:
The bond between writing and living, acknowledging one’s life experience, seems thus to operate in In the Red Kitchen on two related levels. The first functions as spiritualism where the mediumistic activity of passive writing is literally bound up with the act of existing, approving the visiting spirit’s existence, spirit’s materialization. The second functions as the metaphorical representation of individual women’s nostalgia for giving themselves a history, having their life stories acknowledged, even though only in a fictionalized form. (53)
This rather hopeful reading of the potentialities of spiritualist séances and the mediumistic activity of (supposedly passive) writing which, according to Golda-Derejczyk, Michèle Roberts relates to “women as subjects in and of history” (46; emphasis in original), is not always shared by the rest of the contributors to the volume. Dwelling on the notions of “the uncanny double” and on Torok and Abraham’s concept of the “phantom”, Esther Saxey, in ‘The Maid, the Master, her Ghost and his Monster: Alias Grace and Mary Reilly’, argues that the supernatural in Victorian and Neo-Victorian fiction serves a rather ambivalent function in relation to issues such as class, gender and sexuality, since despite criticising restriction, repression and oppression, it does not overtly support liberation nor defend transgression. Silvana Colella’s contribution, included in the section ‘Sensing the Past’, offers a highly persuasive and original analysis of the spectral, uncanny nature of smells, whose trace is undeniable but which defy our possibilities of representation. In her study of Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Colella contends that Faber’s awareness of the duplicity inherent in smells —both material and immaterial spectral ambassadors from a past that remains difficult to name— has interesting bearings on the epistemological questions posed by contemporary historical novels (92). Collela is here aligning herself with Saxey’s view of spectrality as a problematic, contradictory and ambivalent agent in the texts in which it appears. Ann Heilmann offers a study of various creative adaptations of Henry James’s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw (1908). Heilmann convincingly demonstrates how Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly’ (1994), Sara Waters’s Affinity (1999), Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) and A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005), despite belonging to different generic categories (Gothic tale, Neo- Victorian lesbian Gothic, supernatural film and litcrit campus-thriller) are all structured around six categories related to crises or transformations at the turn of the century: social architecture, the family, the question of (narrative) authority, femininity, sexuality and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 193–98· issn 0210-6124 196 margarita estévez saá identity (129). Although Colella’s and Heilmann’s essays comprise the section ‘Sensing the Past’, both demonstrate how the spectral is used to offer a reflection on the present. The chapters included in the last section of the book, ‘Ghosts in the City’, reveal how cities are haunted by phantoms that subvert time dichotomies as traditionally conceived. Thus, Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham deal with ghosts and spectres in the city of London. Michel de Certeau asserted in The Practice of Everyday Life (1988) that the modern city is haunted by the past, and this is precisely what Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham demonstrate in their respective chapters, both dealing with ghosts and spectres in the city of London. Arias analyses the spectral traces of the river Thames and of the mid-nineteenth-century sanitary movement in the neo-Victorian novels Sweet Thames (1992), by Matthew Kneale, and The Great Stink (2005), by Clare Clark. In a well documented chapter, underpinned by the theoretical contributions of Freud, Derrida, and Abraham and Torok, Arias studies how both novels offer a verticalised image of the city of London that emphasises the connectedness of past and present, above and below, inside and outside, the public and the private, and that exposes both the personal and the cultural traumas haunting its inhabitants. These two neo-Victorian novels as interpreted by Arias offer a reflection on the river and on the sanitation movement that convey an image of London “as a storehouse of concealed secrets and unresolved conflicts . . . an encrypted structure, haunted by its traces” 148( ). While Arias finds in the portrayal of the river Thames and of the sewer, as well as in allusions to the sanitation movement, traces of history in the modern city that function as a powerful metaphor for the return of the repressed and the uncanny (144), Patricia Pulham opts for focusing on the spectral presence and haunting effect of the Golem in Ian Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994). The presence of the Golem, Pulham argues, conveys the intrusion of Jewish history and undermines the centrality of the Ripper narrative in both novels. Pulham informs her study with Amy Elias’s notion of “metahistorical romances” and Dana Shiller’s use of Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “historiographic metafiction”, and convincingly contends that the Golem represents “the retrieval, and unpresentability of the past in the neo-Victorian novel” (160), “both a challenge to historical ‘truth’ and narrative realism, embodying the potential for textual and historical disruption” (177). The collection Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction is an enlightening and up-to-date contribution to Neo-Victorian studies which, by focusing on the recurrent trope of the spectre and spirituality, discloses as much about Victorian history and literature as it does about our own contemporary world. It exposes how the traumas, repressions and disturbances that haunted the nineteenth-century have not been exorcised in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The widely different, and at times contradictory, visions of spectrality and haunting offered by the contributors —like the complex relation between the literary phantom and the past that it evokes, the present it haunts and the future it projects—, can be read as reflecting the slippery nature of their subject, the ghost: a notion that resists definition but, as the editors and contributors to the volume successfully show, is hardly an exhausted topic.
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Works Cited Abraham, Nicholas and Torok, Maria 1994: The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. N.T. Rand. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. Ackroyd, Peter 1994: Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. London: Vintage. —, ed. 2010: The English Ghost. Spectres through Time. London: Chatto and Windus. Blanco, María del Pilar and Esther Peeren, eds. 2010: Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London: Continuum. Certeau, Michel de 1988: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P. Clark, Clare 2005: The Great Stink. London: Viking. Derrida, Jacques 1994: Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. P. Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge. Elias, Amy 2001: Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP. Faber, Michael 2002: The Crimson Petal and the White. Edinburgh: Canongate. Hadley, Louisa 2010: Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Harwood, John 2004: The Ghost Writer. London: Vintage. — 2008: The Séance. London: Jonathan Cape. Heilman, Ann and Mark Llewellyn, eds. 2010: Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-Fisrt Century, 1999-2009. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Hutcheon, Linda 1988: A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. James, Henry 1908 (1898): The Turn of the Screw. London: Bedford. Kneale, Matthew 1992: Sweet Thames. London: Penguin. Kohlke, Marie-Louise and Christian Gutleben, eds. 2010: Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. McCorristine, Shane 2010: Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Mitchell, Kate 2010: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Oates, Joyce Carol 1994: ‘Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly’. Haunted Tales of the Grotesque. New York: Dutton. 254-83. Palliser, Charles 1999: The Unburied. London: Phoenix. Poster, Jem 2002: Courting Shadows. London: Sceptre. Roberts, Michèle 1990: In the Red Kitchen. London: Vintage. Shiller, Dana 1997: ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’. Studies in the Novel 29.4: 538-60. Sinclair, Iain 1987: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. London: Vintage.
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Smith, Andrew 2010: The Ghost Story, 1840-1920. A Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester UP. Vickers, Salley 2000: Miss Garnet’s Angel. London: Harper Collins. Waters, Sarah 1999: Affinity. London: Virago. Wilson, A.N. 2005: A Jealous Ghost. London: Hutchinson. Wolfreys, Julian 2001: Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Film Cited The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)
Received 20 February 2011 Revised version accepted 30 April 2012
Margarita Estévez Saá is a Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She is Secretary of the Spanish James Joyce Society and co-editor of the academic journal Papers on Joyce. She has published essays on Joyce, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Janet Frame, modern and post-colonial literature, contemporary Irish literature, critical theory and feminist criticism.
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana. Facultad de Filología. Avda. Castelao s/n. 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Tel.: +34 981 563100 (11839). Fax: +34 981 574646.
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Pilar Cuder-Domínguez. Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613-1713. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 148 pp. isbn: 978-0-7546-6713-1
Jorge Figueroa Dorrego Universidad de Vigo [email protected]
In the last three decades, our knowledge of British women writers of the early modern period has changed radically, largely thanks to the research and teaching of many scholars from around the world. The book under review is one such example, and a wise and successful re-elaboration of many issues that its author, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, a specialist in early modern literature, gender and postcolonial theory, has dealt with in previous articles and essays. This monograph is a sound and groundbreaking analysis of the tragedy and tragicomedy written by women dramatists during the Stuart period, and deserves the attention that its publication by Ashgate is likely to bring. Cuder contends that, despite the inclusion of female-authored texts into the corpus of early modern researchers in recent years, there is still much work to be done, mainly with respect to certain authors and texts. She argues that scholarship so far has mostly focused on Aphra Behn and particularly on her comedies, while the contribution of other contemporary female dramatists to tragedy and tragicomedy has been neglected. Hence Cuder’s stated aim in this text is “to establish the importance of those two dramatic genres —tragedy and tragicomedy— in the context of women’s coming to voice in seventeenth-century England and, in so doing, trace a full genealogy of women-authored works” (8). With this objective in mind, she examines some twenty plays of those genres, published between 1613 (Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam) and 1713 (Anne Finch’s Aristomenes). Thus her study covers a period of a hundred years that roughly coincides with the Stuart reigns in England, and consciously breaks from conventional approaches that establish a gap between the periods before and after the Interregnum, since she sees “inescapable continuities” 9( ) in themes, plots, and formal issues. Nevertheless, her analysis does not seek to establish a linear progress or evolution in women’s employment of tragic modes, but “to map out a number of diverse, multi-nuanced appropriations and uses of tragedy and tragicomedy, all of them serving as vehicles for each playwright’s social, intellectual, and/or formal concerns” (13). All these aims are set out in the first chapter of the book, where the author also delineates her debt to feminism, new historicism and post-colonialism, hence her interest in the construction of gender and racial identities, sexual politics, and ideological issues underlying the texts. Certainly, the work of the women writers of the Stuart period is worthy of further critical attention. The recent interest in Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra
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Behn and Delarivier Manley must still be extended to new issues and neglected texts. And certainly, the work of Frances Boothby, Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter, Jane Wiseman, and Anne Finch needs further scholarly attention, so that it can be better known, (re) assessed, and taken into account for a more thorough knowledge of Stuart England and female literary tradition. Yet I cannot concur with the idea that the female playwrights of that period wrote mostly comedy, and that their comedies have already been sufficiently studied. As Cuder herself notes, the first contributions that English women made to drama were translations of tragic plays: Jane Lumley rendered Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis about 1550, Queen Elizabeth Englished a fragment of Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus about 1561, and Mary Sidney adapted Robert Garnier’s Antonie in 1592. The first original play written by an Englishwoman was also a tragedy, Cary’s Mariam (1613), and before Behn’s first comedy The( Amorous Prince, 1671), only a comic closet piece was female-authored: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies (c1645). Women writers otherwise penned dramatic sketches of difficult generic categorisation (like Cavendish), translated tragedies (e.g. Katherine Philips’s rendering of Corneille’s Pompey, 1663), or opted for tragicomedy (e.g. Boothby’s Marcelia, 1669, and Behn’s The Forced Marriage, 1670). It is true that most of Behn’s later plays are comedies, but at the turn of the century Pix wrote as many comedies as tragedies, Trotter and Manley composed only one comedy each, and neither Finch nor Wiseman employed the comic genre. It is also true that Behn has attracted more scholars than any other female author of this period, but we must bear in mind that she was the most prolific of her era, and also wrote poetry and prose fiction Oroonoko( being the object of much Behn scholarship and, notably, a tragic story). Moreover, most studies on her drama have focused on The Rover (Parts i and II), yet the rest of her dramatic pieces deserve more critical attention than they have had so far. The same can be said of comedies written by the other female dramatists of this period. Considering the aims expounded in the first chapter and the selected corpus, a more specific title for the book would make explicit the study’s restriction to tragic and tragicomic works, a focus which makes the book distinct from previous studies on these female dramatists, such as Cotton (1980), Clark (1986) or Rubik (1998), among others. The first female translators and writers of drama in England were members of prominent aristocratic families and received an education seldom available to early modern women, a sign of the commitment of the English upper classes to humanist ideals. As Cuder rightly points out, classical drama figured prominently in humanist pedagogy, because it was thought to offer good models for the learning of classical languages, rhetoric, and morals. Reading, translating, and memorising extracts of classical drama was part of the educational process of these privileged women. It is no wonder that women translated full texts or (later) wrote their own dramatic pieces following classical models. Moreover, their plays were never meant for public performance and often circulated in manuscript, so the authors could avoid possible censure of their work as a breach of expected feminine modesty and domesticity. Cuder interestingly argues that Elizabeth Cary’s choice of Senecan closet drama as a model for the first original play written by an Englishwoman placed the text in
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 199–204· issn 0210-6124 reviews 201 an ambivalent position (neither private nor widely public), and by providing devices for orienting the readers (summary, chorus, etc.), gives primacy to speech over action. These devices could defend her as a woman author while giving her female characters voice and agency to an unusual degree. In Chapter 2 Cuder centres mainly on Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, where, in the first four scenes of this pioneering play, Cary gives the floor entirely to women, providing female characters with the chance to voice their views. These women are outspoken about their motives, ends, and concerns, expressing their multiple reasons for their resistance to King Herod’s tyranny. There is a clear confrontation between the active, articulate, Iago- like Salome and the stoic and modest Mariam: the agentive, deviant villainess versus the victimised, virtuous heroine. For Cuder, this conflict is further complicated by issues of race and rank, since Salome is othered as a dark woman in relation to Mariam’s fairness, as a “mongrel” versus a purer embodiment of the Jewish nation. Compared to such female characters, the men in this play seem to lack power and direction: the most virtuous — Constabarus— is rather passive, while Herod proves changeable and easily manipulated. Cuder’s analysis of gender and racial politics in the play shows how those categories overlap and are in constant flux, fraught with discrepancies and contradictions. Some characters —mainly women— try to bring about change, while others —often men— simply resist tyranny. Unexpectedly, at the end, scheming, active characters such as Salome and Alexandra are absolved, whereas virtuous, passive characters like Mariam and Constabarus are killed. Mariam’s Stoic resignation as a victim allows for a non-confrontational type of heroine that will prove attractive to later women writers. In Chapter 3 Cuder deals with Margaret Cavendish’s “Dramatic Experiments” during the Interregnum. The writings of this author are sui generis and challenge generic labels, so it seems inappropriate to refer to them as tragedies. Nonetheless, Cuder chooses to analyse two pieces of the 1662 folio edition of her plays with tragic elements: The Unnatural Tragedy and Youths Glory, along with the heroic Bell in Campo. The first of these plays revolves around the topic of incest, presented as ‘unnatural’ because the male protagonist, Frere, uses rhetoric and violence to obtain his ends regardless of moral values, bringing about suffering and death. In the subplot, Monsieur Malateste’s second wife mistreats him, just as he has abused his first wife. Her behaviour is as ‘unnatural’ and monstrous as his, but she somehow becomes an agent of poetic justice. Youths Glory also plays with contrasting and similar fates for female characters. Lady Sanspareille gives up marriage prospects and manages to become a famous scholar, whereas Lady Innocence becomes the fiancé of Lord de L’Amour, who has a married lover —Lady Incontinent— who conspires against her. Their fates, however, are similarly tragic: Sanspareille dies from a sudden illness, and Innocence commits suicide after being falsely accused of robbery. Life without and within marriage turns out to be challenging for women. Similarly, in the subplots of Bell in Campo, the lives of Madam Passionate and Madam Jantil are ruined after their husbands die in battle, although one marries again and the other one does not. In the main plot, Cavendish presents an example of successful heroism in
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Lady Victoria: she leads a group of wives who accompany their spouses to battle, and their military action becomes crucial for victory. Cuder claims that Lady Victoria shows courage and resourcefulness, and proves that women deserve full citizenship, despite the elitist discourse used by this royalist author. Chapter 4 moves to the first original play written by a woman to be performed in the commercial theatre, Boothby’s Marcelia (1669), before proceeding to Behn’s tragicomedies and sole tragedy. Boothby’s play has a tragicomic plot and a comic subplot. As in prior examples, the women in the serious plot are powerless, paralysed by the codes of virtue and can do nothing but complain. However, the female characters of the comic plot are allowed to exhibit more freedom. This Tory piece shows the defeat of upstarts and the triumph of aristocratic values, with a light criticism of Charles II’s libertinism. In analysing Behn’s plays, one of the questions that occupies Cuder is the clash between the author’s partisan and gender politics. For instance, in The Forc’d Marriage (1670), gender violence remains largely unquestioned, and in Abdelazer (1676), female characters are only consequential in so far as they oppose the royalist cause —the villainous Isabella— or advance it —the grieving Leonora and the silent and submissive Florella. According to Cuder, Behn does not resist the characterisation of women as either passive virgins or forward whores. She acknowledges that the Amazon princess Cleomena in The Young King (1679) is one of Behn’s most agentive heroines, engaging in matters of state, like setting up the restoration of her brother Orsames, even though she is forced into marriage. And in The Widdow Ranter (1689), the eponymous heroine is an unconventional, daring, determined woman. Cuder is also interested in the representation of race and cultural confrontation in Abdelazer and The Widdow Ranter, arguing that Behn questions the association of blackness with evil and whiteness with virtue in the former, and is sympathetic with the Native Americans and acknowledges the English mismanagement of colonial Virginia in the latter. Cuder’s combination of gender and post-colonial approaches is also present in Chapter 5, where she analyses the Eastern plays of Pix and Manley: Ibrahim (1696), The Royal Mischief (1696) and Almyna (1706). For the author, these Eastern plays should be understood as reflections on difference and possibility, often with hidden domestic worries. Pix had Whig sympathies and her play justifies active resistance against tyranny. But, as occurs in works previously analysed, female agency is portrayed as deviant, since Sheker Para is a Machiavellian villainess. Similarly transgressive is Homais, in Manley’s Royal Mischief, but this time the politics underlying the play fall on the Tory side, with the final restoration of order. Manley manages to reconcile gender and party politics in Almyna, as the eponymous heroine is depicted as agentive and outspoken without becoming monstrous, and the king, as Charles II had also done, restores order and appoints his brother as his successor. This chapter also analyses Pix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705) and Queen Catherine (1698), together with Manley’s Lucius (1717). The sixth chapter of this monograph focuses on Catherine Trotter, whose tragedies, according to Cuder, enact the public versus private, reason versus passion, and duty versus love dichotomies. Trotter dares to base her first play, Agnes de Castro (1696), on a female-
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 199–204· issn 0210-6124 reviews 203 authored source: a novel by Behn with the same title, seeming to show the admiration that Trotter and the 1690s generation of women dramatists had for Behn. However, according to Hughes (1996: 445), Trotter works against Behn’s emphasis on the fragility of a civilization disrupted by rebellious subjects and rulers. For Cuder, the play shows the fatal consequences of letting feelings guide people’s actions in both the private and public spheres. As for other tragedies by Trotter, the author is concerned with how The Fatal Friendship (1698) emphasises the corrupting power of money, The Unhappy Penitent (1701) explores the private-public dilemma of what may happen if an engagement is broken, and The Revolution of Sweden (1706) ends with the destruction of tyranny and foreign rule, as well as with the union of two individuals who are aware of their public duties. Cuder contends that a Whig conceptualisation of citizenship lies at the heart of this last play. Stuart Women Playwrights ends, rather bluntly, with a very brief chapter on the tragic works of Jane Wiseman and Anne Finch. Cuder limits herself to a few comments on Wiseman’s Antiochus the Great (1701), although she considers it an astonishing achievement for someone who has written no further works, and she addresses Finch’s tragicomedy The Triumphs of Love and Innocence (c.1688) and her tragedy Aristomenes (c. 1690), not published until 1713. These two plays convey Finch’s preoccupations with matters of kingship and exile, as well as her Jacobite sympathies. None of the three pieces discussed in this chapter have yet received much critical attention, so it is a pity that we are not provided with more extensive analysis. What one misses most is a final section where the author might present the conclusions reached after writing this well-documented and insightful study. Highlighting the “outstanding commonalities” among these tragedies written by Stuart women in a period of a hundred years, and providing a detailed account of how her analysis proves that gender and genre “establish challenging and thought- provoking links that have so far been neglected and that deserve to be teased out further” (127), would have successfully concluded a study that is, in all other respects, innovative, clear-sighted, and enlightening. We must warmly welcome a book like this, and hope that it will become an important reference in future research on early modern women writers.
Works Cited Clark, Constance 1986: Three Augustan Women Playwrights. New York: Peter Lang. Cotton, Nancy 1980: Women Playwrights in England, c. 1363-1750. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP. Hughes, Derek 1996: English Drama, 1660-1700. Oxford: Clarendon. Rubik, Margarete 1998: Early Women Dramatists, 1550-1800. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Received 31 October 2011 Revised version accepted 16 April 2012
Jorge Figueroa Dorrego is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Vigo. His research areas are early modern women writers, Restoration literature, humour, and gender. He is the author
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 199–204· issn 0210-6124 204 jorge figueroa dorrego of monographs such as Aphra Behn (1999) and Tecendo tramas, fiando ficcións (2002), and of the introduction to the Galician translation of two novels by Eliza Haywood (2010). He has also co- edited Re-shaping the Genres: Restoration Women Writers (2003) and A Source Book of Literary and Philosophical Writings on Humour and Laughter (2009).
Address: Universidade de Vigo. Facultade de Filoloxía e Tradución. Campus Universitario. 36310, Vigo, Spain. Tel.: +34 986 812084.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.1 (June 2012): 199–204· issn 0210-6124 Ackowledgements
The Editors wish to express their gratitude to the members of the Editorial Board ofAtlantis whose valuable time and expertise made this issue possible. We likewise thank the external experts who willingly assessed specific proposals. For the sake of anonymity, the list of their names will be made public only every two years. We are especially grateful to the previous editor of Atlantis, Angela Downing, and to the mem- bers of her team, for their kind help during this transitional period, and for the preliminary tasks for this issue. Their years of excellent work inspire our own dedication to the Journal.
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Editorial policy, instructions to contributors and abridged guidelines
What we publish Atlantis publishes articles, reviews and interviews in the field of English studies. Contributions submitted to Atlantis should meet the following criteria:
• Suitability for the aim and scope of the journal • Originality and interest in relation to subject matter, method, data or findings • Relevance to current research in the field • Revision of previously published work on the topic • Logical rigour in argumentation and in the analysis of data • Adequate use of concepts and research methodology • Discussion of theoretical implications and/or practical applications • Command of recent bibliography • Linguistic appropriateness, textual organisation and satisfactory presentation • Readability and conciseness of expression
Concurrence Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission, duplicate publication or any other kind of self-plagiarism. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
• That no concurrent consideration of the same or almost identical work byany other journal and/or publisher is taking place. • That the potential contribution has not appeared previously nor is about to appear within two years, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book. • If, after two years, a contribution first published in Atlantis is to be reprinted elsewhere, permission is not required but the author should credit Atlantis for the contribution’s first appearance. If in doubt about any of the above, the author should consult the General Editor.
What to submit The length for articles and interviews is between 6,000 and 8,000 words. Book reviews should be between 2,500 and 3,000 words. The first page of each article must include 100a -200 word summary written in English, followed by a list of six keywords. Title, summary and keywords are also required in Spanish; these will be provided by the Editors for authors who do not handle Spanish.
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Your contribution should reach Esther Álvarez, Managing Editor, in a double-spaced, point 12 electronic Microsoft Word document at [email protected], together with the following information on a separate file:
• Title of the manuscript • Author’s name • Institutional affiliation and full postal address • Home address • Telephone numbers (both home and office) • Fax number and e-mail address (if applicable) • Word processor and version used to format the document • Total number of words, including works cited and notes • A 60-word bionote • The Atlantis Checklist, completed anonymity policy All details of personal identification must be absent from the manuscript, as well as from the file properties. The author’s name should be replaced by ‘author’ throughout the paper. If the submission contains any element of identification of the author, it will not be sent to referees. assessment policy Submissions to Atlantis are evaluated anonymously (double-blind) by three specialists from the journal’s international Board of Referees. Acceptance by at least two specialists is a condition for publication.
Conventions and style Titles of contributions For articles, type the title at the top of the page on which the text begins. Do not italicize your title or capitalize it in full. Italicize only a published work in the title or a cited word in a linguistic study. Capitalize the first letter of the first word and of all significant words (nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs) as well as proper nouns which appear in titles. Do not use a period after titles. The title should not carry a reference to a note, unless by the Editor; in articles or other contributions put necessary acknowledgements or explanations in a footnote to the first or last sentence of the first paragraph, not to the title.
Quotation marks Double quotation marks (“ ”) are used to enclose quoted speech or writing only. For quotations within run-on quotations use single quotation marks. If there are quotes within an indented quotation, the double quotation marks are used. Single quotation marks (‘ ’) are used in the following ways: a) to enclose titles of articles, essays, short stories, short editorial policy, instructions to contributors and abridged guidelines 209 poems, songs, chapters and sections of books, lectures and unpublished works other than dissertations; b) to enclose quotations within quotations; c) in so-called ‘scare quotes’ to indicate that the word or phrase is being used deliberately in an unusual or arguably incorrect sense, as well as for not yet wholly standard terms. ‘Scare quotes’ should be avoided or used only on very exceptional occasions; d) for English or Spanish translations of words or phrases from a different language agua( ‘water’)
Section headings The inclusion of section headings should be kept to a minimum. Section headings must begin from the left margin, with no period at the end. Headings may be numbered. The use of Arabic numerals is recommended. Centred Roman numerals may be used when there is no heading title. If absolutely necessary, further division within a section should follow the same format used for section headings. They must be preceded by Arabic numerals separated by full stop (e.g. 1.1). Do not capitalize headings in full.
Punctuation Usage should be as consistent as possible. Although the finer points of punctuation are often a matter of personal preference, the main purpose is clarity, so it is generally wiser to follow established convention. Please remember: Commas (,) should not be used before “and” and “or” in a series of three or more. A comma and a dash should not be used together. A comma can never precede a parenthesis; it must always follow it. A dash (–) must be distinguished from a hyphen (-). The former is used to introduce an explanation (you must arrive on time —not two hours late), and the latter joins words in a compound such as twenty-four. Question marks (?) and exclamation marks (!) should not normally be used in scholarly writing. Periods (.) close notes and bibliographical citations as well as complete sentences in text and notes. The period is placed within the parenthesis when the parenthetical element is independent. Square brackets ([]) are used for an unavoidable parenthesis within a parenthesis, to enclose interpolations or comments in a quotation or incomplete data and to enclose phonetic transcription Slash marks [/] are used to enclose phonemic transcription. Note that a period or comma is placed before a superscript indicating a note, for example: “ . . . with whose king he has negotiated the monopoly of the sugar trade with England”.14
Works Cited In the titles of books and articles each main word should be capitalized, i.e. nouns, adjectives verb and proper nouns. The first names of authors and editors should be given in full, rather than as initials. Publisher’s names are appropriately abbreviated in the list of works cited: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc. becomes simply Macmillan. Any university press will be abbreviated according to one of two patterns: U of Miami P or Toronto UP. 210 editorial policy, instructions to contributors and abridged guidelines
Bibliographical references should follow this style:
Danby, John F. 1961: Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear. London: Faber. Carnero González, José 1982: ‘Calipso y Penélope en Ulysses’. James Joyce: A New Language: Actas/Proceedings del Simposio Internacional en el Centenario de James Joyce. Francisco García Tortosa, et al., eds. Sevilla: Depto. de Literatura Inglesa de la U de Sevilla: 167-74. Kastovsky, Dieter 1986: ‘The Problem of Productivity in Word-formation’.Linguistics 24: 585- 600.
For full details visit ‹http://www.atlantisjournal.org/AUTHORS/Guidelines.html›