Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Vol. 34, núm. 2 Diciembre 2012
34.2 (December 2012) 34.2 (Diciembre 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 The 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
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Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 34.2 (December 2012) 34.2 (Diciembre 2012)
Table of Contents • Índice
Articles • Artículos
More Than a Number: Reproductive Technologies, Cloning and the Problematic of Fatherhood in Caryl Churchill’s A Number Gabriele Griffin · University of York...... 11
Recovering the Maternal Body as Paradise: Michèle Roberts’s ‘Charity’ Laura M.ª Lojo Rodríguez · Universidade de Santiago de Compostela...... 33
An Interpretation of Masculinity in Manhattan: Reading Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder Peter Ferry · Queen’s University Belfast...... 49
Spaceships and Vampires: Sexual Dissidence in Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Knightly Quest’ Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde. Universidad de Granada ...... 67
‘Hate the world, it’s so romantic’: The Function of Song in Recent British Hooligan Film (1995-2009) Ignacio Ramos Gay · Universidad de Valencia...... 85
Promoting Intercultural Competence through Literature in clil Contexts M.ª Luisa González Rodríguez y Miriam Borham Puyal · Universidad de Salamanca. . . 105
The Duality of Communicative Purposes in the Textbook for Construction Engineering and Architecture: A Corpus-based Study of Blurbs Concha Orna-Montesinos · Universidad de Zaragoza...... 125
The Self-Promotion of Academic Textbooks in the Preface Section: A Genre Analysis Ali Sorayyaie Azar · University of Malaya...... 147
—7— 8 table of contents • índice
Constraints on Subsumption and Amalgamation Processes in the Lexical Constructional Model: the Case of phone and email Alicia Galera Masegosa · Universidad de La Rioja...... 167
Reviews • Reseñas
Pilar Guerrero Medina, ed. 2011: Morphosyntactic Alternations in English. Functional and Cognitive Perspectives reviewed by Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga ...... 187
Helga Ramsey-Kurz and Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, eds. 2011: Projections of Paradise. Ideal Elsewheres in Postcolonial Migrant Literature reviewed by Felicity Hand...... 195
Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona 2010: Alejandro González Iñárritu reviewed by Juan Antonio Suárez ...... 201
J. Isaías Gómez López, ed. 2010: Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos. Estudio preliminar, traducción y notas reviewed by Yolanda Morató Agrafojo ...... 207
Patricia Fra López, ed. 2011: Edith Wharton: Back to Compostela/Regreso a Compostela reviewed by Teresa Gómez Reus ...... 215
Henry Sussman 2011: Around the Book. Systems and Literacy reviewed by Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen...... 221
Editorial policy, instructions to contributors and abridged guidelines...... 227
ARTICLES
ARTÍCULOS
ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31 issn 0210-6124
More Than a Number: Reproductive Technologies, Cloning and the Problematic of Fatherhood in Caryl Churchill’s A Number Gabriele Griffin University of York [email protected]
The rise of new family formations as lived experience, not least as a function of developments in reproductive technologies, has been accompanied by a range of cultural productions —auto/ biography, poetry, films, plays, novels— centring on the question of the impact of these technologies on the individuals concerned. Focussing on one such production, the hitherto little explored text of the play A Number by one of Britain’s most preeminent feminist playwrights, Caryl Churchill, whose work is also much performed in the us, this article examines how the play intervenes in debates about new reproductive technologies. I draw on theoretical writings on reproductive technologies, as well as first-person accounts of donor insemination, to argue that in her exploration of father-son relationships in an all-male setting, Churchill produces a highly innovative and complex engagement with issues of reproduction and paternity, refusing conventional notions of the heteronormative nuclear family, of the effects of non-normative reproduction, and of the predictability of the effects of divergent (pro)creation.
Keywords: Caryl Churchill; A Number; cloning; reproductive technologies; fatherhood . . . Más que un número: tecnologías reproductivas, clonación y la problemática de la paternidad en A Number, de Caryl Churchill
El aumento de nuevas formaciones familiares como experiencia vivida, entre otras cosas, como función de los avances en las tecnologías reproductivas, ha venido acompañado de una variedad de producciones culturales —auto/biografía, poesía, películas, obras de teatro, novelas— que abordan la cuestión del impacto de estas tecnologías en los individuos afectados. Mediante el análisis de A Number, pieza teatral hasta ahora poco estudiada de Caryl Churchill, la dramaturga feminista más importante del Reino Unido, cuyo trabajo se representa también con frecuencia en los ee.uu, este artículo examina el modo en que dicha obra interviene en los debates sobre las nuevas tecnologías reproductivas. Utilizo textos teóricos sobre las tecnologías reproductivas, así como relatos en primera persona de inseminación con donante, para sostener que en su exploración de las relaciones padre-hijo en un ambiente exclusivamente masculino, Churchill establece un diálogo innovador y complejo con los temas de la reproducción y la paternidad, rechazando las nociones convencionales sobre la familia nuclear heteronormativa, los efectos de la reproducción no normativa y el carácter predecible de los efectos de la (pro) creación divergente.
Palabras clave: Caryl Churchill, A number, clonación, tecnologías reproductivas, paternidad.
—11— 12 gabriele griffin
1. Introduction The rise of new family formations as lived experience,1 not least as a function of developments in reproductive technologies,2 has been accompanied by a range of cultural productions —auto/biography, poetry, films, plays, novels— centring on the question of the impact of these technologies on the individuals concerned. These productions include films such as the tellingly titled The Kids Are All Right (2010) and the 2010 film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. They are indicative of our continuing cultural preoccupation with the meanings and implications of divergent procreative processes. The exploration of these processes has a long provenance in the Western cultural imaginary: one might argue that the story of the creation of Jesus Christ is one such narrative,3 as are the many Greek myths that detail how various gods and demi- gods were created. In recent cultural texts exploring this phenomenon, the focus has been not so much on the underlying biotechnological processes themselves —these remain largely the domain of science— but on the socio-emotional and ethical implications of creating human beings through divergent processes.4 In this article I shall focus on one such text, Caryl Churchill’s (2002) play A Number, in order to analyse the imaginative transformation of current debates about reproductive technologies in that work, and to examine what kind of intervention it makes in those debates. As I shall demonstrate, many of the issues raised within A Number with regard to cloning are concerns that are also significantly debated in relation to other types of divergent procreative processes such as donor insemination and ivf. In analysing Churchill’s engagement with these issues, I shall be less concerned with the play as a play, i.e. its performative dimensions,5 and more with the substantive issues around fatherhood which it raises. According to James Brandon, A Number “was one of the most frequently produced plays in American professional theatres during the 2005-2006 season” (2006: 502), following its original run at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2002 and at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2004. Brandon attributes this success to the play’s “minimal technical requirements, a cast of two” and its focus on “the important contemporary issue of cloning” (502). I would argue that as subsequent films such as The Kids Are All Right (2010) and The Switch( 2010) for example show, it is not simply its highlighting of cloning as a divergent and, at present, still utopian procreative process that contributed to the success of A Number, but the fact that its issues speak to concerns that can equally be raised in relation to other forms of biotechnologically assisted reproduction.
1 See for example the Autumn 2002 issue of Tulsa Studies of Women’s Writing (21.2) which centred on ‘The Adoption Issue’; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Bainham 1997. 2 New family formations have also occurred as a function of rising divorce and cohabitation rates, for example. 3 See Ricoeur (1974) for an suggestive reading of this. 4 Interestingly, the review of the first production ofA Number in London in the British Medical Journal (Klotzko 2002) did not engage at all with the questions of the science underlying the play but focussed wholly on the ethical and psychosocial arguments it made. 5 For that discussion see Gobert 2009.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 13
In its preoccupation with family formations and the problematics of family and relational dynamics A Number emblematizes one of the key long-term concerns of Churchill’s work, the “[smashing] of the bourgeois family structure” (Gobert 2009: 121). This is as evident in the radio plays Abortive (1971), The Judge’s Wife (1972) and The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (1990), as it is in her theatre plays, from Cloud Nine (1979) through Top Girls (1982) to Blue Heart (1998). In many of her plays it is an outsider, often genetically unrelated, who serves to highlight the precarity of familial relations. But A Number is the only play that centres exclusively on the father-son relationship, and it is this on which I focus here.
2. Privileging the father-son relationship At the centre of A Number, and in this respect productively unlike many contemporary cultural texts dealing with donor insemination, cloning and divergent forms of reproduction, is the relationship between a father and his sons. Churchill’s play thus makes an important intervention in the arena that has been termed “new fatherhood” studies (see e.g. Pickard 1998; Marsiglio et al. 2000; Wall and Arnold 2007). This is particularly significant because ‘traditionally’, if one might term it as such, feminists —and Caryl Churchill remains the uk’s pre-eminent feminist playwright (see Aston 1997; Aston and Diamond 2009; Adiseshiah 2009; Reinelt 2009)— have tended to focus on the mother and maternity rather than on the father, and thus the creation of an all-male space by a feminist writer, as it occurs in A Number, and her focus on fatherhood, are uncommon. Indeed, many writers on new reproductive technologies and parenting continue to highlight that “mothers are the benchmark for norms in fathering” (e.g. Aitken 2000). Elfenbein and Watkins (2002), for instance, discuss extensively how gay male adoptive families are constructed “in terms of what they lack: a female mother” (306). One might, of course, as Brandon does at one point, argue that the writing out of the mother from this context is in itself an issue. Indeed, Brandon states: “I found the lack of a voiced female perspective in a play about reproductive issues to be a severe shortcoming” (2006: 503). The lack of a voiced female perspective in the context of reproductive technologies was certainly an issue already and previously raised by many feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, when what was then called ‘artificial reproduction’ started to become established and discussed in the public domain as a result of the birth of the so-called first test-tube baby, Louise Brown.6 However, not only does A Number as a text constitute an articulated female perspective since it was written by a woman, and a feminist to boot, but its focus on fatherhood also provides an important contribution to what is after all not merely a concern for women. Significantly, for example, the most widely used method of assisted reproduction in the uk and elsewhere until the 1980s was donor
6 For a discussion of the history of such terms as ‘artificial reproduction’ see McNeil (2007). See Arditti et al. (1984) for a useful set of texts on the ‘test-tube’ issue.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 14 gabriele griffin insemination;7 hence many donor offspring who search for a genetic parent post-2000 are actually searching for their father. In this, the social pattern follows the developments of biotechnological processes. The possibility of egg donation, embryo transfer and surrogate motherhood, for example, all of which involve multiple mothers (genetic and social), is a phenomenon that developed much more rapidly in the 1990s than before.8 It is also the case that fatherhood as such is increasingly under public scrutiny as questions of fathers’ contributions to the socialization of their children, a key concern in A Number, are the object of public debate.9 But, as Sally Sheldon argued, “there is little work on reproductive technologies which takes fatherhood as its central focus” (2005:526). Whilst fatherhood is one central issue in A Number, which I shall explore in detail below, the other is what it means to be a son, including a son conceived through divergent means. In the course of this five-act play, the father, Salter, encounters three of his sons. These are differentially positioned in relation to him, which in part accounts for their specific interactions with and reactions to their father. This also articulates a range of concerns which surface in the broader literature on people conceived through assisted reproduction, in particular donor insemination. The issues addressed in the play —whilst based on a procreative process, cloning, that is at present not possible— thus nonetheless speak to the wider debates around the impacts of assisted reproduction, on those who use it and those who are produced by it, that preoccupy public discussions around divergent procreative processes and new forms of family formation. The play, then, makes an important intervention not only in the so-called new fatherhood debates but also in debates around assisted reproduction. The central underlying narrative of A Number is quickly told even though, within the play, it unfolds gradually over the play’s five acts. As a young man, the father, Salter, is an alcoholic, abusive towards his wife and small son. His wife commits suicide when their son, Bernard (or b1 in the play), an only child, is two years old. In the wake of this death Salter disintegrates into a two-year period of depression and neglect of the child. At the end of this period, Salter hands over his son, by now manifesting the effects of sustained neglect such as having become virtually silent, to social services. At the same time he is gripped by remorse for his parenting failure and wants to recover Bernard as the child he was when he was born —perfect, and unspoilt by the parenting failures of his mother and father. Salter allows himself a second chance at parenting —though not through fathering in the conventional sense. He pays a scientist to clone Bernard, and eventually is presented with a ‘new’ son (B2 in the play), a cloned version of his first child. The scientist also produces further clones of
7 For detailed figures of the various assisted reproductive processes and their outcomes in Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority licensed clinics see, for example, for the uk
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 15
Bernard —the play suggests around twenty in all— and it is not clear whether or not Salter is aware of this. His focus is on the one perfect cloned child that he receives and through whose upbringing he assumes that he in a sense atones for his failure with his ‘original’ son. The hospital where the cloning, seemingly secretly, took place, eventually comes across the records of this process and contacts the clones in order, it would appear, to conduct research on them. Through the hospital’s contacting of the clones, Salter’s sons —his ‘original’ one, the clone he then brought up, and another clone called Michael Black— are made aware of their histories, and Salter himself learns of the multiple clones that were produced. The play then centres on the reactions both Salter’s sons and Salter himself have to these discoveries and, importantly, the play suggests that the sons all react quite differently to the revelations, to their status, to their ‘father’ and to each other. I shall now turn to examining these reactions in order to analyse what commentary Churchill’s play offers on fatherhood and reproductive technologies. These, as the play suggests, are prominently implicated in how and under what circumstances, the sons were ‘made’.
3. ‘Doing’ fatherhood Bernard or b1 was conceived ‘naturally’ through heterosexual intercourse between Salter and his wife. The reasons for b1’s conceptions (whether he was a desired child or an ‘accident’, for example) are never discussed; he is a fact in Salter’s life and acts as the catalyst for Salter’s decision to have him cloned once Salter recognizes that he failed him as a parent. There is thus, in Salter’s behaviour, no articulated specific desire to ensure his lineage or to continue his genetic line. His decision to clone focuses on the recovery of a child that was seemingly perfect at one point and his relationship to that child. It is at this stage that women are written out of the text and out of Salter’s life; following his disastrous relationship with the wife with whom he had Bernard (b1), Salter appears to make no further attempt to establish a relationship with a woman or to conceive children with a woman. His relation to his son/s is thus neither grounded in a quest for familial lineage, nor in the desire to consolidate a relationship with another fe/male adult through a joint child. One might therefore argue that he is concerned with ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’ a father, with his practice as a father rather than with his status as father.10 Importantly, Salter’s concern with his practice as a father centres on how he treats his sons —one at a time— and is thus focussed on the intergenerational dimensions of that relation. There is no consideration of the lateral relations his sons might have with each other. Yet, as I shall discuss further below, those relations are critical to some of his offspring as they also define their relationship to Salter. Once they know of their histories, two of the sons, b1 and b2, confront Salter. The third ‘son’, Michael Black, is contacted by Salter after b1 kills b2 and then commits suicide. The play thus remains focussed throughout on the father-son dynamic. A Number’s dramatic
10 See Sheldon (2005: 552) for a discussion of the difference between being and doing fatherhood.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 16 gabriele griffin impact is in consequence derived from that dynamic and its implications. Importantly, the play is structured around a series of one-on-one encounters Salter has with each of his sons; the meetings between b1 and b2 are reported by them to Salter rather than being acted out on stage. This both reinforces the on-stage intergenerational focus of the play and the structure of Salter’s relations with his sons, which is sequential and singular —one son at a time. Salter is not interested in a multitude of sons, in ‘a number’, even though he has a number of offspring, but in the one (son) with whom he is engaged at any one point in time. A Number as title gestures towards the paradox of Salter’s position as it unfolds in the play, of both wanting a single, particular son and being prepared to draw on ‘any number’ of them to achieve this. However, as the play suggests, even in this single focus, Salter struggles to make adequate connection with each particular son. b1 is severely neglected, b2 is kept in ignorance of his origin and Michael Black seems to be simply ‘the number three’ Salter approaches so he can continue his fathering practice. Churchill thus offers a profoundly pessimistic reading of Salter’s fathering capabilities, and one which in various ways challenges both ideas of the family romance and assisted reproductive practices that do not delimit the number of offspring created from the sperm of any one donor.11 Salter is unwilling to, and possibly incapable of, engaging with all his offspring on equal terms simultaneously —he does not want to know them all and only makes attempts to get to know them one at a time when a vacancy arises on his fathering horizon. He has no emotional attachment to all the clones that were made from his son b1. This constitutes the play’s challenge to the family romance, or genetic fiction in Donna Haraway’s (1991: 1997) terms, which suggests that genetic bonds will automatically lead to emotional ties. On another level it also challenges the appropriateness, no longer a practice in some countries, of utilizing the sperm of one donor for the insemination of large numbers of women since, as Salter demonstrates, it is not at all clear that a single person is capable of relating in a parental role (emotional, social, fiscal, etc) to a multitude of offspring.12 Simultaneously, the play challenges the notion of the often asserted pre-eminence of the mother in parenting, through the ways in which both Salter and his sons relate to the absent mother. Salter’s wife, the play makes clear through b1’s bitter observations, was not a good mother. b1 simply remembers her inadequacy at protecting him from his
11 See Freud (1977). The fantasy of being ‘recognized’ and the genetic bond being the basis for emotional bonding is a very common one among those conceived through donor insemination. As one such person, for example, put it: “I was aware of the dissimiliarities between my [social] dad and me. . . . With my friends I could see . . . a definite bond between them and their fathers. You could see physical similarities easily. My [social] dad seemed impossibly distant to me, emotionally and physically” (Donor Conception Support Group of Australia Inc. 2004: 36). 12 In Children of Eden (Beeney 1999: 348-50), the central character works out that in the late 1960s, when he was donating sperm and the extent of the use of that sperm was unregulated, his sperm was used to produce hundreds of offspring. See also James (n.d.). The question of the capacity of any one individual to relate (equally) to all these offspring if they claim him as ‘father’ in the emotional as well as the biological sense is effectively side-stepped in favour of maintaining the family romance whereby the central character is constructed as feeling immediate affinities with the two offspring whom he does encounter and who end up marrying each other.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 17 father. Neither Salter nor the sons hanker after the mother.b 1 and b2 want to know what happened to her but appear not to mourn her loss. The mother, Churchill’s play argues, is thus not as key to parent-child relations as much literature on the topic would suggest. This line of argument constitutes one of the challenges the play offers to conventional notions of family structure, and possibly, to strands of feminism and feminist psychoanalysis, both conservative and radical, that privilege the mother as central to the child’s development. The sons have both the first and the last word in A Number —they drive its dynamic, with Salter seeking to respond to what he finds himself confronted with. Salter’s own initiative throughout focuses on the (re)construction of the perfect child he spoilt through his neglect, and once this has been achieved (which is only temporary since b2 gets killed), he looks no further. It is only when he has lost both b1 and b2 that he starts to look for the ‘next’ clone. He wants a son, any son it might seem, as long as he is a version of his first child. And although he protests to Michael Black that the nineteen other clones that exist are ‘not the same’ (50), whilst having previously reassured b2 that he was ‘the only one’ that mattered to him (14), Salter searches for the next son once he has lost the other two (b1 and b2), explicitly framing it in those terms. As he tells Michael Black: “I didn’t feel I’d lost him [b1] when I sent him away because I had a second chance. And when the second one my son the second son was murdered it wasn’t so bad as you’d think because it seemed fair. I was back with the first one” (49). Salter’s logic here is the logic of the paternal relation, not at all informed by the child’s reaction. His logic is sequential and separatist. He focuses on one child at a time —but not from the perspective of the effects his actions might have on his offspring. This is what has prompted various reviewers of the play to describe him as a ‘monstrous human’ (e.g. Kritzer 2003: 354). There is no doubt that his main, or only, concern is his own relation to the child, although it is not at all clear what he hopes to derive from it. One possible explanation is that he is looking for intimacy. In his encounter with Michael, in contrast to those with b1 and b2, he is the seeker, he is the petitioner who tries to get close to this offspring. Michael, unlike b1 and b2, is constructed as a well balanced individual who has no particular interest in Salter; Klotzko describes him as “the banal clone” (2002: 1043). He is affable and positive, not assuming that Salter has singled him out for any particular reason. He shows neither particular interest in knowing about Salter, nor aversion to it. One never learns of his life as a child growing up and is thus not provided with a (childhood-centred) rationale to account for his development; as an adult he simply appears to be very well adjusted.
4. Defamilializing genetic connection and ‘undoing’ fatherhood At the point of meeting Salter, Michael is an adult, a teacher, and married with three children. His familial circumstances are thus those of a conventional nuclear family. He is completely unfazed by discovering that he is one of several clones; instead, he thinks it “delightful” (48) and assumes that all the clones will be happy to meet Salter. Sibling
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 18 gabriele griffin rivalry, as it clearly existed between b1 and b2, does not seem to enter his consciousness. In this he resembles people conceived through donor insemination who are curious about other possible offspring from their donor, and strive to make connection (e.g. Scheib et al. 2004). He loves the idea of the possibilities of similarities and differences inherent in the multiplicity of selves of which he is one —“I do see the joy of it”— he says, whilst recognizing that Salter is “not at all happy” (49). Salter is partly ‘not at all happy’ because in this he in a sense loses his ability to ‘mean’ as a father, his power as a father figure. Whereas both b1 and b2, who had relations early in their lives with Salter, are focussed on their relation with him as a/the father figure, Michael, who has had no such connection during his youth to Salter, is not fixated on him. As a consequence, it would seem, he is also much less perturbed by the idea of being ‘a number’ —one of a whole bunch of clones. Michael professes to be happy with his life, and has no need of Salter. As such he flummoxes Salter, who tries to get ‘to the heart of him’ by asking him about himself. But, whatever Michael chooses to tell Salter, such as a story about people living in holes in the ground, his sleeping position etc., none of it satisfies Salter’s need to make connection. This is partly constructed as a function of Michael’s being happy. The final exchange between Salter and Michael which also ends the play has Salter ask Michael: “And you’re happy you say are you? You like your life?” to which Michael replies: “I do yes, sorry” (50). Michael’s happiness appears to liberate him from the need for paternal connection,13 and indeed, from the need to agonize about his status as clone. This is highly significant as it constitutes one important aspect of Churchill’s intervention in the fatherhood and divergent creative processes debate: in the figure of Michael, Churchill undoes the assumed need for a father, the need to be unique so beloved by neoliberal notions of subjectivity, the need to be special. Michael has achieved an adulthood that is not reliant on his biological father. It is not clear how —but it is clear that this has nothing to do with Salter, or indeed with the scientist who cloned Michael. Churchill offers no historicized familial indication as to why Michael’s disposition is as it is —there is no suggestion of a ‘loving family background’ or, alternatively, of no such background. Michael also, as already indicated, does not in any sense suffer from sibling rivalry —free from a need to be ‘fathered’ by Salter, he is also free from feeling any loss or, alternatively, completion of self through the discovery of the existence of others who are like him. He does not mind being ‘a number’. His sense of identity is not threatened by this for, as he, embracing the
13 One important issue here is that in 2010 the uk conservative prime minister David Cameron for a short time manifested a preoccupation with happiness, seemingly derived from the notion that in fiscally constrained times the public needed to be kept on side by reassuring them about their basically happy disposition, which implied that feeling good was supposedly not dependent on one’s material conditions. On 15 November, 2010 the bbc reported that “Mr Cameron, who first floated the idea of a ‘happiness index’ in2005 , when he was running for the leadership of the Conservative Party, argues that gross domestic product (gdp) —the standard measure of economic activity used around the world— is no longer up to the job”. Despite arguing that “You cannot capture happiness on a spreadsheet”, he intended to measure well-being in terms of happiness. See
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 19 scientization of culture, rationalizes: “We’ve got ninety-nine per cent the same genes as any other person. We’ve got ninety per cent the same genes as a chimpanzee. We’ve got thirty per cent the same genes as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong” (62). Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (1998) points out the paradox of contemporary culture, namely “a longing for community, for a sufficient sense of sameness with others” (88) such as Michael manifests, and at the same time, the desire for individualism and to be special, in particular to be special to someone (Phillips 1998: 90), as b1 and b2 want. Churchill distributes this paradox among Salter’s offspring, thus indicating the plurality of reactions that are possible. In his sense of being part of the wider world and thus ‘belonging’, that is, in his defamilializing of genetic connection, Michael’s disposition is clearly completely different from that of b1 and b2. He also does not have the anxiously searching quality that informs the lives of the clones in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, for example, who are haunted by the desire to know about their origin (see Griffin 2009). This is what in Klotzko’s eyes makes him banal, but within the logic of the play he occupies a central, and indeed the final, position in that he refuses the significance of origin, of individuality, and of singularity and, most importantly, that he is happy in this disposition. This is relevant because it indicates the possibility of parenting (biological, social) not being key to, or the be-all and end-all of all development, as b1’s behaviour certainly suggests. Parents, father, may matter, but not necessarily as psychoanalysis and other theories of parent-child relations would have us believe. This is one of the significant ways in whichA Number diverges from the common depiction of parent-child relations. The other, related, way in which this play diverges from such depictions is inits refusal of fatherhood as a homogenized disposition, practice, or experience. Salter is a different father to his three different sons, in part as a function of the circumstances of their production and in consequence of this, through the dynamic between them. To b1, the child produced ‘naturally’, i.e. through heterosexual intercourse within marriage, Salter was the neglecting, abandoning father, damaging his child through the lack of any affirmation of that child’s needs.b 1’s traumatic early childhood and his being handed over to social services, so the play suggests, imbued him with a sustained sense of his own lack of worth. This is exacerbated, from his point of view, by being cloned because this, he argues, means that “they take this painless scrape this specky little cells [sic] of me and kept that and you threw the rest of me away” (25).14 In taking this line about b1, the play offers a forceful critique of the notion of the conventional heterosexual, mother-father-child family formation as the most appropriate for bringing up children. This critique centres squarely, in line with much feminist writing on the subject of the family (e.g. O’Toole et al. 2007; Warner 2009), on the possibility of
14 B1’s line here echoes that of some donor offspring, such as Louise, for example, who said: “it’s deeply inhumane to put kids together from genetic DIY kits . . . it’s how it feels. Like bits of you have been grabbed from somewhere, and you have no idea where” (Lorbach 2003: 165).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 20 gabriele griffin abuse and neglect within that family and the notion that, more important than the family formation per se, is the particularity of those involved. Both Salter and his wife during b1’s first years are constructed as unhappy alcoholics who cannot manage their lives or support each other; Salter —tellingly vaguely— remembers that at the time his wife killed herself, he was “still with her more or less but not with her then no I was having a drink I think” (41). Following his wife’s suicide Salter clearly spirals into a period of alcoholism and depression. His parenting of b1, his first son, becomes wholly inadequate, resulting in extreme neglect, deprivation and cruelty, for instance locking him into a cupboard to shut him up. Of the two-year period until he hands b1 over to social services, Salter maintains: “I don’t remember it. . . . The whole thing is very vague to me” (41). This is fully in line with research on the impact of spousal death on those bereaved. Umberson et al. (1992: 10), for example, state that “[d]epression is a particularly common response to widowhood, at least in the first year or two following the death” (see also Carr 2004) and it affects men more than women. In the play, this acts as a convenient explanation for Salter’s appalling treatment of b1, to some extent absolving Salter from considering his own behaviour too closely. Indeed he is only forced to confront it when his sons discover their histories. I use the word ‘convenient’ because Salter’s resistance to being frank, his continued evasions of his sons’ questions about his actions throughout the play, construct him in such a way as to make it difficult to decide the extent of his culpability in what happened —and this, of course, is one of the points the play makes, namely that judgments cannot readily or easily be made, and/or blame attributed. Salter and his wife’s complete inability to nurture their child —b1 remembers, for example, that “[his mother’d] be there but she wouldn’t help stop anything” (32)— leaves him with the view that the world is full of “a lot of wicked people . . . you see them all around you. You go down the street . . . and you think you don’t fool me I know what you’re capable of ” (30). B1’s utter lack of trust in others, a classic result of child neglect and abandonment (see Gold 2000), coupled with jealousy of the clone b2 who enjoyed a seemingly ‘normal’ son- father relationship with Salter, results in his murdering b2, thereby in a sense confirming the cycle of violence which some researchers have identified as one outcome of parental neglect and abuse (e.g. Dodge et al. 1990; Kashani et al. 1992). Attracted and repulsed by his father in equal measure, b1 reacts to the revelation of his abandonment and re-making by venting his anger on his cloned self/other rather than on the father who commissioned the cloning. The father remains inviolate, the desired object that he cannot do without, and hence cannot destroy. There is no banding together of the brothers to overthrow the father as psychoanalysis would suggest.15 Rather, for b1 the father remains the venerated object whose questionable behaviour he can only deal with through attacking something
15 See Freud’s (1913) ‘Totem and Taboo’ and his (1939) ‘Moses and Monotheism’ for these accounts of brothers banding together to overthrow the father.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 21 or someone the father holds dear (‘If I can’t have you, nobody can…’) as b1 does, or through withdrawal, as b2 does. Salter’s inability to parent b1 within a conventional family formation does not — the play suggests— imply that he cannot parent other children better. Although b2 is brought up within a single-parent household led by a male, an unconventional household formation in terms of family ideals within white Western culture, his relationship to Salter appears to conform to the supposedly ‘normal’ version of a loving father-child dynamic. Salter parents b2 quite differently fromb 1. This suggests both that individuals can change (Salter has stopped drinking, for example) and that they can practise the same type of relationship —here, the father-son one— in radically different ways. This complicates the line the play appears to take on b1, who is constructed as not change-able but as someone whose traumatic childhood seals his fate as a permanently damaged person. It complicates that line because Salter, another person who also leads quite an abjected life at a certain point, is shown to be capable of change, thus indicating that one does not necessarily have to ‘be’ a particular kind of individual but can exhibit different sorts of behaviours with different people. It may thus be that it is a matter of the degree of the damage, or possibly the kinds of damage inflicted that determines an individual’s ability to change with his or her circumstances.
5. ‘Nature’ versus nurture In Salter’s conversation about his own behaviour with b2 in Act 3, the discussion partly centres on the relationship between nature and nurture and the extent to which Salter’s behaviour was a matter of willed choice, and hence moral responsibility, as opposed to genetic (and therefore ‘unwilled’) determination. In this b2 grapples with the question of how “who you are itself forces or you’d be someone else wouldn’t you?” (35) as the play would have it. The play asks after the dichotomy between self-determination or ‘free will’, and determination resulting from multiple influences, such as the environment and genetics, which one is the object of and hence can do nothing about. This question arises because of Salter’s different parenting of b1 and b2; both sons desperately seek answers from him regarding his behaviour. b2 tries to understand Salter’s behaviour in terms of a determination which excludes Salter’s own volition and in doing so denies both Salter’s agency and hence his responsibility. He suggests, for instance, that Salter’s alcoholism might have been the result of a certain genetic susceptibility to drugs, or a genetic disposition towards addictive behaviour (33). In these suggestions he follows current trends of geneticizing dispositions (e.g. Numberger et al. 2005; Jacobson et al. 2008; Gratacos et al. 2009; Edenberg et al. 2010) which have resulted in a re-visioning of the interplay between genetics and environment. That re-visioning is articulated inA Number as a complex interplay which renders it difficult to make judgments about, and attribute responsibility for, people’s behaviour precisely because it is hard to disentangle ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. Churchill mobilizes the issue of identical twins separated at birth to ask about
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 22 gabriele griffin the relative importance of nature versus nurture.16 But, as b2 puts it: “it’s a combination of very complicated and that’s who you were so probably I shouldn’t blame you” (33). Later in the same conversation he re-iterates, “I can’t give you credit for [being good] if I don’t blame you for the other [being bad] . . . it’s too complicated to disentangle” (34, 35). The belief in the pre-eminence of genetic dispositions is common among those who seek their biological parents. Described by Donna Haraway as the genetic fiction, it structures the imaginary of familial relations, including those in divergent family formations, such that people using various forms of reproductive technology have traditionally been advised by clinics to choose donors with physiological characteristics that resemble their own. In the same way, donor-conceived people searching for their genetic parent/s have as their first concern for wanting to find out about that parent whether or not the parent looks like them, and they frequently assume that all manner of traits, interests, hobbies and characteristics may be a function of the genetic disposition of their genetic parent/s. In Let the Offspring Speak (Donor Conception Support Group of Australia 2004: 45-6), for example, Peter says: “The more I learn about genetics . . . the more I recognize that hereditary [sic] determines some important part of character . . . I would like to know what that missing fifty per cent of my gene pool is like . . . And on some level, most of all, I would like to meet an older man who looks like me”. Nicky, a female donor offspring, said: “I am always searching for similar personality traits and interests in an attempt to affirm who I am” (30), and a woman named Caroline states: “Being a sperm donor child makes you question everything about your humanity” (Hardy and Appleyard 2010). Caroline’s view, indicating the depth of her sense of identity crisis provoked by finding out that she is a donor offspring, is common, particularly among those conceived in countries where donor insemination remains anonymous or where donor disclosure is a very recent phenomenon —making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to gain information about the donor.17 Tellingly, one donor offspring cited by Alexina McWhinnie, who could not locate her donor, said: “Eight years on, I no longer feel I live in the black hole. My sense of identity and well-being no longer depend on discovering the identity of my natural father. But reaching this point has been a huge and difficult journey. Without faith in a God who is Father, I think I would still be floundering” (2006: 35). This woman’s statement suggests a shift in investment from the ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ father to a ‘spiritual’ one, exemplifying her strong sense of a
16 Churchill has explored the issue of identical twins in an unpublished radio play first broadcast on BBC on 21 November, 1968 titled Identical Twins. For a discussion of that play see Gobert (2009). Studies of identical twins separated at birth have been one mechanism used to try to understand the relative influence of nature and nurture. Such studies which were highly influential around issues of intelligence and heredity in the first part of the 20th century became somewhat discredited in the early 1970s when one of the chief psychologists working on such twins, Cyril Burt, was found to have faked his data (see Dorfman 1978; Gillie 1977). Twin studies nonetheless persisted into the 1990s, and beyond, as one means of testing the nature-nurture relationship (e.g. Lichtenstein et al. 1992; Davis and Phelps 1995; Joseph 2001). 17 It may also apply in contexts where those who have used donors to conceive have decided to keep this secret, and where offspring find out ‘by accident’ later.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 23 need for a father, whatever form that father takes, with whom she has a clear connection. Churchill’s play, in some senses refuses that position in the figure of Michael; a father himself, he feels no need for the ‘father’ that Salter is to him.
6. Knowing the father In his murderous jealousy of b2, b1 manifests a more profound form of sibling rivalry than commonly haunts the literature on families, not least because much literature on clones does not engage with the question of how ‘the original’ relates to the ‘copy’. In other words, that literature, and one might take Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a certain prototype, is concerned with inter-generational relations, rather than with intra-generational ones or, as is to a significant extent the case with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, with the relations between the clones who are all, ultimately, in the same situation and, in that novel, are not related to each other, or cloned from one another. But in A Number the three sons we encounter are not in the same situation in relation to each other or to their ‘father’. In all of this, Caryl Churchill is highly innovative in her work since she explores multiple relations between diverse sons and their father. As b2 puts it, talking about the difference between himself and b1: “what he feels as hate and what I feel as hate are completely different because what you did to him and what you did to me are different things” (45). Where b1’s trauma is the trauma of neglect, b2’s is the trauma of the loss of his i-dentity or uniqueness. As he puts it to Salter: “Don’t they say that you die if you meet yourself?” (16). b2’s fear is about the loss of self, of being just ‘a number’, compounded by his sense that none of the clones in the “batch” as he describes it, “was the original” (17). This is made worse when he gradually realises that Salter did not want him per se but rather the original son he was cloned from, who Salter paid homage to by giving b2 the same name. When Salter tells b2 that he “loves him” b2 retorts, “That’s something else you can’t help” (46), thus ultimately refusing Salter’s emotional agency and with it also the possibility that Salter’s actions and professions might mean something, i.e. that he, b2, is actually loved, because they are willed rather than being the inevitable unwilled consequence of his genetic make-up. b2’s view is in some respects vindicated by the play since Salter immediately seeks out a next son when he loses b2, showing little regret over b2’s murder or b1’s suicide. His proclamation, “I miss him so much. I miss them both” (62), rings hollow. The audience is thus left to ponder the question whether or not Salter is the ‘victim’ of genetic or environmental factors (such as trauma in his own upbringing, which b2 considers at one point); in other words, whether he cannot help himself, or if he is the human monster that some reviewers have suggested. Both positions are about establishing causality —arriving at understanding through elucidating a cause-and-effect sequence. However, the complexity of the issues involved also defies a simple or unitary explanation; the play does not offer such a singular position. Instead it offers a number. Unlike in many other clone narratives, or indeed the experience of those conceived by anonymous sperm donation, all the sons who appear in A Number know who their father is,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 24 gabriele griffin so b1 and b2’s quest is not about establishing their genetic heritage but about understanding the kind of relationship their father has to them or what their meaning is for him. This is also a prominent concern both for donor offspring and for those who have been abandoned (or given up for adoption) by their parents. The question of why donors or those who gave up a child acted as they did looms large in donor offspring’s and adopted children’s narratives.18 As one American male donor offspring put it: “Sperm donors are the mysterious participants in this method of family building. Are they more like birth parents who relinquish their children or are they more akin to the deadbeat dads who only care about their immediate pleasure?” (Lorbach 2003: 167). The problem in seeking to answer this question is, of course, that donors are motivated to donate for various reasons. In his fictionalized account, former sperm donor Michael Beeney describes the motive of his central character, a medical student at the time of his donations, thus: “Altruistic motives he had none. Before getting on ‘the bank’ he had struggled on a meagre grant” (1999: 91). For Beeney’s character, it is a financial transaction. However, other, often older men with established families who decide to donate can have more altruistic motives, rarely —one has to say— centred on the potential offspring, but commonly wanting to help those unable to have children by other means (see Donor Conception Support Group of Australia 2004). Neither of these reasons, fiscal or altruistic towards infertile adults, has anything to do with the potential resulting offspring, of course. This in itself may be a disappointment to such offspring, who are looking for the significancethey , rather than those who brought them up, have for the donor.
7. Narcissism and the reproductive triangle This leads to what is one of the core issues in this situation and indeed inA Number, namely the narcissistic dimension —the “simulation of sameness” or the making of someone in/ for our image as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (1998: 91-92) describes it— which governs the decision-making processes of those that constitute the triangle of assisted reproduction of any kind: the potential parents, the actual offspring and those who provide the means by which that reproduction occurs (doctors, donors). The potential parents, and this is certainly the case with Salter, are concerned with having the opportunity to parent. Phillips suggests that cloning “is used to get around history, as though in the total fantasy of cloning, history as difference is abolished” (94). In Salter’s case, this means history as the story of failed parenting is obliterated by a new story of successful parenting: his commissioning of a replica of his original son thus serves to fulfil Salter’s need to create an image of himself (and for himself ) as a good father. In the case of infertile men and their female partners, who commonly experience infertility as devastating (see Daniels 2004, especially chapter 2), the narcissistic dimension
18 In The Adoption Papers( 1991), for example, mixed-race writer Jackie Kay (re)constructs her biological parents’ possible motives for and feelings about giving up their daughter at birth, and some of her later writings (e.g. 2010) continue to deal with this issue, particularly the quest for finding her Nigerian father.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 25 of assisted reproduction, the desire to be the thing or person they cannot be, a parent/ family, is expressed as an overweening desire for precisely this: to parent and to have a family. “I was so hungry for a baby”, said one woman (2004: 55); “We were really excited that we were going to have a chance to be a family”, said another (2004: 52). The child’s view is not always taken into account. Salter, for instance, does not consider how either b1 or b2 might feel about his decision to have b1 cloned. In this Salter is in fact like Walter, an actual social father of donor offspring who said: “I didn’t really look at the issues to be quite honest. I didn’t look at the implications further down the track when we first started talking about it. It was just a solution to the problems” (53). Quite so. b2 is also in a sense ‘the solution to the problems’ Salter had in parenting b1, and like Walter, Salter does not consider what kind of impact his decision might have on his offspring. The offspring’s concern, too, both in Churchill’s play and in autobiographical accounts of actual donor offspring, tends to be on their own sense of their identity, and how they might be perceived by their donor. Preoccupation with self, and self ’s relation to others — in that order— is thus at the heart of what I would term ‘the assisted reproductive triangle’ and this, as Churchill’s play suggests, makes for conflicted and conflicting relations since individuals’ needs remain somewhat unfulfilled as the focus of those involved is less on the other than on the self. The good news, in a sense, is that Churchill presents the impact of the narcissistic dispositions that promote procreative activity, as different for the three sons Salter meets. His paternity or ability to procreate ‘naturally’ —a matter which is very frequently seen as an issue both for infertile men themselves and for the donor offspring they rear who are not their genetic children— is not in question here.19 At issue is his socio-emotional competence to parent, and this is firmly placed into the contextual domain rather than presented as a ‘given’ or ‘learnt’ competence. He is able to parent effectively when his circumstances, which he can influence through his behaviour, are conducive to this. This does not mean that he has automatic or instinctual empathy with his children; his reactions to both b1 and b2’s questions to him about his motivation for his behaviour towards them do not derive from any desire to tell the truth, but instead appear to centre on his wish to preserve his ‘good standing’ with his sons, denying any guilt on his part, whilst attempting to make them feel ok about themselves. Only under duress does Salter reveal anything like the truth about what happened. Thus, only whenb 2 suggests that he does not mind if he was the result of assisted reproduction, does Salter concur that this is what happened.
B2 So please if you’re not my father that’s fine. If you couldn’t have children or my mother, and you did in vitro or I don’t know what you did I really think you should tell me. Salter Yes, that’s what it was. (18)
19 See, for example, Beeney (1999) and Daniels (2004) for extended discussions of this from the perspectives of both the infertile fathers and their donor offspring.
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However, gradually of course it becomes clear that this is not exactly the case. In line with the behaviour of many actual social parents of donor offspring, Salter denies the truth about b2’s conception, evading answers, obfuscating and misleading him. As Maggie Kirkman reported in 2004 in relation to actual donor offspring: “offspring, at least of di [donor insemination], are typically not informed of their origin . . . even when legislation demands it” (2). The fact that Salter does not tell b2 about his origin constitutes a fundamental breach of trust which many real-life donor offspring and adoptees, just like b2 in the play, bitterly resent.20 There is extensive research which shows that keeping the history of a child’s origin secret results in feelings of alienation and resentment, especially if, as is the case in the play, offspring only discover the truth about their origin as adults (e.g. Scheib et al. 2004; Kirkman 2004). One such person, David Gollancz (2007: n.p.), has argued:
We use [stories], on every level, as a means of explaining and exploring who we are . . . For the donor-conceived, their story is a lie. When my father told me the truth back in 1965, I felt as though someone was standing in front of me, tearing up my autobiography page by page. Of course, all the things in my story had happened –but the ‘me’ to whom they had happened was not the me who had been telling himself the story. (2007: n.p.)
Gollancz’s reaction here is quite different from that shown by Michael Black, Salter’s third son, who feels no such resentment, and as such breaks that particular mould. Michael Black thus acts to confound assumptions about the predictability of individual responses to unexpected disclosures in his embrace, as opposed to a rejection or resentment, of that discovery. He is therefore the lynchpin in one of the play’s key arguments, namely that responses to events, for good or ill, are not predictable, and that in such unpredictability lies also the possibility of the valediction of difference. ‘Sameness’, Churchill’s play suggests, is not ‘all’, as Adam Phillips would have it.
8. Conclusions Churchill’s play, then, provides a complex intervention in the debates on divergent procreative processes and fatherhood. A Number queries many of the orthodoxies of conventional ideas about family formation and parenting. This includes the notion of the desirability of the conventional nuclear family; the pre-eminence of the mother (she is no good when she is not ‘good enough’ rather than she is always and inevitably ‘the
20 Interestingly, in a recent study Jadva et al. found that “[t]he most common feeling offspring from heterosexual- couple families felt towards their mother was ‘angry at being lied to’ compared with just one offspring feeling angry towards their father. In comparison, the most common feeling towards their father was ‘sympathetic’” (2009: 1918). But in A Number the mother is absent so it is harder to direct anger against her.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 11-31· issn 0210-6124 more than a number 27 best’); 21 a single-parent household headed by a man may be both wholly inadequate and good enough for parenting purposes; children might not hanker after absent parents (either mother or father), or may, on the contrary, be completely devoted to them. Most importantly, perhaps, the play refuses simple explanations. It suggests that parenting, in particular fathering, is a matter of doing rather than being, is not a single practice, even when undertaken by one father, but may be done differently under diverse circumstances, with the effect that all children experience their father in different ways, from being deeply attached to him to being uninterested in him. Similarly, being the product of divergent reproductive processes is constructed as not resulting in one particular reaction by the offspring but different ones, depending on factors that are hard to disentangle and therefore not readily identifiable. ‘Nature’ plays a role —but so does ‘nurture’, and their interplay and its effects are not mappable in ready ways. Having been conceived through divergent procreative processes may be traumatic for one offspring but not necessarily for another. Disclosure of origin may, or may not, matter. That indeterminancy, which simultaneously points to the particularity and inalienability of experience, is articulated in the play through the similarity in appearance of the clones (played by one actor) on the one hand, and through the flow of the characters’ language, on the other —both broken in terms of incomplete sentences, repetitions, and non sequiturs, as well as mutual interruptions in the father-son dialogues, and continues through the minimal use of punctuation on the page. Language here mirrors experience —but the meaning of that experience is not ‘given’. Beneath these complexities lies another key structure that Churchill’s play engages with: the assisted reproductive triangle that I referred to earlier and which, in this play as much as in many other accounts of parenting and reproductivity, is fuelled and sustained by narcissistic impulses, in particular —and here, in terms of the play, Salter is no different from b1 and b2— the desire to mean, to matter to an other as an entity in one’s own right. b1 and b2 in quite severe forms, Salter in a less severe version, all have to confront the notion that they do not matter to the other to whom they want to matter (the father, the son) or in the ways in which they want to matter. 22 They all want to be ‘more than a number’ but this, the play suggests, is not easily achieved. It is not easily achieved precisely because of the underlying narcissism of the procreative triangle. Churchill’s play leaves open how the destructive dimensions or effects of that narcissism might be overcome. However, a whole range of post-9/11 feminist writings and post-holocaust philosophical texts such as Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on community, and the writings of Emmanuel Levinas all suggest ways forward that centre on the suspension of preoccupation with self, of pre-emptive judgment, and on the recognition of the other. But this, as they say, is another story.
21 See Winnicott (1949: 1958) for details of the notion of the ‘good enough’ (as opposed to the ‘perfect’) mother. 22 For a discussion of mattering to the other see Butler (2005); Nancy (2000); Levinas (1999).
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Works Cited Adiseshiah, Siân 2009: Churchill’s Socialism. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Aitken, Stuart C. 2000: ‘Fathering and Faltering: “Sorry, But You Don’t Have the Necessary Accoutrements”’. Environment and Planning A 32: 581-98. Arditti, Rita, Duelli Klein, Renate and Shelley Minden 1984: Test-tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? London: Taylor and Francis. Aston, Elaine 1997: Caryl Churchill. Plymouth: Northcote. Aston, Elaine and Elin Diamond, eds. 2009: The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Bainham, Andrew 1997: ‘Sex, Gender and Fatherhood: Does Biology Really Matter?’. The Cambridge Law Journal 56.3: 512-15. Beeney, Michael 1999: Children of Eden. Lewes: Book Guild. Blakeslee, Sandra 1984: ‘Infertile Woman has Baby Through Embryo Transfer’. The New York Times 4 Feb.
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Freud, Sigmund, 1977 (1909): ‘Family Romances’. On Sexuality. Vol. 7 of the Pelican Freud Library. 15 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 217-26. Freud, Sigmund 1983 (1913): ‘Totem and Taboo’. The Origins of Religion. Vol. 13 of the Pelican Freud Library. 15 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 43-224. Freud, Sigmund 1983 (1939): ‘Moses and Monotheism’. The Origins of Religion. Vol. 13 of the Pelican Freud Library. 15 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 237-386. Gillie, Oliver 1977: ‘Did Sir Cyril Burt Fake His Research on Heritability of Intelligence? Part I’. The Phi Delta Kappan 58.6: 469-71. Gobert, R. Darren 2009: ‘On Performance and Selfhood in Caryl Churchill’. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond, eds. The Cambidge Companion to Caryl Churchill. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 15-24. Gold, Steven N. 2000: Not Trauma Alone: Therapy for Child Abuse Survivors in Family and Social Context. Philadelphia: Brunner. Gollancz, David 2007: ‘Time to Stop Lying’. The Guardian 2 Aug.
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Joseph, J. 2001: ‘Separated Twins and the Genetics of Personality Differences: A Critique’. The American Journal of Psychology 114.1: 1-30. Kashani, Javad H., E. Daniel Anasseril, Alison C. Dandoy and William R. Holcomb 1992: ‘Family Violence: Impact on Children’. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 31.2: 181-9. Kay, Jackie 1991: The Adoption Papers. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. —2010: Red Dust Road. London: Picador. Kirkman, Maggie 2004: ‘Genetic Connection and Relationships in Narratives of Donor-Assisted Conception’. Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 2: 2-20 Klotzko, Arlene Judith 2002: ‘Reviews: A Number’. British Medical Journal 325: 1043. Kritzer, Amelia Howe 2003: ‘A Number’. Theatre Journal 55.2: 354-55. Levinas, Emmanuel 1999: Alterity and Transcendence. New York: Columbia up. Lichtenstein, Paul, Nancy L. Pedersen and G. L. McClearn 1992: ‘The Origins of Individual Differences in Occupational Status and Educational Level: A Study of Twins Reared Apart and Together’. Acta Sociologica 35.1: 13-31. Lorbach, Caroline 2003: Experiences of Donor Conception. London: Jessica Kingsley. Marsiglio, William, Paul Amato, Randal D. Day and Michael E. Lamb 2000: ‘Scholarship on Fatherhood in the 1990s and Beyond’. Journal of Marriage and Family 62.4: 1173-91. McNeil, Maureen 2007: Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology. London: Routledge. McWhinnie, Alexina 2006: Who Am I? Experiences of Donor Conception. Leamington Spa: Idreos Education Trust. Nancy, Jean-Luc 2000: Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford up. Numberger, J. et al. 2005: ‘Prediction of Alcohol Problems Using a Prospective Longitudinal Design Including Genotype’. Alcoholism. Clinical and Experimental Research 29.5: 137A. O’Toole, Laura, Jessica Schiffman and Margie L. Kiter Edwards, eds. 2007: Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: nyup. Phillips, Adam 1998: ‘Sameness is All’. Martha C. Nussbaum and Cass R. Sunstein, eds. Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies about Human Cloning. New York: W.W. Norton. 88-94. Pickard, Mary J. 1998: ‘Fatherhood in Contemporary Society’. Family Relations 47.2: 205-08. Reinelt, Janelle 2009: ‘On Feminist and Sexual Politics’. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 18-35. Ricoeur, Paul 1974: ‘Fatherhood: From Phantasm to Symbol’. The Conflict of Interpretations. Evanston: Northwestern up. 464-93. Scheib, J. E., M. Riordan and S. Rubin 2004: ‘Adolescents with Open-identity Sperm Donors: Reports from 12-17 Year Olds’. Human Reproduction: 1-14.
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Sheldon, Sally 1999: ‘ReConceiving Men: Imagining Men’s Reproductive Bodies in Law’. Journal of Law and Society 26.2: 129-49. —2005: ‘Fragmenting Fatherhood: The Regulation of Reproductive Technologies’. Modern Law Review 68.4: 523-53. Umberson, Debra, Camille B. Wortman and Ronald C. Kessler 1992: ‘Widowhood and Depression: Explaining Long-Term Gender Differences in Vulnerability’. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33: 10-24. Wall, Glenda and Stephanie Arnold 2007: ‘How Involved is Involved Fathering? An Exploration of the Contemporary Culture of Fatherhood’. Gender and Society 21.4: 508-27. Warner, Sam 2009: Understanding the Effects of Child Sexual Abuse: Feminist Revolutions in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Routledge. Winnicott, Donald Woods 1958a (1949): The Ordinary Devoted Mother and Her Baby: Nine Broadcast Talks. London: Tavistock. —1958b (1949): ‘Primary Maternal Preoccupation’. Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. London: Tavistock. 300-05.
Films cited The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Colodenko, 2010). Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010). The Switch (Will Speck and Josh Gordon, 2010).
Received 15 July 2012 Accepted 5 September 2012
Gabriele Griffin is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of York. She is series editor of ‘Research Methods in Arts and Humanities’ (Edinburgh UP). Her research centres on contemporary women’s cultural production, and she is working on a project titled On Not Owning a Story. She has recently co-edited Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research: Researching Differently(New York: Routledge, 2011); The Emotional Politics of Research Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 2013); and The Social Politics of Research Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Address: Centre for Women’s Studies. University of York. York YO10 5DD. Tel.: +44 1904 323030.
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Recovering the Maternal Body as Paradise: Michèle Roberts’s ‘Charity’
Laura M.ª Lojo Rodríguez Universidade de Santiago de Compostela [email protected]
Michèle Roberts’s ‘Charity’ —published in her first collection of short fictionDuring Mother’s Absence (1994)— fictionalises a woman’s attempt to come to terms with the figure of her own mother in order to recover the maternal body as paradise. In discursive terms, this process of reconsideration, forgiveness and recovery is achieved by the character’s enactment of her own perspective as a child, dependant on language, memory, and mythic reconstructions of her own past. This article examines the complex terms of the mother-daughter relationship in Roberts’s short story, which offers an interesting feminist permutation of the traditional male pattern of maturation —or Oedipus complex— by exclusively focusing on the mother-daughter dyad. Furthermore, Robert’s short story offers a psychoanalytically-inspired example of maternal splitting into the spiritual and the eroticised mother, which the narrator will learn to reconcile as she enters the threshold of maturity.
Keywords: Michèle Roberts; ‘Charity’; motherhood; child’s perspective; psychoanalysis; body.
. . .
Recuperar el cuerpo materno como paraíso: ‘Charity’, de Michèle Roberts
El relato ‘Charity’ de Michèle Roberts , publicado en la colección During Mother’s Absence (1994), que muestra los esfuerzos de la narradora protagonista por recuperar la figura materna. En términos discursivos, este proceso de reconsideración y perdón se consigue a través de la recuperación de la perspectiva infantil, ligada al lenguaje, la memoria y a una reconstrucción mítica del propio pasado de la protagonista. Este artículo examina los términos complejos de la relación madre e hija en ‘Charity’, relato que ofrece una interesante variación sobre el patrón tradicional de evolución psicológica infantil, o complejo edípico, al centrarse exclusivamente en la díada madre-hija. Finalmente, y en términos psicoanalíticos, el relato de Roberts ofrece un ejemplo de la fragmentación del sujeto materno en la madre espiritual y la madre erótica, que la protagonista aprenderá a reconciliar al cruzar el umbral del mundo adulto.
Palabras clave: Michèle Roberts; ‘Charity’; maternidad; perspectiva infantil; psicoanálisis; corporeidad
—33— 34 laura m.ª lojo rodríguez
1. Introduction When discussing the short piece entitled ‘Charity’, compiled in her first collection of stories, During Mother’s Absence (1994), Michèle Roberts highlighted the relevance of choosing the tangential, marginal perspective of a child, as part of a young girl’s rebellion against her own father’s “omniscient narrative . . . ; I felt trapped in his story of who I was in life” (Newman 2004).1 Roberts’s story offers an interesting feminist permutation of the traditional male pattern of maturation —or Oedipus complex— by exclusively focusing on the mother-daughter relationship, discursively realised by Roberts’s rejection of omniscience —or of the powerful paternal pattern of familiar dominance along with the elision of the male figure— while also bringing to the fore suggestive rewritings of monoparental models of motherhood, offered in the text through various icons of the Madonna, which also signal physical and spiritual communion between mother and child. ‘Charity’ fictionalises a young woman’s recollection of her childhood, in an attempt to come to terms with her own mother —whose status as such she has till recently denied— in order to, in Roberts’s own words, recover “the maternal body as paradise” (Newman 2004). In discursive terms, this process of reconsideration, forgiveness and, ultimately, recovery is achieved in the text by Marie’s enactment of her own perspective as a child, dependant on language, memory and a particular conception of innocence. The aim of this paper is to examine the complex terms of the mother-daughter relationship in Robert’s short story —a story both ideologically and symbolically embedded in the dynamics underpinning the collection in which it appears, significantly entitled During Mother’s Absence, encompassing both physical and/or emotional departure from the mother. Roberts’s aforementioned rejection of omniscience in favour of a subjective, imagi- native first-person young voice works in the narrative as textual evidence of the complex process of bringing back the character’s own childhood through the imaginative fictionalisations of her mother and of their own relationship: “The place of imagination is . . . the place inside us where we hold and contain a kind of thinking which re-members how we were as children and still can be: non-rational, wanting to make and give gifts, playful, aggressive, destructive, sad, reparative, joyful. It’s a safe place, in which to let go of old certainties, let boundaries dissolve, experience the kind of chaos necessary for new life, new ideas” (Roberts 1998: 22). As Roberts herself has explained at length (2008), psychoanalysis has functioned as a major inspiring methodological framework, not only to come to terms with her own past, but also as a driving force to explain maturation patterns and psychological development in her narrative. As such, this article also draws from various psychoanalytically-inspired critical works which have focused on the child’s process of emotional growth from a feminist slant by looking into the terms of the mother-daughter relationship, core to
1 This article was conceived of as embedded in the methodological framework of the research project ‘Us and Them: Discourses on Foreignness by Irish and Galician Women Writers’ ffi( 2009-08475, subprograma filo), within the research group Discourse and Identity (gi-1924).
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Roberts’s narrative. In psychoanalytical terms, ‘Charity’ dramatises what Luce Irigaray has termed as “the bodily encounter with the mother” (1991: 39), which the Law of the Father forbids, through the exploration of feminine desire and the role of the maternal (38), the imaginary and symbolic relationship with the woman-mother (35).
2. Recovering Paradise through a Child’s Perspective Michèle Roberts herself has suggested how the process of re-enacting one’s own past focuses on the individual’s need to recover what has been irretrievably lost, and which, as she sees it, inevitably tackles one’s relationship with the mother (Roberts 1998: 21). Drawing on the reflections of outstanding postmodern feminists, Roberts overtly acknowledges the capacity of literature to effectively re-imagine, and to some extent recover, one’s childhood and the maternal body:
Images come from the period of my childhood spent partly in France. They give me back what I lost —childhood— and enable me to re-create it idealistically as a happy paradise. They stand in, these images of lost bliss, as images of something even more specific than childhood: she who is paradise itself for the baby, the growing child: the mother. The power of these photographs comes from their capacity to give me back what I lost, thought I had lost for ever: the maternal body, my mother’s body, alive and warm and generous, an image of that body which says that is how she was, that is how we were, once, together. Blissful mutual giving and taking. What the French call la jouissance and what the French feminists like Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous say we find again through writing and reading. (Roberts 1998: 20)
Significantly, Roberts first dramatised such a journey to the maternal in creative terms through her characters’ quests, though it was later systematised in non-fictional reflections on her writing practice, as her collection of essays Food, Sex and God: On Inspiration and Writing (1998) demonstrates. The recreation of one’s own childhood —“paradise” being Roberts’s expression for the individual’s privileged relationship with the mother at that time— requires the ability to intertwine personal memories with the fictional reconstruction of the past. As Sara Ruddick explains, “personal fantasy, fictional representation, and social and cultural reality are so interconnected where motherhood is concerned that it is impossible to talk about one without the other” (qtd. in Suleiman 1988: 27). As a result, in her fictional works, Roberts consistently uses epiphanic moments as a discursive strategy to elide divisions in time and space, not only to powerfully question traditional boundaries of history, culture, and identity (White 2003: 71), but also to suggestively discuss the individual’s necessity to come to terms with the past through innumerable rewritings, revisions, and fictionalisations. This process of repetition and recollection may eventually throw light onto the individual’s fragmentary identity: “I’ve had to see things as broken, separated into their component parts, and these I am examining, through the process of metaphor. . . . I have to go backwards and forwards and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 33–47· issn 0210-6124 36 laura m.ª lojo rodríguez around, just as the eye travels in a cubist painting. . . . It’s not the original . . . but my own version, my own myth” (Roberts 1983: 67). Roberts’s urge to write seems to be dependant on her own need to come to terms with her mother, as well as on the promise which fiction offers to recover an individual’s past and the maternal body with it. Roberts’s female protagonist implicitly deconstructs the linear narrative of her childhood, which will eventually enable her to cope with her inherited, conflicting versions of femininity in order to accept her mother in the ultimate act of love: of “charity”, of “mutual giving and taking”, as Roberts would have it. As explained previously, the story is discursively articulated as a first person reverie of the past childhood of Marie, the narrator, who is perceived as a bright, talented orphan who lives under the care of her aunt —referred to as “Auntie” in the narrative; a most unconventional yet loving and affectionate woman. Marie is a boarder in the Catholic convent of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, and through her innocent narrative the reader progressively understands, as Marie herself does, that the child’s social isolation springs from Auntie’s real status in social and family terms: she is a prostitute, as well as Marie’s own mother. The child’s point of view often accomplishes what Slavoj Žižek has defined asa postmodern “shift of perspective”, where the repressed truth of the false totality emerges and is displaced “into the very heart of the narrative” (1992: 123). Rhetorically speaking, the child’s perspective proves particularly fruitful, for it renders an alienated, marginal, distorted and de-socialised vision of normative power. The child is more than an aesthetic innovation leaping ex nihilo into fictive existence, or a surrogate for unconscious, impulsive lives, for, as a symbolic referent, it possesses “a transformative power which influences not only the image we have of children, but also the image we have of ourselves as adults” (Kuhn 1982: 4). In Roberts’s own terms, the evocation and reconstruction of childhood carries the possibility of construing one’s identity, and of coming to terms with it:
I’m suggesting that the place of imagination is at the heart of each of us, at the heart of culture, of society. It’s the place inside us where we hold and contain a kind of thinking which remembers how we were as children and still can be: non-rational, wanting to make and give gifts, playful, aggressive, destructive, sad, reparative, joyful. It’s a safe place, in which to let go of old certainties, let boundaries dissolve, experience the kind of chaos necessary for new life, new ideas. It’s a space we need inside our culture, a space we need to hold our children in, contain them safely in while they fight and learn. (1998: 22)
3. The Kernel of Jouissance Roberts’s ‘Charity’ is inaugurated by the main character’s dream, which dramatises Marie’s eventual communion with her mother in an epiphanic encounter which not only signals a physical and spiritual reunion of mother and daughter, but also Marie’s entry into adulthood:
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I have a young erotic mother . . . My mother’s flesh is warm. The sheets are cool and smooth. I lay hands on her hips and pull her close, kiss her soft mouth, her shoulders, stroke her hair, the wet silky place between her legs. The storm drums on the roof. She kisses and caresses me. Her smell grows stronger, like a garden after the rain. She offers me her breast, round and white and fat, ardently we lie in each other’s arms, touching kissing sucking biting, then my swollen cunt boils over and I come. (1993: 32)
The location of this passage is privileged within the narrative, and takes place immediately after Marie learns of her mother’s recent death. The character’s unconscious desires shape this dream, and find physical embodiment in the private, motherly realm, as Roberts herself has suggested:
I write about the unconscious as a place and I also think I write about the unconscious as a kind of energy and a kind of language formation. It’s a kind of poetic language. And it is a free space, particularly for these women [Roberts’s female characters] because I think women have been so repressed into the unconscious of the culture if you like, that (a) it’s where we’ve belonged but (b) it’s where we can begin to invent ourselves. (García Sánchez 2005: 140)
The protagonist’s bodily encounter with the mother also dramatises a woman’s discovery of sexual identity, the singularity of her desire and auto-eroticism (Irigaray 1991: 44). In addition, the passage clearly dramatises the character’s efforts to diminish the separation between “the hard kernel of jouissance” (Žižek 1997: 50) and the maternal body —absent and irretrievably lost— by returning to it in a dream that Roberts describes as being “some pre-linguistic state of bliss, which is about unity and non-separation” (Newman 2004), and Kristeva (1984) as a “nonexpressive totality” (25), best dramatised through the image of breast-feeding, here overtly linked with erotic pleasure. The protagonist of the narrative discovers what Irigaray has termed “the singularity of jouissance” (1991: 45), which here functions according to the mother principle, thus deviating from the heterosexual phallic model. For Roberts, the Christian divorce between spirit and flesh, reflection and desire, represents an artificially erected barrier, as she explains in her essay entitled ‘The Place of Imagination’ (1994), where she discusses the taboos which traditionally pertain to the blissful communion between mother and daughter: “Women can have . . . trouble in finding an image of sensual loving delight between mother and daughter; the taboo of homosexuality sees to that, it’s not just the lived difficulties of that crucial relationship so many of us battle with. Yet we search for the image, try to make one, to make one up. We try to mend what was broken” (1998: 21). The spiritual and sensual communion between mother and daughter is strongly suggested in the dream by, among other things, the mother’s lactating, which further on in the narrative brings to the fore major issues pertaining to motherhood, spirituality, and the construction of female subjectivity, as will be discussed later. As such, breast- feeding emerges as a major motif in ‘Charity’ from the narrative’s very inception which,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 33–47· issn 0210-6124 38 laura m.ª lojo rodríguez in psychoanalytical terms, also tackles the problematic of the character’s ambivalent feelings towards her mother, whose nominal status as such is denied through much of the narrative. In general terms, breast-feeding is seen to encapsulate the child’s ambiguous feelings toward the mother; a conflicting mixture of tenderness, gratitude, and destructive rage. Its experience is alternatively gratifying and frustrating, and it also constitutes the starting point of the child’s fantasies: “The baby reacts to unpleasant stimuli, and to the frustration of pleasure through feelings of hatred and aggression. These feelings of hatred are directed towards the same objects as are the pleasurable ones, namely, the breast of the mother” (Klein 1977: 290). However, the child’s initial rage and aggression towards the (lost) mother must necessarily be “channelled into the creation of a restorative and reparative image of her which can in turn form the basis of the image of herself ” as an adult (Hanson 2000: 231). Roberts has consistently emphasised how psychoanalysis has succeeded in enabling/helping/allowing her to follow her own urge to look into the repressed, and come to terms with it, most often through the writing process:
You’ll have heard echoes in what I’ve been saying of the work of Freud, of Melanie Klein, of contemporary writers on art sympathetic to Klein like Marion Milner, Peter Fuller. Certainly I’m indebted to their work, which has helped me to shape own my ideas. But I need to stress the personal aspect of the search. Before reading these writers I was surprised how everything I wrote went back to maternal loss, maternal absence, and now dares to re-imagine maternal presence, fullness. I find these theories suggestive, powerfully evocative, “true”, because I’ve experienced what they’re saying inside myself, inside my own work. (1998: 21-22)
4. Family Romance ‘Charity’, like most of Roberts’s fictional works, dramatises such a movement from rage towards reparation of the maternal in order to construe a subjectivity according to what she calls “the mother principle, the feminine principle” (1983: 65), accomplished both by means of storytelling and by theoretical reflection as bone structure for the narrative:
I know that I write out of the experience of loss; the earliest experience of the loss of my mother. Loss is an emptiness filled with terrifying feelings: burning hate, sizzling despair, rage that tears you apart. I hated my mother (the fantasy image of her I constructed inside myself ) for not always being there when I wanted her, or as much as I needed . . . Hate sets up in turn the need for love, to move back into love; hate impelled me to fill up its emptiness with images I could take back to my mother (in my imagination) and offer her as gifts, emblems of my need for her forgiveness, for her love. (1983: 64)
Similarly, Marie feels the urge to initiate a process of reparation and recovery, which is discursively fulfilled through her particular reconstruction of her past, in an effort to come to terms with Auntie’s identity and with the acknowledgement of the woman’s
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 33–47· issn 0210-6124 recovering the maternal body as paradise 39 true position in family life. However, due to Marie’s strict Catholic upbringing as well as to social conventionalities, the character finds that such an unpalatable fact needs to be disguised and rewritten so as to be socially acceptable. The behaviour of both Marie and Auntie therefore elaborates on a tacit variation of the Freudian family romance, described by the psychoanalyst as a necessary yet painful step involved in the child’s psychological development towards maturity, necessarily implying “the liberation of the individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents” (Freud 1959: 237). According to Freud, for a small child his parents are “at first the only authority and the source of all belief ”, and “his most momentous wish during these early years is to be like his parents (that is, the parent of his own sex)” (1959: 237). Yet, as the child acquires emotional maturity, he or she cannot help discovering the gender category to which his or her parents belong, aided by the knowledge of and comparison to other parents, a fact that often provokes dissatisfaction and becomes the initial point of criticism towards his/her parents. Within this pattern of maturation, and in order to support his or her critical attitude, the child considers that other parents are preferable to his or her own (1959: 237). The child’s sense that his or her own affection is not fully reciprocated finds “a vent in the idea . . . of being a step-child or adopted child” (238). As a result, the child may develop a fantasy sustained by the belief that his or her family are not actually his or her own, biologically speaking, and that s/he is in fact heir to different parents of better birth (1959: 238). Roberts’s narrative fictionalises this in Marie’s recollection of her own family: “I don’t remember my parents. Auntie told me they died in a plane crash when I was two, coming back from holiday. I was lucky they left me with my aunt or I’d have been dead too. I don’t miss them at all because I can’t remember them. I’m very lucky because first Auntie adopted me, then when I got too much for her the nuns let me be a full-time boarder” (1993: 51–52). Marie not only envies in her friends the traditional dynamics of a bourgeois family, but also privately resents the absence of a father figure, who is, however, present in her own fantasised version of the Freudian family romance. During her childhood years Marie preserves this fantasy in order to avoid social rejection and to adapt her personal circumstances to the normative bourgeois nuclear family that she so envies in her friends: “[Auntie] didn’t much like me mixing with other children and never let me bring a friend home for tea. I went to other children’s houses for tea at first in primary school, then less and less because I couldn’t invite them back. We’ll keep ourselves to ourselves, she always said” (1993: 36). Under a traditional capitalist system, men produced valuable capital whereas women became commodities, being valuable only at the cost of the preservation of their virtue (Irigaray 1991: 36), as Marie compulsively repeats as a result of her indoctrination. Within this capitalist division of labour, women’s work in the private realm centres on the indoctrination of their offspring in patriarchal ideology, thus perpetuating the very system that oppresses them. Women’s attempts to transcend the private sphere are negatively perceived by conservative factions as being the result of a precarious domestic economy:
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“Ugly Face [Marie’s teacher] is sorry for Mary’s mother because she has to go out to work and can’t dedicate her entire life to her family like other girls’ mothers do. Only lower- class mothers work” (1993: 48). Significantly, Roberts discusses her memories of her own childhood and adolescence in similar terms: “In adolescence, increasing alienation from myself and from the view of femininity purveyed in the late 1950s/early 1960s culture drove me and my writing underground; I stopped being honest with myself and others about what I felt, and tried to please, and kept my poems, my authentic records, a secret” (1983: 64). Despite Marie’s internalisation of the norm, she is still able to unconsciously perceive the oppression and subjugation which such a model of silence and invisibility implies for women:
The girls who become nuns have a wedding-day after they’ve been postulants for six months, then they die to the world. It’s very beautiful and sad. They glide up the aisle in their white dresses with their hair spread out down their backs, then the habit and veil are fitted over them and they disappear. But if you get married and have children you disappear as well. Housewives stay at home all day and talk about recipes and babies, they read women’s magazines, they go to the hairdresser’s every week and have their hair cut off and have perms. I shall never get married and have children. I might try and go to university, but after that I’m going to become a nun. (1993: 46)
As Sonia Villegas has extensively discussed (2008: 288), the religious dynamics and hierarchy of convent life reproduce the gendered disposition of the domestic realm, actually functioning as a space for the contemplation of others, rather than at self- reflection. Roberts’s interest in this form of religious education not only springs from her own experience as a Catholic boarder, but also partakes of a concern to reflect on the impact of educational paradigms on women’s lives, as she shows in other fictionalisations on this theme, most notably in the Catholic upbringing of Josephine in Impossible Saints (1997).
5. Maternal Splitting The experience of motherhood equates, for the narrator, with submission and powerlessness, for the idea of maternal power —the power to engender and give birth— has been domesticated, reflecting Rich’s suggestion that “[i]n transfiguring and enslaving the woman, the womb —the ultimate source of power— has historically been turned against us and itself made into a source of powerlessness” (1976: 68). In this sense, the childless, unmarried nuns represent for Marie a realistic example of relative emancipation and independence. Furthermore, a nun would conventionally be posed as the opposite of a prostitute, and Marie’s wish to become a nun exemplifies her ‘matrophobia’, or her fear of becoming her own mother: “Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 33–47· issn 0210-6124 recovering the maternal body as paradise 41 self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr” (Rich 1976: 236). In addition, Marie’s ‘surrogate’ mother, Auntie, clearly deviates from established models of social and sexual behaviour, upsetting the child with a painful ambivalent clash of feelings of both love and admiration and of shame and hatred. Furthermore, and in line with the character’s own ambivalence towards her mother, ‘Charity’ provides an overt example of what Susan Suleiman has termed “maternal splitting” (1988: 27), the impulse to split the maternal figure into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ personae. There is indeed an ancient tradition of tackling the conflicts of the mother-daughter relationship, as Bruno Bettelheim remarks in his psychoanalytically-inspired examination of fairy tales: “Far from being a device used only by fairy tales, such a splitting up of one person into two to keep the good image uncontaminated occurs to many children as a solution to a relationship too difficult to manage or comprehend . . . The fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good mother intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one’s angry thoughts about her” (1987: 67, 69). In both literal and metaphorical terms, Marie splits the mother figure into what Freud diagnosed as the “mother/whore” syndrome (1963: 58), which disassociates tenderness and sexuality, aiming to preserve the mother’s asexual purity. As a result, Marie’s suspicion that she is actually the natural daughter of a prostitute is superseded by her own version of the Freudian family romance. Since identification with her own mother would bring about problematic issues concerning sexuality, class, and power, Marie establishes a spiritual affinity —as her own name suggests— with a less problematic, powerful, asexual mother figure: the Virgin Mary becomes Marie’s celestial, surrogate mother, while her biological mother, whether consciously or not, is displaced from this role to become Auntie in an effort to avoid social exclusion:
Being illegitimate is the worst thing you can be. Another word for it is bastard. It means you haven’t got a father and that your mother isn’t married and that she did something really terrible and lower-class. It is very shocking and dirty. It’s like an extra dose of original sin and it never rubs off. People whisper and point when they see an illegitimate person. Janice and Karen said I was but it isn’t true. (1993: 52)
As a result of this self-protective process of maternal splitting, Marie elaborates on images and iconography of the Virgin Mary, not only because of her Catholic upbringing with the nuns, but also because of her own alleged affinity with Mary as a mother. Revealingly, and by doing this, Marie is unconsciously establishing what Irigaray has called “a genealogy of women” (1991: 44), a permutation of the exploration of matrilineal inheritance, which will eventually bring about the encounter with her mother and the discovery of the protagonist’s sexual identity. Of the varied possible invocations of the Mother of God, Marie draws on the Virgin’s iconographic representation as Mater
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Amabilis, which suggests a particular consecration of motherhood through tender images —such as breast-feeding— suggesting nurturing and maternal care. As Julia Kristeva has argued, “the relationship with Mary was to be . . . the prototype of a love relationship and followed two fundamental aspects of western love: courtly love and child love” (1997: 305-06) and, more fundamentally, “the fantasy . . . of a lost territory”, of a pervading bonding with the mother, of an “idealization of primary narcissism” (302), that is, the “child’s love for the woman who nursed him” (Bowie 1991: 33), as proposed by Freud in ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914). Marie is perfectly acquainted with the Catholic Marian myth and its different iconographic representations: “Our Lady didn’t die in the normal way. She fell asleep in the arms of St John, then angels came with a silver tray and carried her up to heaven on it. Now she sits side by side with Our Lord on a throne, they look exactly the same age” (1993: 39). Yet Marie does not feel particularly attracted to Marian icons evocative of power and eternity, such as the myth of Mary’s Dormition or her representation as Maria Regina. Instead, the little girl establishes a strong affinity with the byzantine icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, for here the Virgin becomes the representation of Charity as the greatest of Theological Virtues, meaning “giving and sustaining” (39), implying endless love and generous support as only a mother is capable of offering. In this sense, Marie often turns to this Marian invocation for spiritual encouragement: “I’ve got a picture of our Lady feeding Jesus stuck under my desk lid . . . She knows how much I wish I was thin and popular and pretty with long straight hair and not so clever. She understands all this and she still loves me. She knows I’m praying so hard the bell will ring soon for the end of the school. Before Janice and Karen can say anything” (42-43). In this sense, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour works as an example of an intensely felt, personal relationship with the Virgin: in the medieval Madonna icon, arid theology is transformed into “the image of a human, approachable, supremely adorable woman who stood by humanity like a mother but loved it like a mistress” (Warner 1976: 155). Young Marie, as a good, fervent Catholic, regards Mary as the ideal representation of motherhood in its fullness and perfection, despite her exemption by special privilege “from intercourse, from labour, and from other physical processes or ordinary childbearing. One natural biological function, however, was permitted the Virgin in the Christian cult —suckling”, for Mary’s milk symbolises both Jesus’s full humanity as well as the gift of life (Warner 1976: 192-94). For Marie, the Virgin fills the “visions of those, men or women (often children), who were racked by the anguish of maternal frustration”, the breast symbolising the threshold of infantile regression (Kristeva 1997: 311). In addition to this, the feminisation of the virtue of Charity offers an interesting permutation of the Madonna iconography. According to St Paul, the primacy of this Theological Virtue resides in its compelling the Christian to practice all other virtues, thus embodying the love of God. Marie feels particularly engaged by the practice of this virtue of Charity, and develops a project for Religious Education on the topic:
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We’re doing a project on Charity this term in re and we have to do research. We found a book with pictures of the Virtues, who were women from olden times. Justice had a pair of scales, Faith had a sword. Charity was a lady with no clothes on her top under the black bit of paper, feeding four babies at once. I saw a lady do that once in the dentist’s waiting-room. She pulled up her jumper, quick as a flash, and I saw her floppy white chest before she pressed the baby’s head to it. (1993: 42)
Interestingly, Marie prefers the iconographic representations of Charity rather than its definition in theological terms. It is also significant that Charity has traditionally been represented by various painters throughout history —for example, Anthony Van Dick’s ‘Charity’ (1627–28) or William-Adolphe Boughereau’s ‘Le Charité’ (1878)— as the idealisation of motherhood through love, care, and feeding, best embodied by the lactating mother, as Marie’s unconscious association of thoughts overtly shows.
6. Loss of Eden Marie is soon to discard such idealisations of femininity through motherhood for, as Eva Kittay has suggested, “the Virgin Mary, the female incarnation of Justice, Liberty, Truth, Death; the female Muses” are metaphorical images of woman which emphasise their role as mediators, therefore aiming to represent man’s emotional and irrational elements (1997: 271). Thus, the lactating mother as the idealisation of virtuous femininity is dramatically reversed in the narrative by the allegedly irreconcilable notions of sexual pleasure and eroticism. Young Marie arrives home unexpectedly early from school, only to find Auntie engaged in sexual games with a man:
The room was dim, and the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun. Auntie was resting on the bed. Her eyes were open. A burning cigarette balanced on the ashtray next to her. She was wearing her afternoon frock, the one with mauve and blue flowers on it. It was unbuttoned all down the front. She and the man with her lay very still, like in a photograph. Perhaps they were not still, perhaps that is the way I choose to remember it. I looked at her bare white bosom, at the man who curled in her arms and sucked at one of her breasts like a baby. (1993: 59)
The narrator emphasises her role as such, fictionalising past events when first encountering overt sexuality in a traumatic scene which heralds her loss of the maternal. A propos of the subject, Roberts argues: “I’ve turned more and more to the unconscious, to the ancient memories therein, to resurrect mythic . . . constellations of aspects of the self and others” (1983: 67). In addition to this, Marie’s ‘resurrection’ of her mythic past, of her own subjective construction of childhood, relates to her sudden awareness of the reality of sexuality, which may take the form of a traumatic encounter which forever obliterates “a formerly prelapsarian existence” (Kuhn 1982: 132). As Freud explains in Three
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Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality (1903), children elaborate on sexual ‘theories’ concerning their origin, which concern the castration complex, their treatment as sexual objects, or the sadistic conception they have of the sexual act: “If children at so tender an age witness the sexual act between adults they cannot help conceiving the sexual act as a kind of maltreating or overpowering; that is, it impresses them in a sadistic sense” (Freud 1995: 564). For this reason the passage signals Marie’s irreversible loss of innocence and the abandonment of her childhood world: “Her hand [Auntie’s] caught me on the cheekbone and left a bruise . . . She said I would have to understand it was all for the best. She sat on the stairs and cried. I’d never seen her do that before. It was then that I realised that something was broken, and that I’d done it” (1993: 59). Marie spends the rest of her childhood in the convent as a boarder, later moving to college in Cambridge. However, Marie’s entrance in adulthood has not been fully realised, for she has yet one conflict to resolve, an acknowledgement to make, which ultimately pertains to her own identity and sexuality: “She [Auntie] never met my lover because I didn’t invite her to . . . I was ashamed of letting my friends see her . . . I punished her for all this, and more, by keeping aloof, not bothering to write . . . I preferred it that way” (59).
7. Charitable Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Recovery Marie’s own process of reconciliation, of ‘charitable’ forgiveness is fuelled by the contemplation of female icons of the three Theological Virtues at the Herziana Library in Rome while on a trip with her lover: “I flicked through an old book of engravings I picked at random from the shelf. Allegories. The battle of the soul. The Virtues. There she was, Mrs Charity, feeding four babies from her bare white breast and no black square stuck over it. For some reason, that evening I rang Auntie in Manchester from the hotel. I learned that her funeral had been the week before. Lung cancer. She’d never mentioned it” (1993: 60). The maternal body appears now inevitably lost in a literal sense, and Marie’s recovery must be accomplished in some other way. Marie’s process of mourning is propelled by her remembrance; significantly, she shares her memories with a friend with whom she establishes, at last, a bond of female affinity and mutual understanding, prior to her acknowledgement of Auntie’s true status in her life:
I was alone and separate now, no kindly academic lover to translate for me, mediate between me and the world. Talking in Italian felt truer than my usual English speech. Because another woman sat there, delicate and solid, and listened to me with interest and wanted me to go on. Opening my mouth, I tasted ash, I bit into shards of glass, I swallowed dust. The word Auntie meant a warm flannelette back in bed, a tobacco kiss, yet the bed was empty and her mouth gone. I stumbled along, finding Italian words one after the other, rolling them, sour milk, over my tongue. (62)
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Marie’s entrance into maturity and independence leans on the restoration of her mother’s name to her family history which, in turn, encompasses the unifying of her mother’s split identity which had characterised her childhood: the “spiritual” mother, the iconic Madonna and the eroticised mother, Auntie, the prostitute, who recalls Mary Magdalene. The biblical prostitute reconciles the spiritual and the sexual in the female, a motif which has been extensively looked into by Roberts in her fiction and essays. Against the Catholic denial of the body, there emerges Mary Magdalene as “a highly coloured version of the eternal feminine”, as the very image of the “return of the repressed: the numinous body, sexiness and holiness intertwined”, “a figure of glorious contradiction” (Roberts 1998: 27–29).
8. Conclusion Marie’s narrative —her own reconstruction of the past— dramatises not only her impulse and need to come to terms with herself and construe a stable identity, but also to recover what she thought forever lost, the maternal body, in a process that implies both “remembering” and “re-membering” (Roberts 1998: 20). Marie’s recognition, the charitable “blissful mutual giving and taking” which Roberts describes (20) as exclusively pertaining to motherhood, is fully accomplished in the narrative’s closure, where the eroticised dream of communion between child and lactating mother is effected. In more literal terms, Marie’s successful juxtaposition of her mother’s fragmented identity into a unified image of her is discursively marked in her narrative by the beautiful intersection of feminine images which close the story: “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour Mrs Charity Auntie my young erotic mother” (1993: 62). According to Roberts, recovering the maternal, the mother’s body as “paradise” can be achieved not only through “re-membering”, but also through the rejection of paternal omniscience in favour of a fragmented, contradictory “I” in childhood which paves the way for understanding adulthood: “If we stay in touch with our own imagination, our own unconscious, our own autobiography, our own childhood, we are more tender towards our own children . . . The place of imagination is also perhaps to remind us of the costly effects to our society of either/or thinking, to invite us to a crazy kind of dance inventing some new steps, humming some new kind of music” (Roberts 1998: 22).
Works Cited Bettelheim, Bruno 1987: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage. Bowie, Malcolm 1991: Lacan. London: Fontana. Freud, Sigmund 1959 (1909): ‘Family Romances’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906–1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works. James Strachey, trans. London: Hogarth. 235-42.
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—1963 (1912): ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life’. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. New York: Touchstone. 48-59. —1991 (1914): On Narcissism: An Introduction. Yale: Yale up. —1995 (1903): ‘Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex’.The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. New York: Modern Library. 509-97. García Sánchez, María Soraya 2005: ‘Talking about Women, History, and Writing with Michèle Roberts’. Atlantis 27.2: 137-47. Hanson, Clare 2000: ‘During Mother’s Absence: The Fiction of Michèle Roberts’. Abby H.P. Welock, ed. British Women Writing Fiction. Tuscaloosa and London: u of Alabama p. 229-47. Irigaray, Luce 1991: ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’. Margaret Whitford, ed. The Irigaray Reader. London: Blackwell. 34-46. Kittay, Eva Feder 1997: ‘Woman as Metaphor’. Diana Tietjens-Meyers, ed. Feminist Social Thought: A Reader. New York and London: Routledge. 264-85. Klein, Melanie 1975: Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1). New York: Free. Kristeva, Julia 1984: Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia up. —1997: ‘Stabat Mater’. Diana Tietjens Meyers, ed. Feminist Social Thought. London: Routledge. 302-19. Kuhn, Reinhard Clifford 1982: Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature. Hanover: Brown up. Newman, Jenny 2004: ‘An Interview with Michèle Roberts’. Cercles: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde Anglophone
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Žižek, Slavoj 1992: Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Verso. —1997: The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
Received 30 June 2012 Revised version accepted 12 September 2012
Laura M.ª Lojo Rodríguez is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain). Her academic fields of research comprise women’s and gender studies, literature(s) in English and literary theory. Her most recent publications are ‘Voices from the Margins: Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Female Perspective in The Pale Gold of Alaska and Other Stories’ (Nordic Irish Studies, 2011) and the edition of Moving across a Century: Women’s Short Fiction from Virginia Woolf to Ali Smith (Peter Lang, 2012).
Address: Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemá. Facultade de Filoloxía. Campus Universitario Norte. Avda. de Castelao, s/n. 15782 Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña. Tel.: +34 981 563 100 (ext. 11880). Fax: 981 574 646.
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ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65 issn 0210-6124 An Interpretation of Masculinity in Manhattan: Reading Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder Peter Ferry Queen’s University Belfast [email protected]
This article presents Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder as an ideal case study for the critical analysis of representations of masculinity in contemporary American fiction. Set in Manhattan in 1909, at the time of Freud’s one and only visit to the United States, Rubenfeld uses the arrival of Freud and his theories of psychoanalysis as his point of departure for a historiographic metafictional investigation of this key moment in the history of American masculinity. Focalising his critique through the protagonist of the novel, Dr Stratham Younger, more specifically through Younger’s reinterpretation of Freud’s Oedipus complex, Rubenfeld endeavours to critique the processes that shaped the pattern of hegemony in the opening decade of modernity. Ultimately, approaching a reading of The Interpretation of Murder from a gender(ed) perspective points at the power of the novel in the sociological study of the social construction of masculinity in contemporary society.
Keywords: American fiction; masculinity; New York; psychoanalysis; the Oedipus complex; Sigmund Freud; Jed Rubenfeld . . .
Una interpretación de la masculinidad en Manhattan: lectura de The Interpretation of Murder, de Jed Rubenfeld
Este artículo presenta The Interpretation of Murder, de Jed Rubenfeld, como un estudio de caso ideal para el análisis crítico de las representaciones de la masculinidad en la literatura estadounidense contemporánea. Ambientada en Manhattan en 1909, en el momento en el que tuvo lugar la única visita de Freud a los Estados Unidos, Rubenfeld usa la llegada de Freud y sus teorías del psicoanálisis como punto de partida para una investigación de la metaficción historiográfica en este punto clave de la historia de la masculinidad estadounidense. Al focalizar su crítica a través del protagonista de la novela, el Dr. Stratham Younger, en concreto a través de la interpretación que hace Younger del complejo de Edipo de Freud, Rubenfeld adopta una posición crítica hacia los procesos que dieron forma al patrón hegemónico en la década inicial de la modernidad. En última instancia, acercarse a una lectura de The Interpretation of Murder desde una perspectiva de género señala el poder de la novela en el estudio sociológico de la construcción social de la masculinidad en la sociedad contemporánea.
Palabras clave: ficción norteamericana; masculinidad; Nueva York; psicoanálisis; complejo de Edipo; Sigmund Freud; Jed Rubenfeld
—49— 50 peter ferry
1. Introducing The Interpretation of Murder Jed Rubenfeld’s debut novel, The Interpretation of Murder (2006), begins with a reflection on the male individual’s search for meaning. As the narrator states, to find meaning, “a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain” (2006: 5). The idea of finding meaning by revisiting and reinterpreting the past resonates on various levels in The Interpretation of Murder. Harry Brod, a leading figure within the field of Masculinity Studies, makes the persuasive argument that the return to a specific moment in history can enable a better grasp of our contemporary understanding of the social construction of masculinity. While “men are generally nostalgic for a past perceived as embodying a more stable and secure masculine identity”, Brod argues, “identifying the historical inaccuracies of this mythologizing of the past can free men’s attentions to encounter present realities more directly” (1987: 268). Building upon this recognition, this article aims to illustrate how reading The Interpretation of Murder from a gender(ed) perspective affirms the power of fiction in the sociological investigation of the discourses that shape the social construction of masculinity.
2. The Interpretation of Murder, the historical novel, metafiction and masculinity Written in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but set in the Manhattan of 1909, The Interpretation of Murder can certainly be classified as a work of historical fiction. The recent resurgence in popularity of the historical novel has provoked reaction from certain literary circles on how we should judge the literary value of the genre. The Interpretation of Murder itself experienced the effect of this rise in populist recognition of the genre when it received a British national tv programme’s ‘Best Read of the Year’ award in 2007.1 Despite, or perhaps due to, the ever-increasing commercial popularity of the historical novel, there still remains a certain critical snobbishness toward this genre of literature. This is perhaps best illustrated with the comments made by James Wood, a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University and a literary critic at The New Yorker. Wood makes his position clear: “I am allergic to historical fiction” (2010b: 1). Wood’s New Yorker review of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) is littered with disapproving utterances that illustrate this attitude. Despite judging Mitchell’s text as a “formidable marvel” (2010a: 3), Wood laments, “the book is still a conventional historical novel, and drags with it some of the fake heirlooms of the genre” (3). Citing Henry James, Wood makes the point that “the novel should press down on ‘the present palpable intimate’”, a triad which James used “to distinguish the role of the living novel from that of the historical novel” (4). Wood’s insinuation is clear: in his estimation, a piece of historical fiction is “lifeless” or even “dead” to the
1 The award was from the Richard and Judy Book Club, a regular segment of the Richard and Judy daytime chatshow.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 an interpretation of masculinity in manhattan 51 reader, with no resounding message, literary substance, or connection to contemporary life. He concludes the article thus:
Meanwhile, the historical novel, typically the province of genre gardeners and conservative populists, has become an unlikely laboratory for serious writers, some of them distinctly untraditional in emphasis and concern. (I am thinking not just of Mitchell but of Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Steven Millhauser, A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey). What such novelists are looking for in those oldfangled laboratories is sometimes mysterious to me; and how these daring writers differ from a very gifted but frankly traditional and more commercial historical novelist like Hilary Mantel is an anxiously unanswered question. (4)
A possible explanation to the ‘mystery’ that dumbfounds Wood can be found if we consider what these writers, both ‘serious’ and one must therefore assume ‘unserious’, are actually doing with the historical novel. Taking a moment to consider the evolution of this genre, and its evolving contemporary identity, may prove a useful exercise in determining the sociological value of the historical novel and, specifically, the representations of masculinity in The Interpretation of Murder. The classic study of the genre of historical fiction is Georg Lukács’The Historical Novel (1955). With this critical investigation Lukács aimed to reveal the “social and ideological basis from which the historical novel was able to emerge” (1955: 20). The influential contribution that Lukács’ study made to critical theory of the historical novel was to recognise that evolving economic and social factors played a central role in the evolution of the genre. The development of the Enlightenment period, and the establishment of capitalism as the economic structure after the Enlightenment, proposed the idea of history as a ‘process’ that is in constant flux while simultaneously gesturing toward the potential for historical progress. Speaking about the novel that many consider to be the pioneer of the genre, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly (1814), Lukács states: “These events, this transformation of men’s existence and consciousness throughout Europe form the economic and ideological basis of Scott’s historical novel” (31).2 In Lukács’ estimation the male figures in such novels were not “mere costumery” (226) but were the central focus of these texts. As such, the historical novel emerged as the methodological means for exploring the effect of changing social conditions on the male individual and crucially, the connection between the past and the present: “What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which lead men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (42). Applying this reading of the historical novel to contemporary works of historical fiction indicates that the retelling of historical events is not the primary concern, but the historiography of the novel itself. Essential to the survival of the historical novel is
2 For an overview of the influence of Scott’sWaverley see de Groot (2010: 17-33).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 52 peter ferry its existence as a methodological tool in the interpretation of the discourses that shape society. This, of course, includes the social construction of masculinity. Masculinity has been a major focus of the historical novel since the nineteenth century.3 Jerome de Groot identifies a particular category of the historical novel that discusses the construction of masculinity: “male orientated crime fiction”. In de Groot’s words these are novels, with their narratives of adventure and warfare, “marketed for men” (2010: 51). De Groot identifies their key characteristics as: a sense of serial and authorial brand coherence; one central male protagonist; the narration of stories within the margins of ‘greater’ historical events as a means to reflect and explain those occurrences; and an interest in the common man (81-82). Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder certainly shares these features that emerge from the gendering of the historical novel. Following its 2006 publication, Rubenfeld developed further the narrative of his debut novel in The Death Instinct (2010). Set in the shadow of the Wall Street bombing of 16 September, 1920, Dr Stratham Younger returns as protagonist. As in The Interpretation of Murder, one of the key themes of The Death Instinct is Younger’s struggle with his male subjectivity. After serving at the front line in the First World War, and experiencing first hand the destructive character of ‘man’, Younger returns to New York City and finds himself working once more alongside Detective James Littlemore to uncover the perpetrators of the horrific terrorist attack on Wall Street. If The Interpretation of Murder is Younger’s interpretation of the social construction of his masculinity, The Death Instinct sees Younger, this Manhattan male, engaging with the discourses that appear to be pushing him toward the deconstruction of his masculine self. Returning to The Interpretation of Murder, the novel is fundamentally a work of detective fiction, a genre sharing certain characteristics of the male orientated historical novel, a point recognised by de Groot: “Historical novels and male-orientated crime fiction have many points of overlap, and the combination of historical novel and detective genre fiction more specifically has been particularly fruitful” (2010: 85). These narratives are typically led by a “scholar-historian-detective” (86), who “investigates the intrusion of chaos into a site of order” (86), as exemplified by Dr Stratham Younger probing, questioning, and forming his own interpretation of the underlying dynamics of the arrival of Freud’s new philosophies of masculinity into Manhattan. This “revelation of conspiracy and secret history” (86) is fundamental to works of historical fiction. While clearly displaying these characteristics of male orientated crime fiction, there is a significant dissonance between the traditional mode of the male historical novel andThe Interpretation of Murder that further emphasises the value of the text in readings of literary masculinities. De Groot argues that male historical fiction explores a certain category of masculinity: “These novels present a set of possible masculinities within a relatively conservative nationalistic narrative. Their models of heroism are largely straightforward, dutiful, resourceful, violent and homosocial” (79). In contrast, historical novels identified
3 See de Groot (2010: 78-88).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 an interpretation of masculinity in manhattan 53 as being written primarily for females are seen as “narratives of social, personal and cultural development and crisis rather than journeys, quests or achievements” (79). Rather than contesting ‘masculinity’, the mass-market male orientated historical novel would appear to establish and reinforce traditional masculine traits. As Raewyn Connell writes, “hegemonic masculinity is naturalised in the form of the hero and presented through forms that revolve around heroes: sagas, ballads, westerns, thrillers” (1977: 185-86). The Interpretation of Murder, however, subverts these traditional categorisations of male and female orientated historical novels in its rigorous, engaging and ultimately clever examination of the pattern of masculine hegemony in the Manhattan of 1909. A particularly effective theoretical framework for reading the performance of the Manhattan males in Rubenfeld’s text, therefore, is Raewyn Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity”.4 Connell’s conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity was the first to recognise the existence of various, often competing, male groups representing diverse ideas of what it means to be masculine. Connell asserts that hegemonic masculinity, in contrast to sex role theory, acknowledges that the key concepts of power and change are central in understanding relationships both between and within genders. It is this fundamental idea —that to identify fully the power relations that shape the legitimacy of patriarchy in modern Western society it is crucial to study not only the dominance of men over women but also the dominance of hegemonic masculinities over other masculinities— that underpins one of the most significant contributions to the study of the social construction of masculinity: that of Demetriou (1991), who identified a substantial simplification in Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity. Returning to the origin of the term hegemony in Gramsci’s study of class hegemony, Demetriou suggests the existence of two separate forms: “internal hegemony”, that is to say, “hegemony over subordinated masculinities”; and “external hegemony”, in other words, “hegemony over women” (2001: 341). Only by approaching the study of the discourses of power within the gender system in this dualistic manner is it possible to engage in a rigorous study of the social construction of masculinity. Carefully considering the negotiation, configuration, and reconfiguration of masculinity in The Interpretation of Murder through these models of internal and external hegemony allows certain patterns to emerge in terms of the performance of male behaviour. In his writing on the historical construction of masculinity, Michael Kimmel suggests that rapid industrialization, technological development, and urbanization transformed traditional gender performances in both public and private spheres at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, Kimmel proclaims that the first significant challenge to masculine hegemony in North America took place between 1880 and 1914.5 The performance of Rubenfeld’s characters in The Interpretation of Murder is evidently driven by ambitious, ruthless, and even merciless masculine drives. Notably, Rubenfeld sets up his
4 Nikki Wedgwood has recently called Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity “the most influential theory in the field of men and masculinities” (2009: 329). 5 See Kimmel 1987.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 54 peter ferry depiction of the masculine energies that would come to define Manhattan of the modern era by making a very deliberate contrast with the discourses that defined the preceding polite society of the Gilded Age. As the narrator states, “New York society in the Gilded Age was essentially the creation of two very rich women, Mrs William B. Astor and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, and of the titanic clash between them in the 1880s” (63). At the turn of the twentieth century, however, New York was being transformed into a city shaped by power, money, and celebrity. It was at this moment that Manhattan became the playground in which these “particular American drives” (7), or to be more specific, these masculine drives, became the controlling energies of this urban labyrinth. The narrator underlines the impact of this change: “The only comparison was with Haussmann’s transformation of Paris a half a century earlier, but in New York there was no single vision behind the scenes, no unifying plan, no disciplining authority. Capital and speculation drove everything, releasing fantastic energies, distinctly American and individualistic” (7). This lack of control and order not only denotes the urban development of Manhattan, but is also symbolic and representative of the development of American masculinity in comparison with its European ancestry. This development can be attributed to unprecedented levels of economic wealth that western society, and in particular The United States, enjoyed in the move from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The accumulation of capital in turn stimulated the desire to control and manipulate space and shape it in the image of man. As Rubenfeld’s narrator proclaims, “the goal in New York is to out-do everything that has ever been done before” (75). Marshall Berman argues that this is the instinctive drive of modernity: “A great deal of New York’s construction and development over the past century needs to be seen as symbolic action and communication: it has been conceived and executed not merely to serve immediate economic and political needs but, at least equally important, to demonstrate to the whole world what modern men can build and how modern life can be imagined and lived” (1982: 288-289). Throughout the novel Rubenfeld emphasises the infusion of masculine power discourses that propelled the metropolis into the twentieth century, playing upon the technological and architectural advances that underpinned the urban regeneration of Manhattan: the bridges, the motor car, the pneumatic drill, the telephone, and the underwater train, and of course the emblem of Manhattan that symbolises the masculine drive of modernity, the skyscraper: “On the ground, the implacable Manhattan grid, with its two hundred numbered east-west streets and twelve north-south avenues, gave the city a stamp of abstract rectilinear order. Above this, in the immensity of the towering structures, with their peacock-like embellishments, it was all ambition, speculation, competition, domination, even lust – for height, size, and always money” (2006: 7-8). As Rubenfeld intimates throughout The Interpretation of Murder, Manhattan developed through the conflicts between stability and expansion, control and desire, order and ambition. However a reader may choose to categorise The Interpretation of Murder, it is principally a novel about masculinity in Manhattan. A single line from the opening chapter of the novel resonates throughout: “The masculinity of it all was undeniable” (7).
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The Interpretation of Murder, by consciously engaging with the complex relationship between history and literature, may be read as a work of “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 1988: 5). Linda Hutcheon argued that this genre was not simply another variety of the historical novel, but was a paradigmatic form of writing that fulfilled the “poetics of postmodernism” (3). The question arises, therefore, of whether it is more accurate to read The Interpretation of Murder as a historical novel, or, in fact, a work of historiographic metafiction. Echoing the statement from Harry Brod quoted above, that the return to a specific moment in history can enable a better grasp of our contemporary understanding of the social construction of masculinity, Jerome de Groot suggests, “this conceptualising of the fictionality of the factual past has led some scholars to argue for the educational and historiographic value of writing historical stories or imagining timelines” (112).6 A useful way of working through this issue and, by doing so, affirming the sociological value ofThe Interpretation of Murder in our understanding of the social construction of masculinity, may be to frame its reading and its representation of masculinity in Manhattan in 1909 within the three main components of Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction. Hutcheon sets out these three components of historiographic metafiction by comparing it to Georg Lukács’ classic definition of the historical novel. The first point that Hutcheon broaches is the protagonist of the historical novel. Hutcheon states: “Lukács felt that the historical novel could enact historical process by presenting a microcosm which generalizes and concentrates. The protagonist, therefore, should be a type, a synthesis of the general and particular, of ‘all the humanity and socially essential determinants’” (1988: 105). Hutcheon rejects this reading as overly reductive, arguing that the protagonists of historiographic metafiction are “overtly specific, individual, culturally and familially conditioned in [their] response to history, both public and private” (106). The male subjectivity of the protagonists of these works is complex and multifaceted, a role suitably inhabited by the protagonist of The Interpretation of Murder, Dr Stratham Younger. Younger, as Rubenfeld’s flâneurial detective, is a self-reflexive, analytical agent of male subjectivity. His journey in the text is a journey of (masculine) self-discovery. Younger is also set as a pioneer. Introduced in the novel as “America’s first psychoanalyst” (2006: 11), Rubenfeld places Younger at the frontier of a new historical era in which the European philosophy of psychoanalysis would be brought into the American arena. The significance of the naming of this character as “Younger” should not be overlooked. He is being clearly set as a figurehead of a new generation of American men that would define and would be defined by new theories of masculinity that would come to transform American society. Younger sees the turn of the twentieth century as a time of great intellectual development and change and although he is speaking about the arrival of psychoanalysis, this reading takes on greater significance in terms of his reinterpretation of masculinities in Manhattan: “I felt, [we] were tracing the very edge of man’s self-knowledge, breaking
6 De Groot cites Ferguson (2000) and Slotkin (2005) as exemplars of scholarly work that has pointed to the educational value of historiographical writing.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 56 peter ferry ground in undiscovered country, forging uncharted paths the world would some day follow. Everything man thought he knew about himself —his dreams, his consciousness, his most secret desires— would be changed forever” (2006: 62). Rubenfeld is clearly intimating that this is a moment of great change, a moment that can be read as the starting point in the development of the modern Manhattan male. Younger’s role in the novel is pivotal; it is Younger’s reinterpretation of Freud’s most famous theory, the Oedipus complex, which illustrates the power struggles that underpin male social behaviour in Rubenfeld’s Manhattan. The metafictional pulses of The Interpretation of Murder emerge once more in the fact that Younger achieves his reconsideration of the Oedipus complex through re-reading a work of fiction, Shakespeare’sHamlet . Younger’s questioning of the Oedipus complex, and consequently, the performance of masculinity in society, emerges from his struggle with Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be”. Traditionally this soliloquy has been interpreted as Hamlet’s lament of “to be or to die”. Younger, revisiting the play, soon argues that “not to be” can have a second meaning. “Not to be” can also mean “to seem or to act”. Younger’s re-interpretation comes from his analysing the developing performance of Hamlet. At the beginning of Hamlet, the young Prince of Denmark says to his mother, “Seems, madam, I know not seems” (2008: 1.2.77). And yet, after swearing revenge for his father’s murder, Hamlet enters the world of seeming: he puts on his “antic disposition” (1.5.172), that is to say, he pretends to be mad; he instructs actors in a play how to pretend in a more believable manner; he even writes a script for these actors to re-enact his father’s murder. From these examples Younger argues that Hamlet is falling into the domain of seeming, of performing. Younger sees this as a universal act. All identity is performance, all being is acting. It is how a man appears in society, how he acts in society that determines his masculine status and Younger uses the example of the psychoanalyst. Younger’s self-analysing reflections support this reading of psychoanalysis as a social performance in which the male and female participants enact roles established by patriarchal social discourse. During the act of psychoanalysing a young girl named Priscilla, Younger reveals, “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The ring.’ This yes was a lie. I hoped it would make Priscilla think I already understood everything, when in reality I understood nothing” (2006: 48). Younger is fully aware that psychoanalysis can rely or even turn upon an “act of deception” (48) and admits, “I have found myself repeating the same deception, in one form or another, in every psychoanalysis I have ever attempted” (48). As he reflects, when the male psychoanalyst is treating a patient, he assumes the role of psychoanalyst. He is acting. However after leaving the office he takes on another role in society, be it father, husband, or friend. What Younger has realised at this point is that the individual is a social being shaped by discursive societal forces. As Younger ultimately concludes, “We can choose what part we play, but that’s all” (434). Younger comes to realise that the performance of the Manhattan male, especially his own everyday performance, is shaped by the complex relationship between the individual and the system. It is through the development of this complex protagonist, a student of Freud who ultimately comes to question the grand theories of “the Master,” that the main narrative thread of the novel
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—the male individual’s struggle with the social discourses that maintain the pattern of hegemony in Manhattan— is played out.
3. Reinterpreting Freud, reinterpreting masculinity The second point of Hutcheon’s revision of the intentions of the contemporary historical novel addresses the issue of historiography. In Hutcheon’s estimation, Lukács contended that “the historical novel is defined by the relative unimportance of its use of detail” (1988: 106). Historiographic metafiction contests this claim in two ways: by “play[ing] upon the truth and lies of the historical novel” and highlighting “the way in which postmodern fiction actually uses detail or historical data” (106). Hutcheon argues that instead of merely incorporating historical fact to add a sense of historical verifiability, novels of historiographic metafiction put the process of assimilating these historical facts at the fore. This is very much the case in The Interpretation of Murder. Rubenfeld’s novel is built upon the fictionalization of Freud’s classic case study, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), or as it is more commonly known, ‘Dora’. Rubenfeld’s historiographic metafictional treatment of Freud’s most famous case history not only critiques the scientific credentials of Freudian psychoanalysis but, even more significantly, underlines the potential of this case study to illustrate the discourses that legitimise the pattern of hegemony in society. With the narrative shaped around Freud’s arrival in Manhattan, Rubenfeld is not simply retelling what is on historical record, but is consciously probing the masculine discourses that shaped the event through Younger’s struggle with his (re) interpretation of Freud’s Oedipus complex. As Raewyn Connell proclaims, it is possible to identify psychoanalysis as “the starting point of modern thought about masculinity” (1995: 8). Connell identifies the paradoxical position of psychoanalysis in discussions of the social construction of masculinity.7 While she considers Freud’s work as an important moment in the study of masculinity, she also laments how “later masculinity researchers have known little and cared less about the detail of [Freud’s] ideas” (8). There has always existed a particular tense relationship between psychoanalysis and sociology, but, despite the recent rise in the number of Freud’s critics, to dismiss Freud completely would be extremely foolish.8 As Simon Clarke argues, to take such a critical position “detracts from what Freud does give us in terms of interpretation, and what it might offer sociology in terms of its hermeneutic and philosophical quality” (2006: 1155). As Connell notes, the Oedipus complex “is thought by Freud to be the node of all psychosexual development, and difficulties in its resolution the roots of later neuroses” (1995: 6). And yet, as Connell argues strongly, treating Freud’s theories as socially constructed concepts shows that “the
7 Also see Connell 1994. 8 See Fish 1986; Sulloway 1991; Crews 1995; Cioffi 1998; Dufresne 2003 and 2007. For an excellent edited collection of Freud criticisms see Crews 1998.
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Oedipus complex can be seen as a product of a definite historical type of the family; repression itself as no abstract consequence of human relation in general, but taking definite form and intensity in specifiable historical contexts” (10).9 It is this reading which brings us to the main thread of The Interpretation of Murder. The illustration of the Oedipus complex as a historical construct shaped by power discourses, or to be more accurate, masculine power discourses, emerges as the main narrative of the novel through Rubenfeld’s historiographic metafictional treatment of Freud’s ‘Dora’. The murder mystery that underpins The Interpretation of Murder begins as Freud arrives in Manhattan in September 1909. Upon Freud’s arrival, a young girl, Elizabeth Riverford, is found bound and strangled. The next night another young girl, Nora Acton, is also found, tied to a chandelier. Luckily she has not met the same fate as Miss Riverford. Nora, suffering from aphonia and amnesia, is treated by Dr Stratham Younger. As Younger engages in the act of psychoanalysing Nora she appears to have symptoms consistent with Freud’s most famous theory: the Oedipus complex. What Rubenfeld is doing, therefore, in his historiographic metafictional treatment of this moment in Manhattan is playing upon Freud’s ‘Dora’. ‘Dora’ was composed by Freud to substantiate his earlier work on ‘hysteria’, itself a loaded term with regards to gender politics.10 Freud saw the case study as a practical application of the theories that he had developed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). His patient was Ida Bauer, an eighteen-year-old girl to whom Freud gave the pseudonym Dora in order to protect her identity. Dora came from a typical upper-middle class Viennese family composed of the classic bourgeois configuration of father, mother, son, and daughter. At the time Dora was suffering from symptoms of dyspnoea (difficulty breathing, hysterical choking), aphonia (loss of voice), fainting, depression, and had even threatened suicide. The focus of Freud’s analysis was the construction of the sexual aetiology of Dora’s hysterical symptoms. Freud believed that the trigger for these symptoms was the unwanted sexual advances made by Herr K., a friend of Dora’s family; the repressed sexual feelings that Dora harboured for her father; and the (unacknowledged) homosexual feelings Dora felt toward Herr K.’s wife, Frau K., who was having an affair with Dora’s father, a relationship Freud believed Dora to be jealous of. Rubenfeld’s fictionalised version of the Dora case study maintains a number of these vital details: the patient is a young girl named Nora, also 18 years old. Nora is from an
9 Although Freud did not set out to do research on gender, Connell identifies an undercurrent of thought on ideas of masculinity. She notes three key moments in the evolution of Freud’s ideas on masculinity: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and its introduction of the Oedipus complex; The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) with its general theme of adult sexuality as a constructed, complex, and conflict-ridden process; and third, Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ study and its focus on pre-Oedipal masculinity, which Connell argues “produced the first really detailed map of the contradictions and fissures within an adult man’s personality” (1994: 14). 10 ‘Hysteria’ itself is a loaded term in relation to gender politics. At that time, hysteria was attributed to various psychological maladies to which no somatic cause could be determined. Notably ‘hysteria’ comes from the Greek word for uterus and the condition was associated mainly with women.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 an interpretation of masculinity in manhattan 59 upper-middle class family who live in Manhattan. And after her vicious attack, she is also suffering from aphonia and amnesia. As Younger psychoanalyses Nora, her narrative mirrors that of the classic Dora case: Nora was propositioned twice at the ages of fourteen and sixteen by a family friend, Mr George Banwell. Younger, in consultation with Freud, initially believes that Nora harbours sexual feelings for George Banwell as well as Oedipal desires toward her father. Her aphonia, in the psychoanalysts’ estimation, is a physiological reaction to the jealousy she feels after witnessing Clara Banwell fellating her father in their home library. What Rubenfeld’s narrative does, however, is to underline the masculine power discourses that underpin the performance of these male figures in the novel. Rubenfeld dramatizes these power discourses in the main narrative of The Interpretation of Murder. As Nora tells Younger, after her traumatic encounter with Mr Banwell, she turned to her father for help. However to Nora’s despair, “he acted as if I were the wrongdoer” (151). Nora reports that her father confronted Banwell but Banwell, mirroring her father, “maintained that I had drawn the wicked inference myself, because of – because of the kind of books I read. My father chose to believe Mr Banwell. I hate him” (151). Rubenfeld’s Freud reaches a typical conclusion to account for Nora’s hatred toward her father. Despite Nora being only fourteen at the time, Freud concludes: “you imagine Mr Banwell thrusting himself on an unwilling and innocent victim. But perhaps it was she who seduced him: a handsome man, her father’s best friend. The conquest would have appealed to a girl her age; it would likely have inspired jealousy in her father” (163). The sexualisation of the young female patient is maintained by Younger, who states repeatedly, “you are not to blame, Miss Acton” (150). When Nora reveals that Mr Banwell proposed that she have sex with him, instead of expressing concern for Nora, Younger suggests that Nora should not feel “shame” (151). In a later session in which they discuss Nora seeing her father and Mrs Banwell in the library, Younger assures Nora once more, “you have nothing to be ashamed of, Miss Acton” (202). There is a clear message here: the girl should admit her sexual desires, accept the fact that she has led the male to believe that she wants to have sex with him, and finally submit herself to the male’s sexual advances. What Rubenfeld is doing here is transposing one of the main issues in Freud’s case study into the social arena of Manhattan, clearly displaying the power politics that define the pattern of external hegemony in Manhattan. As Crews argues, Dora was at the mercy of the “two predatory males . . . who basked in the glory of Freud’s unwavering respect” (1995: 52). This gender bias, Crews argues, goes beyond the microcosmic setting of the psychoanalyst’s office and resonates in its reflection of the macrocosmic condition of the legitimisation of patriarchy in wider society. Whereas Freud’s Oedipus complex appears to explain the impact of repressed sexual desires in the performance of these Manhattan males, fictionalising the Dora case study allows Rubenfeld to highlight the institutionalisation of these distorted sexual discourses in the legitimacy of patriarchy in the hegemonic framework in Manhattan. As these powerful men jockey for position within the Manhattan hierarchy, and deal with the challenge to their established hegemonic status, one Manhattan male emerges as the dominant figure above the others:
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George Banwell. Central to Banwell’s aggressive, ambitious and tyrannical masculinity is the performance of his sexuality in relation to two central female characters in the novel, Nora Acton and his wife, Clara. One of the fundamental elements of traditional hegemonic masculinity is the objectification and exploitation of women in sexual acts underpinned by power. A hegemonic male figure in the public sphere, Banwell’s sexual acts with his wife Clara and his obsession with Nora perfectly illustrate that the paradigms of power and sexuality that underpin Freud’s conceptualisation of the Oedipus complex also permeate the discourses in wider society.
4. Masculinities in Manhattan Linda Hutcheon, in her third and final point on the qualities of the historiographic metafictional novel, focuses on the employment of historical figures. She argues, “Lukács’ third major defining characteristic of the historical novel is its relegation of historical personages to secondary roles” (1988: 106), with these figures becoming ontological sleights of hand that exist merely to authenticate the fictional world by their presence. Conversely, Hutcheon argues that in works of historiographic metafiction these historical figures are not only questioned, but aid in the questioning of the knowability of the past. To build upon this, if we consider how Rubenfeld uses the historical figures in the novel, it is clear that they are not only employed to give the novel a sense of historical authenticity, but also serve a (self-reflexive) critical function.11 Rubenfeld does more than simply retell a key moment in the history of the development of the Manhattan male —as a writer of fiction he is looking past the restrictive nature of historical fact to probe the underlying processes that influenced the performance of these men in Manhattan. What Rubenfeld does remarkably well is to intertwine the narratives of historical and fictional Manhattan males to present a critically engaging examination of the discourses of hegemony in that setting. The attitudes and actions of the fictional Manhattan hegemonic males are corroborated through Rubenfeld’s employment of historical hegemonic male figures in Manhattan. As well as the group of psychoanalysts, Freud, Jung and Brill, playing a key role in the novel, there are a small group of other historical Manhattan males lending support to Rubenfeld’s critical analysis of the social construction of masculinity in this historical era: the New York Triumvirate. The Triumvirate are Charles Loomis Dana, Bernard Sachs, and M. Allen Starr, and these men are presented in the text as “the three most powerful neurologists in the country who owed their extraordinary prestige and power to an impressive combination of accomplishment, pedigree, and money” (496). Similar to Banwell, these men obsess over the various manifestations of power that underpin their
11 As Rubenfeld has stated, “about 90% of the dialogue that Freud and Jung speak is taken from actual books, essays, letters that they wrote. I dug through thousands of newspaper articles from the time period, and lots of books, so that I would make New York City of 1909 as real as I could possibly make it” (
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 an interpretation of masculinity in manhattan 61 hegemonic status. They are members of what Brill calls “a secret society” (498), a club that is “one of the most exclusive in the city” (498). Their position within the masculine hegemonic framework is played out in their manipulation of financial, political, social, and sexual power. The weaving of this group into the narrative has an important symbolic significance in terms of the challenges and reactions of psychoanalysis, both as a clinical practice, and as a philosophical theory, to established American masculinity. The Triumvirate were greatly opposed to the arrival of Freud and psychoanalysis in 1909. As Younger explains in one of his reflective set-pieces in the novel: “‘They belong to the somatic school,’ said Younger. ‘They believe that all nervous diseases result from neurological malfunction, not psychological causes. They don’t believe in childhood trauma; they don’t believe sexual repression causes mental illness. Psychoanalysis is anathema for them. They call it a cult’” (497). Historically, there was no plot to derail Freud’s appearance at Clark University during his visit to the United States. Rubenfeld, however, plays upon the tensions that would have certainly underpinned his visit and its challenge to the Triumvirate’s power and influence in Manhattan. Their attempts to stifle the arrival and reception of psychoanalysis illustrate the pivotal role of “secondary” historical figures in the novel as they negotiate their position within the hierarchical framework in Rubenfeld’s Manhattan. Other historical figures play key roles in the novel to authenticate the impact of these sexual drives. A celebrity of the time in Manhattan was Harry K. Thaw.12 Thaw’s infamy was based on his murder of the renowned architect Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. There was a clear motive for the murder: many years before White had bedded Thaw’s wife when she was a sixteen-year-old showgirl. Thaw, however, was acquitted of the murder by a jury on the grounds of insanity. Thaw, despite being a secondary character in The Interpretation of Murder, is employed to validate that fact that the distorted dynamics of male sexuality that are explored through various fictional characters, namely George Banwell, are not mere fictional imaginings but have historical grounding. Throughout the narrative Thaw carries out sadistic attacks on his wife Evelyn Nesbit and many “young ladies” (2006: 266) working as prostitutes; the severity of these attacks revealed in transcripts from Harry K. Thaw’s trial that are discovered in a key moment by Detective Littlemore and Betty Longobardi.13 The significance of sexual violence is evident in the manner in which these distorted ideas of the social performance of masculinity permeate all the narrative threads of The Interpretation of Murder. As well as the attacks on Nora, George Banwell’s relationship
12 Harry K. Thaw is a prominent figure in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1974). Doctorow’s novel, set in the period between 1902 and 1914, is a work of historical fiction that dramatises the move into the modern era. Thaw features in chapter six, before reappearing in the final chapter of the novel. Rather than being a piece of historiographic metafiction, Doctorow’s novel is a more traditional model of the historical novel, engaging with various historical figures of the age, namely Freud and Thaw. 13 The transcripts in the novel are taken directly from the original transcripts of the Harry K. Thaw trial in1906 . For further information see Linder (2011).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 49–65· issn 0210-6124 62 peter ferry with Clara, and Harry K. Thaw’s attacks on his wife and the young prostitutes, the sub- plots involving the New York Triumvirate and Smith Ely Jelliffe also demonstrate the Manhattan male’s treatment of women. We learn that for Jelliffe “girls were his specialty” and “he knew all the best gentlemen’s establishments” (371). The Chinese men Chong Sing and William Leon are also involved in Banwell’s cover-up of the attacks on Nora. Ultimately, Rubenfeld demonstrates that this legitimisation of sexual violence that maintains the established framework of external hegemony transcends class, race, or religion. Connell offers a valid reasoning for this element in the social organization of masculinity. She states: “Violence is part of a system of domination, but is at the same time a measure of its imperfection. A thoroughly legitimate hierarchy would have less need to intimidate. The scale of contemporary violence points to crisis tendencies (to borrow a term from Jürgen Habermas) in the modern gender order” (1995: 84). Although Connell is speaking about violence as an intrinsic element of external hegemony in a contemporary setting, it is applicable to the particular historical era in The Interpretation of Murder. The acts of (sexual) violence in the performance of masculinity in Rubenfeld’s Manhattan can be explained as possible reactions to challenges in the established gender order. These “crisis tendencies”, as Connell explains, are not necessarily crises of masculinity, but are changes in the configuration of practice within a system of gender relations. Whereas Freud’s Oedipus complex appears to explain the impact of repressed sexual desires in the performance of these Manhattan males, fictionalising the Dora case study allows Rubenfeld to highlight the institutionalization of these distorted sexual discourses in the legitimacy of patriarchy in the external hegemonic framework in Manhattan. While the psychoanalysts in the novel initially believe that Nora’s problems relate to the jealousy that she feels toward Clara because of the sexual feelings Nora is harbouring for her own father, it is Younger, in his role of flâneurial sociologist, who finally recognises that Nora’s performance is not due to repressed sexual desires, but is a result of the manipulation of Nora by George Banwell’s wife, Clara. While Freud believes that Nora is in love with Clara, Younger comes to realise that it is actually Clara’s jealousy of Nora, a jealousy that is formed by the repressive nature of the societal framework in Manhattan, and the control that Nora appears to have, in Clara’s view, over the male figures in her life, that is ultimately the key to solving the murder mystery in Manhattan. As our urban detective, Younger, realises, there was no Elizabeth Riverford; it was Nora playing a role directed by Clara Banwell in her master plan to frame the novel’s Manhattan man, her husband, George Banwell. The final message of the sociological value of this re-reading of this historical moment in the development of masculinity in Manhattan is freighted powerfully in Freud’s final warning to Younger as he leaves the New World: “‘This country of yours: I am suspicious of it. Be careful. It brings out the worst in people —crudeness, ambition, savagery. There is too much money. I see the prudery for which your country is famous, but it is brittle. It will shatter in the whirlwind of gratification being called forth. America, I fear, is a mistake. A gigantic mistake, to be sure, but still a mistake’” (515).
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As Rubenfeld’s narrative illustrates, the configuration of practice of these masculine groups appears to work toward strengthening the pattern of hegemony in Manhattan. But it is how Rubenfeld achieves this critical investigation that is of the upmost importance; he does so by employing the protagonist of the novel, Dr Stratham Younger, as the flâneur who observes, reflects, and critiques these new theories of psychoanalysis to offer a counter- hegemonic reinterpretation of the social construction of masculinity in Manhattan. As Younger’s sociological investigations conclude, Freud had held the mirror up to nature but what he had seen was a mirror image of reality. Rather than the performance of these Manhattan males being driven by the repressed sexual drives as Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex appeared to illustrate, Younger’s realisation of masculinity as a social and historical construction emphasises the role of power in the production and reproduction of masculinity. If reaching a hegemonic position in society is the ultimate goal of the male individual, then the control and manipulation of these power discourses is of utmost importance. As such, Rubenfeld’s engagement with this moment in the history of the Manhattan male cleverly posits the Oedipus complex as an indicator of the socially shaped aim of the hegemonic group to oppress any possible challenge to the pattern of hegemony. As Younger argues in his reinterpretation of the Oedipus Complex:
It’s the father, not the son. Yes, when a little boy enters the scene with his mother and father, one party in this trio tends to suffer a profound jealousy – the father. He may naturally feel that the boy intrudes on his special, exclusive relationship with his wife. He may well half want to be rid of the suckling, puling intruder, whom the mother proclaims to be so perfect. He might even wish him dead. (468)
Taking this analogy to its logical conclusion, what Rubenfeld ultimately achieves with this novel is to make visible the power discourses that have shaped the performance of masculinity.14 Rubenfeld’s critical investigation into the sexual aetiology of the Oedipus complex teases out the sociological value of Freud’s theory. The Interpretation of Murder clearly displays the self-reflexive, subversive and contrary tendencies of the “poetics of postmodernism” to question the discourses of fiction and history, and, in doing so, problematises the discourses that have come to shape the social construction of masculinity in Manhattan. In answer, finally, to James Wood’s dismissal of contemporary historical fiction as texts produced in “oldfangled laboratories” by “genre gardeners” and “conservative populists”, it is evident that the historical novel is far from being what Wood continues to see as “a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness” (2012: n.p.). More accurately the contemporary historical novel, through a historiographic metafictional lens, persists as a method of revisiting and reinterpreting key historical events in order to critique the discourses that have shaped, and continue to shape, masculinity in contemporary society.
14 This is a reference to Kimmel’s still relevant argument of the invisibility of masculinity (Kimmel 1993).
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There may be a commercial market for historical fiction but this does not make the genre any less literary. The historical novel continues to maintain its mass-market appeal while engaging with sociological discourse, with The Interpretation of Murdercritically analysing masculinity as an intricate, complex, and multi-faceted social construction.
Works Cited Berman, Marshall 1982: All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brod, Harry 1987: ‘A Case for Men’s Studies’. Michael Kimmel, ed. Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity. Newsbury Park: Sage. 263-77. Cioffi, Frank 1998: Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago: Open Court. Clarke, Simon 2006: ‘Theory and Practice: Psychoanalytic Sociology as Psycho-Social Studies’. Sociology 40.6: 1153-69. Connell, Raewyn 1977: ‘Dr Freud and the Course of History’. Which Way Is Up? Essays on Sex, Class and Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. 3-16. —1994: ‘Psychoanalysis on Masculinity’. Theorizing Masculinities. Harry Brod, Michael Kaufman and Men’s Studies Association (U.S.), eds. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.11 -38. —1995: Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Crews, Frederick 1993: ‘The Unknown Freud’.New York Review of Books 40.19: 55-65. —1995: The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. New York: New York Review of Books. Crews, Frederick, ed. 1998: Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York: Viking. De Groot, Jerome 2010: The Historical Novel. New York: Routledge. Demetriou, Demetrakis Z. 2001: ‘Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique’. Theory and Society 30.3: 337-61. Doctorow, E.L. 1974: Ragtime. New York: Penguin. Dufresne, Todd 2003: Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis. New York: Continuum. —2007: Against Freud: Critics Talk Back. Stanford: Stanford up. Ferguson, Niall 2000: Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic. Fish, Stanley 1986: ‘Withholding the Missing Portion – Power, Meaning and Persuasion in Freud’s “The Wolf-Man”’.tls 4352: 935-38. Freud, Sigmund 1990 (1910): ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis’. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Standard Edition. New York: W.W. Norton. —2006 (1905): ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’. The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin. 435-540. Hutcheon, Linda 1988: A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.
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Kimmel, Michael 1987: ‘The Contemporary Crisis of Masculinity in Historical Perspective’. Harry Brod, ed. The Making of Masculinities: the New Men’s Studies. Winchester: Allen and Unwin. —1993: ‘Invisible Masculinity’. Society 30.6: 28-35. Linder, Douglas O. 2009: ‘Harry Thaw Trials’. Famous Trials
Received 1 January 2012 Revised version accepted 1 October 2012
Peter Ferry (PhD Queen’s University, Belfast) is Teaching Assistant in American Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is currently a director on the board of the American Men’s Studies Association (amsa). His research interests focus on the flâneur in American literature, masculinity in American literature, and Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity. Other publications include ‘Reading Manhattan, Reading American Masculinity: Reintroducing the Flâneur with E.B. White’s Here Is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed’ (Culture, Society & Masculinities).
Address: Queen’s University Belfast. School of English. 2 University Square, Belfast, BT7 1NN.
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Spaceships and Vampires: Sexual Dissidence in Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Knightly Quest’
Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde Universidad de Granada [email protected]
Notwithstanding Gore Vidal’s praise of the story as one of the best ever written by Tennessee Williams, ‘The Knightly Quest’ (1966), a dystopian fable with a spacefaring ending, has received sparse critical attention. Largely sketched during the 1940s, the novella, a hybrid of SF and Gothic, shows Williams’s awareness of the sexual deviant’s political resistance in a world verging on totalitarianism; and, simultaneously, illustrates the author’s use of counter-narrative strategies against the normative order. In choosing apocalyptic SF Williams is reversing the logic of the favorite Cold War genre. Here the threat does not come from an external space (the alien invasion or the Russian nuclear attack) but from within: the emergence of a nation which annihilates any form of alterity and dissidence. Likewise, by making a homosexual vampire (the quintessential expression of the Jungian shadow and the polymorphous perverse) the morally superior hero of a world in its death throes and the survivor in a future utopia, Williams is granting a privileged position to the demonized Other as the savior of the American dream of limitless individual freedom.
Keywords: Tennessee Williams; short fiction; Cold War; homosexuality; science fiction; sexual dissidence . . .
Naves espaciales y vampiros: disidencia sexual en ‘The Knightly Quest’, de Tennessee Williams
Pese a que Gore Vidal calificara ‘The Knightly Quest’ (1966) como uno de los mejores relatos de Tennessee Williams, lo cierto es que el cuento distópico con final intergaláctico ha sido lamentablemente objeto de escasísimos estudios críticos. Bosquejado durante la represión de los años cuarenta y concluido a mediados de la turbulenta década de los sesenta, la obra, un híbrido de ciencia ficción y literatura gótica, revela no solo la conciencia ideológica de Williams sobre el papel de resistencia política del desviado en un sistema que raya en el totalitarismo, sino que muestra algunas de sus estrategias contranarrativas en la lucha contra el orden (hetero) normativo. Al elegir el desenlace típico de la ciencia ficción apocalíptica, Williams invierte la lógica del género popular favorito de la Guerra Fría. La amenaza ya no procede del espacio exterior (la invasión alienígena o el inminente ataque nuclear soviético) sino del propio
—67— 68 mauricio d. aguilera linde
sistema: el surgimiento de una nación que aniquila cualquier forma de alteridad y disidencia. De idéntico modo, al convertir al vampiro homosexual, la quintaesencia del perverso polimorfo y de la sombra jungiana, en el héroe moralmente superior de un mundo agonizante y en el superviviente de una incierta utopía futura, el escritor sureño otorga un papel privilegiado al Otro demonizado como salvador del sueño americano de una libertad individual sin límites.
Palabras clave: Tennessee Williams, relato breve; Guerra fría; homosexualidad; ciencia ficción; disidencia sexual.
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1. Introduction When Samuel R. Delaney was still a teenager befuddled about his sexual identity he experienced a doppelgänger encounter in a wet dream: lying down at his side, he saw a bed companion identical to himself, whose name was Snake and whose tongue had been cut out. Unable to express what he longed for, Snake started to caress his newfound friend and cried with happiness to discover that he had eventually met someone able to understand his wordless messages (Delaney 2004: 97-98). Delaney was then a young black with such a light-skinned complexion that he could pass as white; a homosexual who functioned as a heterosexual (he would marry poet Marilyn Hacker years later); and, in addition, “the most ambiguous of citizens, the writer” (2004: 111). This feeling of suspension among a multiplicity of contradictory identities placed him at the hub of a universe of ambiguities: at any moment a steadfast decision could be adopted but there was no clear sign ahead, or rather there were too many. Writing science fiction in the autumn of 1961 became the only way to avoid being castrated of language; the escape valve through which the young New York writer could appease his suicidal impulses to jump off a roof or under a train. Literature is a marginal discourse, “a subversive activity at play in the social margins of politics, industry, advertising, and the media” (Delaney 1986: 43); and the minor literatures, Delaney convincingly holds, are “on the margin of the margin”. SF emerges as the ideal vehicle to imagine an order where everything that is excluded, oppressed or muffled can be given a legitimate voice. Through the fabrication of utopian worlds, Snake, the Jungian shadow of young Delaney, becomes articulate again. Not in vain, the ultimate goal of SF is to materialize “the unthinking assumptions that limit human potentiality” (James and Mendleson 2003: 153), since the strangeness of the novum, the illogical or impossible in factual terms, is rendered rationalized and plausible. This infidelity to the ‘real world’ infuses the fictive world with a critical mode which aims at destabilizing and decentering patriarchy and heteronormativity (Jackson 1995). As Scott McCracken notes, “at the root of all science fiction lies the fantasy of alien encounter . . . the meeting of self with other is perhaps the most fearful, most exciting and most erotic encounter of all” (1998: 102). In any case, this “encounter with difference” (Roberts 2006: 16), i.e. the expression of alterity, becomes one of the essential ingredients of SF. The purpose of this article is to probe into some of the ideological conflicts disguised in the depiction of a dystopian world within the context of sexual dissidence. I have chosen Tennessee Williams as a case in point in order to analyze: (i) how sexual otherness operates in his short fiction; and (ii) which reverse discourse strategies (Foucault1978 ) are employed to contest and challenge the legitimizing discourse of the oppressor. I will focus on ‘The Knightly Quest’, a novella published on February22 , 1966, although its plot lines were largely sketched in 1942, during the summer the author spent in Macon, Georgia. Given that any SF story, despite “its exotic trappings”, is “best understood as a commentary on contemporary issues” (Boyer 1985, qtd. in Bould et al. 2009: 86), for it remains, in Suvin’s words, largely senseless without “a given socio-historical context” (1988: 62), I will
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 67-83· issn 0210-6124 70 mauricio d. aguilera linde start by introducing the ideological conflicts of the Cold War Era in relation to dissident sexualities. I will then proceed to interpret the novella’s central character, Gewinner, as an icon of a polymorphously perverse sexual order which jeopardizes the stability of gender binaries: his costumes, night-prowlings and insatiable sexual appetite turn him into a vampiric creation, an image of marginal, transgressive homosexual desire.
2. Williams and the Cold War logic Following Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950), Cold War Americans desperately needed the vehicle of the space frontier to maintain the hope of “settling a new land”, “finding a new democracy” and thereby “escaping the ills of urban life” (Wolfe1989 : 249) and the overwhelming constraints on individualism imposed by social institutions. This pervasive influence of SF was not alien to Tennessee Williams as frontier imaginary was already deeply rooted in his short fiction. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Williams’s strategies of resistance against the oppressive laws of uniformity involve the remapping of the Western border: abandoning the conventional values of mainstream society in the quest for a new land entails the recovery of the topoi and the rhetoric of the American frontier (Aguilera Linde 2010). The two homeless people of his short story ‘Two on a Party’, Cora and Bill, “a female lush and a fairy who travel together” (1985: 302), defy the prescriptions of respectable society (the so-called “squares”), and in doing so they become buckaroos, trappers in search of ‘trade’, roughnecks away from the narrow moral constraints of civilization. East in Williams’s imagination is always Puritan and therefore repressive. West is wilderness: it symbolizes the longed-for suspension of prescribed norms and morals. Gradually aware that his own voice could only be that of the Other, Williams assumes that the only space where subversive values can still be embraced is the uncertain terrain beyond the border, his textual strategies implying movement away from the center. Deviation becomes the natural course; marginality the ideal state, and the western frontier the bona fide scenario to counteract the castrating influence of establishment culture. Besides resorting to the props and costumes of a theatrical West (Frederick Jackson Turner had announced the disappearance of the frontier back in 1893) Williams started to look upward to discover a new frontier imaginary, as many of his contemporaries had been doing since the 1930s. The “cowboy world of sagebrush and open spaces” (Mogen 1982: 30) was now to be found not in the recreation of the mythic West but in outer space. Spacefaring fiction offered American readers “both the machine and the wilderness”; and SF can be rightly called “an outgrowth of frontier fiction” (Wolfe 1989: 249). The combative spirit of the American rebel, now “an exile at home” (1985: 444) since “the frontiers [have] been exhausted”, can still be found, Williams hastens to admit, in the defiant, “lunatic honesty” (444) of the homosexual’s rebellion. He may no longer be doing the same things as James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, but the romantic spirit of freedom can still be glimpsed in his pocketknife carving a “large glory hole in the wooden partitions of the depot lavatory” (444).
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In 1941, in his unsuccessful play Stairs to the Roof, Williams retains the Western trappings, but for the first time he introduces a typical spacefaring ending. Ben Murphy’s rebellion against a world dying of spiritual anemia is to go to his office in cowboy boots. Later on, when he helps the heroine recover her love letter, he appears wearing “a broad-brimmed dove-gray Stetson” and “an emerald-studded belt” (2000: 50). Normal adjustment is rejected by this nonconformist white-collar clerk who manages to escape the “cage of the Universe” by discovering a hidden attic from which he can look up at the stars. The finale is marked by an unexpected intergalactic voyage: Ben is chosen by the aliens as the new Adam who must “colonize a brand-new star in heaven” (97), thereby granting mankind a new opportunity for salvation. Mr. E, a Jehovah-like, flowing-bearded figure, is dressed in a “sky-blue robe sprinkled with cosmic symbols” (92) and holds an enormous sparkler. Yet, although Ben’s sexual orientation fits the heterosexual norm (he is married and his wife is actually expecting a baby), Mr. E’s instructions are all too clear: Ben must leave earth on his own and become the begetter of countless millions. Monosexual reproduction is the watchword of the new world: “having two sexes has made [a mess] of things down here on World Number One” (95). Williams’s dabbling in SF can be traced back to his first publication at the age of sixteen, ‘The Vengeance of Nitocris’ in Weird Tales (August 1928). The story, a hybrid of fantasy fiction and Gothic, was reprinted several times: in spring of 1963 Gamma presented it again in a volume subtitled New Frontiers in Fiction, and in 1966 Kurt Singer included the same title in an anthology of the supernatural. An identical label was given to an otherwise very different story, ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’ (1948), classified as a horror story and reprinted in The Unspeakable People (1968). This overlapping of fantasy and Gothic continues in his novella ‘The Knightly Quest’ (1966). Not surprisingly, Donald Allen Wollheim, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, the leading SF magazine of the 1930s and 1940s much sought after by the Great Depression writers as it paid very well, did not harbor any doubts about Williams’s true nature as a writer: he “could have been another Kuttner if he hadn’t wasted himself trying to break into that rat’s nest, the Broadway theater” (Resnick 1997: 22). Williams himself acknowledged to “have developed a great interest in atomic and cosmic science”, and although he confessed “being so stupid that [he had] to read each page twice and sometimes twice again”, he had no qualms in admitting that “[e]ven so it [was] better than prevailing trends in fiction” (2004: 140). Williams spent the summer of 1942 with Paul Bigelow in Macon, Georgia: there he encountered the eccentricities of the gay world in the circle formed by Holt Gewinner; became the lover of Andrew Lyndon, a very conflictive relationship marked by clashes between violence and tender feelings; met Emily Jelkes, a crippled music teacher who would serve as the basis for such characters as Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Hanna Jelkes in The Night of the Iguana; and was arrested and taken to jail, along with Paul, for scandalous behavior: “I was recently picked up on Cherry Street . . . as a suspicious character because of my dark glasses and cigarette holder” (2006: 298). As early as July 3, 1942 his diary entry reads: “I have the material for a short novel in my mind”. The
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 67-83· issn 0210-6124 72 mauricio d. aguilera linde message of the new work in progress is no other than the terrible danger hovering over the nation: “personal freedom is gone, even the illusion of it” (2006: 299). Sexual repression, neurosis and fear dominate the writer’s mind during the so-called Macon period, one of the most decidedly formative of his prolific career: “I see a terrifying, narrow vista of time like this —no real escape anywhere; effort and endurance— thirst of the body and of the heart that I cannot slake any longer. Am I beginning to walk across a long desert under a merciless sun?” (2006: 291). The feelings that the small town milieu arouses go from “lostness”, “helplessness”, “struggle for contact” to “final surrender” (299). Racial conflicts, pervasive in the South, also lurk behind the deceitful peacefulness of this town. ‘The Knightly Quest’ has been rightly defined as a dystopian tale “to protest against the repression of freedom” (Murphy 2005: 189); “a campy fable” (Barrow 1967: 81) that inveighs against an increasingly homogenized society which implements direct methods, as well as less conspicuous ways, to suppress differences, and which punishes those who dare challenge the norm. It is simply the story of the transformation of a southern town called Gewinner (clearly modeled on Macon) into the seat of The Project, a powerful military organization which pursues the eradication of freaks; a society not very different, in Williams’s words, from “the famous Jones Project”, the radar system invented by the British physicist of the same name aimed at identifying enemy targets at night (2004: 275). The clash between the squares and the freaks —an obligatory thematic force in his short fiction and drama— intensifies, and the world depicted looks even more menacing. Gewinner (“Gay Winner”) is a “non-fitter-in”, the gay artist isolated in a tower, unable to come to terms with a world composed of big corporations, and dominated by uniformity and a “wave of new religiousness” which short-circuits any attempt to become a deviant (1985: 421). He is the medieval knight in pursuit of impossible ideals, a reincarnation of the eternal Don Quixote, now converted into a homosexual rebel who sleeps with his hand intertwined in Sancho’s (445). Gewinner’s homosexuality, a key element in the story, and not a subject of minor importance as Ren Draya suggests (1977: 661), emerges as a form of oppositional consciousness against castrating, oppressive models of masculinity (as in the character Spangler) and the dictatorial powers of Cold War America. When he returns home, the city, swept by a non-stop spy scare, has been transformed by The Project into a mass of frightened workers, unable to fight for their rights since the major unions have been dissolved (1985: 432). New regulations designed to isolate freaks and weed them out of society are passed every day: “It’s all right to talk about tolerance and individual rights and all that sort of business but you got to draw a line somewhere”, Spangler claims (421- 22). The target of the new legislation are “the fuck-offs . . . like the sissy Pearce brother”, blacks and Asians (421). The punishment against non-conformists or radicals is “Camp Tranquillity”, a concentration camp where all kind of tortures are systematically inflicted upon dissident prisoners. Business premises, polluting factories and fast-food eateries are erected in areas previously designated as residential. To keep people contented movie theatres are opened everywhere, and there is a ban on blues music, for the city’s motto is
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“Nothing to worry about”. Accordingly, a Happy Song Center has been created with the sole aim of composing “light-hearted ballads” (432). The only solution for Gewinner is to escape aboard a spaceship called, significantly, “The Ark”. Unlike Ben Murphy in Stairs to the Roof who has to travel without a companion, this spacefaring ending has Gewinner escaping with two women as well. Raymond Williams (1956: 41) divides SF into three subgenres: putropia (the story of a paradise that turns into a secular hell); Doomsday (the story of a catastrophe that puts an end to all forms of life); and Space Anthropology (the discovery of new patterns of life on a new planet). ‘The Knightly Quest’ brings together all three types, although it is undeniable that the first dominates most of the story: it recounts the decline of a city which is finally destroyed by the bomb that, hidden in a thermos of coffee, goes off in the hands of Billy, the man in the service of The Project’s security. Raymond Williams uses a three-fold schema to explain the inextricably linked notions of utopia and dystopia: “the externally altered world”; the technological revolution; and “the willed transformation, in which a new but less happy kind of life has been brought about by social degeneration” (Williams 1980: 196). Gewinner, the Southern town, clearly fits into the last type. When the protagonist returns from his never-ending travels, the place has been turned into a “harmful [kind] of social order” (196). The destruction of planet Earth takes place some minutes after the three subversive characters —Gewinner, Gladys and Violet, terrorists against a State of terror— board the spaceship headed toward an unknown destination. The explorative model of SF, the discovery of an alien land rife with possibilities for a new life, is merely hinted at, and remains largely uncertain: the new world to be discovered is “a spot marked X on the chart of time without end” (455), but whether Gewinner’s sexual orientation will be accepted or not is a question that is left deliberately unresolved. Tennessee Williams’s dystopian tale becomes meaningful only against the backdrop of the Cold War conflation of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare. The postwar fear of an atomic attack from the Soviet Union, and the identification of ‘commies and queers’ resulted in the conviction that “[s]ex [was] the subversives’ secret weapon”, since “Marxism came into Russia on a wave of free love” (Lait and Mortimer 1952: 52) and “Communism actively promote[d] and support[ed] sex deviation” (44). As the whole nation was “going queer” (the masculinization of women, Lait and Mortimer contended, had its inevitable counterpart in the feminization of men), the first area which threatened the security of the country was the State Department which, “despite denials and purges, [was] considerably more than 30 per cent faggot” (1952: 44). Homosexuals destabilized the security of the nation by creating an anonymous underground network in the army, the Capitol and the major universities with the aim of spreading the Communist credo and paving the road for a Russian attack. In the 81st United States Congress (March 29-April 24, 1950) Congressman Mr. Miller of Nebraska, the infamous author of “the sex pervert bill” whereby homosexuals were ordered to be confined as pathological cases in psychiatric units, defended the need to continue work in this direction first and foremost in the District of Columbia:
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How many have been in sensitive positions and subject to blackmail. It is a known fact that homosexuality goes back to the Orientals . . . that the Russians are strong believers in homosexuality, and that those same people are able to get into the State Department and get somebody in their embrace, and once they are in their embrace, fearing blackmail, will make them go to any extent. Perhaps if all the facts were known these same homosexuals have been used by the Communists . . . These homosexuals have strong emotions. They are not to be trusted and when blackmail threatens they are a dangerous group. (Griffith and Baker 2001: 132)
This “Red bed-battalion” (Lait and Mortimer 1952: 52), i.e. the clandestine army of ‘pinko commies’, was to be found and arrested. As D’Emilio and Freedman argue: “[l]abeling of homosexuals as moral perverts and national security risks, along with repressive policies of the federal government [e.g. Executive Orders 9835 and 10450], encouraged local police forces across the country to harass them with impunity . . . Throughout the1950 s, and well into the 1960s, gay men and lesbians suffered from unpredictable, brutal crackdowns” (1997: 293). Williams’s creation of The Project, a military-police unit patrolling the city and watching over the citizens’ movements with the aim of cleansing the social order of anomics (prostitutes are banned; maladjusted people are sent to neurological hospitals; subversives are simply “torn to pieces by wild dogs”, [435]), closely resembles the McCarthy witch- hunt, the paranoiac prosecutions brought by the huaac, and the social riots of the late fifties. In fact “spy scare” was not periodic in Gewinner but constant. The police forces combing the cities for nests of “perverts” in the America of the 1940s and 1950s also find their parallel in the “Black Cat Gang”, a criminal band assaulting solitary patrolmen at nighttime. Crime is everywhere, more bans and a night curfew are imposed. After finding out that the leader of the gang is the Chief of the Police, the security forces of The Project are in the hands of “government agents in armored cars” (438) who make certain that everything falls back “into the former well-ordered pattern of existence” (438). In the meantime, The Project is engaged “all day and all night in the development of some marvelously mysterious weapon of annihilation” (402). The fumes from its industrial plants result in inevitable collateral damage: flowers die as soon as they start to bloom. However, Williams is doing something more than simply building up an Orwellian image of the America of the forties and fifties and a utopian hope for the future through the opening of the space frontier. In rehashing the clichéd ending of the apocalyptic SF novel with its messianic savior, undoubtedly one of the favorite subgenres of the 1950s,1
1 In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb; in 1957 the Soviet satellite Sputnik was launched. The fear of a Soviet occupation was followed by the threat of nuclear annihilation: not only would “our children be living as enslaved subjects of the Kremlin”, they would be annihilated as well. McCartheyite scaremongering “fostered paranoia of all kinds” (James 1994: 84). In this atmosphere, apocalyptic SF (alien races invading the earth or nuclear holocaust) becomes the favorite genre. The Cold War fifties is the golden age for novels and motion films about the aftermath of atomic wars and other catastrophes. In1956 25 sf films were released;24 , one year later. See David Seed (1999) and Mark Bould et al. (2009).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 67-83· issn 0210-6124 spaceships and vampires: sexual dissidence 75 the narrator is, strangely, reversing the Cold War logic. Now the potential threat, the fear of an attack, does not come from without —be it through an alien invasion or from nuclear radiation— but from within. What is to be destroyed is not foreign but domestic, indeed the very power structure and the set of deeply rooted values which conservative American nurtures: patriarchy, repression of sex (masturbation is now preferable to messing around with women), loss of freedom, oppressiveness, the Puritan morality —“men with characters of rock” is what the world needs, Bill Spangler asserts (424)— and, of course, its condemnation of all that defies labels and categorization; in short, the principles represented by The Project and The Center, the elite members of the organization. The Eye, wide-open and blue and painted on the entrance (432), is the symbol of the vigilante tradition of meting out punishments for bodily pleasures and it watches over the mass of dull, obedient workers. Conformism, the idea that citizens should act as though “cells of one great uplifted being”, rules out dissident values and is seen as the only “way toward which the whole progress of mankind [has] always pointed” (421). Individual difference is a terrible sin which jeopardizes the stability of America. It is at this point that Gewinner, the incarnation of evil, comes onto scene, and becomes the elected man who can hamper the doings of The Project, and challenge Bill Spangler’s ‘moral’ strength. By inverting the logic of the apocalyptic stories of the 1950s, Williams is creating a counter-narrative whereby he is warning not against the risks of atomic devastation orchestrated by the Soviet Union, but against the emergence of American totalitarianism.
3. Gewinner and the Jungian Shadow: Williams’s gay vampire
But feeling guilty is foolish. I am a deeper and warmer and kinder man for my deviation . . . Someday society will take perhaps the suitable action —but I do not believe that it will be or should be extermination. (Tennessee Williams, qtd. in Leverich 1995: 421)
Williams debunks the ideological message of the postwar SF genre by also creating an antihero, Gewinner Pearce, the last hope for the regeneration of American liberties and genuine values. If the dynamics of anti-Utopia involve, as Jameson puts it, a dialectic of Identity (uniformity) and Difference (alterity), i.e. a confrontation between “the systemic nature of the social totality” and “radical otherness” (2005: xii), Gewinner unambiguously represents the latter aspect of this dichotomy. Following a narrative strategy similar to the one adopted in ‘Two on a Party’, the point at stake here is the choice of the deviant as the morally superior candidate, the savior of a civilization gone to pot. Not only does he represent the reprobate, his sexual orientation makes him a pervert as well. Thus, he stands for everything that the hegemonic establishment decries and silences. The ideology that equates sexual deviation and political subversion is, Dollimore notes, very old, and is accompanied by religious and racial fears (1991: 236). As Corber argues apropos of Cold
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War America, “gay male identity is defined less by sexual preference than by resistance to the dominant political and social order” (1997: 4). The reverse-discourse strategy entails the displacement of the binaries through inversion: only the pervert, along with the women rebels, can destabilize the dominant, oppressive masculinity and ultimately provide an alternative order through the discovery of an emergent utopia. Although Williams echoes the Women’s and Gay Lib vindications of the 1960s, he also expresses his doubts that homosexuality can be permanently given a central position and a legitimate voice in the making of the new status quo. In any case, the narrator does not hesitate to lay bare the protagonist’s marginality and oppositional role. Gewinner is an anomaly, a mistake, an accident that should not be brought to the surface; a disturbing presence lurking in the dark. In brief, he embodies the Jungian notion of the shadow.2 In ‘Psychology of the Unconscious’, Jung defines the term as the other within. The shadow archetype can be described as a dark mirror reflex, the uncivilized, unspeakable desires and drives we feel ashamed of for they are simply incompatible with widely accepted moral principles; “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the content of the personal unconscious” (Jung 1943: 66). The shadow is therefore the Other, opposed to the Self but absolutely necessary if we aim to maintain the stability of the ego. Once repressed, it “remains in the background, unsatisfied and resentful, only waiting for an opportunity to take its revenge in the most atrocious way” (Jung 1953: 587). This dualistic tension between the Other and the Self is rendered visible in the novella through the dialectical opposition of Gewinner vs. Spangler. As the very name denotes, a spangler is somebody or something that spangles, i.e. that sparks or glitters. Billy Spangler, the muscled American boy with a dazzling smile, the attractive owner of “The Laughing Boy” drive-in, dressed in a snowy white uniform (412), “seem[s] to be a matching part” of the “fair-weather day” (414). Gewinner Pearce’s true personality, on the other hand, belongs to the night: he loves “most the hours between midnight and dawn” (438) when he patrols “the empty and dimly-lit [streets] till three or four in the morning” (421). Spangler is the light; Gewinner, the shadow. Not at all surprisingly, Bill’s smile “set off sparklers and spit devils in Gewinner’s nervous system, a scorching reminder of various irreconcilables in his nature” (414-15). While Gewinner is unable to control his outbursts of anger, which verge on epileptic seizures, Bill, a master of his own passions, always keeps his calmness and “unruffled voice”. Gewinner literally knocks the drive-in owner down by racing his car on two wheels while Bill is leaning on the fender. Bill, poised and unfazed, manages to catch sight of his enemy’s “snakelike jerking forward of the head” (426). His
2 Williams started to read Jung in the forties, not long before his stay in Macon, as his letter to Windham (dated November 3, 1943) proves. In 1958 Jung writes Flying Saucers. A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, whereby the psychologist launches the theory that ufos are the expression of “a living myth” (2002: 11) which allows man to believe in something supernatural (“extraterrestrial, heavenly powers”) disguised in the shape of a technological construction which intervenes with the aim of providing “order, deliverance, salvation, and wholeness” (2002: 18) at a time when anxiety over global destruction is a predominant feeling.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 67-83· issn 0210-6124 spaceships and vampires: sexual dissidence 77 angel-like appearance —“he was wreathed in cherubic smiles that made him look like a butch and tender angel of honest-to-goodness young, sweet, pure-hearted manhood” (437)— stands in contrast to Gewinner’s devilish, emasculated nature. The former divides women into two kinds, the good and the bad, and sees sex as Satan’s temptation —when he smells Edna’s menstruation, he thinks of it as “the darkly crimson incubative condition” (424); the latter enjoys cruising the streets for a sexual partner. These binary cuts (light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, bright and pleasant vs. obscure and offensive, creation vs. destruction) echo the sharply polarized, Zoroastrian system: the complementary twins, one dark (Harminus) and one light (Hormistus), that dominate the world, and man’s Janus-like nature. That Gewinner incarnates polymorph-perverse tendencies can be seen in his depiction as a vampire.3 A creature of the night, Gewinner, the “Prince in the tower” (406) is, like Dracula, a refined dandy —“they had called him the Prince as much in awe as in mockery of his refinements” (408)— and a man “instructed in the humanities” (406), who lives in the highest room of a gray stone mansion “with a pop-art resemblance to a medieval castle” (407). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) and Alan Sinfield (1994) long ago noted both the historical connection of the Gothic genre (the perfect locus for the trope of the “unspeakable”) with the feminization of the aristocracy (otiose, decorative and ethereal as opposed to the productive, pragmatic and manly values of the bourgeoisie). Byron, the outsider, the fatal man and the sexual deviant, was the earliest model of the modern vampire (Wilson 1999).4 After the trials of Oscar Wilde, the effeminate aristocratic model (aesthete, flâneur, bon vivant) became “the dominant one available for homosexual men of both upper and middle class” (Sedgwick 1985: 94). Les Brookes, following Richard Dyer’s ideas, argues that one of the most conspicuous figures of this aristocratic decadence is the vampire. “Charming, cultivated, dandified, sexually voracious and abnormally aware” (Les Brookes 2009: 132), vampires are liminal figures with transgressive energies since they mirror the dissidence encoded in aesthetic effeminacy. Their secret nature,
3 A perversion was originally defined as a sexual activity which “has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it” (Freud 1966: 316); or, more precisely, a sexual function which “has transgressed its limits in respect to the part of the body concerned or to the sexual object chosen” (Freud 1997: 43). Children are born with an innately bisexual disposition which is polymorphously perverse. I herein use the term as understood in post-Foucauldian (queer) theory as a departure or transgression (deviance) from any social order, or hegemonic norm. 4 The first literary vampire is Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, clearly modeled on Byron, the peripatetic, depraved aristocrat, a regular customer of “the centres of all fashionable vices” (The Vampyre). Williams felt powerfully attracted to the figure of Lord Byron, to the extent that a character of an early story, Paul Bagby, an alter ego, was nicknamed “Byron, the Campus poet”. Paul Bagby is an obvious variant of Paul Bigelow, Williams’s inevitable companion in his cruising adventures (2006: 128). Lord Byron is also one of the characters of Camino Real: he embodies the rebellious spirit who, much like Gewinner, is ready “to make a departure” from a world that is too restrictive, and to “struggle for freedom” (1953: 56). Williams might have also been attracted to the conflicting sides of the Byronic hero torn asunder by the clash of centripetal forces and reputed to be “bad, mad, and dangerous to know” (Gross 2001: 148). Byron was also familiar with Zoroaster’s philosophy, and he was an admirer of Persian Sufi poet Hafiz.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 67-83· issn 0210-6124 78 mauricio d. aguilera linde coupled with their voyeurism, runs in parallel with the furtive nocturnality and cruising of contemporary homosexuals. Thus, while the rest of the city dwellers are fast asleep, Gewinner, bathed and anointed with perfume “like a bride”, walks down the fire escape ladder, dressed in “a midnight-blue tuxedo made of silk gabardine” (439) and a white silk scarf.5 During his nocturnal prowlings he cruises the streets at junctions and stops at the stadium where he eventually finds a suitable stranger. Then they both drive to the Negro cemetery, a clearly heterotopian space whereby mainstream values (those that legitimate the prevailing order) are contested, and have sex “among the humble mossy tablets and weather-paled crosses of wood” (441). After unfolding the silk scarf on the floor and taking off his clothes, Gewinner asks the stranger: “Well? Am I too ugly?” (441). In choosing a black cemetery as the setting for the acts of deviant sexuality, Williams is linking the Sexual Other with the Racial Other, for they have in common the fact of embodying evil values and practices: crime, uncleanliness, and rampant, sordid sexuality.6 By depicting Gewinner as a vampire Williams is also validating Judith Halberstam’s assertion that sexuality is “the dominant mark of otherness” in the twentieth century (1995: 7). Characterized by a hidden depravity and the secrecy of a sordid sexuality, vampires belong, along with wolves, to the non-heteronormative terrain. In fact they “cross back and forth boundaries that should otherwise be secure —the boundaries between humans and animals, humans and God, and, as an expression of a ‘polymorphous’ sexuality, man and woman” (Gelder 1994: 70). What moves a vampire is “the gratification of all desire” (Day 2002: 6) since all taboos are broken. Jung believed that the vampire image was an expression of the shadow. In fact we can subscribe to Cohen’s words when he states that the “cultural fascination with the monster is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens” the stability of the system (Cohen 1996: viii).7
5 Gewinner’s tuxedo, black topcoat and moiré silk scarf are the obligatory costume of the cliché vampire as a urbanite sophisticate, an image popularized by Lugosi’s films that can be traced back to Hamilton Deane’s first theatrical adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula in 1924. McNally and Florescu demonstrate that the tuxedo-clad, pale- skinned vampire is to a large extent a consequence of Deane’s impersonations of the character (1994: 156-57). Gewinner’s body is also “lightly dusted with powder” (439), as befits the post-Deane antihero. 6 Heterotopias are “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986: 24). Cemeteries are “no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city but ‘the other city’, where each family possesses its dark resting place” (1986: 25). Cemeteries are typically Gothic settings, a natural scenario for the necrophilious impulses. In choosing a black cemetery as the place where homosexual acts are performed, Williams endorses Leslie Fiedler’s famous assertion that “the proper subject for the American gothic is the black man” (1960: 397), slavery and racial conflict. Homosexuality is therefore coupled with blackness as the most visible expression of subjugated alterity. 7 Not surprisingly Williams started to have vampire nightmares during his summer in Macon in 1942 immediately after meeting Holt Gewinner, Williams’s “connection with the gay-mad world” 2006( : 286; Leverich 1995: 455). Williams must have felt both attracted and frightened by the disregard of moral conventions and unprincipled life of excess and pleasure which Gewinner led in such a conservative environment. His “white skin”, which Williams defined as “tantalizing”, and his constant parties in “the most fantastic house” (2006: 287) definitely aroused mixed
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Following C. W. E. Bigsby’s sentiments, David Savran insists that Williams’s radicalism, “lacking a political correlative, tends to be displaced into a sexual subversiveness” (1992: 80). The only way to transform the world was neither political activism nor the Marxist credo but the “destabilization of the mid-century notions of masculinity and femininity” through the celebration of “subjugated masculinities” and the valorization of “female power and female sexual desire” (1992: 81). The solution lies in “re-moulding the world a little nearer to our Heart’s Desire”, if one aims to understand the “sorry Scheme of Things”, as Tom, the protagonist of ‘Square Pegs’ (and Williams’s alter ego) defends; a goal which duplicates the lines of the Rubáiyát. If (wo)man’s desire could be nurtured without constraints, if (s)he were allowed to meet and follow her/his own shadow, (s)he “could find his own, natural place in the world. Get what I mean? No mis-fits! No square pegs in round holes!” (2006: 206). Gewinner’s Persian coin, the gift he wants to give to the right owner on his (k)nightly quest, is a motif that insists on the idea of following the libidinal instincts of the ego. His nocturnal prowlings become the twentieth-century counterpart of the medieval knight’s quest for the Holy Grail. Unlike Spangler, the successful young jock cut out for business, Gewinner epitomizes the romantic quester. He is “the eternal Don Quixote in the human flux” (444): the idealist aspiring to find true love “some galactic night”, someone to whom he could make the gift of the Persian pendant. In the1898 preface to the Rubáiyát, Talcott Williams speaks about the necessity of understanding that “religious fervor and sexual passion may be legal tender for the same emotions”, a message present in the two faces of some ancient coins which bear on one side “the altars of the God and on the other the symbol of lust” (1898: xiv). “I’d like to live a simple life – with epic fornications”, writes Williams in Macon in the summer of 1942 (2006: 303). Gewinner’s coin encapsulates the unambiguous triumph of dissident sexuality. To conclude, in making the “Prince of the Tower” one of the few survivors after the destruction of the world and the only male passenger of the Ark of Space, Williams is joining Freud and Jung in their insistence on the importance of awakening libidinal energies in order to counteract the discontent of present-day civilization, and the castrating one-sidedness of contemporary society. Only the return of Dionysos, “not just the de-repression but the recuperation” (Bishop 1995: 227) of sexual and creative urges which Western civilization has buried, will regenerate the world. By desublimating the polymorphous perverse the individual can liberate himself from repressive constraints (the negation of the self ) and aggressive impulses (the negation of the environment), and release a subversive energy; an idea, Dollimore remarks, already expressed in Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death (1959): we must reach a “Dionysian consciousness” in order feelings, a conflict of desire and fear. Soon he felt like “a divided being”: one part of him pulled into the direction of “Brimstone Drive in Perdition” (2006: 289); the other pulling in the direction of fear and violence: “The sexual neurosis continues to occupy the center of my emotional stage” (2006: 289). Williams is about to transform the neurosis into a perversion. Perversion is “the opposite of neurosis . . . either we sexualize something or it becomes a neurotic character trait” (Delaney 1999: 19).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 67-83· issn 0210-6124 80 mauricio d. aguilera linde to “return our souls to our bodies” (Brown 1985: 158). Apollo, the negation of instinct, is a deathly form which sustains “displacement from below upwards” (174) and makes us “desexualized animals” (167). Gewinner is the savior, the “finally elected” (444), the dark monster who will vanquish Apollo and open the sluice-gates of desire, the vampire who will murder Spangler and be on the lookout for new frontiers. The original Apocalypse, contends Fredric Jameson, entails “both catastrophe and fulfillment, the end of the world and the inauguration of the reign of Christ on earth, Utopia and the extinction of the human race all at once” (2005: 199). Williams’s finale is therefore rife with religious or metaphysical reverberations, but the central strategy of his novella is to invert the binaries (natural vs. unnatural, good vs. evil, normative vs. marginal) that define sexual identities: the aberrant, demonized Other is now the morally superior opponent, the survivor of a civilization in decline. Aboard the spaceship, en route to an unknown destination, Gewinner asks the pilot whether his silk scarf, the garment he uses as ‘bedlinen’ on his nocturnal cruises, will be allowed in the new world. The answer is that he will be admitted to the new planet on a term of probation. In other words, the outsider will remain perpetually an outsider, a man inexorably bound to inhabit the fringes of the system, the restless quester in pursuit of a radically innocent and natural vision of the self and society.
Works Cited Aguilera Linde, Mauricio D. 2010: ‘“The Wilderness is Interior”: Williams’s Strategies of Resistance in “Two on a Party”’. The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 11: 41-52. Barrow, William 1967: Rev. of The Knightly Quest and Other Stories, by Tennessee Williams. Negro Digest July: 80-81. Bishop, Paul 1995: The Dyonisian Self. C. G. Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzche. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bould, Mark, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, eds. 2009: The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. New York: Routledge. Bradbury, Ray 2012 (1945): The Martian Chronicles. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brookes, Les 2009: Gay Male Fiction since Stonewall. Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. Brown, Norman O. 1985 (1959): Life against Death. The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middleton: Wesleyan up. Cober, Rober J. 1997: Homosexuality in Cold War. Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke up. Cohen, Jeffrey, J., ed. 1996: Monster Theory. Minneapolis: u of Minnesota p. Day, William Patrick 2002: Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. What Becomes a Legend Most. Lexington: u of Kentucky p. Delaney, Samuel R. and Takayuki Tatsumi 1986: ‘Interview’. Diacritics 16.3: 27-45.
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—1999: Shorter Views. Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary. Hanover: Wesleyan up. —2004: The Motion of Light in Water. Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village. New York: InsightOut Books. D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman 1997: Intimate Matters. A History of Sexuality in America. Chicago: u of Chicago p. Dollimore, Jonathan 1991: Sexual Dissidence. Augustine to Wilde. Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon p. Draya, Ren 1977: ‘The Fiction of Tennessee Williams’. Jac Tharpe, ed.Tennessee Williams: A Tribute. Jackson: u of Mississippi p. 647-62. Fiedler, Leslie 1960: Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor. Foucault, Michel 1978: The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert F. C. Hurley. New York: Random House. —1986 (1984): ‘Of Other Spaces’. Trans. Jay Miscowiec. Diacritics 16.1: 22-27. Freud, Sigmund 1966 (1916): Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Liveright. —1997 (1905): Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Touchstone. Gelder, Ken 1994: Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge. Griffith, Robert and Paula C. Baker 2001: Major Problems in American History since 1945: Documents and Essays. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Gross, Jonathan David 2001: Byron. The Erotic Liberal. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Halberstam, Judith 1995: Skin Shows: Gothic Horrors and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, nc: Duke up. James, Edward 1994: Science Fiction and the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford up. James, Edward and Farah Mendleson, eds. 2003: The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Jameson, Fredric 2005: Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jackson, Earl Jr. 1995: Strategies of Deviance. Studies in Gay Male Representation. Bloomington: Indiana up. Jung, Carl G. 1943: ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works. Vol. 7. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 9-119. —1953: The Symbolic Life. Collected Works. Vol. 18. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —2002 (1958): Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge. Lait, Jack and Lee Mortimer 1952: usa Confidential. New York: Crown. Leverich, Lyle 1995: Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown. McCracken, Scott 1998: Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester up.
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McNally, Raymond. T. and Radu Florescu 1994: In Search of Dracula. The History of Dracula and Vampires. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Mogen, David 1982: Wilderness Visions. The Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature. San Bernardino: The Borgo p. Murphy, Brenda A. 2005: ‘“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams’. David Krasner, ed. A Companion to the Twentieth Century American Drama. Malden: Blackwell. 179-91. Polidori, John William 1819: The Vampyre.
Received 18 January 2012 Revised version accepted 13 September 2012
Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde teaches at the University of Granada. A visiting senior fellow at the University of Rutgers, Stanford and California University at Berkeley, he specializes in contemporary
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American drama and short fiction from a cultural materialist perspective. Coeditor of an anthology of Victorian fairytales (Valdemar, 1999), he has recently published a volume of Oriya short fiction (Miraguano 2009). His Spanish translation of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s masterpiece, ‘Six Acres and a Third’, was released in September 2012 (Madrid: Eneida).
Address: Departamento de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Campus de Cartuja s/n. 18071, Granada. Tel.: +34 958241000 (ext. 20240). Fax: +34 958-243678.
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ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103 issn 0210-6124
‘Hate the world, it’s so romantic’: The Function of Song in Recent British Football Hooligan Film (1995-2009)
Ignacio Ramos Gay Universidad de Valencia [email protected]
This article argues that popular music in contemporary British hooligan cinema fosters a romanticised and nostalgic portrait of football violence that neutralises the media’s earlier stigmatisation of the phenomenon. The epic flavour provided by the films’ soundtracks and their warfare connotations contribute to the exorcising of the social fears awakened by hooliganism. I conclude by stating that the films’ musical scores aim not only at establishing an accurate, legitimate correlation with British cultural history in the 1980s, but also at revisiting the general desolation that sociologists and historians associate with it.
Keywords: popular music; hooliganism; Thatcherism; film narrative; epic narrative; soundtrack; football culture . . .
‘Hate the world, it’s so romantic’: La función de la música en el cine hooligan contemporáneo británico (1995-2009)
El objeto de este artículo es analizar la música popular en el cine hooligan contemporáneo británico en tanto que proyección de una mirada romántica y nostálgica al fenómeno de la violencia en el fútbol, susceptible de neutralizar la estigmatización mediática tradicional. El sentido épico de la banda sonora derivado de sus connotaciones bélicas contribuye a exorcizar los miedos sociales despertados por el hooliganismo. Concluyo afirmando que el acompañamiento musical cinematográfico tiene por fin tanto establecer un correlato exacto y legítimo de la historia cultural británica de los años ochenta, cuanto revisitar la desolación general que sociólogos e historiadores asocian a ella.
Palabras clave: música popular; hooliganismo; Thatcherismo; narrativa cinematográfica; narrativa épica; banda sonora; cultura del fútbol
—85— 86 ignacio ramos gay
1. Introduction Recent revolts in Port Said stadium in Egypt after a football game between the country’s top team, Cairo’s Al-Ahly, and home team Al-Masry show that hooliganism is back in the news.1 On February 1, 2012, Cairo supporters fought the local rival fans, leaving seventy-three dead and hundreds injured. Far from the press’s standard outraged cries, international media coverage focused on the political, rather than the social nature of the no longer exclusively English ‘disease’. Headlines like The Guardian’s ‘Hooliganism on the Surface, State Thuggery Underneath’ (February 2, 2012) or Aljazeera’s ‘Egypt’s politicised football hooligans’ (February 2, 2012) mark a stark contrast to the media’s biased focus on British fans’ violence in the past. Classic issues such as youth alienation and disaffection, or the disintegration of working-class communities have been replaced by a discourse of political commitment and anti-establishment sedition in the wake of the late revolutionary protests that peppered the so-called Arab Spring. Port Said’s disaster refutes the zeitgeist dismissing hooliganism as a minor concern both for the state and the press nowadays (King 1997: 576; Horrocks 1995: 155), and underscores the substantial role of the media in the construction and social perception of the phenomenon. This article argues that the contemporary representation of football violence in the cinema stands as a reaction against a specifically biased conceptualisation of the fierce ‘terrace legends’ fuelled by the British media in the 1980s. Recent filmmakers have been inclined towards a glorification of the disorder of the thugs, conveyed by a peculiar combination of the verbal, the visual and the musical. In much the same way that hooliganism was once the product of news sensationalism during the Thatcher administration, I argue that the musical score in contemporary cinema fosters a romanticised, even nostalgic, portrait of football violence that counteracts its classic connotations. In order to provide an insight into the function of song in recent British hooligan cinema, I will examine a number of recent productions, the soundtracks of which function as a semantic corollary to the plot. I contend that films likeI.D. (Philip Davis, 1995), Mean Machine (Barri Skolnick, 2001), The Football Factory (Nick Love, 2004), Green Street (Lexi Alexander, 2005), Rise of the Footsoldier (Julian Gilbey, 2007), Cass (John S. Baird, 2008), Awaydays (Pat Holden, 2009), Green Street 2: Stand Your Ground (Jesse V. Johnson, 2009) and The Firm (Nick Love, 2009) use popular music specifically chosen for the construction of a glamourised image of hooliganism that neutralises the media’s earlier social and political stigmatisation of the phenomenon. I conclude that such an aesthetic endeavour emerges as a conscious attempt to rewrite, and redeem, a highly controversial and now concluded period of the recent history of Great Britain.
2. The media construction of hooliganism In a pioneering analysis, Dunning et al. suggest that the advent of football hooliganism
1 This paper was written at the time of the Port Said disaster. When sent for publication, the investigation of the killing of more than seventy fans was still being conducted.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 ‘hate the world, it’s so romantic’ 87 coincided in time with the extensive media coverage of the World Cup hosted in England in 1966. According to the authors, during the interwar years, “English football fans tended to be praised by the media for their good behaviour” and therefore British national identity was forged by the dictum “it couldn’t happen here” when reporting football violence abroad (1986: 238). However, from the early 1960s onwards, social hysteria ignited by juvenile delinquents (chiefly the ‘teddy boy’ and ‘mod’ scare) seduced the media enough to “pick on” and “amplify” the sort of “violent incidents that had always . . . occurred at crowded football grounds”, resulting in a hyperbolically distorted tv, press and radio construction of hooliganism. The preliminaries of the1966 World Cup put the country in the international spotlight: the crowd, as much as the game itself, became so tempestuously targeted by the news that “England began to focus on football hooliganism as a threat to the country’s international prestige” (1986: 239). Dunning et al.’s statement is sustained by Anthony King’s understanding of football’s disorder in the light of magnified news coverage as a sales strategy within the fiercely competitive media market. In King’s opinion, the press’s hyperbolic representation of thugs as dehumanised and animalised anti-social beings was meant to “fuel moral panics” but, paradoxically, it also launched an “irresistibly fascinating” image for readers. Fans’ activities were continuously deplored by the media whilst, ironically, they “also constituted a rich source of sensational stories by which newspapers could market themselves in an ever more competitive market” (King 1997: 584). Indeed, as Yvonne Jewkes notes in her study of the interaction of media and crime in modern societies, “shock, outrage and fear sell newspapers” (2004: 28). The birth of the hooligan as a figure “who had descended into the beyond and the abnormal” (King 1997: 583) followed in the long tradition of British sensationalism, operating under the premise that a heightened fear of crime drastically increases newspaper sales. This would explain why, as Bodin et al. argue, the media frequently resorted to facts that were partially or totally false (2005: 63). In the authors’ words, “the essential thing [is] maybe simply selling [newspapers]” (2005: 78).2 Newspapers, then, were striving to increase their profits by rendering a disturbing yet attractive image of abjection and liminality in contemporary society (King 1995: 585). Analogical descriptions of football thugs as “animalic”, “lunatic”, or “barbaric” “madmen” (Dunning et al. 1988: 108-09) may initially have been coined to further consumer strategies, but they undeniably contributed to a cultural construction of hooliganism as a postmodern transgression of society’s boundaries. Several studies have revealed how convenient this vilifying imagery was for authorities keen to implement a large number of public order measures. The 1980s attested to a significant increment of state control of hooliganism, to the extent that the ultra-repressive measures adopted before, and by, the Thatcher administration have led critics to suggest that the rise in moral panic was actually a consequence of the police’s zeal when arresting violent fans. Horrocks argues that the
2 “L’essentiel est peut-être tout simplement de vendre”. Bodin et al.’s quotes have been translated into English by the author.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 88 ignacio ramos gay social anxieties over football violence “became for right-wing politicians a spectre used to frighten anxious middle-class voters, and to whip up enthusiasm for harsh punishments” (1995: 155). In this sense, in his influential work on the State as a generator of violence, Hall identified a circular reciprocity between institutions of the British establishment orchestrating public opinion (newspapers, tv debates, etc.) and crime, which he termed “mugging” (1978a). This notion expanded the idea of ‘mugging’ as mere street theft to include the “relation between crime and the reaction to crime” (viii), placing particular emphasis on the “culture of control” (76) created to police it. As Hall puts it, “once individuals had been robbed of their rationality and humanity, then state violence could be seen as the only effective solution to their activities” (1978b: 30, qtd. in King 1997: 583). In other words, the hooligans’ violence legitimised state violence. Furthermore, the media not only influenced readers’ perception of hooliganism but also became a deterministic tool in the development of the fans’ own self-image. A revealing article written by Peter Marsh as early as 1977, titled ‘Football Hooliganism, Fact or Fiction?’, suggested that press reports of football violence were instrumental in spreading the image of the young offender as a magnetic, attractive figure. In Marsh’s words, “attitudes have hardened and the stereotypes have become more fixed” and, as a result, “football fans begin to match up to society’s expectations of them. They begin to play the game we always thought they were playing, but weren’t” (258). So, far from being deterred by the media rhetoric, many fans moulded themselves according to the press’s representation of them: the conducts and social behaviours that had been so colourfully portrayed and exacerbated by sensationalist headlines became credentials of authenticity, and gangs of football hooligans, the so-called ‘firms’, fleshed out those same animalistic traits attributed to them by reporters in a sort of “feedback cycle” (Dunning et al. 1986: 238). Most importantly, argues King, fans enjoyed “the notorious liminal status granted by the press”, for it “added to the excitement of a Saturday afternoon, that fans could indulge their often fanciful notion that they were somehow beyond the pale and, therefore, a threat to society” (1997: 584). The tabloids had thus provided hooligans with a public reputation they had to live up to. Therefore, acting from the fringes of the social norm became the identifying trait of football liminoids, to the extent that “fans [imagined] themselves to be so” (585). On this account, it would be logical to conclude that, in no small degree, the social danger of football hooliganism was concocted by the media through their persistent “weight of words and the shock of photographs” (Bodin et al. 2005: 78).3 In fact, 1980s journalists may not have invented modern hooliganism, for coverage of social hysteria provoked by young offenders and ‘scuttlers’ dates from the late Georgian period and has been extensively documented during the Victorian era, when the term ‘hooligan’ was first recorded (Davies 1998; Chassaigne 2005; Savage 2008; Taylor 2010). Nevertheless, the press was the “amplifying, multiplying and catalysing element [that] widely contributed
3 “poids des mots et du choc des potos”.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 ‘hate the world, it’s so romantic’ 89 to its promotion” (Bodin et al. 2005: 79)4 at a time when moral fears were inflamed by juvenile delinquency, and the affluent teenager “was promoted as the figurehead of Britain’s march into a new era of prosperous consumerism” (Oliker and Krolikowski 2001: 244).
3. Authenticating the Thatcher years through song A considerable amount of literature has been published on the representation of Thatcherism in contemporary film. This requires a synthetic insight into the cultural, political and economic atmosphere of the period so as to understand the issues confronted in such productions. Lester Friedman identifies three defining elements of the Thatcherite revolution: laissez faire and an “‘unregulated’ market neoliberalism” which structured the economic ideology of Thatcher’s administration; closely followed by a “politically neoconservative authoritarianism”; and, in social terms, by a project “dividing the country geographically, between North and South” (2006: 30). The ‘Party of Law and Order’ unleashed a frenzy of dismantling of public services, the most direct consequences of which were the liquidation of the power of trade-unions, mass unemployment, the privatisation of public utilities, and the “demonisation of the working-class” (Jones 2011: 10). Moreover, social exclusion based on homophobic and xenophobic positions permeated Thatcher’s New Right discourse, and a “moral crusade” was initiated to “weed out and punish the ‘workshy’, to encourage materialism” and to re-establish the family as a moral nucleus through the passing of “repressive legislation to ‘outlaw’ those lifestyles and pursuits which contradicted Thatcherite ideology” (Lay 2002: 81-82). The nation’s malaise was transcribed in social realist films by Chris Bernard, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and more recently in productions by Shane Meadows, Stephen Daldry and Peter Mullan. Meanwhile, on television, soap operas like EastEnders, Albion Market and Brookside accommodated a sombre image of Britain that counteracted the glittering icons of American serials (Lay 2002: 82). Simon Gallagher (2010) has identified two antagonistic, though sometimes coexisting, schools of thought represented in the characterisation of the working class under Thatcherism in film. On the one hand, there is a penchant towards depicting working-class existence as “counter-human and stifling”, rife with “morose” characters “never fulfilling their human potential”. On the other, is the mainstream tendency in which “the restrictive conditions of the working class are precisely the conditions to encourage diverse and rich characters, full of colour and spirit” (Gallagher 2010). Regardless of the filmmakers’ reaction to the lugubrious background of Thatcherite England through the description of the divergent (and often scant) aspirations of the working class, both trends coincide in offering a vision of the political regime of the time as one unable to provide any solutions to the problems exposed. In this sense, recent film productions focus on the social problems of the 1980s as the seed of hooliganism.
4 “un élément amplificateur, multiplicateur et catalyseur. Ils en ont amplement contribué à sa promotion”.
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As a response to the high unemployment and lack of opportunities for young people at the time, a number of present day filmmakers have depicted football violence as a form of escapist entertainment, a “coded emblem for the disoriented and disaffected British working-class” (Horrocks 1955: 155). Bad parenting, alcohol abuse, racism, class segregation and the use of physical and verbal violence as the only means of self-assertion for working-class men within modern deindustrialised societies can be traced in the first- person biographic accounts of ‘terrace legends’ Cass Pennant (Cass) and Carlton Leach (Rise of the Foot Soldier), as well as in the lives of the fictional characters Paul Carty (Awaydays) and Tommy Johnson (The Football Factory), thereby illustrating the aftermath of Thatcherism on British young adults. However, realism is not only achieved through the faithful transcription of settings, attitudes and characters. Apart from visual imagery, filmmakers tend to reconstruct the tumultuous atmosphere of the time by resorting to musical pieces that are emblematic of the social and cultural scene. Nick Love’s 2009 The Firm, a free adaptation of Alan Clarke’s 1989 tv drama, tracks the social awakening of Dominic, a wannabe teenager mesmerised by Bex, West Ham’s InterCity Firm’s ‘topman’. Set in London in the 1980s, the film is a modern counterpoint to Clarke’s original production, which was critically acclaimed for its absence of musical score. Love’s version carves out the temporal and spatial context by featuring an eclectic and telling selection of the popular songs that became landmarks of the 1980s: ‘Mad World’ (Tears for Fears, 1982), ‘Don’t Stop the Music’ (Yarbrough People, 1980), ‘Tainted Love’ (Soft Cell, 1981), ‘Hip Hop Be Bop’ (Man Parrish, 1982), ‘Town Called Malice’ (The Jam, 1982), ‘Poison Arrow’ (ABC, 1982), ‘Get Down on It’, ‘Celebration’ (Kool & The Gang, 1980,1981) or ‘I Feel Love’ (Donna Summers, 1977). The musical pastiche attests to the filmmaker’s refusal to succumb to a single, specific movement (punk, glam, new wave, etc.) and to his commitment to portray London as a multifarious cultural scenario encompassing ethnicities, geographies and music styles, whose origins range from the West Indies’s melodic walking bass lines (ska) to Great Britain’s fast, short, hard-edged songs (punk rock). The Firm’s score stands as the soundtrack to a period of British history. As a musical narrative voice, it encompasses a variety of diegetic strategies. On the one hand, music is played in the background and cannot be perceived by the characters or, as Wierzbicki would have it, is “somehow apart from, or outside, the fictional world of filmic narrative” (extra-, or non-diegetic musical narration) (2009: 23). On the other, it can indeed often be heard by the characters themselves, as it is inherent in the film narrative (diegetic orsource music) (Wierzbicki 2009: 5). All the films in the corpus resort to such strategies in order to co-locate the action in time and space. In John S. Baird’s Cass, ska melodies from British bands Madness (‘One Step Beyond’), The Beat (‘March of the Swindle Heads’, ‘Jackpot’, ‘Click Click’) and Jamaican songwriter Desmond Dekker (‘Fu Manchu’) intermingle with the Housemartins’s pop (‘Happy Hour’), The Jam’s new wave (‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’) and Australian punkrock by The Saints (‘Perfect Day’). Similarly, Joy Division’s ‘Insight’, Ultravox’s ‘Young Savage’ and The Cure’s ‘Saturday Night 10:15’
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 ‘hate the world, it’s so romantic’ 91 illustrate the decade’s desolation in Birkenhead in Awaydays, and in a like manner, The Bee Gees’s disco music is played in I.D. (‘Saturday Night Fever’). Whether for adorning poetic, expository or reflexive modes of filming, or for the purpose of accompanying introductory or final credits, the extra-diegetic mode operates as a vehicle which identifies time, space and music. Furthermore, filmmakers seem to be not only interested in documenting the kind of music played at the time, but in addressing its chief role in the cultural shaping of the 1980s. This is reflected by both the characters’ and the epoch’s obsession with music itself. Dominic hauntingly hums ‘Don’t Stop the Music’, mirroring the persistence with which pop songs are played on home stereos and tv sets. Like wise characters are systematically set in a wide array of pubs and nightclubs where contemporary music is played as a background to their effusive conversations. By linking time and sound, the selected soundtrack authenticates the epoch revived in the film. What Danny Burns terms the “desolation of the Thatcher years” (1992: 7) is musically expressed by the sinister performances of Joy Division, The Cure’s urban gothic and the post-punk distortion of Sham 69, Ultravox and Magazine. Borthwick and Moy state that “these tracks prefaced the national mood of the early 1980s”, one which was characterised by “rising unemployment, an increasing gap between rich and poor and increased social unrest” (2004: 182). Similarly, Marxist theorist Kenneth Surin asserts that these bands represented “an iconic repudiation, at the subliminal level, of anything that Ms. Thatcher could ever have brought herself to avow as ‘pleasurable’” (2009: 303), and Cavanagh notes that post-punk lyrics were directly linked to Thatcherism in their contemplation of “alienation, paranoia and morbidity” (Cavanagh 2001: 29, qtd. in Borthwick and Moy 2004: 182). “Alienating”, “paranoid” and “morbid” parallelisms between characters and actual bands and musicians are likewise worth noting. In Awaydays, the fate of one of the characters, Elvis, is obviously ensured by the curse of his name. The character’s tragedy, however, also strongly resembles that of Joy Division’s front man Ian Curtis, whose songs lacquer the film. Elvis’s resolution to commit suicide to finally escape the suffocating atmosphere of Birkenhead imitates Elvis Presley’s breakdown and death in 1977, and more accurately, Ian Curtis’s self-annihilation in 1980. Furthermore, the twisted, dark humour of Joy Division’s name, which alludes to the Jewish brothels in concentration camps during World War II, evinces a close connection with the nihilistic omens and tonalities featured in their recordings —what Wojcik terms the “fetishization of the sinister and the morbid” (1995: 23). The sombre cadences of Joy Division’s ‘Insight’ in the closing credits voice the ominous epitaph of the film. They musically verbalise the youth’s gothic sense of despair and frustration in the 1980s, as was also laconically portrayed in the Sex Pistols’s cross-generational anthem ‘God Save the Queen’. But while Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols accused corrupted politicians of robbing British youth of the possibility of a better, dignified future, Curtis pushes the aesthetic boundaries even further by glamourising existentialist disillusionment: “Guess your dreams always end / They don’t rise up / Just descend/ But I don’t care anymore / I’ve lost the will to want more / I’m not
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 92 ignacio ramos gay afraid not at all”. Contrary to Rotten’s “no future” wake-up call, Curtis’s repetitive and self-indulgent final chorus (“I’m not afraid anymore / I’m not afraid anymore”) is as much an embellished premonition of his own martyrdom as a victim of suicide, as it is a death requiem to a whole generation. The correlation between the epoch and its soundtrack denotes a narrative and semantic equivalence that legitimates the filmmakers’ resuscitation of the Thatcher years. Consequently, it could be argued that the musical score functions in a manner not unlike that of sound effects. Natural or artificial sound effects that enliven the action (rattles, whistles, doorbells, banging, explosions, sirens, etc.) help create a naturalistic ambience that enhances the plot’s verisimilitude. As Jill Nelmes states, “sound effects are normally perceived as part of the narrative realism, authenticating the images and informing the narrative attention” (2003: 78). Likewise, the soundtrack to these films metaphorises reality by disclosing significant information on the films’ time (the 1980s), the geographical location of the plot (Great Britain), and the characters’ class values (working-class values imbibed in punk, ska, and rock strains). Through the selected pieces (as opposed to classical, American or European music of the 1990s and 2000s), all these traits informatively construct a holistic image of a specific cultural group. As agents of historical accuracy, popular songs reach beyond the limits of musical language to emerge as the most authentic sound effects of the era. Further features can be drawn from the understanding of popular music as sound effects in the films. Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis assert that, apart from defining a scene’s location and “suggest[ing] the environment’s impact on characters”, sound effects also “contribute to the emotional and intellectual depth of a scene” by “lending a mood” to it (2005: 220). This implies that not only the external, situational aspects of the characters can be sonically defined by corollary sound effects, but also their inner disposition and frame of mind. Pramaggiore and Wallis refer to such representations of the characters’ subjectivity through the example of a device as common as a clap of thunder in horror films. In this case, contextual and metonymic sound effects signifying a storm stand as suprasegmental elements illustrating the character’s fear and hence provoking empathy in the viewer. An identical function may be accomplished by the score. For instance, in Awaydays, the home demo by The Cure’s frontman Robert Smith of their 1979 classic ‘Saturday Night 10:15’ reproduces in its melody the nocturnal, monotonous dripping of a tap which reflects the character’s solitude both in the song and in the film. The tedious onomatopoeic alliteration of the piano notes and the drum’s percussion couples with the lyrics to reinforce the visual and musical despair of the situation (“And I’m sitting / In the kitchen sink / And the tap drips / And I’m waiting…”). In this case, not only does the score vividly recreate the mood evoked by specific sound effects like a dripping tap at night but it actually merges with them, becoming an accurate sonic transcription of the character’s subjectivity. The filmmakers’ striving for verisimilitude requires the use of naturalistic film techniques. Popular songs are often juxtaposed with real footage borrowed from tv
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 ‘hate the world, it’s so romantic’ 93 documentaries, police and cctv cameras. Fragments of original tv interviews with hooligans are shown in Cass, and numerous mass surveillance recordings reflect actual fighting scenarios in football grounds and streets. This documentary-type footage is recurrently used for the opening shots of films Green( Street) or is intercalated within plot sequences (I.D., The Rise of the Foot Soldier, The Football Factory). Furthermore, police devices like thermal night vision cameras or helicopter videos are even imitated by filmmakers in order to increase the credibility of the scene The( Football Factory). In all these cases, music accentuates the impact of the scene on the audience at the same time that it establishes a firm connection between the action and its invisible, sonic incarnation. In other words, the film sequences are to the eyes what the score is to the ear. Musical authenticity parallels narrative construction. The films incorporate credits accurately pinpointing factual, significant dates and places within hooligan history. The Rise of the Foot Soldier is a semi-documentary chronicle of the triple Rettendon murders in Essex, in which three well-known drug dealers were found shot in a Range Rover on a farm in 1995. The film is a raw biography of Carlton Leach, a former InterCity Firmicf ( ) member who eventually became involved in the murdered gang’s drug-selling activities. Director Julian Gilbey’s point —that hooliganism is a first step into organised-crime— is backed by substantial real footage of the police and press coverage of the investigation as well as by the musical score. Leach’s chronological progression from violence on the terraces to the mob is steadily reflected by the film’s soundtrack. Early, conventional fights between hooligan gangs are set to British punk melodies by Motörhead (‘We Are The Road Crew’) and Sham 69 (‘Borstal Breakout’), whose market release coincided with the period depicted (1978). Punk electric guitars answer to a more primitive and familiar confrontation between youth gangs —one characterised by fistfights, the use of rudimentary weapons (sticks, chains, Stanley knives and ‘blades’) and ‘one to one’ fights. Punk music thus accounts for a classic, primitive style of combat. However, as the plot unfolds and time progresses, Leach leaves the terraces to embrace the flourishing industry of nightclub security under rave culture. The electronic rhythms that follow him as a bouncer and doorman manager unveil a new age of fighting and entertainment. Cappella’s (‘U Got 2 Know’), Felix’s (‘Don’t You Want Me’) and Kariya’s (‘Let Me Love You for Tonight’, ‘Move It Up’) techno-house cadences match the advent of designer drugs and ‘ecstasy culture’ of Britain’s nightlife in the early nineties. Similarly, classic weaponry is replaced by heavy, automatic guns. This technologisation process reaches into music just as much as into the drugs and arms scenes. Consequently, not only does the use of techno music at this point in the film testify to explicit chronology and data, but also to a mutating fighting typology that parallels developments in the entertainment industry. A final remark on the directors’ dedication to the portrayal of the authentic should be made regarding the numerous films inspired by autobiographical accounts of hooligans themselves. Cass is based on the 2000 eponymous autobiography of Cass Pennant, one of the leaders of the InterCity Firm in the 1980s, who eventually turned into a bestselling author and even went on to launch his own publishing house (Pennant Publishing Ltd.).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 94 ignacio ramos gay
Another prominent transgeneric adaptation is Gilbey’s The Rise of the Foot Soldier, a filmic reading of West Ham supporter and icf member Carlton Leach’s conspicuously titled memoir, Muscle (2003). In other cases, the films draw their material from the eye- witness accounts of authors who documented, but did not participate in, violence on the terraces. This is the case of Kevin Sampson’s 1998 novel Awaydays (which inspired the subsequent film) and John King’s The Football Factory, which according to the author reqired no further research beyond his experience of having been a Chelsea fan (Ciesla 2004). The rigorously selected soundtracks for these films endorse their plot’s credibility by emphasising its evidentiary probity, turning the films into musical chronicles of the Thatcher years.
4. Combat rock: football thugs and the militarisation of music As Ben Carrington and Ian MacDonald argue, the lyrics of one of the most (in)famous chants of English fans when England play in Germany, “Two world wars and one world cup, doo dah, doo dah” suggest, firstly, “that war is a sport” and that football “has the same value as war in the indices of a distinctive national axiology”, for they are both key symbols in the construction of national consciousness. According to these critics, the equivalence of these terms is founded upon their interchangeability, as “war and sport generate many of the same emotions and libidinal investments” and “they articulate the same intense and highly-prized forms of fraternal solidarity” (2001: 3). Mergenthal’s study of John King’s narrative England Away (1998) —the final part of a trilogy that included The Football Factory( 1996), which inspired Love’s 2004 eponymous film, and Headhunter (1997)— focuses on the connections between sports, war, nationalism and masculinities. She argues that the English national character is not only symbolically fleshed out in the English football player, but may be similarly recognised in the English football supporter and in the soldier hero. All three figures can be construed as archetypal “avatar(s) of idealized masculinity” (2002: 264) whose kindred lies in the acknowledgement and assimilation of strength, courage and prowess as the quintessential masculine virtues within an ideal nationhood. Mergenthal’s hypothesis is in line with Theweleit’s classic psychological study of masculinity and warfare as embodied in the ‘soldier-male’ prototype of the German Freikorps in the 1920s and 1930s (Theweleit1987 ). This direct connection between warfare, masculinity, and nationalism is precisely conveyed by hooliganism and its musical expression in films. The militarisation of the football thug seeps into its verbal self-definition and inner organisation: conflict with other gangs is frequently termed ‘war’, work tools like Stanley knives are referred to as ‘weapons’ or ‘arms’, and members, mainly men, christen themselves as ‘foot-soldiers’, clearly echoing a military terminology that also links them to the lexicon of organised crime. With regard to their inner structure, the disciplining of gang membership requires, as in the army, the endurance of a severe training period. To cross the threshold of this rite of passage, the initiated thugs are taught the Spartan tactics of physical confrontation,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 ‘hate the world, it’s so romantic’ 95 a scenario that has become a favourite of many directors for the opening sequences of their films. Indeed, strict obedience to gang hierarchy, embodied by the firms’ ‘top men’, is imperative in order to gain acceptance into the gang. Moreover, specialised dress codes emulate the function of military uniforms: within the battlefield of the football ground, attire (just as much as the club banners and merchandising products of, for example, the St George’s and the Union flags) visibly articulates a firm’s territorial identity. Finally, territorialisation is enacted through the symbolic invasion of the rival’s ‘ends’ during both home and away matches. This militarising schema is audibly amplified by rock music in hooligan films, particularly during fight scenes. Beyond reductive appreciations of rock as mere background music to the combats, I would argue that the music serves as a sort of diegetic narrator to the plot. Hooligan films distance themselves from ‘rockumentaries’ in the line of Julien Temple’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980) and The Filth and the Fury (2000), Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy (1980), or Jim Field and Michael Gramaglia’s End of the Century (2003), the focus of which is to track down the advent of punk bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash or The Ramones in the international countercultural scene of the late 1970s, and in which songs are used to illustrate the facts narrated. One of the aesthetic merits of contemporary hooligan cinema is that songs transcend their role as sheer samples ornamenting the scene and embrace their potential as marching and melodic military transcriptions of the action. The fight between rival inmates during a football game in the prison-set Mean Machine is musicalised by Sigue Sigue Sputnick’s 1986 hardcore classic ‘Love Missile F1-11’. Similarly, street rows in Awaydays and Green Street 2 are respectively set to Ultravox’s ‘Young Savage’ and Goldblade’s ‘Riot, Riot!’. More well-known tunes like The Jam’s ‘Town Called Malice’ The( Firm), The Stone Roses’s ‘Waterfall’ and ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ (Green Street), or Primal Scream’s ‘Swastika Eyes’ (The Football Factory) go hand in hand with the harsh, alternative beats of Terence Jay’s ‘Run From the Pigs’, Kasabian’s ‘Stuntman’ and Junkie XL’s ‘One Kick Beyond’ (Green Street) or Stage Bottles’s ‘Some Times Anti-Social But Always Anti-Fascist’ (Green Street 2). Song titles themselves constitute a gallery of militarised images and motifs. The soundtrack to Green Street, for example, is replete with such evocatively-titled songs as Ivan Koustikov’s ‘Hooligan drums’, Acarine and Brett Gordon’s hooligan motto ‘Stand Your Ground’, Terence Jay’s ‘Run from the Pigs’ (the slang term for the police) and Dash’s ‘Test of Man’ (in which the lyrics even quote and expand the icf hymn ‘Forever Blowing Bubbles’). Despite this eclectic selection of a myriad of bands and styles ranging from post-punk and new wave sounds to electric hardcore and progressive rock, all the songs come together in their stimulation of the dynamism and energy of the fight sequences, thereby encouraging the viewer’s engagement with the scene through the provocation of psychosomatic responses. Power chords, screaming electric guitars, screeching solos, frenetic drums and hard beats catapult us into the riots themselves and the orgiastic choreography of the fighting mayhem. Furthermore, the films’ narrative too relies deeply on the musical score: following the frenzied motion of fights, the multiplication of swish pans and the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 96 ignacio ramos gay swift juxtaposition of panning shots are interwoven within a speeding visual texture which aims to follow the frantic rhythm of electric guitars and drums as much as to recreate the point of view of those immersed within the battle. This delirious combination of image and sound finds much of its influence in the cadences and aesthetics of the music video, thus reinstating the genre’s connection to the fragmentary character of contemporary visual culture and its postmodern audiences. Through musical expressionism, where the sound of punches, kicks and cries are befittingly channeled by the energy and drive that characterise rock music and modern music videos, audiences emotionally participate in the mob fights themselves, transcending the fictional barrier erected by the screen and joining the heroic celebration of the combat. Moreover, although in many cases it would seem that both the instruments’ effects and the throat-wrenching punk vocal techniques inhibit and overpower the content of the lyrics, there remain a considerable number of instances where the lyrics in fact acquire the fundamental role of magnifying the sense of militarisation to the extreme. Ultravox’s ‘Young Savage’ portrays a generation of young people “Condemned to be a stranger / A subway dweller, dead-end angel”, naturalising the path from frustration to physical aggression (“Changing blossoms into fists / And taking bites from every kiss”). Doomed to a life as outcasts and sentenced to a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ transformation from their everyday routines into the ‘abject’ Saturday afternoon hooligan, the characters in Awaydays follow Ultravox’s final, disquieting words used in the opening scene “Hate the world, it’s so romantic”. As a tonal foreword to the plot, ‘Young Savage’ fuses the same purity of hatred, energy, resentment, frustration and violence that is contained in the characters’ subjectivity and released in football warfare. That rock music has become a somewhat conventionalised aesthetic tool through which to contribute to the epic character of hooligan culture is not only due to its recurrent accompaniment to fight scenes. Rock’n’roll songs also potently enhance military-like traits and motifs through their strategic usage in sequences portraying the preliminaries for combat. Scenes located in pubs where gangs gather together to drink and euphorically chant to the glory of their teams in Green Street, or within the prison walls where convicts train in preparation for a football match against guards in Mean Machine (which clearly echoes John Huston’s Victory) are recurrently set to rock rhythms as well. It could be argued that the reason for this is not necessarily to guarantee entertainment value, but to blur the thin line between gang organisation and the discipline of soldiers. In his study of the use of rock as a stimulus for combat for American troops during the war in Iraq, Jonathan Pieslack contends that due to recent developments in audio technology, music invaded every realm of warfare. While soldiers of earlier conflicts had largely depended on the radio as their sole source of music, American soldiers in Iraq had the “greater availability of portable audio devices, like small tape players” which provided “the opportunity for music to play a more prevalent role as an inspiration for combat” (2009: 48). Pieslack’s research is based on a number of interviews with soldiers who had served in Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. Most of the interviewees identified
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 ‘hate the world, it’s so romantic’ 97 hard rock/metal bands as their music of choice before going into combat, chiefly Metallica, AC/DC, Megadeth, Skid Row, Guns N’ Roses, Judas Priest and Faith No More. Bearing in mind the list of bands and songs collected by Pieslack, it is interesting to note two significant facts. First, that all these bands are originally American, just as much as the majority of rock bands featured in the score of hooligan films are essentially British, which corroborates the connection between musical nationalism and war as conveyed by the bands’ national credentials. Secondly, that the thrills and rush sought by hard rock strains have a direct effect on the motivation and attitude of listeners, both on an individual and on a collective level, as they aim to “[inject] the crowd with massive shots of energy” (Campbell and Brody 2008: 360). Scholars have duly analysed this particular stimuli- response pattern of rock to further comprehend the music’s galvanising potential and have frequently pointed to the electric component as the fundamental triggering source. James Wade describes Jimmi Hendrix’s electric musical flow as a substance with (re)animating powers, making “living things alive” (2008: 97). On a similar note, Nick Cohn argues that the heart of rock’n’roll lies in the central, governing presence of the electric guitar, and its vast possibilities as lead instrument, for even though it had regularly featured in other types of music such as jazz or R&B, “it had never been used as bedrock, as the basis of a whole music [before]” (2001: 11). Rock bands in hooligan films reproduce what De la Fuente terms the 1970s and 1980s fascination with electric guitar sounds (2007: 81) and with the electric devices that accompany them (synthesisers and amplifiers). Thus the films succeed in securing rock’s status as a cadence for fighting, a fact not lost on The Clash, who, in their aesthetic crusade to merge punk’s fury with the epic rage of battle, titled their 1982 album Combat Rock. Rock music, therefore, has a vital role in the enactment of rituals for bonding among soldiers. Their sense of community is strengthened as they “come together and participate, either by listening, or singing/yelling along with the lyrics, in organized pre-combat actions” (Pieslack 2009: 54). Pieslack elaborates on the collective aspect of music when he describes how “the soldiers psychologically prepare themselves for the possibility of combat through the shared experience of music” (54). Thus he follows in the line of DeNora’s psychological exploration of the association between music and combat which contends that, in the battlefield, music functions as a device for “establishing a collaborative action” and as a “pretext for action” (DeNora 2000: 111, qtd. in Pieslack 2009: 55). In hooligan films, this musical, ritualistic function of collaborative action is doubly accomplished through rock. On the one hand, as we have seen, rock is more than just a background intonation of fight and pre-combative scenes: every musical element (from the rhythmic drive to the lyrics and song titles) and contextual detail (from musicians’ biographies to the countercultural turmoil Britain was immersed in during the 1980s) is manipulated to convey the characters’ firm sense of belonging to something larger and more important than the individual by himself could ever aspire to: the gang. On the other hand, at a meta-narrative level, rock encourages in viewers the impulse to empathise and become emotionally involved in the characters’ desire to integrate and contribute to that
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 98 ignacio ramos gay larger, collective entity. As an aesthetic tool charged with several signifying layers, rock persuades viewers to give in to the characters’ conviction that gangs and firms represent the protective fortress where the individual becomes fused with the group. The firms’ chants have just such a decisive role in the ritualising of group behaviours and in affirming the members’ affiliation and loyalty to them. West Ham’s anthem ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ stands out as one of the most popular hymns in hooligan films, appearing in productions such as Green Street, Cass and The Firm. Originally a popular tune performed in Broadway musicals during the interwar years, it was eventually appropriated by West Ham’s terrace and the InterCity Firm. Within the cinematographic context, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ is cantillated a capella by the hooligans as they arouse their sense of shared identity over countless pints at pubs or on their way to and from the stadium. Once again the central motif around which these practices gravitate is the notion of warfare, as hooligans reproduce and systematise within their own lines, the ceremonious conduct of soldiers during training or on their way to combat. As Pieslack puts it, the musical environment of “Basic Combat Training”, together with “running and marching cadences, involves soldiers in collective singing responses that are intended to develop camaraderie” (2009: 54). Just as teamwork and unity is “vital to military service, completing a mission and, in some cases, survival” (55), the sonic environment of the chants democratises the differences between the gangs’ members themselves and unifies them against the enemy. This clear buildup towards the integrative and the homogeneous explains why in Green Street Elijah Wood’s character is accepted in the gang. Overruling what would initially appear an impediment (the character’s Americanness) is his loyalty to the group, an allegiance that is at its best when he joins in the chanting of ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ in absolute unison. Hence in the context of actual warfare, rock’s stimulus as an awakening against defeat and as a medium to solidify and seal cracks that may potentially fracture the troops is also present in football chants. According to Pieslack, “by singing/screaming the lyrics of a song or listening to a song within the same physical space, soldiers create a sense of community through their common act in preparation for a common objective” (2009: 54). In the same way, in hooligan gangs, sharing and participating in the same musical experience both in time and space consolidates group formation as well as friendships founded on similar tastes in popular music. It is important to note that the chanting occurs either before or after combat and not during it, since, obviously, full concentration is necessary during confrontation. In this sense, chants resemble American soldiers’ reliance on metal music in that “the music is a ‘pretext’ for action, not a soundtrack to the fighting” (Pieslack 2009: 56). The fact that in combat scenes filmmakers resort to extra-diegetic rock music is significant for two reasons. Firstly, embedded within pre- and post-fight chant scenes, rock’s prominence as a means to totalise the glamourous appeal of the football soldier becomes all the more evident. Secondly, directors’ delicate combination of rock and the sound effects of the violence onscreen represents an interesting sonic twist to real-life military attacks. Pieslack argues that the soldier’s survival instinct forces him to “block out sounds that are not
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 ‘hate the world, it’s so romantic’ 99 immediately useful” in the battlefield. In Buzzell’s words, “the sounds of combat become the music” (qtd. in Pieslack 2009: 56). Filmmakers’ creation of an environment where the natural sound effects of the action are synthesised within the rock track at hand, resonating and reverberating within the music, suggests that sole reliance on sound effects may be insufficient to reproduce the rush of thrills and the agitation aroused in combat situations. By coupling sound effects and rock, they surrender to viewers a perfected consummation of the sound of combat.
5. Conclusion. Revising the hooligan myth: music and the glamorisation of violence The epic flavour provided by rock’n’roll music and its connection to a symbolic battlefield contribute to the exorcising of the social fears awakened by hooligan terror. In the light of popular music, the hooligan’s toughness is conveniently set to music and hence, dulcified. The films’ soundtracks aim not only at establishing an accurate, legitimate correlation with a specific period within recent British history, but also at revisiting the general desolation and dissatisfaction that sociologists and historians associate with the decade. This backwards glance into the psychological and social depths of the past constitutes in itself a re-writing of accepted historical records and reports whereupon the thug is re-examined. By activating emotional and visceral mechanisms in the viewer that appease and explain the motives underlying thug violence, the hooligan becomes, to a large extent, redeemed from the impenetrable absolutism characteristic of archetypes of social terror. That music plays a fundamental part in the aesthetic penchant towards a partial atonement of the hooligan would explain why films like I.D., with almost no musical score at all, may be considered darker and cruder reflections of hooliganism. By this token, I would contend that films heavily and consistently charged with popular songs, such as Cass or The Firm, may be regarded as paler, romantic contributions to hooligan iconography. Music contributes to the glamourisation of the Thatcher years and its side effect of juvenile violence by means of igniting what Tulving termed the “episodic memory” (1985), by which he referred to the subjective record of events surrounding personal experiences. Applied to musical processing, episodic memory is built on the assumption that emotions are induced in the listener “because the music evokes a personal memory of a specific event in the listener’s life” (Deliège et al. 2011: 123). The conscious selection of an ‘old-school’ musical score in films like The Firm or Cass excites in the viewer a vivid recollection of the past, one that sways to and fro between these emotional possibilities. The sound, with its spontaneous connection between time, image and music conjures intense memories that evoke and redefine, if not glorify, the whole epoch by means of filtering it through nostalgia of youth. The nostalgically sentimental component should not be underestimated, for it has frequently been the object of criticism and complaint of the die-hard football fans and former hooligans themselves. In this sense, following the release of Green Street in the uk, Cass Pennant, evidently unshaken by its redolent sentimentality, declared that the film “failed to
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 85-103· issn 0210-6124 100 ignacio ramos gay impress the hardcore icf who . . . are too close to the subject of football violence for Green Street to ever have a chance of being able to meet their expectations” (Pennant 2002: 310). It is not just their sharing of subject matter (hooliganism during the Thatcher era) that yields to the consideration of these films en bloc; the pervading nostalgic, reminiscent tones of the countercultural, anti-establishment spirit of the 1980s demands that they be regarded as a sub-genre within the cinematographic tradition of Britain. In these films, music acts as an agent of poetic justice by assisting filmmakers in their mission to release the liminal hooligan from the abject stigmas once fathomed and perpetuated by the media. Soundtracks varnish and reshape anti-social violence, turning hooligans into romantic heroes and victims of the conservative system. As members of the oppressed, working-class kinship, their military methods —construed more nihilistically at times and at others, more quixotically— resist reductive appreciations of their conduct as acts akin to the terrorising behaviour of mercenaries. Chantal Cornut-Gentille (2006) states that ‘heritage films’ in the Thatcher years sought to retrieve a romanticised epoch of aristocratic values in order to confront the current time’s decadence, through a combination of evocative and reflexive nostalgia. We should wonder whether recent hooligan music scores have not become the new and most effective instrument of the ‘heritage’ mood of today, and should welcome further study on the aesthetic negotiations between the media’s hooligan and the films’ mystified “faux thug” (Neville 2011: 33) so as to balance out what could potentially determine the final, sempiternal words to be engraved in the palimpsest of 1980s British history.
Works Cited Bodin, Dominique, Luc Robène and Stéphane Héas 2005: ‘Le hooliganisme entre genèse et modernité’. Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 85: 61-83. Borthwick, Stuart, Ron Moy 2004: Popular Music Genres: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh up. Burns, Danny 1992: Poll Tax Rebellion. Stirling: ak. Campbell, Michael and James Brody 2008: Rock and Roll: An Introduction. Belmont: CA: Cengage Learning. Carrington, Ben and Ian McDonald, eds. 2001: ‘Race’, Sport and British Society. London and New York: Routledge. Cavanagh, David 2001: The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For the Prize. London: Virgin. Chassaigne, Philippe 2005: Ville et violence. Tensions et conflits dans la Grande-Bretagne victorienne (1840-1914). Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Ciesla, Robert 2004: ‘The Sharp Edge. Interview with John King’
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Cornut-Gentille, Chantal 2006: El cine británico de la era Thatcher. ¿Cine nacional o nacionalista? Zaragoza: P Universitarias. Davies, Andrew 1998: ‘Youth Gangs, Masculinity and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’. Journal of Social History 32.2: 349-69. De la Fuente, Manuel 2007: ‘El rock y su escenario. Características y desafíos del espectáculo en la música popular’. Boletín Hispánico Helvético 23: 71-82. DeNora, Tia 2000: Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Deliège, Irène, Jane Davidson and John Sloboda 2011: Music and the Mind. Essays in Honour of John Soloboda. Oxford: Oxford up. Diab, Osama 2012: ‘Egypt Football Violence: Hooliganism on the Surface, State Thuggery Underneath’
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Montague, James 2012: ‘Egypt’s Politicised Football Hooligans’
Films cited Awaydays (Pat Holden, 2009) Cass (John S. Baird, 2008) End of the Century (Jim Field and Michael Gramaglia, 2003) The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 2000) The Firm (Nick Love, 2009) The Football Factory (Nick Love, 2004) Green Street (Lexi Alexander, 2005) Green Street 2: Stand Your Ground (Jesse V. Johnson, 2009) I.D. (Philip Davis, 1995) Mean Machine (Barry Skolnick, 2001) Rise of the Footsoldier (Julian Gilbey, 2007) Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (Julien Temple, 1980) Rude Boy (Jack Hazan and David Mingay, 1980) Victory (John Huston, 1981)
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Received 20 February 2012 Revised version accepted 10 October 2012
Ignacio Ramos Gay is Senior Lecturer in French Literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. He specialised in nineteenth-century European drama and popular culture. He is the author of Oscar Wilde and French Boulevard Theatre (2007), and has published a wide range of articles on theatre adaptation in journals like Romantisme, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, Revue des Sciences Humaines, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Pennsylvania Literary Journal. He is currently working on hooliganism on the stage, and on the interaction between the theatrical freak show and British tv comedy.
Address: Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación. Universidad de Valencia. Avda. Blasco Ibáñez 32. 46010, Valencia. Tel.: +34 963864100.
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ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24 issn 0210-6124 Luisa María González Rodríguez · Miriam Borham Puyal
Promoting Intercultural Competence through Literature in clil Contexts
Luisa María González Rodríguez Miriam Borham Puyal Universidad de Salamanca Universidad de Salamanca [email protected] [email protected]
Recent approaches to English Language Teaching show that learning a language should not just involve linguistic competence but also include intercultural competence. The linguistic aspect of language learning has been played down in favour of an intercultural competence framework where learners can acquire skills that enable them to explore cultural complexity and enhance cultural understanding. It is widely acknowledged that literary texts may offer learners opportunities to develop critical reading skills that help them understand other cultures, thus acquiring new cultural frames of reference and a transformed world view. The purpose of this paper is to show how to foster students’ intercultural competence by having them read literary texts in English within a clil context. The approach presented here aims at working with literary texts both on a cognitive and an affective level by offering creative and challenging tasks focused on developing intercultural competence inscribed in this content- based teaching methodology. In order to do so, the present article describes a case study in which a unit entitled “Gender Roles” has been developed for and implemented with students of English. Their responses have been monitored and analysed, evidencing the initial hypothesis of the relevance of literary texts for the enhancement of intercultural awareness.
Keywords: linguistic competence; intercultural competence; language learning; cultural frames of reference; clil. . . .
Promover la competencia intercultural a través de la literatura en contextos clil
Los nuevos enfoques de la enseñanza del inglés demuestran que aprender una lengua no debería suponer sólo adquirir competencia lingüística, sino que debería incluir la competencia intercultural. El aspecto lingüístico del aprendizaje de una lengua ha perdido relevancia a favor de un contexto de competencia intercultural en el cual los discentes puedan adquirir habilidades que les permitan explorar complejidades culturales y promuevan la comprensión. Es ampliamente reconocido que los textos literarios pueden ofrecer a estos discentes la
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oportunidad de desarrollar la capacidad de lectura crítica que pueda ayudarles a entender otras culturas, adquiriendo así nuevos marcos de referencia y una nueva perspectiva del mundo. El propósito del presente artículo es potenciar la competencia intercultural de los estudiantes a través de la lectura de textos literarios en lengua inglesa, dentro de un contexto clil. El enfoque que aquí se presenta pretende trabajar con textos literarios tanto en el nivel cognitivo como en el afectivo, ofreciendo tareas creativas y motivadoras que se centren en el desarrollo de la competencia intercultural enmarcada en la metodología de enseñanza basada en contenidos (content-based). Este artículo ofrece pues la descripción de una unidad didáctica llamada “Gender Roles” diseñada para estudiantes de Estudios Ingleses, y la presentación y análisis de sus respuestas a la misma, demostrando la hipótesis inicial de la importancia de la literatura para desarrollar la competencia intercultural.
Palabras clave: competencia lingüística; competencia intercultural; aprendizaje de lenguas; marcos culturales de referencia; clil.
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1. Introduction Current approaches to Foreign Language Teaching (flt) have shifted from aiming at proficient linguistic competence to highlighting the importance of achieving intercultural competence. Most Foreign Language (fl) teachers are in favour of introducing the cultural dimension as an integral part of fl curricula. There are, however, different opinions as to what the best methods of enhancing intercultural competence might be. Some scholars complain that few fl teachers have a deep understanding of the importance of culture teaching as a means of fostering the acquisition of intercultural skills, and contend that this should be one of the pedagogical challenges of flt (Sercu 2005). There seems to be a consensus as to the need to nurture cultural responsiveness in fl educators so that they can make classrooms “culturally sensitive places to learn” (Porto 2010: 47). In fact, a more comprehensive view of culture, understood as the particular beliefs, ways of life, and even artistic expressions of a specific society, should obviously be the goal of current fl education. As foreign language classrooms become more multicultural —in the case of Spain owing to ever increasing immigration from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia—, some educators suggest that new fl teaching practices should reflect this trend by enhancing intercultural awareness and promoting cultural understanding. In this context, culture is usually considered as a dynamic process leading to intercultural encounters. Sercu, for example, contends that culture learning should be defined “in terms of the acquisition of intercultural skills, such as independent exploration of cultures or the ability to mediate successfully in intercultural situations” (2005: 120). In the same vein, Skopinskaja (2003: 40-41) aptly remarks that students should not only be aware of similarities and differences between the target culture and their own cultural background but also that they should establish a “sphere of interculturality” by learning to observe the world from the perspective of others, thus decentring their own perspective. Bredella (2003: 237) also points out that intercultural awareness makes us relativize our own cultural values and prevents fundamentalist attitudes. For this reason, Byram (2008) underlines the importance of enhancing in learners a “critical cultural awareness” since fl teaching should contribute to better understanding of other peoples and cultures. He also suggests that fl learning should be a comprehensive and deep process leading to critical reflection and consequently to intercultural communicative competence. Within this framework, the present article introduces a case study conducted in a Spanish university which aims to suggest means to enhance this increasingly relevant intercultural communicative competence by the use of literary texts as part of the syllabus within a Content and Language Integrated Learning (clil) context. This paper tries to highlight the importance of the cultural dimension in the foreign language curriculum and reflects on the potential of literary texts for promoting intercultural competence in higher education. With these goals in mind, this paper describes the advantages of using clil as a pedagogical approach for developing intercultural reflection through the use of literary texts.
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2. Intercultural awareness and its development in Higher Education 2.1. Relevance of intercultural competence in higher education The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (cefr) underscores the need to move towards intercultural education by stating that “[i]n an intercultural approach, it is a central objective of language learning to promote the favourable development of the learner’s whole personality and sense of identity in response to the enriching experience of otherness in language and culture” (2001: 1). Moreover, due to the internationalisation of higher education, fl teachers are becoming especially aware of the importance of promoting intercultural skills in their classrooms. Stier (2006: 9), when reflecting on this issue, considers that higher education should help students “operate efficiently in intercultural-interaction situations” and accordingly “increase students’ future employability”. That is, higher education will probably play an important role in providing intercultural training and preparing students to understand and accept cultural diversity. This internationalization calls for new methodologies that can help students achieve intercultural skills in order to interact efficiently in intercultural situations.
2.2. Literary texts and intercultural awareness The power of literary texts to construct sociocultural images and reflect different ways of experiencing the world has been widely acknowledged. The use of literary texts can promote reflection on cultural differences, develop understanding of the home culture, and consequently enhance more tolerant and open attitudes towards other cultures. Some authors point out the potential of fictional texts to develop critical self-awareness by engaging both students’ cognitive and affective dimensions, which paves the way to intercultural awareness and understanding (Phipps and González 2004; Zacharias 2005). Such texts not only provide opportunities for developing our students’ capacity for critical analysis of foreign cultures, but also for affective response when learners vicariously experience other attitudes and values. Tomlinson and Masuhara (2004), for instance, claim that cultural awareness may be achieved through experiencing the culture, either directly through visiting a culture, or indirectly through films, music or literature. According to Thanasoulas (2010), exposure to literary texts not only helps students increase their language competence, but also helps them define and redefine their own cultural values by exploring and interpreting the assumptions and beliefs of the target culture. Furthermore, Bredella (2003: 230) contends that art contributes to self-reflection and imaginative immersion in otherness thus fostering intercultural skills. In the same vein, Corbett (2010: 6-7) highlights the importance of using literary works and other cultural forms of expression as effective ways of enhancing tolerance for diversity and empathy; while Ghosn (2002) remarks on the potential of literature as a change agent since good literature contributes to the emotional development of the student by nurturing interpersonal and intercultural attitudes. Although the potential of literary texts in flt has been underestimated in the past, present methodologies have started to appreciate the advantages of using them not only
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 promoting intercultural competence 109 for communicative purposes but for developing cultural understanding as well. Fiction would meet intercultural objectives as long as analytical and creative tasks were designed to enable students to explore different cultural perspectives and compare these to their own. In this sense, literary texts are authentic materials which may help discover culture- dependent beliefs, opinions, habits and viewpoints. Since there are many English language cultures, Pulverness (2004) strongly recommends teachers to use texts and materials which relate to more than one English-speaking culture and to avoid conveying the impression that they are focusing only on British or American culture. While Cai (2002) proposes different views on how to use multicultural literature to help students to vicariously experience crossing cultural borders, some research has proven that multicultural stories induce empathetic responses to the experiences of the story characters (Häggblom 2006). Multicultural literature can then provide a wide variety of values, beliefs and different perspectives which can enrich and enlarge our students’ viewpoints. Thus, the use of literary texts avoids superficial, simplified, impersonal, or artificial ways of presenting cultural content in textbooks. Literature could then replace course-book cultural materials since it is proven to be more representative of the multilingual diversity of English language and culture. Furthermore, literary texts can be used in conjunction with new methodological innovations to facilitate intercultural learning processes within different contexts, as well as to complement other sources of information.
2.3. How could we address intercultural competence within current language approaches? Traditional approaches to fl teaching were often unable to raise our students’ intercultural awareness since they were more focused on language training and the cultural materials provided for instruction were recurrently used to contextualise the presentation and practice of language points. Many teachers complain that most foreign language teaching textbooks rarely include consideration of culture and intercultural communication and, when this happens, cultural information is usually considered as secondary to linguistic content and is presented in an arbitrary and artificial way. Thus, Cortazzi and Jin contend that “what is needed are appropriate methods for teaching and learning culture in the efl classroom that will facilitate a reflective use of the best available materials” (1999: 210). Content and language integrated learning (clil) is a new paradigm in language education advocated by some researchers as a holistic approach which engages students intellectually and cognitively in both language and content and which may, therefore, have an impact on mental activities (Martyniuk 2008). clil is claimed to promote cultural literacy and fluency in the target language while students apply prior knowledge and use cognitive skills. The use of real-world topics reflecting foreign viewpoints reinforces the potential for combining language and intercultural learning. The importance of this approach lies in the fact that learning contents in another language can affect our conceptual mapping, modify the way we think, and, in addition, broaden our thinking horizon (Marsh 2011). We would suggest here that clil is an integrated dual-focussed approach to fl teaching that could easily include the cultural dimension in order to
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 110 luisa maría gonzález rodríguez · miriam borham puyal provide a more comprehensive and pluralistic view of foreign cultures. Lonon Blanton contends that only content-oriented curricula can help college students develop “the deep literacy on which their academic success depends” (1992: 285). In the same vein, Wolff (2007) sustains that the educational objective of intercultural competence may be best implemented within clil approaches. Recent research has found that topics on ethnic diversity raise students’ intercultural awareness and ethnic tolerance (Neto 2006). It could be argued that the potential of clil contexts for enhancing intercultural competence seems to be high since this framework allows teachers to deal with topics linked to the construction of people’s cultural identity. Hence, “the integrative nature of clil classes provides an opportunity for taking not only a dual-focussed but a triple-focussed approach: simultaneously combining foreign language learning, content subject and intercultural learning” (Sudhoff 2010: 36). From an intercultural perspective, the topics selected for clil programs might allow students to explore and to ponder on cultural topics self-reflexively. The topics organizing the syllabus in clil contexts seem to be ideal for introducing and exploring cultural issues connected to the themes. Moreover, as one of the aims of this pedagogical approach is to develop students’ critical thinking, it could promote an awareness of worldwide problems and consequently contribute to intercultural competence.
3. Theoretical Framework clil contexts provide the opportunity to work with authentic materials and, consequently, they have great potential in the enhancement of students’ insights into authentic foreign perspectives. As a result, clil provides a unique framework to promote intercultural competence through the use of multicultural literary texts. Hence, this article offers a frame for integrating literary texts into flt and dealing with intercultural skills and competencies in a systematic, natural way. clil is proposed as the theoretical framework within which literary texts can be used to enhance intercultural communicative competence while focusing on specific topics. We contend that literary texts should be a crucial element in content-based fl instruction since they might complement other source texts, while they also provide wider insights into the topics. By reading multicultural fictions that portray varied attitudes, feelings and assumptions on a given topic, students will acquire a richer and broader perspective of the theme. Moreover, the affective component present in literary texts will lead to deeper processing and better learning of both language and content matter. This would allow students to become interculturally competent as they explore a topic from foreign viewpoints. With the abovementioned frame in mind, our methodological proposal consisted of organising the syllabus in terms of thematic units, and in employing a variety of texts so that the students acquire both the language and the contents. Theme-based courses are among the most common models of clil implemented at tertiary levels because of the lack of complexity in terms of their implementation, since “language instructors operate
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 promoting intercultural competence 111 autonomously from the rest of the faculty and there is no demand for organizational or administrative adjustments” (Dueñas 2004). In order to structure and develop these thematic units, texts from varied articles were used to help the students attain ideas on the topic, as well as the vocabulary or the linguistic structures necessary to express these ideas. Then, literary texts were employed to complement printed and online resources such as articles from newspapers, psychology or sociology papers, statistics, governmental reports, lectures, films, documentaries, etc. In this way, the literary texts contributed a multicultural perspective to each topic, through inviting the students to become emotionally involved and to observe the theme from different perspectives whilst taking cultural conditionings into account. The texts employed in class were structured within themes or social concerns that would allow a dialogue to be established between the different cultural groups represented by those texts, and would invite a greater emotional involvement and the existence of more points of view. That is, our proposal was to use a dialogic and multicultural model in order to work with the literary texts for pedagogical ends. In this vein, the general objectives of the units with which we subsequently worked were to reflect on culturally determined attitudes and values, to analyse the characters’ feelings to develop empathy, to compare target culture values to home culture ones, to promote critical interest in social and cultural issues, to explore and discuss cultural stereotypes, to nurture students’ tolerance and respect, and to overcome stereotyped perspectives in order to promote intercultural understanding. Further activities were suggested in relation to the chosen texts. These included discussing scenes and situations, role-plays and dialogues, creative tasks, such as writing letters or articles for newspapers, keeping a journal, and doing project work. Taking into account Corbett’s suggestions (2010: 5) and the abovementioned considerations, these activities were designed to focus attention on sociocultural issues in order to promote alternative attitudes and to foster respectful questioning of cultural practices.
4. Classroom Context The present case study was designed for and conducted in a second-year class of English as a Foreign Language (efl) in the context of the syllabus of the new degree in English Studies (Grado de Estudios Ingleses). This particular course, named “Lengua Inglesa III”, aims to achieve a b2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. According to the cefr, a b2 learner can understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation; can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party; and can produce clear, detailed texts on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options. The participants in the study were those students who regularly attended class and, consequently, could actively engage in classroom activities. Among the alumni were two
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Chinese and three French students, as well as one from South America, evincing the growing multicultural nature of current Spanish courses.
5. Syllabus implementation The syllabus of the course was organised into a number of didactic units which explored issues considered relevant in any society, and which we thought would engage the students’ interest: gender roles, work, education, etc. Different literary texts were selected for each unit, and before-, during- and after-reading tasks were designed. Students carried out some of these tasks as classroom activities, and others as homework. The main criterion in the selection of literary texts for the present case study was their portrayal of other ways of life within an English-speaking context. That is, they were chosen because of the potential they displayed for the development of intercultural awareness. Together with this potential, length or the possibility of exploring separate shorter chapters in the tight course schedule were also important factors in the selection process. We hoped to avoid an initial negative attitude towards the additional amount of reading the texts would imply. With this in mind, we also tried to find entertaining texts that students at a consolidated b1 level could approach without excessive difficulty. In this sense, Sandra Cisneros’ critically acclaimed The House on Mango Street( 1984) and Rakesh Ratti ‘The Greater God’ (1998) seemed appropriate, and, in addition, provided an insight into two different genres. To complement the reading of Ratti’s poem, a film, Outsourced (2006), was also used to explore important issues of contemporary Indian society. As an example, a unit on gender roles, as developed in the classroom, is described below in detail. A second unit developed within the syllabus, one which aims to improve other aspects of intercultural competency through the use of literature, can be found in Appendix 2.
Unit: Gender Roles This unit focuses on the traditionally and culturally assigned male and female stereotypes, raises awareness as to their function in different cultures, and draws attention towards the negative consequences of these stereotypes. In order to analyse the differences between men and women, we focused on Sandra Cisneros’s novel, The House on Mango Street, which provides several chapters that deal with female roles in Chicano culture and that describe how women try to free themselves from those stereotypes. The chapter ‘Beautiful and Cruel’ mirrors the desire of a new generation of Chicano women not to follow the tradition of submitting to men and depending on them financially. Paying special attention to sentences such as, “I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate” (Cisneros 1984: 89), the following activities were suggested, as shown in table 1:
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Pre-reading While reading Post-reading Creative writing Enumerate the Take notes of the Analyse how the Write a short biography positive and negative attitudes or behaviours influence of American about a man/woman stereotypes that define that support or destroy films or the contact who contributed to the roles of men and these stereotypes with a new culture subverting established women has changed Chicano stereotypes, using women’s desire to adapt other available sources to cultural conditionings of information.
Table 1
In another chapter, ‘Smart Cookie’, the submission and financial dependence of Chicano women is presented. As with the previous chapter, students examined Esperanza’s mother’s advice —“Esperanza, you go to school. Study hard . . . Got to take care all your own” (91)— and made connections to their own culture. Students were also asked to explain in groups their interpretation of this quotation and the one above under the light of the stereotypes and the defiance to these stereotypes as identified in the text. This kind of activities can make students aware that stereotypes are just a way of understanding what is foreign or incomprehensible from a cultural perspective. In addition, students watched extracts from the film Outsourced (2006), by director John Jeffcoat, in which a Westerner must face the challenge of finding himself in the midst of Indian culture and of trying to understand their values, beliefs and way of life. In these particular instances, the episode chosen approached the matter of what is socially expected from women and of arranged marriages. Students then debated their impressions in class, emphasising the differences they perceived with their own culture and aiming to make sense of such cultural differences. This activity served as a warm-up for the reading of the poem ‘The Greater God’ by Hindu author Rakesh Ratti. This poem was used in order to analyse the dichotomy between the role assigned by Ratti’s culture to women and his own way of perceiving things conditioned by his contact with American culture. Some of the proposed activities are described in the table 2.
Finally, students were asked to answer the post-reading questions in groups, as well as to attempt to write their own poem, which was considered a voluntary task. In addition, extra activities on gender roles were created to complement and further develop this unit, employing alternative texts which enhanced the variety of sources and tasks, as seen in Appendix 2. These activities could be used independently to constitute the core of the unit, or, as in the present case, as a means to reinforce the cultural awareness developed through the tasks described above. The aim of these activities was that students should become aware of cultural differences and of their own gender constructions, highlighting the consequences of gender discrimination and empathizing with the difficulties faced by women of different cultures.
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Pre-reading While reading Post-reading Creative writing Watching videos of Identifying and listing What are the female Write your own poem Outsourced on the the varied metaphors roles described in the including what you topic of arranged of the poem. poem? Are they the think Western female marriages and the same in your own stereotypes are. social expectations Writing an explanation culture? of Indian women. for the meaning of those metaphors. Why does the poet Working on the compare the woman of vocabulary. the poem with a lesser god? What does this metaphor imply? Why are women considered inferior to men in some cultures?
Why do you think the author ends his poem stating that the woman is to him “the greater god”?
In what ways do you think the fact that he grew up in America could have had an impact on his cultural values?
Table 2
6. Assessment 6.1. Method Two methods of assessment of the experience and of the intercultural awareness raised in the students were utilized. First, teachers employed observation as an instrument for assessing the level of students’ involvement and learning by means of monitoring their participation in class and their performance in the written activities that they had to carry out in groups. After the students worked together, the post-reading activities were submitted, and the teacher marked the students’ essays as part of their overall assessment. This method allowed for the collection of qualitative data and the observation of the students’ learning progress. In this part of the study most of the students enrolled in the class participated (n=40), and their performance was evaluated as part of their formative assessment. In order to provide quantitative data, a questionnaire was used to explore our students’ acquisition of intercultural competence (Appendix 1). The questionnaire used a 5-point Likert scale to measure the level of agreement of the students with different statements about the activities performed in class. The questionnaire was divided into three sections: the first related to cultural awareness in general and to how it had been enhanced by the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 promoting intercultural competence 115 literary activities; the second related to the way in which very specific elements of the texts had contributed to developing the students’ empathy or intercultural awareness; the third section looked into the students’ attitudes towards literature in a language classroom. The more general items were selected in accordance with the objectives of intercultural competence described by the cefr, while the more specific ones concerned with the readings carried out by the students focused on the outcome of the activities we had previously suggested (e.g. the focus on metaphors, which the students had worked on, or the exploration of their identification with the first–person writing). This questionnaire was handed out in class once the unit was concluded. Students had half an hour to complete it and could ask for clarification if needed. The items were written employing a language and style similar to that used in class; probably as a consequence of this, there were no doubts or misunderstandings while the students completed the questionnaire. From the students attending class, a representative sample was collected (n=33), and tabulated and analysed in order to gauge the success or failure of the experience. In contrast to the previous method, in this questionnaire the students reflected on their own experience and on the significance these activities had for their intercultural awareness. This emphasized the importance of self-assessment, which the European Space of Higher Education highlights, as opposed to the teachers’ assessment. This part of the research was therefore presented and used as an instrument for self-awareness rather than as a class activity that could be graded.
6.2. Results The response of the students was highly positive, as the results, expressed in percentages, show in Table 3. The majority of students agreed and strongly agreed with all25 items, which confirms the value they place on these activities in the development of their intercultural awareness. Among these general satisfactory results, we would highlight particularly relevant instances of agreement (i.e. items in which agreement was greater than 60%) as to the usefulness of literature as an instrument to raise intercultural awareness. For example, items such as “I think that the literary works used in class helped me reflect on my attitude towards gender differences in my own culture” (3), “These texts provided me with a vision of the restrictions to which females from other cultural backgrounds are subject due to conventional gender roles” (9), or “Ratti’s poem helped me reflect on the extent to which these positive female roles are present in/absent from Western culture” (20), assert the importance these literary texts had in the students’ reflection on their own culture, as well as on other cultures. Moreover, items such as: “By the inclusion of many female characters and voices in Cisneros’s novel, I achieved a wider vision of Chicano women’s issues and problems” (14), or: “These metaphors contributed to develop my empathy for the problems of Chicano women” (16), highlight the process of empathy and of sharing the other’s point of view which has been rendered possible by the use of the characters’ focalization or of metaphoric language, resources particular to literary texts. Finally,
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Item Strongly Disagree Neither agree Agree Strongly (n=33) disagree nor disagree agree f % f % f % f % f % 1. Cultural borders 1 3,0 12 36,4 14 42,4 6 18,2 2. Gender in other cultures 10 30,3 19 57,6 4 12,1 3. Gender in my culture 2 6,1 6 18,2 22 66,7 3 9,1 4. Question values 13 39,4 16 48,5 4 12,1 5. Gender stereotypes 1 3,1 6 18,8 19 59,4 6 18,8 6. My cultural values 1 3,0 7 21,2 19 57,6 6 18,2 7. Dangers of stereotypes 4 12,1 7 21,2 19 57,6 3 9,1 8. Approach cultures 1 3,0 10 30,3 15 45,5 7 21,2 9. Restrictions of gender roles 3 9,4 25 78,1 4 12,5 10. Low expectations towards women 7 21,2 16 48,5 10 30,3 11. Gender roles in my culture 16 50,0 15 46,9 1 3,1 12. Empathy for the underprivileged 1 3,0 8 24,2 17 51,5 7 21,2 13. Empathy for Esperanza 1 3,0 4 12,1 16 48,5 12 36,4 14. Female voices 1 3,1 6 18,8 21 65,6 4 12,5 15. Metaphors convey message 10 30,3 14 42,4 9 27,3 16. Metaphors develop empathy 1 3,0 8 24,2 21 63,6 3 9,1 17. Awareness of Chicano women’s issues 1 3,0 6 18,2 17 51,5 9 27,3 18. Women’s inferiority in some cultures 7 21,2 10 30,3 16 48,5 19. Metaphors of the poem 12 36,4 16 48,5 5 15,2 20. Female roles in my culture 1 3,1 7 21,9 20 62,5 4 12,5 21. Enjoyed literary texts 1 3,0 2 6,1 3 9,1 20 60,6 7 21,2 22. Enjoyed different genres 2 6,1 2 6,1 23 69,7 6 18,2 23. New vocabulary 2 6,1 6 18,2 14 42,4 11 33,3 24. Improved linguistic and communicative competence 1 3,0 11 33,3 19 57,6 2 6,1 25. Improved intercultural competence 1 3,0 8 24,2 15 45,5 9 27,3
Table 3. Distribution of frequencies a great majority of students also agree with items that assert the value of these texts in their learning of vocabulary or grammar (items 23, 24). Moreover, the level of agreement with items like “I enjoyed reading literary texts as part of my classroom activities” (21) and “I enjoyed reading different genres” (22), allows us to assume that literature has also contributed to making their learning more pleasurable and has become an important element in their learning motivation. In addition to the analysis of quantitative data, the questionnaire and the students’ group work provides qualitative data that supports these results. The answers to the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 promoting intercultural competence 117 questions “How would you feel if you were Esperanza, Esperanza’s mother or one of the women described in Ratti’s poem?” or “Do you think that Chicano and Indian women should challenge male power and cultural and social expectations? What should they do?” evidence that students’ were capable of assuming a first-person approach to the problems created by gender differences expressed in these texts. Some answers were, for instance, “If I were Esperanza’s mother I would feel disappointed with my life, and with the decisions she had to take. If I were Esperanza, I would feel hopefull [sic], because she has the opportunity of changing her life”.1 While mistakes still occur at this level, both the grammatical and cultural contents have been achieved: students can employ such structures as hypothetical conditionals to reflect on the situation of other women as compared to their own. In addition, these examples can be used both to work on the linguistic contents of the syllabus, and to deepen the discussion on the students’ empathy. Furthermore, working in groups as well as providing an opportunity for greater reflection and creativity, also offers a valuable insight into the development of the ‘students’ intercultural awareness. To the question on ‘Smart Cookie’ asking to explain the words of Esperanza’s mother, a representative answer was:
In Chicano culture women depend economically on their male counterpart. It is the women’s role to stay in the house and raise the children while it is the male’s obligation to receive an education and work to provide for their family. . . . She wants Esperanza to prosper on her own without the help of a man. Esperanza’s mom regrets leaving school because she was ashamed that she didn’t have nice clothes and she doesn’t want Esperanza to follow her footsteps. She doesn’t want Esperanza to sacrifice her own needs and dreams in order to comply with what Chicano culture expects from them.
Answers to the question “Why do you think the author ends his poem stating that woman is to him the greater God?” include:
I think the author ends his poem by stating that the woman is to him “the greater god” because he doesn’t agree with the point of view of his culture regarding the roles of women and he has come to realise that women are even more powerful and intellectual than men and they have a very important role in our lives. They are the pillar of the family who absorb all the negative things but radiate positive things like love, light and happiness.
Moreover, some students expressed the ways in which American culture influenced Ratti and his cultural values thus: “growing up in America has helped change his point of view about women’s role in society; perhaps, by looking at how women are treated in America he has come to noticed [sic] that women in his culture are looked down on, less
1 All instances of students’ production are reproduced verbatim.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 118 luisa maría gonzález rodríguez · miriam borham puyal valued and not treated with the respect they deserve. He thinks that the female’s role in his culture is like a punishment and it is an aberration to treat women in such a way”. Another remarkable example of this qualitative data would be the following poem, composed by three students:
‘Pleasant Resignation’ Behind smiling faces lie the pain and grief Behind those efforts to reach the degrading perfection I’ve seen tragedy A perfect complexion hides suffering within Everything surrounding them Treats them as disposable objects But want it to keep on being the same Unless they want to fade into the oblivion Not trying to claim back their soul And the fake smile they wear The crown on their heads The cross they bear Will be too heavy2
This is not only an interesting piece of creative writing, one which presents a skilful use of vocabulary, but also an instance of how students perceive what is hidden behind cultural constructions. This poem is just an example of the many we could quote from the students’ production. As a final remark, under the heading “personal reflection”, another group of students wrote that, after dealing with this unit, their conclusion was that “stereotypes should disappear” and “men and women should be equal”, reflecting that, though discriminating behaviour has changed over the years, “there are still too many countries were women are discriminated against” and that the latter should strive to achieve change. This paragraph was not asked for, it was provided by the students voluntarily, further evidencing their awareness of the intercultural contents of the unit. Intercultural values prove, then, not merely attitudes, but potential codes of behaviour that can change the society they live in.
7. Conclusions Under the light of our quantitative and qualitative results, we conclude that literary texts are an excellent resource for teaching students practical language skills, as well as for helping them to develop tolerance and empathy. The fact that the students’ perception of their own linguistic, communicative and intercultural competence had improved supports
2 We are very thankful to our second-year students for allowing us to publish their work in this study.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 promoting intercultural competence 119 our initial idea that the use of literary texts in an English Language classroom can enrich students from an intellectual and affective perspective, whilst at the same time widening their linguistic and communicative competence. Literary texts in English contribute to developing their intercultural competence, since they help to erase prejudices, to enhance empathy for others, to avoid monolithic perspectives, to reduce contempt towards other cultures, and to counter racist attitudes. The adoption of a multicultural pedagogy may help students understand different points of view, which leads to a revision of preconceived ideas. From this perspective, literary texts provide a multicultural interplay of voices that can teach students to respect the values and customs of different cultural groups. The integration of multicultural English fictions within clil contexts could further reinforce the benefits of these texts by encouraging reflection on different cultural representations. Moreover, clil seems to be the ideal framework for developing critical intercultural awareness since it allows teachers to design challenging activities which promote the acquisition of linguistic, communicative and intercultural skills. This case study shows that clil provides an adequate platform from which to explore different ways in which authentic materials in general, and literary texts in particular, can be integrated into the syllabus, and can be the source of motivating tasks which promote much —needed intercultural awareness. Our syllabus, then, is just a starting point for further research and methodological implementation. In the future, for example, this highly positive experience could be developed through portfolios (Simmons 2010), in order not only to analyse the results, but also to better monitor the acquisition process of intercultural competence. The unlimited availability and richness of literary sources opens the field for teachers to implement similar experiences and to continue exploring the compelling ways in which literature can enhance the syllabus of language classes.
Works cited Bredella, Lothar 2003: ‘Afterword. What Does it Mean to Be Intercultural?’. Geof Alred, Michael Byram and Michael Fleming, eds. Intercultural Experience and Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 225-39. Byram, Michael 2008: From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship: Essays and Reflections. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cai, Mingshui 2002: Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults. Reflection on Critical Issues. Westport, ct.: Greenwood. Cisneros, Sandra 1984: The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage. Corbett, John 2010: Intercultural Language Activities. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Cortazzi, Martin and Lixian Jin 1999: ‘Cultural Mirrors: Materials and Methods in the efl Classroom’. Eli Hinkel, ed. Culture in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 196-219. Council of Europe 2001: The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge up.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 120 luisa maría gonzález rodríguez · miriam borham puyal
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 promoting intercultural competence 121 Sudhoff, Julian 2010: ‘clil and Intercultural Communicative Competence: Foundations and Approaches towards a Fusion’. International clil Research Journal 1.3: 30-7. Thanasoulas, Dimitrios 2001: ‘The Importance of Teaching Culture in Foreign Language Classroom’. Radical Pedagogy Films cited Outsourced (John Jeffcoat,2006 ) ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 122 luisa maría gonzález rodríguez · miriam borham puyal Appendix 1. Questionnaire Express your agreement or disagreement with the following statements, taking into account that 1= strongly disagree, 2= disagree, 3= neither agree nor disagree, 4=agree, 5= strongly agree. Cultural awareness 1. I believe literary texts facilitate crossing cultural borders 2. I think that the literary works used in class helped me reflect onmy attitude towards gender differences in other cultures 3. I think that the literary works used in class helped me reflect on my attitude towards gender differences in my own culture 4. After working on gender roles in other countries, I am willing to question the values and presuppositions of my own cultural environment 5. These texts have helped me understand that gender stereotypes have a cultural construction 6. After reading these texts, I am aware of how my cultural valuesaffect my approach to gender stereotypes 7. After reading these texts, I am aware of the dangers of generalizing individual behaviours as representative of the whole culture The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, and “The Greater God”, by Rakesh Ratti 8. These texts allowed me to approach cultures very different from my own with which I had had little previous contact (Chicanoand Hindu) 9. These texts provided me with a vision of the restrictions towhich females from other cultural backgrounds are subject due to conventional gender roles 10. These texts have helped me reflect on the low expectations existing in certain cultures towards women 11. These texts helped me reflect on the restrictions owing to conventional gender roles existing in my own culture 12. These texts helped me develop empathy for women from underprivileged backgrounds 13. The fact thatThe House on Mango Street is written from Esperanza’s point of view and written in first person contributed to creating a better understanding of her situation as a Chicano woman 14. By the inclusion of many female characters and voices in Cisneros’s novel, I achieved a wider vision of Chicano women’s issues and problems 15. The metaphors employed by Cisneros’s heroine contributedeffectively to explaining the real situation of Chicano women 16. These metaphors contributed to develop my empathy for the problems of Chicano women 17. Cisneros’s text contributed to my awareness of the role of education and literacy in the liberation from constrained gender stereotypes 18. The poem by Rakesh Ratti made me reflect on the fact that in some cultures women are considered inferior to men 19. The metaphors used in Ratti’s poem helped me discover new positive female roles and expectations ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 promoting intercultural competence 123 20. Ratti’s poem helped me reflect on the extent to which these positive female roles are present in/ absent from Western culture Literature in the classroom 21. I enjoyed reading literary texts as part of my classroom activities 22. I enjoyed reading different genres 23. I feel I have learnt new vocabulary by means of these literary texts 24. I feel my linguistic and communicative competence has also improved through the performance of these activities 25. I feel my intercultural competence has improved through the performance of these activities Answer the following questions and justify your answer. How would you feel if you were Esperanza, Esperanza’s mother or one of the women described in Ratti’s poem? Do you think that Chicano and Indian women should challenge male power and cultural and social expectations? What should they do? Appendix 2. Alternative Intercultural Units based on Literary Texts Unit: Education. In this unit, students must become aware of the importance of education to prevent discrimination and to enhance their life. The chapter entitled ‘No Speak English’ from Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street describes the feelings of a Latin-American immigrant that is incapable of communicating in English, told from the perspective of the girl that lives on the same street. The following activities would be proposed: Pre-reading Post-reading Creative writing Project work Journal writing and role-play Have a look at the Analyse the woman’s Students write a dialogue Students will work in Students write about title and make feelings and possible between the woman and groups and gather the problems that can predictions about motives for being so the narrator. The girl information from arise when children the content of the sad. Explain the should ask the woman different sources about are educated within a story, the meaning of the about her feelings, her the way in which different culture than characters, etc. expression: “her voice expectations, etc. and she education can function that of their parents. sounds like a seagull.” should also try to convince either to empower or her of the necessity of disempower people. Reflect on why she is speaking English and Then, they should give reluctant to learn educating her son to an oral presentation English; why she is master the target summarizing relevant unhappy when her language and culture. information. son’s first words are pronounced in English. Students role-play the dialogue in front of the class. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 124 luisa maría gonzález rodríguez · miriam borham puyal In terms of intercultural competence, students would once again develop their capacity for empathy, while they reflect on the sense of belonging to a specific culture and hence also improve the awareness of their own culture and that of others. Together with the text by Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko’s short story ‘Lullaby’ could also be used to analyse the impotence and defencelessness of Native Americans that cannot read or write, nor use English to express their opinions or to challenge what is being imposed on them. Therefore, it also provides the opportunity to explore relevant intercultural issues with similar activities to the ones described above. Received 16 February 2012 Revised version accepted 1 October 2012 Luisa M.ª González Rodríguez teaches English Language and Discourse Analysis at the University of Salamanca. Her main fields of research are postmodern literature and second language acquisition. Her latest work is on the use of collage and intertextuality in Barthelme’s short fiction, published as part of the book Short Story Theories by Rodopi (2012). Miriam Borham-Puyal is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Salamanca where she also works as an English teacher, Assessment and Language Testing Coordinator and Head of Studies at the University Language Centre. She combines research on literature and language. Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Universidad de Salamanca. C/ Placentinos 18. 37008, Salamanca, Spain. Tel.: +34 923 294400 (ext. 1752; ext. 1247). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 105–24· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45 issn 0210-6124 The Duality of Communicative Purposes in the Textbook for Construction Engineering and Architecture: A Corpus-based Study of Blurbs Concepción Orna-Montesinos Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected] Although the textbook has traditionally been assigned a peripheral status in the repertoire of academic genres, in tertiary education settings it plays an essential role as a source of both content and generic literacy, hence acculturating novices into the epistemology of the discipline. However, the role of the textbook in the professional context has been to date relatively underexplored. The aim of this paper is to define the textbook as a textual product linking the academic and the professional. Corpus-based results of a study of the online blurbs which accompany construction engineering and architecture textbooks show an intricate merging of descriptive and promotional features which provides a valuable source for understanding the way authors and target audience interact and the way authors and audiences conceive the textbook genre. The analysis of the blurb moves shows a duality of communicative purposes, translated into a multifaceted discourse meant to accommodate the linguistic and rhetorical needs of a duality of audiences, both learners and professional peers. Corpus findings call for a reconceptualization of the textbook genre, as a genre addressing both an educational and a professional audience, and whose purpose is thus only partially educational. Keywords: textbook; blurb; construction; duality; audience; reconceptualization . . . La dualidad del propósito comunicativo de los libros de texto de la Ingeniería de la construcción y la Arquitectura: el estudio de un corpus de solapas (blurbs) A pesar del rol marginal tradicionalmente asignado al libro de texto entre los géneros académicos, en el contexto de la educación superior juega un papel esencial como fuente de aculturación de los no expertos, tanto en los contenidos y géneros de la disciplina como en la epistemología de la disciplina. Sin embargo, su papel en el contexto profesional no ha sido hasta el momento suficientemente investigado. El objetivo de este artículo es definir el libro de texto —125— 126 concepción orna-montesinos como un texto que une el mundo académico y el mundo profesional. Los resultados de este análisis de un corpus de solapas (blurbs) electrónicas muestran una intricada fusión de rasgos descriptivos y promocionales, una valiosa fuente para entender el modo en que interactúan el escritor y su público y el modo en que ambos conciben el género. El análisis de las solapas muestra una dualidad de propósitos comunicativos traducidos en un discurso con múltiples facetas, destinado a acomodar las necesidades lingüísticas y retóricas de un doble público lector, aprendices y profesionales. El estudio del corpus sugiere la necesidad de reconceptualizar el género de los libros de texto como un género a la vez educativo y profesional, cuya finalidad es solo parcialmente educativa. Palabras clave: libro de texto; solapa; construcción; dualidad; público lector, reconceptuali- zación ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 127 1. Introduction: conceptualizing the textbook genre Under the umbrella term of ‘textbook’, considered one of the “instructional registers” (Biber and Barbieri 2007) or “class genres” (Hyon 2001), the concept of textbook has often been associated with a pedagogical profile, a textbook designed to be used by learners in the classroom, both in secondary (Young and Nguyen 2002; Dimopoulous et al. 2003; Bezemer and Kress 2008, 2009) and tertiary education (Tadros 1989, 1994; Love 1991, 1993; Myers 1992; Swales 1995; Ward 2001; Biber et al. 2002; Parkinson and Adendorff 2004; Richardson 2004; Biber 2006; Jackson et al. 2006; Biber and Barbieri 2007). A key component of the system of university genres, the textbook is viewed as providing an epistemological map of disciplinary knowledge by summarizing confirmed knowledge and accepted and established views. Different definitions of textbooks have been proposed in the literature in this respect: “embodiments of the knowledge of their discipline” (Hyland 1999: 4); “repositories of codified facts and disciplinary orthodoxy, the place where we find the tamed and accepted theories of a discipline” (Hyland 2005: 101); “summaries of received knowledge, regarded by writer and (ideally) by reader, as fact” (Parkinson and Adendorff 2004: 382-83); “facts already accepted by the discourse community” (Jackson et al. 2006: 270). The textbook summarizes the ideas of the established members of a given disciplinary community and the author, “speaking for it” (Parkinson and Adendorff 2004: 389), appears as the only source of information, which internalizes the voice of individual members of the community and makes it an objective timeless truth so that the new claims of disciplinary research are transformed into accredited facts in textbooks. In this way, the author reduces the “cacophony of past texts to a single voice of authority” (Hyland 2005: 101). Because of the formative character of the genre (Kuhn 1963; Love 1991, 1993; Myers 1992; Hyland 1999, 2002, 2005; Moore 2002; Young and Nguyen 2002; Parkinson and Adendorff 2004; Klerides 2010), the textbook has been defined as a “canonical text” (Richardson 2004: 505) which acculturates learners into disciplinary knowledge, as well as into disciplinary culture. As such, it becomes a key literacy tool for students as a source for the acquisition not only of scientific and technological literacy but also of rhetorical and generic literacy. By introducing students into the contents, beliefs, values and methodology of the discipline, the textbook plays a “social action” (Miller 1984) and represents an example of “situated cognition” (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995), since learners are exposed to a dual knowledge —subject knowledge and knowledge of the rhetorical, generic and linguistic conventions established by the discipline for this particular genre typology. The mentioned studies agree that by providing a multidimensional disciplinary knowledge that comprises rhetorical knowledge, knowledge of the subject-matter itself, procedural knowledge and formal knowledge, the textbook genre helps learners and readers in the discipline to develop a professional identity and expertise, which, in the case of neophytes, will facilitate the transition from academic training into the workplace. In this paper I align myself with this integrative view of the formative character of the textbook. However, I also have to acknowledge that, despite their key acculturating role, ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 128 concepción orna-montesinos textbooks have been assigned a marginal, peripheral and, certainly, controversial status in the literature, which favors more prestigious genres such as research articles, “in terms of the improbability and implausibility of it [the textbook] contributing to our communal research enterprise”, as Swales (1995: 3) also remarks. Research genres, particularly the article, constitute a very specialized type of specialist-to-specialist communication through which members of a community legitimate new disciplinary knowledge, whereas “reading physics textbooks does not make you a physicist, and if you are a physicist, writing physics textbooks will not get you promoted” (Myers 1992: 3). Also frequently questioned is the contribution of textbook authoring to scholarship and promotion, justified in the argument that the textbook seems to be addressed to students rather than to teacher- scholars (Alred and Thelen 1993; Gebhardt 1993; Swales 1995). The reason for the lesser consideration of the textbook is, in my view, the fact that research into the genre has focused on the pedagogical purpose of the textbook, neglecting for its large part its connection with the profession. From the literature the image of the ‘textbook’ emerges as a very general one, referring to any kind of ‘book’, of a more or less academic nature, an image which would define any kind of pedagogical book designed to be used in the classroom, at any educational level. However, a preliminary analysis of the textbooks written and read by the architecture and construction engineering community reflects an unquestionably more complex picture (Orna-Montesinos 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2011). Thus the initial hypothesis of this paper is that the vast majority of textbooks written in this context only partially have use in the classroom as their single purpose. My claim, therefore, is that textbooks also have a professional readership which, to my knowledge, is underexplored in the literature. Although some authors do refer to a dual audience of students and peers (Alred and Thelen 1993; Hyland 2002, Swales 1995), the professional readership of the textbook seems to be considered as an indirect audience, restricted to reviewers or material evaluators —“directly addressed to the student audience”, but “constructed for the professional audience” (Alred and Thelen 1993: 469). In sum, the textbook has a complex nature as a pedagogical and disciplinary genre reflecting, as claimed by Hyland (2002), a duality of audiences and as a consequence a duality of discourses to accommodate the needs of both audiences. Departing from Swales’ (1995) view of textbooks as “‘hybrid’ in their efforts to cope with a complex audience configuration, to represent a broad area of available knowledge, to offer a ‘vision’, and to incorporate new findings emerging as a result of the exigencies of textbook writing” (15), this paper claims that the textbook genre has an all-encompassing pedagogical purpose, but with other perhaps not so obvious, underlying intentions behind that umbrella motivation. Hypothesizing about the multi-purpose character of the textbook genre and in line with Askehave and Swales’ (2001) work, my aim in this paper is to explore the communicative purposes of the genre, a key criterion for generic identification and ascription. Thus, in the theoretical background of this conceptualization of the generic integrity of the genre are the postulates of genre theory (Miller 1984; Swales, 1990; Bhatia 1993, 2004; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Hyon 1996; Johns ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 129 1997), which, with a socio-constructionist perspective, has traditionally emphasized an awareness of what, how and why texts are produced, their context, audience and purpose. However, I agree with Askehave and Swales that this purpose might be “more evasive, multiple, layered, and complex than originally envisaged”(2001: 197). 2. Corpus and methodology The analysis presented in this paper is rooted in previous research on the discourse of architecture and construction engineering textbooks (Orna-Montesinos 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2011) which has drawn attention to the complexity of the architecture and construction engineering textbook as an interplay of individuals, communities and institutions linked to a hybridity of communicative purposes. Based on that, the purpose of this paper is to explore a corpus of textbook blurbs in order to provide evidence of the hybrid character of the textbook genre. Focusing on one particular discipline, the construction discipline, my goal is to explore who, for whom and for what purposes these textbooks are written, thus contributing to the larger more ambitious body of research on the many approaches to textbook analysis. For the present work I used a self-compiled corpus of the online blurbs of 234 textbooks published between 1996 and 2011 by Elsevier Publishing under two imprints, Butterworth-Heinemann and Architectural Press,1 with a total 82,497 words, an average of 352.55 words per blurb (blurbs range between 105 and 1,225 words). A wide range of textbooks compose the corpus, among them textbooks devoted to the review of the work of an architect, or of an architectural period, treaties on the history of architecture, essays on the psychological or philosophical nature of the discipline, expert manuals on brickwork or timber construction, complete studies of particular aspects of construction such as light or stairs in buildings, detailed compilations of building regulations, or innovative presentations of new views, for instance, on sustainability or digital imaging. The choice of samples was based upon availability, since, with some rare exceptions, the publisher offered online blurbs for the above mentioned time-span. Although acknowledging that older titles are frequently mentioned as the basic bibliographical references of most disciplines, considered as classical or seminal contributions to the foundations of disciplinary knowledge, we cannot deny the fact that more recent publications undoubtedly allow their readers to access the most updated disciplinary knowledge. Considering the clear connection of the construction profession with technology and design, and particularly with the advances and most recent views in these areas, I find the corpus a significantly relevant repertoire of disciplinary texts. However, among the limitations of the corpus selection I should mention issues such as the possible longitudinal variation involved in this wide time span, or the specific generic constraints of the electronic blurb genre (as opposed to the traditional written blurb genre). 1 On 17 May, 2011 Elsevier’s uk Local booklist was sold to Taylor & Francis ( ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 130 concepción orna-montesinos I should also mention the disciplinary relevance of the textbooks published by Elsevier Publishing, which are among the most frequently cited texts in both academic and professional contexts. Also supporting the adequateness of corpus materials selected is the fact that, unlike other publishers, Elsevier online blurbs offered more complete information about the textbook author and about its intended readership. Elsevier blurbs followed a common pattern of sections, which include: • General information about the book: picture of the cover, title, name of the author, number of pages, size, year of publication, price and isbn (232 samples, 99.15%). • Key features: a summary, in bullet format, of the most relevant features of the textbook (224 samples, 95.73%). • Description of the textbook (231 samples, 98.72%). • Readership (230 samples, 98.29%). • Contents (233 samples, 99.57%). • Author information: professional adscription, qualifications, location, etc. (229 samples, 97.86%). • A quotes section (95 samples, 40.60%). The blurb thus became an invaluable source of information about the textbook, their author and their target audience; frequently the only one available. An ethnographic analysis complementary to the corpus analysis would have been a desirable source of first-hand insight into target readership, into textbook writing motivation or into communicative purposes. This, however, proved particularly challenging, since contact information about the authors was not provided by the publishers. Personal contact with some textbook authors, including those in the architecture and construction engineering discipline, as well as with authors from other disciplines, brought to the fore first of all the motivations and intentions mentioned in blurbs but also, surprisingly, the elusiveness of these authors about their purposes (one of them even claimed that he did not write ‘textbooks’). For the analysis of blurbs I will draw upon studies of the functional profile of blurbs. Combining genre theory (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1997, 2004) and studies of evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Martin and White 2005), these works have focused on the promotional intention of the genre (Bhatia 1997; Kathpalia 1997; Basturkman 1999; Gea-Valor 2005, 2006; Gesuato 2007; Gea-Valor and Íñigo-Ros 2009). As mentioned above, the connection of the blurb genre with the textbook, its target readership, and the author’s motivation for writing the textbook, which this paper specifically focuses on, has been, to my knowledge, under-researched. However, I must acknowledge the limited scope of this paper. A cross-generic analysis of blurbs with other genres sharing similar purposes, such as adverts, other book covers or other textbook presentations, or with other didactic and professionals genres would certainly broaden the understanding of the textbook genre. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 131 3. Moves in engineering textbook blurbs With the aim of better understanding the purposes and motivations of textbook authoring, in my study I focused on exploring who writes the textbook, how the addressee of the textbook is profiled and how the textbook is described and presented to the reader. Inspired by Swales’ (1990) moves and steps model of genre analysis, the exploration of the blurbs accompanying engineering textbooks showed that they are arranged according to four big moves: authorship, readership, presenting the textbook, and promoting the textbook. The four are present in the majority of the blurbs studied: Moves of the Blurb # textbooks % Authorship 229 97.86 Readership 230 98.29 Presenting the textbook contents 233 99.57 general presentation 223 95.30 defining approach 284 87.65 facilitating comprehension 295 70.51 outlining purpose 195 60.19 Promoting the textbook claiming value 181 77.35 showing credentials 150 64.10 responding to the profession 145 61.97 Table 1. Summary of moves of the blurb 3.1. Textbook authoring and reading The analysis of the ‘authorship’ move of the blurb yielded the following results about the professional adscription of the corpus textbook authors: Authorship Scholars 110 47.01% Architects 31 13.25% Mixed co-authorship 31 13.25% Consultancy 22 9.40% Business 9 3.85% Other 26 11.11% N/A 5 2.14% 234 Table 2. The ‘authorship’ move Of the 234 textbook blurbs analyzed, only 110 of them (47.01%) are authored, or co- authored, by scholars from different universities worldwide. Another group of textbooks is written by architects (13.25%), or by professionals working in different areas, such as consultancy (9.40%), business practice (3.85%), or a varied group of other specialized areas (11.11%) (local government, journalism, conservation, landscaping, surveying, law, planning, etc.). Interestingly, a number of textbooks (13.25%) are authored by writers who ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 132 concepción orna-montesinos claim a dual adscription as both academics and professionals, or co-authored by academics and professionals. The professional insight into the profession or the double academic and professional perspective do not only provide the reader with a more complete and realistic picture of the two facets of the discipline, but also challenges a priori expectations about the traditional educational adscription of textbook authors, thus pointing to the duality of the textbook as an educational and professional genre. When analyzing the ‘readership’ move of the textbooks discussed, I found that only 11.11% of them are targeted to an exclusively educational audience (students —graduate and undergraduate— and/or academics —lecturers, historians, libraries, etc.), as Table 3 shows. The majority of them (74.79%) are addressed to a mixed audience of both students and professionals, and 12.39% are written to cater for the needs of a professional audience, including a large range of professionals in all fields and sectors of the construction profession or of related fields (architects, engineers, designers, lectures, facility managers, planners, surveyors, contractors, manufacturers, institutions, etc.). Readership Mixed readership 175 74.79% Professionals 29 12.39% Students 26 11.11% N/A 4 1.71% 234 Table 3. The ‘readership’ move Arguing flexibility, textbook authors seem to be addressing a variety of readers everyone( in the construction industry, one of them claims; whether just starting out or as seasoned campaigners and practitioners says another) and therefore make a conscious effort to try to reach as wide an audience as possible, thus responding to the promotional character of the blurb genre: (1) Architects and building designers–professionals, students (senior undergraduates and postgraduates), and academics, researchers, all parties interested in sustainable developments, home owners, environmentalists, those involved in policy and management issues. [149] In an attempt to attract a wider readership, the move becomes a vehicle to provide the careful detail in an attempt to include any potential reader or to offer very specific data about the potential reader’s profile. Very few of the textbooks in the corpus do mention a specific reader (12 blurbs), and this they mainly do when the textbook is also devoted to a very specific topic. Rather, authors tend to move from the most specific audience to the most general (103), gradually opening their specificity focus to include all parties interested in, everyone involved in or those in related areas: ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 133 (2) Undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on vernacular architecture worldwide. Professionals involved in the provision of emergency housing or reconstruction work. Architectural historians, building conservators, anthropologists. [163] Some authors make an explicit reference to a primary and a secondary readership or market (22). However, most often this distinction is made implicitly: (3) Students learning estimating and tendering as part of building surveying, construction management, quantity surveying and civil engineering courses. May be of interest to professional estimators beginning in industry. [83] Although not the primary target, the promotional effort of the textbook writer also reaches the layman (15): self-builders, techie self-builders, diy enthusiasts or eco-enthusiasts with limited, if any, knowledge of the discipline. With the purpose of widening the focus to include people who might be interested in the particular topic of the book, a textbook on the architecture of London, for example, includes visitors to London and architectural tourists among its readership. More metaphorically, a textbook on architecture as a healing art is considered of interest to a mind, body and spirit audience. The readership move is in sum an informative move which intends to define the profile of the intended audience, but which, at the same time, tries to ‘sell’ the textbook to the widest possible audience of both professionals and even outsiders to the discipline. 3.2. Audiences constructed: the aims of textbook authoring Disperse throughout the sections of the blurb, textbook authors merge two different moves; the presentation of the textbook (of its contents, purpose or approach, both from the point of view of disciplinary knowledge and format, and justifying the textbook in the territory or the niche the textbook is aimed at occupying), and the promotion of the textbook (also the self-promotion of the author). See Table 4. An essential purpose of the corpus blurbs is, as expected, to introduce the textbook to the readers. Most of the blurbs analyzed refer to the contents of the textbook (233 textbooks). Another common feature in the corpus is the general description of the book (223), which serves as an introduction, followed by more in-depth considerations about the purpose of the textbook (195): providing guidance, understanding, reference, introduction or insight into any particular topic. Adapting to the purposes mentioned, the blurbs analyzed refer to different approaches taken by textbooks (284): to become introductory, the approach might require, for example, presenting the basics; to achieve understanding, providing a global overview of the topic or bringing a range of information together. Together with the transfer of knowledge, and very frequently at the same time, the blurbs refer to the practically- oriented purpose of the textbook, which are meant to be practical or to put theory into practice. Textbooks seem to be oriented to providing advice, models which can serve as ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 134 concepción orna-montesinos inspiration, or solutions for the readers’ own practice. Also very often the aim is to offer all the knowledge the reader might need to respond to their demands or deficiencies, whether in design or in any other field. Presenting the Textbook # cases # textbooks Contents 233 99.57% General presentation 223 95.30% Defining approach 284 87.65% practical 52 design advice 48 global overview 48 theory put to practice 40 info together 25 all knowledge needed 22 the basics 20 inspiration 16 advice / solution 13 Facilitating comprehension 295 91.05% visual style 66 case studies 64 examples 61 easiness 60 pedagogical approach 44 Outlining purpose 195 60.19% guidance 65 understanding 34 reference 28 introduction 21 insight 19 discussion 13 thought-provoking 10 refresher 5 Table 4. The ‘presenting the textbook’ move Merging the readership and the purpose moves, guiding seems to be oriented to both the professional and the student (e.g., to provide an easy point of reference for today’s designers and students and all those interested in the architectural history of London). For its learner audience (26 textbooks are specifically targeted at students, and 175 of them address a mixed professional and learner audience) this means helping them to achieve academic or educational goals (e.g., a comprehensive guide to all that an architecture student might need to know about undertaking the dissertation), whilst at the same time assisting them in their transition to professional life (e.g., a practical guide to planning a career in architecture). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 135 However, the textbooks in the corpus also target the professional readership (29 textbooks exclusively address an audience of architects or professionals) when they are presented as providing design strategies, how-to guides or recipes, labels which were frequently associated with the textbooks which seek to help the reader to achieve success (e.g., strategies for success in this fast growing, constantly changing and highly competitive marketplace) both by offering technical information or information about requirements, specifications or codes to comply with, and by providing design inspiration or supporting the designer to develop a design identity. As findings show (see Table 4), the textbook also seems to be a tool for provoking discussion or for stimulating reflection, particularly for more innovative or challenging topics or approaches (e.g., have a grasp of where the debate on urban design stands today, and where it may be going in the future), or even for questioning the current state of affairs (e.g., with a very serious aim: to radically change the way the urban realm is both experienced and designed), and thus for conceiving the textbook as a way of sharing new knowledge and, as a consequence, as an instrument for moving the field forward. The purpose of the blurb is not only to present the textbook. Intertwined with the description of the textbook is the blurb’s promotional purpose. The aim seems to be to show concepts in a practical context, but is also to enable you to develop and improve your design skills, to connect theory and practice to outline the future for successful design for critical care settings, or to offer design solutions to guarantee the safe, efficient and cost- effective running of any facilities function. By helping the reader to achieve academic or professional success, the corpus blurbs are contributing to claim value for the textbook. The ambitious aim of the textbook cannot be separated from the way knowledge is presented to readers (295 textbooks). The analysis of the blurbs shows that the authors of the corpus textbooks try to facilitate comprehension of the knowledge or approaches presented, for which many authors choose to use a case-study format and the introduction of examples. The frequent use of a visual style (illustrations, detailed drawings, 3d images, sketches, full color photographs) addresses both the learner audience (e.g., with over 100 sketches included, the book inspires student’s design ideas) and the more professional readership (e.g., by emphasizing design and discussing key concepts with accompanying visual material, architects are given the background knowledge and practical tools needed). As would be the case with textbooks in most disciplines, the direct or indirect pedagogical purpose of the construction engineering and architecture textbook (made clearly explicit in 44 blurbs) would justify the large number of the blurbs (295) that focus on features of the textbook which seek to facilitate comprehension (appendices, flow charts, tables, glossaries, diagrams, figures, calculations) or to assist in the learning progress (checklists, end of chapter exercises, tests). In order to aid understanding, and aware of the difficulties faced by readers to grasp the language of the trade, the blurbs describe their textbooks as being jargon-free or using simple English. The search for easiness (60), for an informal, easy to follow, user-friendly style, with unambiguous explanations, accessible ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 136 concepción orna-montesinos narrative, logical progression or a step-by-step approach makes it clear that the purpose of the textbook is to help the reader through the maze of the construction industry, whilst providing an essential and easy-to-use reference guide to this complex subject for the building industry professional. It is again another instance of merging of moves in which the presentation of contents combines with the presentation of value. The move is clearly a descriptive move on the textual and formal features of the textbook, but used with a promotional purpose. The introduction of facilitation techniques, the search for easiness and the use of examples and case studies is primarily a way of helping readers in the textbook; at the same time they are promoting resources in the blurb. 3.3. The blurb: promoting the textbook Promoting the textbook is not only implied in the discourse of the blurbs when they claim to respond to professional needs (145). It is also unambiguously expressed in a move in which the authors overtly claim value for their texts (203), or when the blurb establishes the authors’ credentials as experts in their discipline, or the credentials of textbook itself (153): Promoting the Textbook # cases # textbooks Claiming value 203 86.75% importance / relevance / value 125 uniqueness / novelty / difference 74 disciplinary value 73 updated edition 59 benefit for the reader 50 added value 16 Showing credentials 153 65.38% quotes 99 author(s)’ experience / expertise 36 bio 26 author(s)’ reputation 24 previous editions 24 author(s)’ previous work 8 Responding to the profession 145 61.97% problem-solving 107 disciplinary value 73 Table 5. The ‘promoting the textbook’ move As I have already mentioned, the textbook is meant to serve as a reference, a guide, or an introduction; but, by means of a highly, and explicitly evaluative discourse, the corpus blurbs present the textbook as an ideal, useful, indispensable, invaluable, vital or crucial resource for the reader’s professional or academic purposes. It is an essential one-stop shop, a must-have purchase, essential reading, which you simply can’t afford to be without, which ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 137 truly belongs on every design office desk. Its uniqueness and novelty, or the difference with other similar textbooks, are frequent value-creation arguments. Value also lies in the benefit the textbook can provide to the reader, whether in their success as professionals or as students (e.g. the reader will acquire a vocabulary covering the entire range of structure types and learn a new approach to understanding the development of design). Even the size, the format or the price of the textbook bring added value to the textbook. The presence of the textbook author in the blurb is clearly felt in their effort to show their credentials (153), professional, educational or personal. Value is established by referring the reader to the authors’ experience (36) or reputation (24). The blurb depicts authors as experienced practitioners (the authors have worked together in the area of engineering, professional and business ethics for many years), educators (uses his experience as a lecturer to present the material in a logical and accessible manner) or as conjugating both (an author team of academics and professional surveyors). Their participation in well-known projects (to draw on the experience of the design firm that delivered the 1999 Cardiff Millennium stadium), their involvement in an area directly related with the textbook topic (a member of the bsi sub-committee involved in the development of Eurocode 9), or the authors’ own personal experience (his experience of living in a solar house) also provide evidence of authorial expertise. Together with their experience, the reputation of the author as an expert, constructed with the help of highly evaluative adjectives such as leading, acknowledged, well established, foremost, unrivalled, unparalleled, recognized or well-known, also contributes to proving their credentials. In addition, the reputation of the author’s previous texts (8) (from the bestselling author of ‘Ecohouse’), or of previous editions of the textbook (24) (a bible for practising architects around the world) speak for the value of the textbook. In other blurbs the purpose of establishing the author’s credentials is more openly and explicitly achieved by including a short bio (26) claiming the author’s knowledge, professional expertise, awards, achievements or reputation: Clive Beggs is Professor of Medical Technology at the University of Bradford. He is both a mechanical engineer and a biomedical scientist, who for many years has had an interest in ways in which energy is utilized and consumed. He is an expert in the fields of energy management and low energy building design, with many years’ experience of the design and installation of mechanical services within the construction industry. He is a well-known international speaker and is author of many scientific papers on low energy and environmentally friendly building design. He is a holder of the cibse Carter Bronze Medal for his work on desiccant cooling. But the most frequently used resource to build the reputation and value of the textbook is the use of quotes (99) taken from the reviews or comments from customers, famous architects, academics, newspapers, professional journals, institutions, etc.: This book, while offering a primer for the understanding of materials, focusing particularly on contemporary materials, also promotes a revision of our thinking as design professionals . . . ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 138 concepción orna-montesinos the authors carefully construct their discussion around specific materials that do or could have architectural applications. By focusing on material behavior, rather than appearances, the book argues for a new way of thinking about architectural production. Journal of Architectural Education As the two previous examples have shown, at the same time that they promote the textbook, the use of quotes becomes the final step in building the reputation of the author. Thus, the promotional move merges with the self-promotion of the author. However, it is not only evaluative language that helps the blurb create value for their textbooks, but also the more subtle link to disciplinary value, with ethical, social or cultural considerations about sustainability, the environment or the protection of the architectural or archeological heritage, together with its contribution to developing adequate architect- client relations, or with disciplinary principles such as the future of the profession, innovation, safety, quality or best practice. The search for innovation, or for updating the reader on the latest developments and techniques, is the argument mentioned in the case of new editions of previously published, frequently successful, textbooks. Claiming value is not only connected with the author’s reputation but also with the aims in writing the textbook. When claiming to respond to perceived needs or lacks (e.g., demands faced by architects in their training and education; offers the missing interface between the different disciplines, identify important, but often unrecognised, principles), the move becomes a ‘fill-in-the-niche’ move in which writers at the same time create their niche as textbook authors. Corpus findings thus support studies about the promotional character of the blurb genre (Bhatia 1997; Kathpalia 1997; Basturkman 1999; Gea-Valor 2005, 2006; Gesuato 2007; Gea-Valor and Íñigo-Ros 2009) To ‘sell’ the textbook, as claimed by Bhatia (1997), has required the manipulation of the generic conventions of this introductory genre, the blurb, to make it what Gea-Valor (2005: 42) calls “factual marketing strategies”, with the clearly persuasive function of advertising and recommending the book to potential buyers. 4. Discussion of findings This corpus analysis of the online blurbs accompanying construction engineering and architecture textbooks has shown a very skillfully crafted merging of two purposes, as discussed in Bhatia (1997): the presentation of the textbook with its promotion. Because, as this study has illustrated, when describing the purpose of the textbook, its approach, format or target readership, the corpus blurbs rarely take a neutral position, but rather a clearly evaluative one. The value of the textbook is associated with the comprehension facilitation move, in which authors, showing awareness of the difficulties posed by “increasingly antidemocratic” (Halliday 1993: 21) techno-scientific discourse, make the effort to make the textbook accessible and comprehensible by means of a wealth of what Bhatia (2002) calls “easification” resources. Also used to promote the textbook are its ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 139 visual features, whose goal is, as claimed in the literature (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996; Bezemer and Kress 2008, 2009; Myers 1997), to aid comprehension of more challenging material, both for the novice and the experienced reader, thus responding to the highly visual learning style of the profession (see Úbeda and Escribano 2002). At the same time the use of case studies, of examples or photographs of famous buildings is a value creation tool conveying an implied positive comparison with prestigious buildings, the accepted models of disciplinary value. It is precisely the disciplinary relevance of visual features, ratified by the high frequency of use of visual resources, that should lead to a multimodal analysis of the textbooks comprising the corpus, like that proposed by Bezemer and Kress (2008, 2009). This could complement and ratify the claims made in the blurbs about their role in the illustration or the comprehension of the text. Also of interest for the purpose of understanding the blurb genre would be the exploration of the crucial role played by the visual/textual relation of the publisher website itself, as suggested by Gea-Valor’s work (2006). The absence of either of these is one of the limitations of this paper and as an option for future research. However, creating value is not only achieved by means of overtly evaluative discourse. By bringing information together, and therefore by making knowledge available, the purpose of the blurb seems not only to describe the textbook but also to help the reader. Adapting the textbook approach to its target audience and to the intended purpose of the textbook, the authors of the blurbs in the corpus choose to stress the aspect of the textbook which best suits their aims. Providing a practical approach, bridging the gap between theory or research and practice, or offering design advice or solutions, all appear in the corpus as clear disciplinary assets. The projection of the author onto their texts as responsible for responding to demands, needs or deficiencies, or for contributing solutions to the discipline’s problems, evidences the problem-solving applied nature of the construction engineering discipline. The reference to the author’s and the book’s credentials are at the same time a more subtle way of praising and justifying the textbook authoring. The undeniable effort shown in the corpus blurbs to interact with the reader by constructing the image of the textbook as a helpful, while at the same time reliable, resource shows the author’s awareness of the perspective of the reader. The reception of the text, as the postulates of reception theory put forward by Bakhtin and the members of the Russian Formalist School suggest, is as decisive as its production. The voice of the author needs to reach the reader. The successful interaction of the writer and the audience of the textbook requires the understanding of how the writer creates the textbook but also of how the audience will read, interpret and evaluate it, depending on the reader’s own assumptions, beliefs, values and expectations (Matsuda and Tardy 2007; Swales and Leeder 2011). The analysis of the corpus blurbs has provided a better understanding of the profile of the construction engineering and architecture textbook, and of the profile of both authors and potential readers. Supporting my initial hypothesis, my findings show that although a large percentage of the blurbs studied are written by university scholars, a high ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 140 concepción orna-montesinos proportion of them are written by architects or professionals from related disciplines. More importantly, a significant number of textbooks are co-written by academics and professionals. Mirroring the profile of the authors, the profile of the target readership of the textbook also reflects a multi-faceted picture: the largest group of textbooks addresses a mixed readership of professionals and students, professionals only, or even the layman. Contrary to expectations about the ascription of the textbook to an exclusively pedagogical context, the analysis of the corpus has shown that these textbooks have a dual orientation, a double-fold communicative purpose associated with two clear-cut target audiences: a pedagogical audience on the one hand, and the specialized audience on the other. Although students could be considered the primary addressees of the textbook, a more professional audience, the scholar and professional spheres of the discipline, is also addressed. This view of the textbook genre as a hybrid academic and professional construct, a view shared by authors such as Alred and Thelen (1993), Hyland (2002) or Swales (1995), means a duality of audiences and, associated with it, a complex discourse which has to be accommodated to cater for the needs of their pedagogic addressee, novices to the discipline, while more or less indirectly addressing specialized peers of the discipline. For the textbook to fulfill its purpose of successfully reaching both new and expert members of the community, the author must meet the contrasting needs of both the pedagogical and the professional audiences. The corpus authors seem to have defined their communicative purposes, addressing both, facilitating access to the material on the one hand, while establishing their credentials and displaying their authoritative voice on the other. Although the blurb’s promotional character, and therefore its commercial aim, certainly conditions and justifies the effort to try to reach the widest possible audience for the textbook, the duality of audience also suggests the specificity of the textbook published in the academic and professional context of the construction discipline, which is meant to transmit disciplinary knowledge but is not restricted to any particular pedagogical setting; in other words, is meant to educate, but not strictly in the classroom. The benefit of this duality also applies to the corpus itself, and thus the corpus textbooks become a valuable repertoire of scholarly and professional contributions. This integration of perspectives in the textbook certainly provides the reader with a unique insight into the reality of the engineering and architecture discipline, a hard applied science that is characterized both by its purposive and pragmatic character, and by its aim to transfer the abstract knowledge of scientific discourse into products and techniques, and into commonsense knowledge (see for example Becher and Trowler 2001). It is this link between the academic and the professional worlds of this discipline that, in my view, takes the textbook beyond the definition provided in the literature of a summary of received disciplinary knowledge legitimized by the expert voice of the author (Love 1991; Parkinson and Adendorff 2004; Richardson 2004; Hyland 2005). Rather, the textbook becomes a vehicle to disseminate disciplinary knowledge therefore fulfilling the social action of acculturating the reader into the epistemology of the discipline, and ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 141 conversely transmitting how the authors conceive the scope of the profession. In addition to this, there is the perhaps more indirect search for the academic or professional prestige and visibility of the author in the disciplinary community, and even, as Swales (1995) suggests, the academic pressure to publish, or the obvious commercial reasons behind the publication of textbooks. 5. Conclusions The study of the online blurbs of construction engineering and architecture textbooks described above has shed light primarily on the moves of the blurb —authorship, readership, description and promotion— and through their analysis has helped to reach a wider understanding of the nature of the textbook and of the motivations for writing it. The analysis has attempted to present evidence of the duality of communicative purposes of the textbook in the construction discipline. In the light of this, I argue for the repurposing of the textbook as a hybrid academic and professional genre. In my view, this multiplicity of communicative purposes would justify the reconceptualization of the textbook genre in this particular discipline that I advocate for in this paper, and would entail devising a broader label to designate a genre whose communicative purposes are only partially educational, or whose pedagogical task is achieved indirectly. A new label, ‘specialized book’, might better reflect the reality of this genre which Swales calls “a miscegenation of scholarly fish and commercial fowl” (1995: 5). Construction engineering and architecture textbook authoring appears to be a compromising task requiring the author to address both novice and experienced readers, accommodating the textbook discourse to both, adopting a position of stability and authority to acculturate the reader into the content and generic literacies of the discipline, and being responsible for the transmission of disciplinary knowledge. Writing the textbook blurb is equally compromising since the purpose of the textbook runs parallel with the need to prove undisputed credentials, with the search for visibility and prestige and, above all, with certain underlying purposes: the commercial purpose of the textbook, the promotion of the textbook, and the self-promotion of the author. The interweaving of purposes in the blurbs analyzed in this study has brought to the fore the lack of generic integrity of the blurb genre. Mixing descriptive and promotional features, this introductory genre is exploited to convey the underlying intention of advertising the textbook (Bhatia 2004). The aim of this paper has been to explore a genre, the textbook blurb, in one particular discipline, construction engineering and architecture. Although restricted to these highly specialized disciplines, the results of the analysis of the dual professional and pedagogical character of the textbook suggest their applicability to other disciplines, as well as to possible disciplinary variation, which a cross-disciplinary analysis of textbook blurbs in other disciplines might reveal. The study presented in this paper has explored the textbook genre through the information provided by another genre, the textbook blurb, ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 142 concepción orna-montesinos which has helped to clarify the target readership of the textbook, as well as the motivation behind textbook authoring. The limited amount of information provided by the genre is undoubtedly restricted, and even biased, by the promotional character of the blurb genre. If a more complete analysis of the specialized textbook genre is to be achieved, a broad cross-generic analysis should be carried out. Works Cited Alred, Gerald and Erik Thelen 1993: ‘Are Textbooks Contributions to Scholarship?’ College Composition and Communication 44.4: 466-77. Askehave, Inger and John Swales 2001: ‘Genre Identification and Communicative Purpose: A Problem and a Possible Solution’. Applied Linguistics 22.2: 195-212. Basturkman, Helen 1999: ‘A Content Analysis of elt Textbook Blurbs: Reflections of Theory-in-Use’.relc Journal 30.1: 18-38. 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Hyland, Ken 1999: ‘Talking to Students: Metadiscourse in Introductory Coursebooks’. English for Specific Purposes 18.1: 3-26. —2002: ‘Directives: Argument and Engagement in Academic Writing’. Applied Linguistics 23.2: 215-39. —2005: Metadiscourse. Exploring Interaction in Writing. London: Continuum. Hyon, Sunny 1996. ‘Genre in Three Traditions: Implications for esl’. tesol Quarterly 30.4: 693-722. —2001: ‘Long-term Effects of Genre-based Instruction: A Follow-up Study of an eap Reading Course’. English for Specific Purposes 20, Suppl. 1: 417-38. Jackson, Leonora, Wilhelm Meyer and Jean Parkinson 2006: ‘A Study of the Writing Tasks and Reading Assigned to Undergraduate Science Students at a South African University’. English for Specific Purposes 25.3: 260-81. Johns, Ann 1997: Text, Role and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Kathpalia, Sujata 1997: ‘Cross-cultural Variation in Professional Genres: A Comparative Study of Book Blurbs’. World Englishes16.3: 417-26. Klerides, Eleftherios 2010: ‘Imagining the Textbook: Textbooks as Discourse and Genre’. Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 2.1: 31-54. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen 1996: Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Thomas 1963: ‘The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research’. Alistair Crombie, ed. Scientific Change. London: Heinemann. 347-69. Love, Alison 1991: ‘Process and Product in Geology: An Investigation of some Discourse Features of Two Introductory Textbooks. English for Specific Purposes 10.2: 89-109. —1993: ‘Lexico-grammatical Features of Geology Textbooks: Process and Product Revisited’. English for Specific Purposes 12.3: 197-218. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 144 concepción orna-montesinos Martin, James and Peter White 2005: The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Matsuda, Paul and Christine Tardy 2007: ‘Voice in Academic Writing: The Rhetorical Construction of Author Identity in Blind Manuscript Review’. English for Specific Purposes 26.2: 235-49. Miller, Carolyn 1984: ‘Genre as Social Action’. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70.2: 151-67. Moore, Tim 2002: ‘Knowledge and Agency: A Study of Metaphenomenal Discourse in Textbooks from Three Disciplines’.English for Specific Purposes 21.4: 347-66. Myers, Gregory 1992: ‘Textbooks and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’. English for Specific Purposes11.1: 3-17. —1997: ‘Words and Pictures in a Biology Textbook’. Tom Miller, ed. Functional Approaches to Written Text: Classroom Applications. Washington, dc: United States Information Agency. 93-104. Orna-Montesinos, Concepción 2008: ‘A Contribution to the Lexis of Construction Engineering Textbooks: The Case of Building and Construction’.Ibérica 16: 59-79. —2010a:‘The Parts of the Building: Meronymy in the Discourse of Construction Engineering’. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 18: 11-34. —2010b: ‘Hyponymy Relations in Construction Textbooks: a Corpus-based Analysis. María Luisa Gea Valor, Isabel García Izquierdo and María José Esteve, eds. Linguistic and Translation Studies in Scientific Communication. Linguistic Insights Series, vol. 86. Bern: Peter Lang. 91-114. —2011:‘Words and Patterns: Lexico-grammatical Patterns and Semantic Relations in Domain-specific Discourses’.Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses. Special Issue Words on Words and Dictionaries 24: 213-33. Parkinson, Jean and Ralph Adendorff 2004: ‘The Use of Popular Science Articles in Teaching Scientific Literacy’.English for Specific Purposes 23.4: 379-96. Richardson, Paul 2004: ‘Reading and Writing from Textbooks in Higher Education: A Case Study from Economics’. Studies in Higher Education 29.4: 505-21. Swales, John 1990. Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge up. —1995: ‘The Role of the Textbook in eap Writing Research’. English for Specific Purposes 14.1: 3-18. Swales, John and Christopher Leeder 2011: ‘A Reception Study of the Articles Published in English for Specific Purposes from 1990-1999’. English for Specific Purposes31 .2: 137-46. Tadros, Angele 1989: ‘Predictive Categories in University Textbooks’. English for Specific Purposes 8.1: 17-31. —1994: ‘Predictive Categories in Expository Text’. Malcolm Coulthard, ed. Advances in Written Text Analysis. London: Routledge. 69-82. Úbeda, Paloma and M. Luisa Escribano 2002: ‘Estudio contrastivo de los estilos de aprendizaje en los estudiantes de Arquitectura’. Didáctica (Lengua y Literatura) 14: 251-72. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 the duality of communicative purposes 145 Ward, Jeremy 2001: ‘est: Evading Scientific Text’.English for Specific Purposes, 20.2: 141-52. Young, Richard and Hanh Nguyen 2002: ‘Modes of Meaning in High School Science’. Applied Linguistics 23.3: 348-72. Received 13 April 2012 Revised version accepted 2 October 2011 Concepción Orna-Montesinos teaches efl and esp at the Centro Universitario de la Defensa of the University of Zaragoza. Linking her pedagogical and research interests, her focus has been on the functional and rhetorical features of the lexis of specialized discourses, using the methodological approach of corpus linguistics. She is also interested in genre analysis, as well as in ethno- methodological research into the discursive practices and corporate culture of the international community. Address: Centro Universitario de la Defensa, Universidad de Zaragoza, Academia General Militar. Ctra. de Huesca s/n, 50090, Zaragoza. Tel.: +34976739638. Fax: +34976739824. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 125–45· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65 issn 0210-6124 The Self-Promotion of Academic Textbooks in the Preface Section: A Genre Analysis Ali Sorayyaei Azar University of Malaya [email protected] This paper presents a genre analysis of the preface section in academic textbooks, specifically twenty-two preface sections from the closely-related fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. Using a move structure analysis such as those proposed by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), four moves were identified to account for the different rhetorical purposes employed by writers of preface sections to create a niche and establish the importance of their textbooks. These moves comprise: establishing the needs of the readership, establishing their orientations like purpose and audiences, outlining of the scope of the chapters, and finally acknowledgments. This move structure reflects the textual strategies used by writers to achieve the rhetorical purposes of the preface sections. It is suggested that these findings could be incorporated into instructional literature for writers wishing to start book projects, and that they may also be helpful for English as a Foreign Language (efl) teachers in selecting materials for their classrooms based on their external evaluation of academic textbooks. Keywords: genre; genre-mixing; move; preface; functional categories; textual strategies . . . La autopromoción de los libros de texto académicos en la sección del prefacio: un análisis de género Este artículo presenta un análisis de género del prefacio de los libros de texto académicos, en concreto veintidós prefacios en los campos de la lingüística y la lingüística aplicada. Mediante el uso de un análisis basado en la estructura del movimiento, como los propuestos por Swales (1990) y Bhatia (1993), se identificaron cuatro movimientos que explican las distintas finalidades retóricas empleadas por escritores de prefacios para crear un nicho y establecer la importancia de sus libros de texto. Estos movimientos incluyen: establecer las necesidades del público lector, establecer sus orientaciones, como la finalidad y el público receptor, perfilar el ámbito de los capítulos y, finalmente, los agradecimientos. Esta estructura de movimientos refleja las estructuras textuales empleadas por los autores para conseguir las finalidades retóricas de las secciones del prefacio. Se sugiere que estas conclusiones podrían incorporarse a la bibliografía educativa para quienes deseen iniciar el proyecto de un libro y que pueden ser de ayuda para el profesorado de Inglés como lengua extranjera (efl) a la hora de seleccionar materiales para sus clases basándose en su evaluación externa de los libros de texto académicos. Palabras clave: género; mezcla de géneros; movimiento; prefacio; categorías funcionales; estrategias textuales. —147— 148 ali sorayyaei azar 1. Introduction Over the last three decades, esp (English for Specific Purposes) researchers have employed genre analysis extensively to examine academic texts and their related discourses (e.g. Bhatia 1993, 1997, 2004; Dudley-Evans 1986; Hopkins and Dudley-Evans 1988; Hyland 2000, 2004; Hyon 1996; Martin et al. 1987; Paltridge 1997; Swales 1981, 1990, 2004; Thompson 1994).1 This interest in genre analysis has to a large extent been motivated by pedagogical concerns, especially the need to provide comprehensible patterns of academic texts to assist efl learners and writers to understand and enter the discourse communities and communicate effectively. As Swales argues, “a genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (1990: 58). Based on this definition, he introduced his pioneering cars (create a research space) model for the introduction sections of ras (research articles). Despite interest focused on almost all sections of the ra, the introductory sections of the academic genre have received special attention, many following Swales’ cars model (1990). Swales’ definition views the concept of genre as centrally related to communicative purpose and the ways in which communicative needs can shape or affect both surface and deep rhetorical structure. Rhetorical structures, however, as Bhatia points out, may not be static, a fact which is especially true in the current, competitive academic climate (1997). Because of their dynamic nature, there can often be a mismatch between genres described in terms of static values and the changing realities of the academic settings. As a result, Bhatia, based on his 2004 research on promotional genres, introduced the notion of genre-mixing in academic settings. He believes there is an interaction between discourses or, to put it another way, that new discourses emerge from within other discourses. In addition, Bhatia views genre as concerned with textual space, socio-cognitive space, and social space (Tardy and Swales 2008). This genre-mixing notion is relatively new in genre theory, and both text and context have been considered key factors in the analysis of professional genres. In the early conceptualizations of genre, the focus was more centrally on text, context playing a less important background role. However, more recent versions assign context a more important role, and there have been attempts to redefine genre as a configuration of text-internal and text-external factors (Bhatia 2008), thus highlighting two kinds of relationships involving texts and contexts. Firstly, those that are intertextual in nature, that is, within and across texts and focusing primarily on text-internal properties. And secondly, interactions within and across genres, principally involving text-external resources, which can be viewed as interdiscursive in nature (Bhatia 2004). Interdiscursivity thus accounts for 1 I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Azirah Hashim, my supervisor at the University of Malaya, Malaysia, for her longstanding support through the process of my PhD program. My special thanks go to Dr Ian Bruce for his constructive feedback on the previous draft of this article. Finally, I really appreciate the feedback and useful suggestions from the chief editor and the two anonymous reviewers. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 149 a variety of discursive processes and professional practices, often resulting in the mixing, embedding, and bending of generic norms in professional contexts. It may operate at all levels; generic, professional practice, and professional culture, and it is also claimed that it allows a more comprehensive analysis of genres in professional practice (Bhatia 2004). In order to show interdiscursivity, this study focuses on introductory sections of academic textbooks as a frequently found sub-genre in academic communication. There is a wealth of research on articles, lectures, book reviews, introductory chapters of textbooks, business letters, and so many others to name, but few studies have addressed introductory genres in academic textbooks and the interdiscursive processes involved. Prefaces to academic textbooks, while providing an overview of the book, may also have a promotional purpose, an increasingly common phenomenon in the current professional climate (Bhatia 1997, 2004). In the following paragraph, definitions of academic textbooks and of introductory sections are briefly presented. Academic textbooks obviously constitute an important pedagogic genre in academic and professional settings. According to Swales (1995), academic textbooks should not be excluded from the set of research-process genres because they can combine and apply recent scholarship, incorporate new research findings and generate interesting new topics worth further study; Swales thus terms them “hybrid genres”. It has also been suggested that academic textbooks are a component of the systems of genres, which orchestrate both academic life and related verbal behaviors. Hyland, for instance, suggests that “university textbooks are something of a neglected genre; little is known about their rhetorical structure and their relationship to other genres” (2000: 14). Moreover, academic textbooks have a great impact on both scholars and novices and provide professional writers with the means to disseminate their vision of their disciplines. These multiple audiences and purposes of academic textbooks, Hyland believes (2000), link them to their disciplines in interesting ways, and highlight the relationship between disciplinary discourses and related social practices. In such books, it is possible to see the evidence of other texts, such that discourses comprise other discourses, i.e. they demonstrate ‘interdiscursivity’ (see Fairclough 1992; Bhatia 1997). Moreover, the academic textbook genre is a good example of evolving discourses or interdiscursive discourses in its multiple purposes and audiences. Stakeholders in the genre include not only teachers, learners and academic colleagues who use them in academic education contexts, but also publishers and those involved with the genre as a commercial product in the increasingly globalized academic publishing industry. This appears to more than justify the analysis of the academic textbook genre to reveal its discourse norms and the comprehensible patterns of the overall genre and its sub-genres, particularly preface sections. However, before stating the main aim of this study it is necessary to clarify the nature of introductory pages, that is, the foreword, introduction and preface sections as used in academic textbooks. In the front matter pages of academic textbooks there are usually a few introductory sections positioned before the contents page which are not part of the text. An exception ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 150 ali sorayyaei azar may be made when such sections are so long that they push the contents page too far into the book (Lee 1979). These front matter pages may include: foreword, preface by the editor, preface, acknowledgements and introduction. Although the sequence may vary, it has been suggested that these sections share the same communicative purpose in terms of introducing the book, as well as perhaps minor purposes like offering comments and promoting the writers’ work (Bhatia 1997). It is not always clear how a preface, foreword or introduction differ and the terms are often used interchangeably, an understandable tendency given that there are no clear definitions in most dictionaries. The useful distinction is that a preface is about the book as a whole, a foreword provides a comment on the book by someone other than the writer, and an introduction discusses the text itself. It is the preface section of academic textbooks that has been selected as the main focus of this paper. Material normally included in a preface section consists of reasons for undertaking the book, methodology, acknowledgements, and sometimes permissions granted for the use of previously published material. Sometimes, when an acknowledgements section is lengthy, it might be placed in a separate section following the preface (see The Chicago Manual of Style). Based on the genre approach of Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), this study examines preface sections of academic textbooks in terms of possible ‘move structures’ and the type of signaling (i.e. linguistic or textual devices) that may introduce such moves and the steps involved. For this purpose, a move can be defined as “a text segment made up of a bundle of linguistic features which give the segment a uniform orientation and signal the content of discourse in it” (Nwogu 1991: 114). Such a segment may be shaped by a specific communicative function, hence a move in a text is considered as a functional unit. This study therefore also tries to clarify the functional value of each move. In addition, the study also explains and evaluates the nature of introductory genres of academic textbooks, particularly preface sections in terms of their interdiscursive elements and the type of genre-mixing that takes place. In summary, the present study, hence, aims to identify dominant move patterns in preface sections of linguistics and applied linguistics academic textbooks, and to investigate the use of typical interdiscursive processes such as genre- mixing. 2. Method 2.1. Data The (raw) material for this study was twenty-two preface sections from the same number of academic textbooks in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics published between 1970 and 2005 randomly selected from the library of the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia. These books are all commonly used sources for undergraduate and postgraduate English language students who are majoring in esl (English as a Second Language) or in Linguistics at this Faculty. Full bibliographical details are given in the Appendix. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 151 2.2. Data Analysis Procedure As mentioned in the introduction, the main framework for this investigation was Swales’ (1990) genre analysis because it offers a broad perspective. After the moves analysis of the prefaces, following Swales’ theoretical framework, was completed, a move structure model was proposed based on Swales’ cyclical approach, which identified the steps and textual devices in the data. Thus the investigation employed both top-down and bottom-up procedures: a two-layer analysis in terms of moves and steps which is an accepted method of genre analysis. In the top-down procedure, moves were identified on the basis of function or content of the prefaces (the data of this study). In the bottom-up procedure, the identified moves were analyzed and so steps of the prefaces were realized and distinguished on the basis of certain move markers and textual devices. Therefore, the principles of the analysis were as follows: the data comprised was the unit of the move which is the basic unit of analysis in esp genre analysis and whose analysis identifies specific communicative purposes. According to Swales’ model (1990), the Introduction section in a ra includes three basic moves, each of which can be realized by either a single step or a series of steps (see Figure 1). Move 1: Establishing a territory: Declining Step 1 Claiming centrality and/or Rhetorical Step 2 Making topic generalization(s) and/or Effort Step 3 Reviewing items of previous research Move 2: Establishing a niche: Step 1A Counter-claiming and/or Step 1B Indicating a gap and/or Step 1C Question-raising and/or Step 1D Continuing a tradition Move 3: Occupying the niche: Step 1A Outlining purposes or Step 1B Announcing present research or Weakening Step 2 Announcing principal findings or Knowledge Step 3 Indicating RA structure Figure 1. Swales’ cars model (Swales 1990: 141) ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 152 ali sorayyaei azar In order to examine more closely Swales’ assertion that textual boundaries between moves can be identified based on content and linguistic or textual devices, we will examine 4 examples below and analyze them with reference to Move2step1B —indicating a gap— according to the model (Fig 1) presented above. My italics, used to identify components of the texts referred to in subsequent comments: (1) the implementations of Swales’ move analysis by subsequent researchers are limited in many aspects. For instance, many move-based studies tend to involve a relatively small number of texts (e.g., Peng 1987; Williams 1999; Wood 1982), limiting the generalizability of the results. Moreover, few move-based studies (e.g., Nwogu 1997; Posteguillo 1999) have worked with a representative corpus, (2) However, the previously mentioned methods suffer from some limitations. (3) In spite of its importance, this genre has so far received little attention. Even Connor and her colleagues, who have conducted quite a few studies on grant proposals (see Connor 2000; Connor and Mauranen 1999; Connor and Wagner 1999; Connor and Upton 2004), have neglected this sub-genre in their research. (4) Until recently, however, scant attention has been paid to the analysis of the characteristic features of academic speech, partly perhaps because of its less prestigious epistemological status, but also more mundanely because of the greater difficulty in accessing and deconstructing oral corpora. In examples 2 and 4 the moves open with a contrastive comment like however; the other most commonly used signals in the data studies being nevertheless, yet, unfortunately and but. Gaps may be also signaled lexically either by the use of verbs (with negative connotations) such as ‘suffer’, ‘neglect’ and ‘limit’ or in the phrases such as a relatively small number of texts, scant attention . . . paid, few move-based studies, and limiting . . . the results. In order to identify the move patterns, recurring moves in all 22 prefaces examined were identified and color-coded. This involves knowledge of the field of applied linguistics and the types of communicative purpose and linguistic features of the texts, but it is an intrinsically subjective exercise, as are the choices made by the author of the texts at the time of writing. Halliday proposes that textual or linguistic elements have an enabling role (1994), facilitating the creation of discourse by helping writers to create and organize texts which make sense within their contexts. Hyland (2005) further asserts that these textual devices act as elements of the writer’s interpersonal decisions to make meaningful and coherent relations in their texts, which it could be contended guide readers toward the writer’s intended meanings and interpretation. At the same time Dudley-Evans suggests: “Decisions about the classification of the moves are made on the basis of linguistic evidence, comprehension of the text and understanding of the expectations that both the general academic community and the particular discourse community have of the text” (1994: 226). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 153 After being identified and marked in the texts, the move structures were analyzed to ascertain dominant patterns using the sentences or paragraph as the unit of analysis. Where more than one move appeared in a sentence it was coded as containing two moves. The texts were then analyzed in terms of the writer’s textual strategies applying a qualitative bottom-up procedure that required all features of the text to be taken into account. The subjectivity of qualitative research such as moves analysis (Bachman and Palmer 1996; Gamaroff 2000) often leads to a questioning of the reliability of its results and conclusions. For example, Shohamy et al. believe that if there is no inter-rater reliability there can be no validity (1992). Thus, in order to assess the reliability of move boundary identification in this study, an inter-rater was invited to independently analyze 11 randomly selected prefaces from the 22 studied. This second rater is a PhD holder in applied linguistics and clearly possesses extensive experience and expertise in reading academic texts in applied linguistics, as well as already being familiar with the notion of move identification. Following specific training, the second rater was asked to mark and identify moves in the texts and his work was then compared to the author’s. The percentage agreement between the two raters was calculated and used firstly to check the appropriateness of the first rater’s assessments and secondly to illustrate the level of inter-rater reliability. This was done by summing all agreements between the two raters in move identification (30), multiplying by 100 and dividing by the total number of moves identified (38) resulting in a percentage agreement rate of 79%. In spite of some differences in move identification, this suggests high overall inter-rater reliability in this study. 3. Results Analysis identified a four move structure: Move1: Establishing the needs of the readership; Move2: Establishing orientations; Move3: Introducing chapters and scope; and Move4: Acknowledgements, with the first three occurring most frequently. To facilitate understanding and discussion of the results in the subsequent sections, the rhetorical move pattern is delineated below: M1: Establishing the needs of the readership M2: Establishing orientations By Step1: Purpose and/ or Step2: Announcing audience M3: Introducing chapters and scope M4 Acknowledgements Figure 2. The rhetorical move pattern of the preface section in academic textbooks ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 154 ali sorayyaei azar The findings of this research are, to some extent, at odds with Kuhi’s (2008) study examining dominant patterns of move structures in 21 prefaces of textbooks, also applying Swales’ analysis. He identified four major moves in his data: (1) purpose, (2) audience, (3) introducing chapters, (4) acknowledgement. While it should be emphasized that he did not address the concept of genre-mixing, his findings indicated the two most frequent moves (i.e. Announcing Audience and Acknowledging), that is to say they were most commonly employed, whereas these categories are the least frequent moves found in the present study. From Tables 1 and 2 below it can be seen that the current study found Move1 (22 instances), Move2step1 (24) and Move3 (17) to be the most frequent. In fact, the findings of this study go some way to support the work of Bhatia (1997), who demonstrated only two major moves: Move1: Establishing the needs of the potential readership and Move2: Describing the book, which closely correspond to Move1 and Move3 of the current work. Table1 shows the total number of occurrences of each move type in the prefaces examined along with the frequency of their occurrence at different positions in the texts. It can be seen that at position 1 Move1 and Move2step1 were considerably more common than other moves (12 and 10 times respectively) whilst in position 2 Move2step1 was by far the most common move type, occurring 10 times compared to the next most frequent moves (Move1 and Move2step2) which both occurred 5 times. At position 3, Move3 was clearly more frequent and at position 4, Move4. Move Number of Number of Number of Number of Number of Total number of Types times in 1st times in 2nd times in 3rd times in 4th times in 5th occurrences position position position position position Move1 12 5 4 - 1 22 M2s1 10 10 2 2 - 24 M2s2 0 5 6 - 1 12 M3 0 1 6 9 1 17 M4 0 0 1 3 6 10 Table 1. Frequency of occurrence for the different types of move at various positions in the preface sections studied Table 2 indicates the order of occurrence of the different move types (move structure) and the move patterns discerned in the data and the total number of moves used in each preface. The most common move structure employed consisted of3 moves (7 prefaces), followed by 4 move structures. In order to identify the moves and names, theme, a functional/ discoursal orientation was adopted. The following section considers the functional values of the moves described, and it also indicates the textual devices used by the writers. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 155 Preface Moves Number of Order of Moves Number Types of m1 m2 m3 m4 Total Moves m2s1 m2s2 Number of moves 1 1 1 1 1 1 5 4 m2s1-m2s2-m1-m3-m4 2 1 1 1 - - 3 2 m2s1-m1-m2s2 3 1 2 - 1 - 4 3 m2s1-m1-m2s1-m3 4 1 1 1 - - 3 2 m1-m2s2-m2s1 5 1 2 - 1 - 4 3 m1-m2s1-m3-m2s1 6 1 1 - 1 1 4 4 m1-m2s1-m4-m3 7 1 1 - 1 1 4 4 m2s1-m1-m3-m4 8 1 1 1 1 1 5 4 m1-m2s1-m2s2-m3-m4 9 1 1 - - - 2 2 m1-m2s1 10 1 - - - - 1 1 m1 11 1 1 1 - 3 2 m2s1-m2s2-m3 12 1 1 - - - 2 2 m1-m2s1 13 1 1 1 1 1 5 4 m1-m2s1-m2s2-m3-m4 14 1 2 1 1 1 6 4 m2s1-m2s2-m1-m2s1-m3-m4 15 1 1 1 1 - 4 3 m1-m2s1-m3-m2s2 16 1 1 - 1 1 4 3 m1-m2s1-m3-m4 17 1 1 - 1 - 3 3 m2s1-m3-m1 18 1 1 1 1 - 4 3 m1-m2s1-m2s2-m3 19 2 1 1 1 - 5 3 m2s1-m2s2-m1-m3-m1 20 1 1 - 1 1 4 4 m2s1-m1-m3-m4 21 1 1 1 1 1 5 4 m1-m2s1-m2s2-m3-m4 22 1 1 1 1 1 5 4 m2s1-m1-m2s2-m3-m4 Table 2. Move Structures and Number of Types of Moves in each of the Prefaces 3.1. Establishing the needs of the readership This was one of the most frequent moves identified, appearing in21 of the 22 prefaces and occupying the initial position in 12 of them. Writers employed this move to establish a niche in the relevant field of study and it can be considered a typical promotional input as demonstrated by example (5) below: (5) Although there are now a number of excellent textbooks on the methods of teaching English... we have lacked a short, concise text on the testing of esl... It is hoped that this little book will help to meet the need by providing... (Preface 8) The textual devices highlighted in the above example Although( , we have lacked and will help to meet the need) serve to emphasize both the gap in the market and this textbook’s aim to fill it, thereby attempting to persuade the reader to purchase or use this book. The use of the textual strategy (ts) of contrastive comment (such as the Although above) in this move is common according to Bhatia’s (1997) findings. The current research found that writers made use of the following tss in order to establish a niche: lexical negation (ts ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 156 ali sorayyaei azar a), contrastive comment (ts b), logical conclusion (ts c), and expressing needs (ts d), all of which are illustrated in the following examples. (6) I hope, therefore, this . . . will do something to resolve the continuing crisis. (ts c, Preface1) (7) As a result, the book looks at . . . in a way that may be unfamiliar to some readers. Readers must be drawn in... (respectively tss c, a and d, Preface 2) (8) After having engaged with the knowledge in this introductory book, you should be able to move on to more advanced books... Applied Linguistics is a big field and one person cannot be an expert in all areas. (ts c and a, Preface 7) (9) It is clear to me that if learners are to develop… they need to use... the most important reason for writing this book is my wish to see sla develop... I do acknowledge the need for... This is not a ‘how to book’ (although I can see the need for such a book). (ts d, Preface12) (10) Seldom, however, have we had the opportunity to connect in substantive ways technology use to methods for teaching... There are many reasons for this frustrating division between our work and technology instructors... there are a lack of rich instructional models… for integrating technology with language learning. (ts a & b & a, Preface16) (11) This book is just an initial exploration in… There are many gaps… (ts a & d, Preface19) Functionally, through this move writers are trying to show a need for their academic textbook and that it contains accredited knowledge in the relevant field of study. They are also looking for readership, as research article introductions do, and as Swales (1990) argues also happens indirectly in academic texts introductions. Since Bhatia believes (1997) genre-mixing to be a typical discursive process (that is to say, it may be one of the interdiscursive processes used to facilitate interactions within and across genres involving primarily text-external resources), analysis of internal- and external-textual resources can identify and explain these patterns and discourse norms used in texts. Typical textualisation patterns have been discerned, although in real life situations expert members of discourse communities exploit them to create novel patterns (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995). In the current work numerous instances of genre-mixing were found in the prefaces examined. The examples below demonstrate how the writers’ promotional intentions and positive attitudes interact and are mixed. My italics, used to identify components of the texts referred to in subsequent comments: (12) ... to ensure that each chapter contains an authoritative treatment of an area; it is co-authored by two leading international specialists. (Preface 7) (13) We have tried to take a broad and inclusive view of what is meant by... our examples reflect concepts from a variety of perspectives in... the book is designed to address issues important for research... we have attempted to cast a similarly wide net in our coverage of topics… (Preface14) ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 157 (14) This may reflect a deeply ingrained bias in traditional educational systems toward dividing… Our experience confirms what recent research says about the lack of access to technology for tesol teachers (Wetzel and Chisholm, 1998)… Wiburg, in her work with teachers…, has found that…(Preface16) (15) … we have had enthusiastic responses from readers… the continuing positive feedback and the dramatic growth of… made us aware that the book needed to be brought up to date. (Preface18) (16) … the origins of this book can be traced to introductory courses on language taught at the University of… to the suggestions and criticisms of several hundred students who forced me to present what I had to say in a way they could understand. (Preface 20) Adjectives like authoritative, leading international, broad and inclusive, important, continuing positive and dramatic (examples 12, 13, and 15 respectively) and the stating another person’s opinion about the textbook (examples 14 and 15) are used to describe and evaluate it in a positive light. In addition, some referenced the fact that they were only persuaded to publish at the insistence of their students, fellow researchers or publishers (example 16). These strategies are salient features of promotional genres, and the current work thus demonstrates the mixing of preface and promotional genres. Stance and engagement features were found to be numerous in the prefaces studied. Some examples follow: (17) This volume has been a long time in the making: my professional life and research have been devoted to... I became a tenured faculty member… throughout my professional life, I have conducted research… and immersed myself in… I use this reading, and my long experience as a teacher, in attempting to… (Preface 5) (18) This book has developed out of my experience as a language teacher and researcher over the past twenty years… because I have never viewed my . . . roles dualistically… (Preface 6) (19) In this book we take a primarily linguistic approach… We examine how humans use language… We call on insights from all of the inter-disciplinary areas… but our primary interest is… we have necessarily had to impose constraints on our discussion… (Preface 9) (20) … you’ve picked up this book because you want to improve your business communication skills. You realize that effective communication gives a professional impression of you… I would love to hear from you if… (Preface 10) (21) I decided to write a book about task-based… for a number of reasons… One is my personal commitment to… (Preface 12) (22) … Surveys of even a subdiscipline within this growing field now require hundreds of bibliographic entries to document… In this mélange of topics and issues, assessments remains an area of intense fascination… This book provides the teacher trainee with aclear, reader-friendly presentation of the essential foundation stones of language assessment, with ample practical examples to… (Preface 21) ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 158 ali sorayyaei azar Such stance and engagement features are used to present and show the writer’s intentional position and positive attitudes towards their academic textbooks as a product as well as in order to present their attitudes, evaluation, feelings and judgments (Hyland 2005). The writers have also tried to engage their addressees and readers through using the pronoun you and bringing the readers into their discourses in order to indicate the readers’ need for such a product, features similar to those employed in the advertisement genre. This identification of individual and typical genres belies the real life situation where these genres are often seen in mixed and hybrid forms (Fairclough1993 ). In the examples above (17-22), features include explicit self-representation elements (such as: I, my, me, myself, we, and our), boosters (such as: never, to ensure that, examine, call on, have to refer to, confirm, present, It is clear to…, give, introduce, familiarize, and do know), and potential positive adjectives to show the writers’ attitudes (such as: professional, tenured, long, authoritative, influential, primary, personal, the most important, important, demanding, ample practical, extensive, and critical). In many of the examples, the writers have intruded into these texts in order to show their positive attitudes, evaluations and feelings toward their books (my professional life, my long experience, give you a broad overview, introduce you to important areas, refer the reader to standard works, chosen certainly profitable approaches, my personal commitment, the most important reason is my wish, take a critical view of, feel that you do know, reflects my own experience). The explicitness of writers using intentional positions and potential positive adjectives and attitudes in this way produces a default interpretation of preface as a piece of promotional genre. These prefaces also indicate that the writers try to bring the readers’ attention to the society’s demand for their products. In addition to the use of reader’s pronoun, the reader is also talked to using directives, questions (you, you realize that…, you do know…, we must have it, it will introduce you… and familiarize you, …take a critical view of, I would love to hear from you, etc.) which have an enabling role. Writers need to show a clear stance towards their readers when describing their academic textbooks in order to convince them of their credibility, the validity of and need for their books. The inclusion of adjectives, self-representation markers, boosters, and readers’ pronouns all contribute to displaying an appropriate stance, indicating the writers’ views and opinions. Thus it can be said that, in this study, there appear to be interactions within the writers’ promotional intentions and the communicative purposes of their academic textbooks. 3.2. Establishing orientations This was the second most frequently observed move and was subdivided into2 sub-moves or steps; purpose (Move2step1) and audience (Move2step2), which appeared in 21 and 12 of the prefaces respectively with the purpose sub-move occupying the second position in 10 prefaces and the audience sub-move the third position in 6 prefaces (according to Table1 and 2). By using this move, the writers establish the orientation of the book and described why it has been written and produced. They also usually announce their ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 159 audience and express their hope that individuals will be able to take advantage of the books. 3.2.1. Purpose The importance of this sub-move is illustrated by its use in all but one of the prefaces studied. A variety of different textual strategies were found to be employed: A. B. Writer(s) + Verb — (Preface1) I have attempted in this book to… — (Preface 4) Our aim was to present… B. Noun phrases — (Preface 3) the main aim of this book is to… — (Preface 8) the twofold objective of the book is to… C. Book + to be + Past Participle of the Verb — (Preface 1) it is primarily designed to… — (Preface 7) this book is intended to… D. Book + Verb — (Preface 2) this book attempts to… — Preface 5) this volume extends… 3.2.2. Audience This sub-move occurs in12 of the prefaces. Those who would benefit most from the book are introduced and in some cases the threshold or educational level for using the book is defined: — (Preface 1) it should be useful for… — (Preface 2) it will be of great value to … the book will also be of interest to… — (Preface 4)… to serve as an introduction for student… — (Preface 14) we approached the book with novice researchers in mind… — (Preface 22) I hope teachers will find practical… 3.3 Introducing chapters and scope Move3 is used to guide readers as if with a roadmap; the writers give the number of chapters and sometimes the order and they also try to show the scope of their academic books. This move appeared in17 of the prefaces. It never appeared in the first position, and only once in the second position. In 15 of them it was located after moves1 and 2, hence it can be located in the third position of the schematic structure of the moves in the data. The important textual strategies of the data of this study (i.e. ‘The book+ Verb’, ‘The book+ to be+ Past Participle’, ‘Writer(s) + Present Perfect’, and ‘In Chapter… + Verb’) are as follows: ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 160 ali sorayyaei azar — (Preface 2) the book is divided into… — (Preface 7) a number of chapters show… there is a common format for the chapters — (Preface 8) in the opening chapters… a series of six chapters then describes… — (Preface 13) … I report… in chapters… — (Preface 14) we have included one chapter that focuses on… we have placed… at — (Preface 21) notable features of this book include… 3.4 Acknowledging This move (Move4) is the least used in the prefaces studied here, appearing in 10 out of 22 prefaces, always in the last position. In the 12 other prefaces studied it appeared as a separate section of the introductory pages but this data was not considered in the present study. Writers appear to put Acknowledgments in different sections of introductory pages of academic textbooks depending on their length. Furthermore, in one preface (Preface12), Acknowledgements was a separate section, interestingly appearing before the preface section. In another (Preface21), the writer addressed Acknowledgements under the sub-title of Words of Thanks. Functionally, it can be concluded that Acknowledgements in academic textbooks serves as an attempt to express gratitude to people who the writer feels have helped in the preparation of the book. Various textual strategies were used as illustrated below: — (Preface 1) I would like to thank… I owe a greater debt to … — (Preface13) in preparing a book of this… many people... had a hand. I must also mention my… thanks here go to… — (Preface16) we give special thanks to… we also acknowledge… finally, we express our appreciation to… — (Preface 22) I must acknowledge… 4. Discussion The findings of this study suggest that the main communicative purposes of the introductory sections of academic textbooks, particularly preface sections, emphasize the establishment of a need for the writer’s work and serve to introduce the textbook not only to academic and professional settings (i.e. to their colleagues, teachers, learners, and interested readers), but also to the publishing and selling market (i.e. publishers, editors, and book sellers). A second concern though is identified, the extensive describing of aspects of the book using direct and clear adjectives as though the writer, as a producer, wants to promote the product. Additionally, writers can be seen to present potential positive attitudes and intentions towards their work using stance and engagement features (Hyland 2005; Hyland and Tse 2004) like self-representation markers, reader’s pronoun, potential adjectives, and boosters. As Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) suggest, nowadays writers make more frequent use of self-promotional features in order to advertise their research. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 161 Personal pronouns are one of the ‘marketing tactics’ (Harwood 2005a, 2005b) which together with attitude markers, boosters and positive adjectives, writers use to formulate their promotional intentions. Forming promotional and advertisement genres, as Bhatia (1993) believes, one may take advantage of predominant use of adjectives and establish credentials. In other words, writers often need to present a clear stance towards their readers while describing their books to them in order to convince the readers of the validity of their academic textbooks and establish a need for them. Writers’ communicative purposes and promotional intentions can be seen to influence and shape choice of content, schematic structure of the discourse and style with the establishing a niche move and the establishing orientations move occurring in 21 of the 22 prefaces studied whilst the acknowledging move and the audience sub-move are the least frequent moves in this study. The introducing chapters and scope move occurred in the majority (18 out of 22) of the prefaces. Genres can be regarded as inherently dynamic structures which can be manipulated based on the conditions of their use (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995). Furthermore, in the contemporary academic setting, genres are less often seen to keep fixed values, rather they are used as tools to exchange more complex information as Bhatia (1997) proposed. This notion matches with one of the recognized generic forms, like introductory genres of academic books, which can be considered to be a subgenre of the teaching genre in professional and academic settings and serves to profile the writer’s specific promotional intentions and the communicative purposes of preface. 5. Conclusion In this study, the schematic genre structures, their discoursal values, and specific textual devices used in the preface sections of academic textbooks were analyzed. The findings, whilst limited to only 22 examples, indicate there to be three major moves and one minor move. Functionally, writers use these major moves to attempt to establish a need for their work in the current competitive academic setting, and show their orientations and describe their work positively in order to promote them as products. Finally, in some cases, writers express their gratitude to those who have helped in the production of their work, although in cases where this section is lengthy, it is often put in a separate section following, or occasionally before, the preface (See section 3.4 Acknowledging). This study has attempted to show the ways in which ‘textual devices’ are used in the prefaces, namely personal pronouns, attitude markers and adjectives, and boosters where they clearly function to demonstrate the social practices of writers as expert members of discourse communities. In order to make the prefaces of academic textbooks promotional and persuasive, writers must draw on these social practices and intrude their own promotional intentions and attitudes into their texts. As the findings of this study reveal, writers, in the preface of the academic introduction, are appealing to a potential readership, talking to their readers and bringing them into the texts by using positive adjectives extensively, presenting positive attitudes and intentions towards their work using stance features like ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 162 ali sorayyaei azar self-representation markers and boosters, reminiscent of the advertising genre, in order to promote their books. Through potential positive attitudes and adjectives, the writers assess the value and usefulness of their texts, though the abundance of evaluative adjectives in these prefaces is more likely to be attributed to the individual style and promotional intentions of the writers. Therefore, this work concludes that the phenomenon of genre mixing in academic textbooks is not only one of the features of the academic introduction, but that it is widely used in professional genres as discursive processes. Mastery of such knowledge of academic introductory genres can be acquired by means of genre-based courses which attempt to increase esp teachers’ and efl advanced learners’ awareness and nature of the schematic genre structures (Swales 1990). It has been suggested that acquiring the ability to use different textual strategies in writing academic introductions and exposing efl advanced learners to the academic introductory discourse norms can activate their schematic knowledge and raise their awareness (Hashim 2006). Such information can also be incorporated into instructional literature for writers embarking on book projects. Similar courses could be helpful for syllabus designers and teachers to take advantage of in their planning, syllabuses, courses, curriculum materials, and their classes. It could be suggested that one should be able to study the different sections of academic scholarly books and textbooks within the same field and across disciplines in order to find different textual devices and strategies. The metadiscoursal features, especially interaction markers (Hyland and Tse 2004, Hyland 2005) of the subgenres of academic textbooks within the related field between native writers and non-native writers can be, for instance, analyzed and compared in order to explore and indicate cross-cultural differences in the academic setting. They can also be analyzed in order to grasp how native and non-native writers present their stance, their attitudes towards texts and readers. Works Cited Bachman, Lyle and Adrian S. Palmer 1996: Language Testing in Practice. Oxford: Oxford up. berkenkotter, Carol and Thomas Huckin1995 : Genre in Disciplinary Communication. Hillsdale, nj: Erlbaum. Bhatia,Vijay K. 1993: Analyzing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. —1997: ‘Genre-mixing in Academic Introductions’. English for Specific Purposes 16: 181-95. —2004: Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based View. London: Continuum. —2008: ‘Genre Analysis, esp and Professional Practice’. English for Specific Purposes 27: 161-74. Dudley-Evans, Tony 1986: ‘Genre Analysis: An Investigation of the Introduction and Discussion Sections of Masters Dissertations’. Malcom Coulthard, ed. Talking about Text. Discourse Analysis Monographs no.13. English Language Research. Birmingham: u Birmingham p. 128-45. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 163 —1994: ‘Genre Analysis: An Approach to Text Analysis in esp’. Malcom Coulthard, ed. Advances in Written Text Analysis. London: Routledge. 219-28. Fairclough, Norman 1992: ‘Discourse and Text: Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis within Discourse Analysis’. Discourse Society 3.2: 193-217. —1993: ‘Critical Discourse Analysis and the Marketization of Public Discourse: the Universities’. Discourse & Society 4.2: 133-68. Gamaroff, R. 2000: ‘Rater Reliability in Language Assessment: The Bugs of All Bears’. System 28: 31-35. Halliday, Michael Alexander K. 1994a: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd ed. London, Melbourne and Auckland: Arnold. Harwood, Nigel 2005a: ‘“We Do not Seem to Have a Theory... The Theory I Present Here Attempts to Fill This Gap”: Inclusive and Exclusive Pronouns in Academic Writing’. Applied Linguistics 26: 343-75. —2005b: ‘“Nowhere Has Anyone Attempted... In This Article I Aim to Do Just That”. A Corpus-based Study of Self-promotional I and We in Academic Writing across Four Disciplines’. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1207-31. Hashim, Azirah 2006: ‘Genre-based Study of Thesis Introductions’. Azirah Hashim and Nurizah Hasan, eds. English in Southeast Asia: Prospects, Perspectives and Possibilities. Kuala Lumpur: Malaya up. Hopkins, Andy and Tony Dudley-Evans 1988: ‘A Genre-based Investigation of the Discussion Sections in Articles and Dissertations’. English for Specific Purposes 7: 113-22. Hyland, Ken 2000: Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interaction in Academic Writing. London: Pearson Education. —2005: ‘Stance and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse’. Discourse Studies 7.2: 173–92. Hyland, Ken and Poly Tse 2004: ‘Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Reappraisal’. Applied Linguistics 25: 156-77. Hyon, Sunny 1996: Genre in Three Traditions: Implication of esl’. tesol Quarterly 30: 693-722. Kuhi, Davud 2008: ‘An Analysis of Move Structure of Textbook Prefaces’. Asian esp 7: 63- 78. Lee, Marshall 1979: Book Making: The Illustrated Guide to Design, Production, Editing. 2nd edition. New York: R.R. Bowker. Martin, James Robert, Frances Christie and Joan Rothery 1987: ‘Social Processes in Education: A Reply to Sawyer and Watson and Others’. Ian Reid, ed. The Place of Genre in Learning: Current Debates. Geelong: Deakin up. 58- 82. Nwogu, Kevin 1991: Discourse Variation in Medical Texts: Schema, Theme, and Cohesion in Professional and Journalistic Accounts, Monograph in Systemic Linguistics. Vol. 2. Nottingham: Department of English Studies, u of Nottingham p. Paltridge, Brian 1997: Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. Philadelphia: Benjamins. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 164 ali sorayyaei azar Shohamy, Elana, Claire M. Gordon, and Roberta Kraemer 1992: ‘The Effect of Raters Background and Training on the Reliability of Direct Writing Tests’. Modern Language Journal 76: 27-33. Swales, J. 1981: Aspects of Article Introduction. Birmingham: Aston up. —1990: Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge up. —1995: ‘The Role of the Textbook in eap Writing Research’. English for Specific Purposes 14.1: 3-18. —2004: Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Tardy, Christine M. and John Swales 2008: ‘Form, Text Organization, Genre, Coherence, and Cohesion’. Charles Bazerman, ed. Handbook of Research on Writing. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. 565- 81. The Chicago Manual of Style1982 : A Manual of Style. 13th edition. Chicago: Chicago up. Thompson, Susan 1994: ‘Frameworks and Contexts: A Genre-based Approach to Analyzing Lecture Introductions’. English for Specific Purposes 13.2: 171-86. Appendix Texts Used in the Analysis: 1. Swales, John 1971: Writing Scientific English. London: Butler and Tanner. 2. Bhatia, Vijay 1993: Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. 3. Hyland, Kenneth 2000: Disciplinary Discourse: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. London: Pearson Education. 4. Hunston, Susan and Geoff Thompson, eds.2000 . Evaluation in Text. Oxford: Oxford up. 5. Johns, Ann 1997: Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 6. Kern, Richard 2000: Literacy and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford up. 7. Schmitt, Norbert 2002: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics. London: Arnold. 8. Harris, David 1978: Testing English as a Second Language. New York: McGraw Hill. 9. Brown, Gillian and George Yule 1983: Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 10. Taylor, Shirley 2000: Essential Communication Skills. London: Pearson Education. 11. Dudley-Evans, Tony and Maggie Jo St John 1998: Developments in esp: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 12. Ellis, Rod 2003: Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford up. 13. McCarthy, Michael 1991: Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 14. Mackey, Alison and Susan M. Gass 2005: Second Language Research Methodology of Design. London: lea. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 the self-promotion of academic textbooks 165 15. Harmer, Jeremy 2001: The Practice of English Language Teaching. 3rd edition. London: Longman. 16. Butter-Pascoe, Mary Ellen and Karen W. Wiburg 2003: Technology and Teaching English Language Learners. Boston: Allyu and Bacon. 17. Byrne, Donn 1988: Teaching Writing Skills. London: Longman. 18. Lightbown, Patsy and Nina Spada 2006: How Languages are Learned. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford up. 19. Van Lier, Leo 2004: The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning. Kulwer. 20. Yule, George 1996: The Study of Language. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 21. Brown, Douglas 2004: Language Assessment Principles and Classroom Practices. New York: Longman. 22. Hughes, Arthur 2003: Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Received 3 November 2011 Revised version accepted 5 November 2012 Ali Sorayyaei Azar is currently pursuing his PhD in the field of genre analysis on academic discourses at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia. He is an MA holder in Tefl, and also a faculty member of the English Department at the Islamic Azad University of Maragheh, Iran. In a career spanning 20 years, he has worked as an efl teacher and researcher in Iran and Malaysia. He has published and presented research papers on his interest topics, namely academic discourse analysis and language teaching strategies. Address: Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Tel.: +603-79673177, Fax : +603-79579707. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 147–65· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84 issn 0210-6124 Constraints on Subsumption and Amalgamation Processes in the Lexical Constructional Model: the Case of phone and email Alicia Galera Masegosa Universidad de La Rioja [email protected] This article deals with the study of the processes of lexical-constructional integration, or subsumption, of the verbs phone and email (as representatives of the subclass of verbs of instrument of communication) into the English dative and ditransitive argument-structure constructions. The exploration of the irregularities in such processes has led us to postulate the existence and explore the activity of two phrasal constructions, namely the X About Y and the X With Y constructions. These phrasal constructions may combine, on the basis of level-internal constructional amalgamation with the transitive construction as required by the semantic nature of the direct object, thus giving rise to a combined construction into which both verbs may subsume. The Lexical Constructional Model (lcm) provides the necessary analytical tools for the development of this study, especially the set of internal and external constraints that regulate subsumption and amalgamation. Keywords: amalgam; dative; ditransitive; instrument of communication verbs; subsumption . . . Restricciones en los procesos de subsunción y amalgamación en el Modelo Léxico Construccional: un estudio de caso de phone y email Este artículo trata el estudio de los procesos de integración léxico-construccional o subsunción de los verbos ingleses phone y email (representativos de la subclase de verbos de instrumento de comunicación) en las construcciones dativa y ditransitiva. El análisis de las irregularidades halladas en dichos procesos nos lleva a postular la existencia y explorar la actividad de dos construcciones, a saber, las construcciones frasales X About Y y X With Y. Estas construcciones frasales pueden combinarse sobre la base de procesos de amalgamación construccional con la construcción transitiva en aquellos casos en que la naturaleza semántica del objeto directo lo requiera, dando lugar a una nueva construcción en la que ambos verbos pueden subsumirse. El Modelo Léxico Construccional (mlc) nos proporciona las herramientas analíticas que necesitamos para el desarrollo de este estudio, especialmente las restricciones internas y externas que regulan los procesos de subsunción y amalgama. Palabras clave: amalgama; dativa; ditransitiva; subsunción; verbos de instrumento de comunicación —167— 168 alicia galera masegosa 1. Introduction The English dative and the ditransitive constructions have received a great deal of attention in Construction Grammar(s) (CxG henceforth) (e.g. Goldberg 1995, 2006; Iwata 2005, among many others),1 and also in works by authors that invoke the notion of construction in their accounts (e.g. Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2008).2 In this article, we explore in detail the integration of two verbs, namely phone and email, into these two constructional configurations.3 According to Levin’s taxonomy, these verbs belong to the subclass of verbs of instrument of communication, which are in turn part of the general class of verbs of communication (1993: 202-12). My research, which has been carried out on the basis of naturally-occurring data from such corpora as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca) and the British National Corpus (the bnc World edition), sometimes complemented with Google searches, suggests that even though both lexical items are listed within the same subclass, there are discrepancies between the two verbs when we try to integrate them into the constructional configurations under scrutiny. Thus, while the verb email seems to equally fit into both the ditransitive and the dative constructions,4 the uses of the verb phone in the ditransitive construction are marginal (no results obtained from coca, bnc; 7 results obtained in Google searches). We have also identified certain irregularities in the process of integration of both verbs into the ditransitive construction, as evidenced by the contrast between the sentences *He emailed me the situation vs. He emailed me about the situation; #He phoned me good news vs. He phoned me with good news.5 In order to solve these problems, we make use of the analytical tools provided by the Lexical Constructional Model (lcm). This model, as propounded by Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal-Usón (2008, 2011) and Mairal-Usón and Ruiz de Mendoza (2009), combines insights from cognitively-oriented constructionist and functional approaches to language. The lcm postulates that the integration of lexical items into argument-structure constructional configurations (called subsumption) is regulated by constraints based on conceptual compatibility and cognitive construal processes. The model also postulates amalgamation (Ruiz de Mendoza and Gonzálvez 2011) as a constrained process that can integrate several constructions into a constructional complex. The present research makes use of this explanatory apparatus in order to account for the constructional idiosyncrasy of the verbs mentioned above. The differences are so marked that, despite the obvious 1 For some authors, the ditransitive and the dative constructions constitute the so-called dative alternation (Levin 1993). In fact, in CxG(s), the ditransitive and the dative are different, though nonetheless, related constructions. 2 Here we broadly understand the notion of construction as a form-meaning pairing. See section 2 for a more detailed definition of the term. 3 Financial support for this research has been received from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, grant number ffi 2010-17610/filo. 4 “Dative and ditransitive constructions” are short for “English dative and ditransitive constructions” throughout this paper. 5 ‘#’ stands for uses that are only acceptable in very specific contexts. See Boas (2010) for a principled account of the participation of verbs of communication into the ditransitive construction. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 169 similarities in denotative meaning, the two verbs will be argued to belong to different subclasses within the general class of verbs of communication. An overview of the lcm, especially those aspects that will be helpful in the development of this article, is provided in section 2. In section 3, we discuss the reasons why the verbs phone and email should not be regarded as members of the same subclass. We offer a detailed account of the subsumption processes of these two verbs into the ditransitive and the dative constructions; problematic cases are addressed and plausible solutions are proposed. This analysis points to the necessity of postulating the existence of theX About Y and the X With Y phrasal constructions, which will be accordingly described, and whose role as constructions will be defended. Section 4 summarizes the main findings of this study. 2. The Lexical Constructional Model (lcm): An overview As noted in the introduction to this article, the lcm is a cognitively-oriented constructionist approach to language that encompasses relevant features from apparently diverging paradigms such as Van Valin’s (2005) Role and Reference Grammar (rgg), Dik’s (1997) Functional Grammar (fg) and Goldberg’s (1995, 2006) (Cognitive) Construction Grammar (cxg). The lcm incorporates insights from these three accounts together with relevant developments of Lakoff ’s (1987) Cognitive Semantics carried out by Ruiz de Mendoza and his collaborators (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal-Usón 2007; Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez 2011). The lcm provides a unified account of meaning construction and a set of constraints that regulate the integration of lexical and constructional elements at all levels of meaning description. Let us briefly describe each of these levels, focusing on level1 , with which our study is concerned: (i) Level 1, which deals with argument structure characterizations, contains the building blocks of the model, namely lexical and constructional templates. At this level, the lcm explores the ways in which lexical predicates, which are lower-level configurations, are built into (higher-level) argument-structure constructions, such as the caused-motion, resultative, ditransitive, and dative constructions (Goldberg 1995: 2006). For example, the sentences Mary gave me the book and Mary gave a book to me are instantiations of the ditransitive and the dative constructions, respectively. They differ in the way in which the transfer process is put into perspective: while the dative focuses on the transfer process, the ditransitive highlights the result of such process, which is the possession of the object by the receiver. The verb give is compatible with both perspectives, which is why the dative and ditransitive constructions can alternate (Levin 1993) with this verb. However, this alternation is not possible with the verb contribute, despite its semantic similarity with give: Each partner contributed capital to the partnership/ *Each partner contributed the partnership capital. This is so because the notion of contributing highlights ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 170 alicia galera masegosa the idea of giving to a common fund, which relegates the actual receiver to a secondary role (Rosca 2012). (ii) Level 2 is concerned with the study of implicational constructions. Together with level 3, it constitutes the pragmatic module of the model. An example of level-2 construction is the well-known configurationWhat’s X Doing Y?, originally identified and discussed by Kay and Fillmore (1999). Consider the sentence What are you doing in my house? The idea that the speaker is bothered by the hearer’s presence in his house is in origin a pragmatic implication that has become conventionally associated to the construction through frequency of use. (iii) Level 3 includes illocutionary constructions. The Can You X? construction is an instance of illocutionary construction. The expressionCan you pass me the salt? invokes the illocutionary scenario of requests by mentioning the ability component (Pérez and Ruiz de Mendoza 2002; Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi 2007). (iv) Level 4 addresses discourse phenomena, including discourse constructions intended to endow discourse with connectivity. For example, a cause-consequence relation underlies the interpretation of the sentence The bomb exploded; many people died. In terms of the lcm, the integration of conceptual structure across levels of description is handled under the notion of subsumption, while level-internal integration is a matter of representational amalgamation (Ruiz de Mendoza and Gonzálvez 2011). Furthermore, subsumption is also the process by virtue of which lexical templates fuse into constructional configurations at level 1. The integration of the verb push into the caused- motion construction in the sentence Mary pushed Peter out of the room is an example of subsumption.6 For an example of constructional amalgam, consider the sentence I will call you this evening. In this expression, the X Will Y construction amalgamates with the transitive construction (i.e. I call you) in such a way that the variables of the former (a more abstract construction) are parametrized by the argument and the predicate of the latter, which is an argument-structure construction. The lcm provides a set of constraints that regulate this process. Internal constraints arise from the degree of conceptual compatibility between lexical and constructional characterizations, while external constraints have to do with the sensitiveness of a lexical predicate to be construed from different perspectives. An example of the former is the Lexical Class Constraint, according to which all members of the same class or subclass are in principle compatible with a given constructional configuration. For example, break verbs, which involve a change of state (e.g. shatter, burst, etc), can participate in the inchoative construction (The bottle broke/shattered, The tire burst). By contrast, certain verbs belonging to a different class, even if they are semantically related, cannot take part in the inchoative construction, as is the case of destroy and demolish, which belong to the 6 The caused-motion construction may be schematized as x causes y to move z (Goldberg 1995; 2006). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 171 class of cessation of existence (*The house destroyed/demolished). These two verbs contrast with other similar verbs as regards intentionality (e.g. The house collapsed). Examples of external constraint are high-level metaphor and metonymy. Let us see how each of these processes works. Take the sentence The audience laughed the actor off the stage. The verb laugh denotes an activity that is usually directed to a target. This is indicated by the use of at to introduce the target (They laughedat the actor). The absence of this grammatical mark in the sentence above is an indication that laugh has experienced a re-construal process whereby its object is no longer seen as a targeted activity but rather as what lcm theorists call an effectual object, i.e. one that receives the direct physical impact of an action (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal-Usón 2007; 2008).7 Such a re-construal process is, in fact, the result of a metaphor according to which activities having a target can be seen as if they were effectual actions an( experiential action is an effectual action). This metaphor allows us to treat verbs like laugh, stare, smile, talk, and others as if they were verbs like strike, hit, or kick, which are effectual action verbs. Once re-construed in this way, the verb laugh can be built into the caused-motion construction. High-level metonymy can have a similar licensing role. Think of the possibility of using an action verb like open as if it designated a process, as in The door opened. What this sentence literally designates is incongruent with what we know to be the case in the real world: agents or forces open doors but doors do not open themselves. Envisaging the action as if it were a process, which it is not, facilitates the use of such purported process to make it stand for the action. Thus, the metonymyprocess for action is an obvious cognitive strategy aimed to lend conceptual prominence to the action that is taking place over the agent of the action (see Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez 2001; Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal-Usón 2007, for a more detailed discussion). In addition to high-level metaphor and metonymy, the interaction of two or more metaphors or two or more metonymies may also play a regulating role in subsumption and amalgamation processes (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal-Usón 2011). For example, He beat silence into me combines the metaphors an effectual action is caused motion and acquiring a property is receiving a moving object. As a result of this combination, the two metaphors have a common target domain, i.e. an effectual action that results in the object of the action (or ‘effectee’) acquiring a new property, where the ‘effectee’ is seen both as the destination of a moving object and as the new possessor of the object. The combination of these two metaphors licenses the use of beat silence in the caused-motion construction (‘silence’ is the new property that is figuratively transferred to the person that acquires it). Two metonymies may also combine into a metonymic chain (Ruiz de Mendoza 2007). In He has too much lip the metonymy instrument for action for ability to perform the action licenses the use of “lip” as an uncountable noun standing for the ability to perform the action of speaking easily. 7 In line with Langacker (1987), here we understand construal as the different ways in which the same event may be perspectivized. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 172 alicia galera masegosa Before we get to the core of this article, we should clarify what the lcm understands by the term construction. According to Goldberg, “any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts of other constructions recognized to exist. In addition, patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient frequency” (2006: 5). Thelcm takes the notions of frequency and entrenchment to be central, which gives rise to a usage-based understanding of the notion. Furthermore, the lcm rounds up its own definition of construction by adding replicability as one more criterion for a linguistic pattern to actually qualify as a construction. Thus, according to the lcm, a construction is a pairing of form and meaning (or function), such that form affords access to meaning and meaning is realized by form. In a true construction, these two processes are entrenched in the speaker’s mind and are generally recognized by the speech community to be stably associated.8 Furthermore, in the lcm, a pattern qualifies as a construction with the proviso that it can be replicated by other speakers with irrelevant variation in its form and meaning (Ruiz de Mendoza 2013).9 The theoretical background provided by the lcm will aid us in the exploration of the distinctive features of verbs of instrument of communication, in this case phone and email. 3. The verbs phone and email as members of the same subclass 3.1. Preliminary issues Verbs of instrument of communication are a subclass of verbs of communication. Like the rest of verbs in the larger class, the members of this subclass can generally occur in the ditransitive and dative constructions. This is possible because these two constructions typically take in verbs denoting transfer of possession (He gave me the book/He gave the book to me) and communication can be seen as a metaphorical transfer of information (Levin 1993: 207). In fact, several authors list this subclass in their accounts of groups of verbs that may participate both in the ditransitive and the dative constructions (Levin 1993; Goldberg 1995, 2006; Radden and Dirven 2007; Rappaport and Levin 2008). However, some preliminary considerations are necessary before we can fully account for the peculiarities of the integration of the members of this subclass into these constructional patterns. Let us first examine the internal makeup of two of the verbs from the subclass of verbs of instrument of communication, namely phone and email. Unlike other communication verbs (e.g. tell, say, narrate), phone and email (and the rest of the verbs included within this subclass such as fax, cable, etc.) originate in nouns that have undergone categorial conversion into verbal predicates. This process is regulated 8 For further reference on usage-based models in general and their implications for the definition of a construction, the interested reader is referred to Bybee (2010, 2012). 9 Note that replicability does not necessarily correlate with frequency, although high-frequency constructions are more likely to be replicated by other speakers. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 173 by a high-level metonymy. In the case of email, the source of this metonymy is the means that we use to get the information across from one person to another, that is, the way in which the information is transferred (via email, fax, etc.). The target is the communicative action (means for action). A different metonymy licenses the conversion of phone into a verb, namely instrument for action. In the acts of communication made by phone, the instrument is perceived as more relevant than any other element involved in the transmission of information, so by naming the instrument, it is made to stand for the whole act of communication. Making a difference between the means for action and the instrument for action metonymies is not a moot point. Note that it is not possible to use instrument for action in the case of email message transmission, which is why a sentence like *Mary computered me is unacceptable. This difference of focus has syntactic implications that will be discussed in section 3.2, where we provide an account of the subsumption processes that the verbs email and phone may undergo in relation to the ditransitive and the dative constructions. 3.2. The ditransitive and the dative constructions: the subsumption processes ofphone and email As we pointed out in the introduction to this article, the verb phone may be subsumed into the dative construction, as we can see in the sentence The President immediately phoned congratulations to House speaker Foley (coca, 1993). By contrast, the integration of this same verb into the ditransitive construction is a marginal phenomenon (7 occurrences in Google, none in the bnc, none in the coca), and therefore cannot be taken as a regular pattern of integration.10 This fact clashes with the Lexical Class Constraint, according to which lexical items belonging to the same class tend to have the same constructional behaviour. Thus, we may assume that there are significant differences between the verbs phone and email that may explain some of the inconsistencies found and that may support the possibility of listing these two verbs within different categories (or sub-categories). We have traced some of the differences between phone and email to the different metonymies that underlie their processes of categorial conversion from noun to verb. Let us now explore the implications of this discrepancy in relation to the subsumption of these verbs into the constructions under scrutiny. In order to do so, we shall start by providing a general overview of the features that differentiate the ditransitive from the dative construction. The ditransitive and the dative constructions can be schematized as SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2 and SUBJ V OBJ2 ‘to’ OBJ1, respectively. According to Goldberg (1995), the ditransitive differs from the dative construction in that the ditransitive highlights the new possessor of the transferred object (the result of the process) while the dative focuses on 10 Kay (2012) refers to low-frequency configurations as patterns of coining, and denies them the status of construction. A case in point is the English caused-motion construction and oft-quoted instances such asShe sneezed the napkin off the table in particular. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 174 alicia galera masegosa the object and the process of transference itself (the action).11 For example, the ditransitive use of the verb in Sally baked her sister a cake can only mean that the intention of Sally was for her sister to have the cake (Goldberg 1995: 141). Advocates of the lcm, in line with other cognitively-oriented constructionists (e.g. Panther 1997; Goldberg and Bencini 2005; Colleman and De Clerck 2009), further argue that the dative construction is but a case of the caused-motion construction. Let us now contrast the uses of the verbs email and phone. We have already mentioned that the verbal use of email arises from the licensing ability of the high-level metonymy means for action. Phone, on the other hand, is based on instrument for action. Despite this superficial similarity, however, the two verbs behave differently:email can be subsumed into the dative and the ditransitive constructions (He emailed the report to me/ He emailed me the report), while phone works much better with the dative construction (He phoned the good news to me/#He phoned me the good news; but He phoned me with the news). The reason for this is to be found in the fact that the noun email, which is the means of conveying the message, is itself metonymic for ‘a message sent by email’ and the action of sending can have either a dative or a ditransitive construction (He sent me the message/He sent the message to me). The combination ofmeans for action and means (of sending a message) for message calls for the following paraphrases of the verb email: ‘send a message to someone by email’ or ‘send someone a message by email’. The former paraphrase focuses on the motion aspect of the transfer of information, while the latter highlights its resultative aspect, i.e. the idea that the receiver figuratively ‘possesses’ the information. The noun phone, by contrast, is not metonymic for the message that is communicated by telephone. Such a message is called a phone message. So, the verb phone simply means ‘use a phone to communicate a message’ through the application of instrument for action. This metonymy focuses on the communicative activity but not on the transfer of information, which means that the message cannot be seen as a possession; it is just the object of communication. Since the ditransitive construction focuses on the message as a possession, it follows that using the verb phone in such a construction would result in a focal prominence clash. In the light of the lcm, we may claim that the possibility of subsuming the verb phone into the ditransitive construction is ruled out by the Focal Prominence Compatibility constraint (Del Campo Martínez 2011). According to this constraint, the conceptual prominence given to lexical and constructional elements that we integrate into a conceptual construct must be compatible. Thus, since the new possessor of the transferred object (the result) is given conceptual prominence in the ditransitive construction, this constructional configuration is not compatible with the verb phone, which gives conceptual prominence to the action by mentioning the instrument used to perform action. It logically follows that the verb phone is compatible with the dative construction, which, as a subtype of 11 See Langacker (1991) for a similar treatment of the difference between these two uses within the context of Cognitive Grammar. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 175 the caused-motion construction, places emphasis on the process of transfer rather than on the possession of the transferred object. By contrast, the verb email, for the reasons discussed above, can be licensed into either the dative or the ditransitive constructions in terms of the Focal Prominence Compatibility constraint. Obviously, in the case of email, the choice of the ditransitive construction to the detriment of the dative involves a shift of emphasis from the transferred information to the receptor as the metaphorical possessor of information. These considerations provide an explanation for the asymmetric constructional behaviour of phone and email on the basis of their semantic properties. However, this discussion is not enough to account for problematic cases such as (i) the impossibility of *He emailed me the situation versus the acceptability of He emailed me about the situation, and (ii) the impossibility of *He phoned me good news versus the acceptability of He phoned me with good news. These two configurations are dealt with in sections3 .3 and 3.4, respectively. 3.3. TheAbout construction We initially assumed that verbs of instrument of communication constitute a special subclass whose syntactic behaviour not only patterns with sister subclasses that belong to the verbs of communication class (tell, talk, say, etc.), but also assimilates to verbs of change of possession (give, send, etc.). In this respect, consider the examples in (1)-(3): (1) Louie emailed her letter to Joachim. (coca, 2003) (2) Zoe emailed me Dr Marmur’s contact information. (coca, 2010) (3) Angie immediately emailed Frank about her concerns for their daughter’s safety. (coca, 2007) Sentences (1) and (2) are clear examples of the use of the verb email with central instances of the dative and ditransitive constructions respectively. Example (3), on the other hand, features an additional element, a prepositional phrase introduced by about indicating the topic of the object of communication. In this respect, we should note that the dative and the ditransitive constructions are usually found to incorporate verbs of change of possession; we could easily replace the verb email with the verb send in sentences (1) and (2). On the other hand, the constructional pattern in (3), and its variant where the receiver is introduced by to, typically integrates some of the subclasses belonging to the general class of verbs of communication such as tell and advise verbs (without to) or talk and complain (with to), as in Ellen told/advised/talked to/complained to Helen about the situation (Levin 1993: 202-12). Our searches reveal that the selection of the syntactic pattern in (3) is associated to objects that may be discussed about (her concerns for their daughter’s safety), while the central instances of the ditransitive and the dative constructions typically feature syntactic objects that denote items that may be transferred (her letter, Mr. Marmur’s contact information). Therefore, we may postulate that in those cases in which the OBJ2 slot of ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 176 alicia galera masegosa the ditransitive construction is filled in by a topic that lends itself to discussion rather than to (literal or metaphorical) transmission, the transitive construction amalgamates with what we have termed the X About Y construction. In the X About Y construction, X is any communicative action in which the receiver may or may not be explicitly mentioned.12 Y may be realized by any topic of discussion. It only follows that X and Y must not coincide (#Mary told a story about a story). Note that the constructional status of this configuration follows from the definition outlined in section 2 above.13 First, it pairs a specific formal structure X( about Y, where X and Y are noun phrases of various degrees of complexity) with a given function (introducing a topic): (4) a. He told me the true story about John’s death. b. He told me everything he knew about John’s death. c. He told me everything he’d been told about John’s death. d. He told me everything he’d been told during the week about John’s death. e. He told me everything he’d been told during the week by his mother about John’s death. Of course, following general iconicity constraints, the smaller the distance between the head of the X noun phrase and the about phrase, the greater the felicity of the constructional realization.14 Second, the X About Y configuration is highly replicable provided that the formal and functional constraints mentioned above are not violated; e.g. I like stories about true love, I will not tell you anything about that issue, I don’t know anything about what she said; however, *I like stories about stories, I will not tell you anything about anything; etc. In addition, there are specific syntactic restrictions on the distribution of this construction, which strengthen its role as such. The X About Y construction cannot amalgamate, for instance, with the following syntactic patterns: the dative construction (He emailed the letter to me vs. *He emailed about the letter to me), the complex-transitive construction (He considers Mary a good person vs. *He considers Mary about a good person).15 By contrast, the X About Y construction may amalgamate, for instance, with the intransitive (Mary phoned/ about the problem) and the transitive constructions (Mary phoned me/ about the problem). 12 TheX About Y construction may also be superimposed with clauses containing verbs of cognition (e.g. I’ve been thinking about you, I know a lot about animals, etc.). However, given the restricted scope of this article, we will focus on verbs that involve a communicative action. 13 The X About Y construction needs to be considered as a phrasal construction (as opposed to clausal constructions), given its syntactic dependency and lack of clausal structure. The distinction between phrasal and clausal constructions is fully at home with the continuum posited between morphemes and complex constructions as endpoints (the grammar-lexicon continuum). 14 We regard iconicity as the principle underlying linguistic expressions that emulate a given state of affairs (Croft 2008 and Haiman 1980, 1985, 2008, among many others). 15 Here we use Quirk et al.’s terminology (1985). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 177 If we examine examples from our data, there are apparently two ways in which the X About Y construction may amalgamate with the transitive construction. Let us see examples (5) and (6) below: (5) But a fellow nba reporter recently emailed me about how rude Garnett continues to be to the media. (coca, 2004) (6) Supervisor Mike Antonovich emailed me the news about the promotion of Assistant Sheriff Paul Tanaka.16 In these examples, even if syntactically optional, the X About Y construction is obligatory for discourse purposes. In both cases, the X About Y construction provides additional information that complements the semantic object of the sentence, which is the email itself in (5) and the news in (6). One may argue that in the sentence Mary told me about the problem, the X About Y construction constitutes the direct object. However, this is not possible in view of the possibility of making a transitive use of tell: Mary told me everything/what she knew about the problem. The sequence Mary told me is the result of applying what Goldberg (2006) has termed the Deprofiled Object Construction. This construction has the function of omitting non-focal arguments that are irrelevant in discourse. As a result of this, in Mary told me the emphasis is on the relationship between the communicative action and the receiver of the communication. On the basis of the observations made above we can contend that the transitive and the X About Y constructions can only amalgamate in one way. In the amalgam, the About Y part of the construction complements (by introducing a topic) the semantic object within the X part thus designating the information transmitted, which may, in turn, be either implicit or explicit. One word of caution is nonetheless in order here. TheX About Y construction is what we can call a topic construction.17 It has the function of introducing a topic that provides information about an object of communication or cognition. It is different from other uses of about, as in the following sentence: About your financial situation, let me just tell you that you made a mistake. This sentence instantiates a topicalization construction, which in the lcm is a discourse or level-4 construction whose function is to bring a discourse topic (your financial situation) to the front.18 This construction may be represented as follows: 16 ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 178 alicia galera masegosa About X, Y, where X is a noun phrase introducing the discourse topic and Y a clause or a clause complex commenting on the topic. Let us now turn our attention to the verb phone, which may, in fact, be subsumed into the construction resulting from the amalgam between the X About Y and the transitive construction, as shown in examples (7) and (8) below: (7) April Jolley phoned me about the Spring Fling Dance.19 (8) He phoned her about a surprise fortieth birthday party for a mutual friend. (coca, 2001) TheX About Y construction ensures that the semantic direct object of the sentence will include a topic that can be discussed about. Therefore, the interpretation of the amalgam between the X About Y and the transitive constructions is semantically closer to verbs of communication than to verbs of change of possession, which, in fact, cannot be subsumed into this amalgam (*April Jolley sent me about the Spring Fling Dance). We may contend that the construction that results from the amalgam is somehow semantically close to the ditransitive construction in that we may identify a recipient and an affected object (which is usually implicit within the semantic configuration of the verb). Examples (7) and (8) show that, even if the verb phone cannot be integrated into the ditransitive construction, it may become part of what we may call the transitive-about amalgam. The verb phone can thus be said to constitute an exception within the subclass of verbs of instrument of communication in that it inherits syntactic and semantic properties from sister subclasses, but not from verbs of change of possession. The verb phone patterns with other verbs of communication in that the semantic object is implicit within the verbal configuration: in He told me about the situation, the semantic object is implicit within the verb, as is revealed by the following paraphrase: He gave me information about the situation. This is not the case, for instance, of other subclasses such as say verbs. We must observe that the syntactic behaviour of say and tell verbs is different, despite their evident semantic relatedness: He said something to me vs. *He said me something; *He told something to me vs. He told me something. In our view, the verb say (defined as “to express with words”)20 is the verb of communication that genuinely conveys the implications of Reddy’s Conduit Metaphor (1979). In general lines, this metaphor allows us to reason and talk about acts of communication in terms of acts of physical transfer (ideas as moving objects that go from speaker to hearer, the speaker is the point of departure, the hearer is the final destination, etc.; Grady 1988). Therefore, the use of this metaphor points to the dative construction as the prototypical construction in acts of communication, as is the case with acts of transfer of possession. This explains why the verb say cannot be subsumed into the ditransitive construction, which intrinsically focalises the final state rather than the act of transfer itself. 19 ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 179 However, not every subclass within the general class of verb of communication is sensitive to the use of the conduit metaphor within its semantic structure. Verbs like tell convey a more specific meaning related to narration. Therefore, acts of communication coded by this verb are not seen as transfers of information, but rather as giving an account of an event in sequenced and ordered ways. The conduit metaphor also provides an explanation for the fact that tell can be subsumed into the transitive-about amalgam (He told me about the situation), while say cannot (*He said me about the situation): as we pointed out, the transitive-about amalgam is semantically related to the ditransitive construction, so the subsumption of the verb say is blocked. 3.4. TheX With Y construction Consider sentences (9) and (10) below: (9) I emailed the company with this information. (coca, 2010) (10) Josephson phoned him with big news. (coca, 1996) In the light of these examples, we postulate the existence of another phrasal construction that may amalgamate with argument-structure constructions, namely the X With Y construction. This construction may amalgamate, for instance, with the intransitive and the transitive constructions. The representation of this construction is X With Y, in which X is an act of communication and Y constitutes the object of communication. Therefore, X With Y is not a topic construction, since it introduces the semantic object rather than a topic that complements it. In the light of our database, we have identified a semantic restriction on the object introduced by with. This object must be informatively relevant, that is, it must add information that is not already implicit in other constituents of the sentence. Consider, in this respect, example (9) above. This sentence is acceptable within a context in which speaker and hearer are aware of the existence of some information related to a topic that they have been previously discussing. By saying with this information, the speaker is making reference to information that is known to the hearer. By contrast, the sentence I emailed the company with information would be less relevant in principle, since we take it for granted that an email message contains some kind of information. The same can be said about the other members of the subclass of verbs of instrument of communication. Let us see another example: The morning a friend emailed her with news of Loren’s arrest (coca, 1999). The prepositional object news of Loren’s arrest is informatively more relevant than news, since it is far more specific about the nature of what is communicated. The X With Y construction also differs from the X About Y construction since it needs metonymic licensing in order to amalgamate with the transitive and the intransitive constructions when used with verbs of instrument of communication like phone and ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 180 alicia galera masegosa email. Let us go back to example (10) above. Here we postulate a double metonymic shift based on domain expansion and reduction within the action frame (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal-Usón 2007; Ruiz de Mendoza 2011). The complement with big news constitutes the point of departure for the first metonymic shift. Although the “big news” is what gets communicated, this notion is metaphorically presented as if it were an instrument (He hit me with a hammer; Eat your soup with a spoon). This figurative instrument is first made to stand, through metonymic expansion, for the whole communicative action. Then, through metonymic reduction, the subdomain of the communicated object is highlighted within the broader domain of communicative action. This metonymic chain may be schematized as shown in figure 1 below: Fig. 1. Metonymic chain in the X With Y construction The overall meaning implication of treating the “big news” as an instrument in this metonymic chain is that their importance is what actually makes the whole communicative act worth the while. This explains the tendency to use this constructional amalgam when the object to be communicated is thought to deserve special attention: Hayes phoned him with an idea; They phoned him with congratulations; She phoned him with the offer, etc. (vs. #Hayes phoned an idea to him; #They phoned congratulations to him; #She phoned the offer to him, which are at best rather odd). 4. Conclusions The present article has explored in some detail the integration of the verbs email and phone into the ditransitive and the dative constructions. Making use of the analytical and explanatory tools provided by the lcm, we have found that some of the asymmetries between the subsumption processes of these two verbs may be explained in terms of the high-level metonymies that regulate the categorial conversion of the nouns phone and email into verbs: the instrument for action metonymy, in the case of phone, ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 181 and the combination of means for action and means (of sending a message) for message, in the case of email. Moreover, we have postulated the existence of two phrasal constructions that may amalgamate with the transitive construction in order to accommodate these two verbal predicates with certain objects: the X About Y and the X With Y constructions. These two constructions are different in that the former is a case of topic construction while the latter is not. In other words, the X About Y construction introduces a topic that complements the direct object while the X With Y construction introduces the object of communication itself, although the object is treated as if it were an instrument of communication. Our study points to the possibility of listing the verb phone within a separate subclass, given its idiosyncratic constructional behaviour. This verb may not be subsumed within the ditransitive construction, but may be integrated within the transitive-about amalgam. We have suggested that the verb phone patterns with say verbs in that it is conceptually grounded in the conduit metaphor, which explains why it cannot be subsumed into the ditransitive construction. Finally, metonymic chains have been shown to be a licensing factor for certain amalgamation processes, as in the case of the amalgam of the transitive and the X With Y constructions in English. Works Cited Boas, Hans 2010: ‘The Syntax-lexicon Continuum in Construction Grammar: the Case of Communication Verbs’. Belgium Journal of Linguistics 24: 54-82. Bybee, Joan 2010: Language, Usage, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge up. —forthcoming: ‘Exemplars and Constructions’. Thomas Hoffmann and Graham Trousdale, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford up. Colleman, Timothy and Bernard De Clerck 2009: ‘“Caused Motion?” The Semantics of the English to-dative and the Dutch aan-dative’. Cognitive Linguistics 20: 5-42. Croft, William 2008: ‘On Iconicity of Distance’. Cognitive Linguistics 19: 49-58. Del Campo Martínez, Nuria 2011: ‘Cognitive Modeling in Illocutionary Meaning’. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9.2: 392-412. Dik, Simon 1997: The Theory of Functional Grammar: The Structure of the Clause. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Goldberg, Adele 1995: Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: u of Chicago p. —2006: Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford up. Goldberg, Adele and Giulia Bencini 2005: ‘Support from Processing for a Constructional Approach to Grammar’. Andrea E. Tyler, Mari Takada, Yiyoung Kim and Diana Marinova, eds. Language in Use: Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives on Language and Language Learning. Washington: Georgetown up. 3-18. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 182 alicia galera masegosa Grady, Joseph 1998: ‘The “Conduit Metaphor” Revisited: A Reassessment of Metaphors for Communication’. Jean-Pierre Koenig, ed. Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language II. Buffalo: csli. 205-18. Gregory, Michelle and Laura Michaelis 2001: ‘Topicalization and Left-dislocation: A Functional Opposition Revisited’. Journal of Pragmatics 33.11: 1665-706. Haiman, John 1980: ‘The Iconicity of Grammar: Isomorphism and Motivation’. Language 56.3: 515-40. —1985: Natural Syntax: Iconicity and Erosion. Cambridge: Cambridge up. —2008: ‘In Defence of Iconicity’. Cognitive Linguistics 19: 59-66. Halliday, Michael 1976 (1967): Halliday: System and Function in Language. Selected Papers. Gunther Kress, ed. Oxford up. 174-88. Iwata, Seizi 2005: ‘The Role of Verb Meaning in Locative Alternations’. Mirjam Fried and Hans Boas, eds. Grammatical Constructions: Back to the Roots. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 101-18. Kay, Paul forthcoming: ‘The Limits of Construction Grammar’. Thomas Hoffmann and Graham Trousdale, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford up. Kay, Paul and Charles Fillmore 1999: ‘Grammatical Constructions and Linguistic Generalizations: The “What’s X doing Y” Construction’.Language 75: 1-33. Lakoff, George 1987: Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago and London: u of Chicago p. Langacker, Ronald 1987: Foundations of Cognitive Grammar – Volume I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford up. —1991: Foundations of Cognitive Grammar – Volume II: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford up. Levin, Beth 1993: English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago and London: u of Chicago p. Mairal-Usón, Ricardo and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza 2009: ‘Levels of Description and Explanation in Meaning Construction’. Christopher Butler and Javier Martín Arista, eds. Deconstructing Constructions. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 153-98. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik 1985: A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Panther, Klaus-Uwe 1997: ‘Dative Alternation from a Cognitive Perspective’. Birgit Smieja and Meike Tasch, eds. Human Contact through Language and Linguistics. Frankfurt and Main: Peter Lang. 107-26. Pérez, Lorena and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza 2002: ‘Grounding, Semantic Motivation, and Conceptual Interaction in Indirect Directive Speech Acts’. Journal of Pragmatics 34.3: 259-84. Radden, Günter and René Dirven 2007: Cognitive English Grammar. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 constraints on subsumption and amalgamation processes 183 Rappaport Hovav, Malka and Beth Levin 2008: ‘The English Dative Alternation: The Case for Verb Sensitivity’. Journal of Linguistics 44: 129-67. Reddy, Michael J. 1979: ‘The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict inour Language about Language’. Andrew Ortony, ed. Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge up. 284-310. Rosca, Andrea forthcoming: ‘How Conceptual Structure Impinges on Constructional Behavior. The Case ofGive Verbs’. Revista de Filología Inglesa 33. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco 2000: ‘The Role of Mappings and Domains in Understanding Metonymy’. Antonio Barcelona, ed. Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 109-32. —2007: ‘High-level Cognitive Models: in Search of a Unified Framework for Inferential and Grammatical Behavior’. Krzysztof Kosecki, ed. Perspectives on Metonymy. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 11-30. —2011: ‘Metonymy and Cognitive Operations’. Reka Benczes, Antonio Barcelona and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza, eds. Defining Metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics. Towards a Consensus View. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 103-23. —forthcoming: ‘Meaning Construction, Meaning Interpretation and Formal Expression in the Lexical Constructional Model’. Brian Nolan and Elke Diedrichsen, eds. Linking Constructions into Functional Linguistics: The Role of Constructions in RRG Grammars. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco and Annalisa Baicchi 2007: ‘Illocutionary Constructions. Cognitive Motivation and Linguistic Realization’. Istvan Kecskes and L. Horn, eds. Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Intercultural Aspects. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 95-128. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco and Francisco Gonzálvez 2011: ‘Constructional Integration in the Lexical Constructional Model’. British and American Studies 17: 75-95. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco and Ricardo Mairal-Usón 2007: ‘High-level Metaphor and Metonymy in Meaning Construction’. Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg and Peter Siemund, eds. Aspects of Meaning Construction. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 33-51. —2008: ‘Levels of Description and Constraining Factors in Meaning Construction: An Introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model’. Folia Lingüística 42.2: 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 and Oakville: Equinox. 62-82. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco and Lorena Pérez 2001: ‘Metonymy and the Grammar: Motivation, Constraints, and Interaction’. Language and Communication 21: 321-57. —2011: ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: Myths, Developments and Challenges’. Metaphor and Symbol 26: 161-85. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 184 alicia galera masegosa Received 5 June, 2012 Revised version accepted 25 October, 2012 Alicia Galera Masegosa is a PhD student in English Linguistics at the University of La Rioja. Her primary research interests include cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches to language and their computational implementation. She also carried out research concerning the conceptual theory of metaphor, metonymy and the multiple ways in which they may combine. Her work has been published in journals such as resla and Language Sciences. Address: Universidad de La Rioja. Edificio de Filologías Modernas. C/ San José de Calasanz, s/n. 26004, Logroño (La Rioja). Tel.: +34 941299416. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 167–84· issn 0210-6124 REVIEWS RESEÑAS ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94 issn 0210-6124 reviews Pilar Guerrero Medina, ed. 2011: Morphosyntactic Alternations in English. Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. Sheffield: Equinox. 383 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84553-744-9. Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga Universidad de Huelva [email protected] Morphosyntactic alternations have always been at the core of both formal and functional linguistic analysis. Due to their complexity, however, there are still, even today, many morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic issues concerning alternations that remain unanswered in the literature, something the present collective work attempts to address. In the words of Guerrero Medina, its editor, one of the main objectives of this volume is, in fact, no less than to “contribute to a better understanding of the phenomena subsumed under the rubric of morphosyntactic alternation” (2). To this end, this volume brings together fourteen chapters couched in the functional paradigm of linguistic analysis, though within different contemporary theoretical frameworks, which, as a whole, present a serious, original and updated examination of the phenomenon in general, and of various different English morphosyntactic alternations in particular. The chapters are coherently organized in two parts. The first, entitled ‘Theoretically- oriented Approaches to the Issue of Morphosyntactic Alternations’, comprises four chapters of a clearly theoretical orientation which investigate the notion of alternation and/or verb classification, supported by descriptive evidence from the grammatical theories in which they are rooted. The second, in turn, consists of ten studies on specific English alternations, having, thus, a more descriptive orientation. Since the intrinsic behaviour of the different alternations tackled does not remain constant throughout, this second part of the volume assumes its own internal structure which groups together the first four contributions, dealing with three clear instances of “transitivity alternations” (Levin 1993: 25), on the one hand, and, on the other, the six remaining chapters, all focussing on alternations which imply a change in the morphosyntactic expression and/or placement of arguments and do not affect the transitivity of the verb. Part I opens with a contribution by Davidse, ‘Alternations as a Heuristic to Verb Meaning and the Semantics of Constructions’, located within the structural-functional tradition of Gleason (1966) and Halliday (1967, 1968), in which the author, on the basis of two case studies, makes a strong defence of the usefulness of verb-specific alternations in verb classification and in the semantics of constructions. The former is examined in relation to English ditransitive verbs; specifically, their behaviour in alternations which, —187— 188 beatriz rodríguez arrizabalaga allowing the omission of the non-agentive participants known as “Dative” and “Patient”, are clearly dependent on semantics. Two of the results obtained here should be regarded as extremely innovative since, as Davidse herself remarks, they “had tended to be neglected so far” (33): first, the existence of an important class of ditransitive verbsattribute, ( ascribe, impute, etc.) which encode the “causation of a possessive relation” and for which Dative and Patient are always obligatory; and second, the existence of several subclasses of ditransitive verbs (pay, feed, etc.) which strongly profile Agent-Dative action chains. The specific area chosen to demonstrate the heuristic of alternations for the semantics of constructions is that of English intransitive ergatives, which Davidse classifies, according to the lexical restrictions imposed by their grammatical subjects, into two different types on the basis of their possible alternation with a reflexive pattern: He stopped/He stopped himself vs. Eggs boil/*Eggs boil themselves. The second chapter, ‘The Study of Alternations in a Dialogic Functional Discourse Grammar’, is a contribution by Mackenzie which deals with the phenomenon of English morphosyntactic alternations within the dialogic model of Functional Discourse Grammar (fdg); a version of fdg which incorporates recent findings of contemporary sociolinguistics in relation to priming on formulation and decoding, and which basically differs from the “standard” model (Hengeveld and Mackenzie2008 ) in that the contextual component is visualized as shared by the two participants in a dialogue. The analysis offered by Mackenzie may strike the reader as shocking and surprising, since it defends a completely new conception of alternations, radically different from the traditional one, in which the key factor is not the semantic and/or pragmatic connection between two or more clauses but, on the contrary, the clear morphosyntactic parallelism between lexically related (The 747 was landing by the control tower/The 474 was alerted by the control tower) or lexically unrelated clauses (The moon has set in the west/A man should rely on his friends/ These arguments were refuted by several scholars). To support his hypothesis, Mackenzie provides psycholinguistic evidence that shows that morphosyntactic parallel clauses do group together cognitively, which he expands on with the examination of a short extract taken from the Michigan Corpus of Spoken English (micase) which reveals, through the analysis of the verb take, how this relatedness becomes visible in dialogue in the operation of priming. The following chapter, ‘Constraints on Syntactic Alternation: Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in the Lexical Constructional Model’, is a contribution by Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón which discusses syntactic alternations as epiphenomenal to constrained lexical-constructional integration within the framework of the Lexico-Constructional Model (lcm). The authors focus mainly on the external principles of high-level metaphor and metonymy to prove that these are crucial in the explanation of related alternations, such as, for instance, the causative/inchoative (The child broke the window/The window broke) and the middle (These clothes don’t wash well), on the one hand, and the caused-motion construction (She sneezed the napkin off the table) and the resultative (He beat me silent), on the other. In this way they demonstrate that both high-level phenomena do, in fact, ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94· issn 0210-6124 reviews 189 constrain the process of subsuming lexical characterizations into constructions and that their comprehension is essential to account for constructional coercion over lexical structure. Part I closes with Neale’s contribution ‘Alternation and Participant Role: A Contribution from a Systemic Functional Grammar’. Framed in the approach to transitivity developed within the output of Systemic Functional Linguistics known as the Cardiff Grammar (CG), this work provides an alternative analysis to Levin’s (1993) lexicon-based approach to alternations, in which the study of paradigmatic relations between verb senses as alternations is abandoned in favour of one that considers them, instead, as cases of “near equivalences”. Neale illustrates her analysis with the two different senses underlying the verb break in the traditionally named causative alternation (“a one role”, “affected only” Process in The glass broke and a “two-role”, “agent plus affected” Process in Sebastian broke the glass), which is extremely useful for the reader who, thanks to the detailed explanation offered, is able to understand how any other alternation would be handled using the system network in the cg approach. The initial part of the paper is also very helpful for the reader because, by presenting a complete overview of the treatment given to transitivity in the cg, in which the notions of “process”, “system network” and “delicacy” receive special attention, it provides the appropriate context for this theoretical approach to verbal alternation. Part II starts with García Velasco’s contribution ‘The Causative/Inchoative Alternation in Functional Discourse Grammar’, in which the author defends the position that fdg provides the natural locus to represent the causative/inchoative alternation in English, as well as in other languages, on the basis of the following two arguments: (i) the separation of lexemes from the frames in which they occur that takes place in this specific theoretical framework; and (ii) the inclusion of a conceptual component, absent from the classic version of fg (Dik 1997), which provides an appropriate interpretation of pairs, like John broke the window/The window broke, which, according to the author, require a conceptual explanation rather than a purely linguistic one, as commonly put forward in the literature. In the following paper Marín Arrese revisits, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, two particular thematic-subject constructions in English and Spanish for which she proposes, basing her argument on the notions of construal and profiling, a non-derivational analysis: (i) the inchoative construction illustrated in The vase broke/El jarrón se rompió, which denotes spontaneous events; and (ii) the middle construction, exemplified in Wholemeal bread cuts easily/El pan integral se corta con facilidad, which encodes, in turn, facilitative events. Furthermore, Marín Arrese asserts that both constructions lie on a continuum defined by three of their most relevant distinguishing features (namely, (i) the degree of distinctness of participants in the events; (ii) the degree to which the external source of energy is implicit or schematically evoked; and (iii) the degree to which the thematic participant initiates or facilitates the event), and posits, thus, between them a middle ground which accommodates instances of “blends” and other non-prototypical phenomena, such as middles with instruments, means or locatives as thematic subjects ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94· issn 0210-6124 190 beatriz rodríguez arrizabalaga (see examples in García de la Maza below) and middles of intransitive predicates (This music dances better than the other one). The paper ends with an interesting brief account of the network which subsumes these two thematic subject constructions along with other constructions of reduced transitivity, such as passives and unaccusative intransitives. Middle constructions are also the focus of the following contribution in the book: ‘The Semantics of English Middles and Pseudo-middles’, by García de la Maza. In the exhaustive research the author carries out on the semantico-pragmatic peculiarities underlying English middles there are three important issues that are worth highlighting: (i) the compositional interpretation of the constructional meaning of the English middle as a function of the meaning of the subject together with the verb and the adverb; (ii) the inclusion within the middle paradigm of three idyiosyncratic and marginal English constructions which deviate from the prototypical middle: namely, (a) those having a Location or a Means as subject of an intransitive vp (The top loch is fishing well; This music dances better than the other one); and (b) those with a Means participant as subject of a transitive vp (This wood carves beautiful toys); finally, (iii) the lexicalization process which some middles are undergoing. The contribution by Guerrero Medina, ‘An Antipassive Interpretation of the English “Conative Alternation”: Semantic and Discourse Pragmatic Dimensions’, deals with the English conative alternation, illustrated in She kicked the mule/She kicked at the mule. After briefly reviewing how it has been studied in Levin’s (1993) lexically-based approach and Goldberg’s (1995) construction-based approach, Guerrero Medina comes down in favour of the latter, though with some reservations. In order to overcome the greater of these (i.e., the representation of the meaning of the construction as invariable), Guerrero Medina presents a corpus-based analysis of the semantic and discourse-pragmatic dimensions of the English conative construction, placing special emphasis on its connection, based on the parameters below, with the construction traditionally called “antipassive” in the functional-typological literature (Cooreman 1994): (i) identifiability and affectedness of the object; (ii) the aspectual changes in the predicate; and (iii) the lack of volitionality of the agent. As regards pragmatics, this corpus analysis also shows a clear connection between both constructions in terms of topicality. The section of the volume concerned with alternations that do not affect the transitivity of the verb opens with a work by Boas entitled ‘A Frame-Semantic Approach to Syntactic Alternation: The Case of Build Verbs’. Intended to a be a contribution to the ongoing discussion in the literature on the inconsistencies detected in Levin’s (1993) classification of English verbs, this paper offers an alternative frame-semantic analysis of the so-called build verbs, which allows for a finer-grained account of semantic verb classes, avoiding, thus, the problems underlying Levin’s approach, as well as providing some insteresting advantages for cross-linguistic applications. Basically, it asserts that the differences in the syntactic behaviour of build verbs proposed by Levin (1993) are best accounted for in terms of the different polysemy network of verb senses. Adopting ideas from Fillmore’s (1982) Frame Semantics and drawing on data from the corpus-based database of English known ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94· issn 0210-6124 reviews 191 as FrameNet, Boas proposes, on the basis of his analysis of the verb grind, accounting for the alternating behaviour of verbs by determining, first, the different types of Lexical Units associated with each verb and, consequently, with the semantic frames they evoke and, secondly, the valence patterns which represent their over realization. The contribution by Gries, ‘Acquiring Particle Placement in English: A Corpus-Based Perspective’, stands out in this collective work for being the only contribution developed within the field of language acquisition. It focuses on the linguistic factors that determine, together with some psycholinguistic variables, children’s early acquisition of the constituent order called “particle placement”, illustrated in He picked up the book/He picked the book up, which is so characteristic of English transitive phrasal verbs. Specifically, Gries examines, on the one hand, the lexical preferences children manifest to use one construction (VPrtDirObj) over the other (VDirObjPrt), and on the other, the influence on the choice of construction exerted by some traditionally-studied syntactico-semantic variables (i.e. length and type of object) as well as of some new phonological (i.e. segment and cv alternation) and frequency variables, which, in contrast, have received almost no attention in the literature. For this purpose, Gries compiles a sample of 3673 verb-particle constructions taken from three children’s corpora, extracted from the childes databank, which he examines separately. His findings, that remain constant across the three corpora, establish that the VDirObjPrt order is the predominant one in children’s production (95% of all vpcs analysed) due, according to the author, to two main reasons: (i) it is the order used to encode the movement of an object caused by an agent, a scenario that is cognitively salient and basic for children; and (ii) it constitutes a significant portion of the children’s input, being more characteristic of oral discourse than the VPrtDirObj order. The next contribution by Gonzálvez García, ‘Looks, Appearances, and Judgements: Towards a Unified Constructionsist Analysis of Predicative Complement Alternations in English and Spanish’, is an extensive corpus-based analysis on two particular predicative constructions found in both English and Spanish: (i) those called by the author “subjective-attributive constructions”, in which the predicative complement follows a verb of the seem/parecer-type (He seems (to be) angry/Parece (estar) enfadado); and (ii) those he calls “evaluative subjective-transitive constructions”, in which the predicative relationship appears after verbs of sensory and/or cognitive perceptionThe ( bbc considers this alternative inappropriate/ La rae considera esta oración incorrecta). Despite the two basic differences concerning the choice of the main clause subject and the feasibility of reflexive arguments, Gonzálvez García proposes a unitary Goldbergian constructionist account of both constructions, different from those proposed by Gisborne (2008) and Yoon (2004), due to the features the two constructions share: (i) their core constructional meaning; (ii) the common semantico-pragmatic profile of their components; and finally, (iii) the feasibility of coercion in relation to scalarity and their possible progressive modification and occurrence with an imperative form. In the next chapter, entitled ‘Metonymy-Motivated Morphosyntactic Alternations’, Barcelona argues, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, for the crucial role of ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94· issn 0210-6124 192 beatriz rodríguez arrizabalaga conceptual metonymy in the motivation of some instances of the three main types of what, for him, constitute the phenomenon of morphosyntactic alternations: namely, (i) the conventional pairing of a basic form with more than one basic meaning (class I), which Barcelona discusses in relation to the field of suffixal derivation and conversion; (ii) the conventional pairing of a basic constructional meaning with more than one uninflected form (class II), which the author explains with examples of ellipsis; and (iii) the model-variant relationship of two constructions within the same network (class III), which Barcelona describes through particular cases of syntactic constructions. Located within the fdg framework, the contribution by Portero Muñoz, ‘A Functional Discourse Grammar Approach to the Swarm-Alternation as a Case of Conversion’, centres on the so-called “swarm-alternation”, a specific case of the locative alternation illustrated in Bees are swarming in the garden/The garden is swarming with bees. The proposal presented here must be regarded as truly original because, in contrast to most traditional approaches which exclude verbal alternations from the word-formation domain, it studies the swarm- alternation, on semantic and syntactic grounds, as a case of conversion. Specifically, Portero Muñoz bases her analysis on a corpus of –ing /–ed forms of recurrent verbs in the with-construction of the alternation that shows that, due to the deverbalization process and subsequent adjetivization they undergo in this particular structure, these verbs display a similar behaviour to classical examples of the conversion of verbs into adjectives. Following a similar line to that of García Velasco in this same volume, Portero Muñoz devotes the second part of her work to explaining the suitability of fdg to account for the swarm-alternation by means of a non-derivational syntactic approach which overcomes most of the problems underlying the derivational approaches rooted in the field of lexical semantics such as, for instance, that of Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1998). The final contribution by Martín Arista, ‘Morphological Relatedness and Zero Alternation in Old English’, distinguishes itself from the rest because it deals with morphological alternations in Old English (oe); specifically, with two cases of formal- functional mismatches in morphologically related words which Martín Arista subsumes under the phenomenon known as “zero-alternation” due to their relationship and to their strong implication for the organization of the oe lexicon. The first case concerns the morphological processes of zero derivation and conversion, which are not distinguished between here since they both establish a semantic relationship between two different morphological forms by means of a zero morph (A:ngenga “solitary goer, isolated one”/ A:ngenga “solitary, isolated”). In the very complete overview of zero derivation presented, the typology of affixless derivation and the analysis of oe strong verbs deserve special attention due to the scientific care with which they are handled. The second case focuses on empty morphs; that is, explicit suffixes without any semantic effect that, likeig — — in the pair Đri:stlic/∂ri:stiglic (“daring”), establish a relationship between two different morphological forms. Due to its meaning and recursiveness in oe, the phenomenon of redundant derivation through empty morphs is to be differentiated, according to the author, from lexicalization and convergent derivation. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94· issn 0210-6124 reviews 193 Although the volume as a whole is intelligently organized, moving from the functionalist approaches to the study of morphosyntactic alternations of the first section and then to the more descriptive corpus-based studies of the second part, there is a slight theoretical shortcoming which warrants some attention here. The expression “Functional and Cognitive Perspectives” that appears in the subtitle of the work may perhaps be understood in a narrower sense than it really has because, aside from the structural-functionalist models known as Functional Discourse Grammar (Dik 1997) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1967, 1968) and the more cognitively- oriented approaches of Goldberg’s (1995, 2006) Construction Grammar and Fillmore’s (1982) Frame Semantics, in which most of the contributions of the book are couched, there is a number of other functional and cognitive theoretical frameworks which are not mentioned in the book; the different versions of Construction Grammar (Fillmore and Kay’s Berkeley Construction Grammar 1996); Croft’s Construction Grammar (2001); Steels and de Beule’s Fluid Construction Grammar (2006), among others, or Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces (1997), to name a few. Notwithstanding, the presentation of theoretical constructs and mechanisms from different approaches in order to produce a more accurate account of morphosyntactic alternations is a very positive feature of the book, since it proves that different linguistic approaches are complementary, rather than exclusive. Another weak structural point is the varying quantity of real data found in the different descriptive contributions of the second part: some chapters make use of a very limited amount of corpus data (Guerrero Medina, García de la Maza, among others), whereas others base their studies on a large amount of data and offer detailed frequency analysis (Gonzálvez García, Gries and Martín Arista, for instance). Despite these two flaws, the book is, all in all, a successful work on the study of English morphosyntactic alternations, which provides new suggestive insights into this complex linguistic phenomenon. It contains, in fact, many reflections and findings that are enlightening, arousing the reader’s curiosity and opening interesting new lines of future research. Works Cited Cooreman, Ann 1994: ‘A Functional Typology of Antipassives’. Barbara Fox and Paul J. Hopper, eds. Voice: Form and Function. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 49-88. Croft, William 2001: Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford up. Dik, Simon C. 1997: The Theory of Functional Grammar, Part I: The Structure ofthe Clause. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fauconnier, Gilles 1997: Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge up. Fillmore, Charles J. 1982: ‘Frame Semantics’. Linguistic Society of Korea, ed. Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin. 111-38. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94· issn 0210-6124 194 beatriz rodríguez arrizabalaga Fillmore, Charles J. and Paul Kay 1996: Construction Grammar. csli Lecture Notes. Stanford: csli. Gisborne, Nikolas 2008: ‘Dependencies are Constructions’. Graeme Trousdale and Nikolas Gisborne, eds. Constructional Approaches to English Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 219-55. Gleason, Henry Allan 1996: Linguistics and English Grammar. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston. 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. Halliday, Michael A. K. 1967: ‘Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English 1’. Journal of Linguistics 3.1: 37-81. —1968: ‘Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English 3’. Journal of Linguistics 4.2: 179-215. Hengeveld, Kees and J. Lachlan Mackenzie 2008: Functional Discourse Grammar. Oxford: Oxford up. Levin, Beth 1993: English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: Chicago up. Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav 1998: ‘Morphology and Lexical Semantics’. Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky, eds. Handbook of Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell. 248-71. 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) Received 26 September 2012 Accepted 31 October 2012 Dr Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Huelva. Her research focuses mainly on the syntax and semantics of English and on their contrastive analysis with those of Spanish. She has published several works on the following topics: the attributive systems of English and Spanish, English and Spanish change of state verbs, and English and Spanish resultative constructions. At the moment she is carrying out a corpus-based analysis of English cognate object constructions. Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Universidad de Huelva. Avda. Tres de Marzo s/n, 21071, Huelva, Spain. Tel.: +34 959 219133. Fax: +34 959 219143. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 187–94· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 195–200 issn 0210-6124 Helga Ramsey-Kurz and Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, eds. 2011. Projections of Paradise. Ideal Elsewheres in Postcolonial Migrant Literature. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. xxv + 277 pp. isbn: 978-90-420-3333-7. Felicity Hand Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected] Elleke Boehmer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature has argued that “perspectives on other lands continued to be directed through the prisms of inherited tropes: Utopia, or the lawless wilderness; the Noble Savage, or the unregenerate primitive; the Garden of Eden, and the Holy City. For Britain the glorious figure of Britannia was regnant over all” (2005: 43). Postcolonial texts have striven to rid themselves of these tropes of idyllic territories in order to reclaim them as everyday living spaces. However, it is also true that, in trying to erase such distorted visions of exotic paradises, the stereotype is inadvertently reinstated, as, beneath the claims for a share in modernity, there lies a yearning for the lost precolonial world. This appears to indicate a desire to return to an imagined unspoilt age of innocence: urban culture and lifestyle, long seen as the pinnacle of progress and modernity, seeking refuge in ‘nature’ and the ‘wilderness’. At the same time, undeveloped countries of the south, and allegedly unspoilt villages have lured cheap mass tourism and, more recently, adventure tours. This powerful desire to ‘penetrate’ virgin land reeks of past colonialisms as tourists often unconsciously destroy what they seek: the moment paradise is attained, it brings about its own demise. As Michael Wood argues: “The true paradises, indeed the only paradises, are the ones we have always already lost, because loss is what they are for, they have no other purpose than to be lost” (1997: 248). The increased critical focus on diasporic communities in the last thirty years has singled out the migrant —or diasporic subject— as the symbol of cosmopolitan travel and relocation. His or her anxieties as regards an often hostile host environment, and nostalgia for the lost homeland are frequently articulated through self-contrived myths of irretrievable, romanticised pasts. As Wood aptly puts it: “Paradise is the denial of the disagreeable; not an isolated garden but a form of willed blindness” (1997: 248). This book of essays edited by Helga Ramsey-Kurz and Geetha Ganapathy-Doré centres on this notion of home as “a site mostly out of reach [and therefore] a site of desire” (xix). The thirteen essays, together with the introduction by Ramsey-Kurz, tease out the various understandings of the paradise trope as it is dealt with in recent writing by authors with backgrounds in countries that have experienced colonization. The originality of the volume lies in the challenging way the authors of the essays have approached a wide variety —195— 196 felicity hand of literary genres from what appears to be a universal concept, yet have found multifarious layers of meaning of the term paradise embedded in the texts. Ranging from tropes of abundance and ambition of mastery through to Utopian dreams of escapism from modern life, the essays bring together a series of writers and texts that engage in thought-provoking dialogues, whether one reads the volume in one sitting or dips into it only to read a specific essay. This collection is an excellent example of thematically based postcolonial criticism centred around the trope of paradise, and as such is a refreshing change from studies that seem determined to fit the text under scrutiny into a theoretical straightjacket. In her introduction, Ramsey-Kurtz surveys various understandings of paradise, including the wild, as a place of innocence, and shows how the domination and exploitation of formerly unknown places actually brought about the disintegration of the earthly paradise only to reinstate it in the realm of myth. Her argument that “established conceptual hierarchies are displaced, alienated, suspended, and eventually replaced by new structures” (xviii) —what she later calls a site of desire (xix)— forms the framework for the remaining essays in the volume. This fashionable search for untouched Nature, disguised as nostalgia for the loss of innocence, pits the former colonies against the ‘peripheral’ areas. The latter are ruthlessly exploited and destroyed by industrialized agriculture, and are ironically devalued as being backward at the same time as being anxiously sought out as the object of urban longing. Nowadays tourists —read paradise seekers— want to experience nature and the landscape as consumers or voyeurs but rarely as actors. Interestingly, in view of this, only a few of the authors have linked their arguments with the rising body of work on ecocriticism. Ramsey-Kurtz touches upon “environmentalist anxieties about natural resource exploitation” (xvi), but no further reference is made to the way “a postcolonial poetics attends to the fragmented conditions of colonial displacement or diaspora without either idealizing fragmentation or yearning nostagically for wholeness” (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011: 29). Projections of Paradise could have sought to incorporate some of the writers who are deeply concerned about the need to fight for “a sustainable ecosystem”, which is indeed modern jargon forparadise (see Benson 2011: 62). It is true that Evelyne Hanquart-Turner’s essay, ‘The Search for Paradise: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide’ mentions in the conclusion “Ghosh’s ecological commitment as well as his social concern for the fate of the Indian subcontinent” (80), but her essay in fact focuses on the two visions of paradise that the novel projects: “a prelapsarian, elemental world of origins, beyond good and evil” and a “place of refuge from evil” (74-75) rather than on the environmental issues that the novel raises. Gerd Bayer does indeed cite several ecocritical studies in his contribution ‘Subverting the Tropical Paradise’, in which he seeks to explore how the myth of the island paradise is deconstructed in a selection of writers from Sri Lanka and India. Bayer reminds us that “the actual reality of such localities, not to mention the needs of the local population, easily falls by the wayside” (51). Through his analyses of some Sri Lankan novels and Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) he denounces the Western world’s commodification of nature, which “puts non-Western humanity into a position of subservience to the environment in which it lives” (57). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 195–200· issn 0210-6124 reviews 197 Continuing with Sri Lanka, Susanne Pichler asks ‘“But are we not all refugees from something?”: Projections of Paradise in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef ’. In linking her study with the work of sociologist Avtar Brah, Pichler unravels many of the connotations that the concept of paradise carries. Place inevitably conjures up the awkward question of belonging —a central issue for migrants— and banishment, which serves as a cruel reminder for those people who saw emigration as their only hope for survival. Pichler suggests that for Triton in Reef (1994) paradise is more an imagined space than a spatial configuration. Sri Lanka in Gunesekera’s work —like Zanzibar in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction examined in the same collection by Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso— lends itself to deconstructions of paradisiacal islands when the sociopolitical realities take centre stage: civil war and interethnic genocide shatter any hopes of the harmonious communities the travel brochures hint at beneath the exoticism they doggedly promote. Petra Tournay-Theodotou’s ‘Reconfigurations of “Home as a Mythic Place of Desire”: Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists’ suggests that the project of rewriting Africans into European history does not necessarily bring about present-day satisfaction. The character Stanley becomes more conscious of his liminal status and the search for home constitutes “a place that remains forever out of reach, deferred – an unattainable paradise” (121). In ‘The Paradise Within: Displacement, Memory and Nostalgia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea’ Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso has boldly opted to centre her discussion of the paradise trope in Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) rather than his aptly, albeit ironically, named Booker- shortlisted Paradise (1994), which has been analyzed extensively from this perspective. She shows how the earlier novel proves “the impossibility of finding a paradise on earth [while] By the Sea ends on a note of hope” (142-43). Muñoz Valdivieso’s focus on the elderly asylum seeker, Saleh Omar, highlights his “ability to remember and spin stories from the land of memory” (124), which becomes the antidote to the sense of rootlessness that enforced migrancy entails. Guilt features in few of the essays despite the obvious religious connection between the biblical expulsion from paradise and the impossibility of any restoration of prelapsarian bliss because of wrongdoing. Muñoz Valdivieso links Omar’s quest for forgiveness with his search for internal peace and likewise Vera Alexandra suggests that the paradisiacal garden “raises questions about the inevitability of human guilt” (2). Alexander deals with the ambiguities of Penelope Lively’s writing in the first essay of the volume, ‘Revisiting Lost Gardens. The Expulsion from Childhood in the Writings of Penelope Lively’. Her discussion refutes any doubt about the postcolonial credentials of English writers, highlighting the fact that Lively’s works “reflect a concern with postcolonial questions and a shared interest in issues debated in postcolonial discourse” (3), apart from the writer’s personal history of having spent much of her early childhood in Egypt and the Middle East. Alexander suggests that paradise can be construed as time more than place (25) and much of Lively’s writing portrays childhood not only as an age of innocence but also as “an open state of mind free of limiting preconceptions” (26). Geetha Ganapathy-Doré discusses narrative and the loss of paradise in ‘Kashmir by Way of London and New York: Projections of Paradise in Salman Rushdie and Agha ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 195–200· issn 0210-6124 198 felicity hand Shahid Ali’. Kashmir has been for many Indians an iconic, almost mythical, territory of desire —see the title of Kabir’s recent study (2009)— and Ganapathy-Doré provides a thorough background with which the texts, Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown (2006) and a selection of Ali’s poetry, are to be read. She points to “the loss of origin and childhood innocence that condemns the immigrant to exile and wandering” (45) as a shared motif in the novel and the poems, almost what Stephen Morton had called “a belated fantasy” (2012: 169). However, the close reading of Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry is somewhat weakly linked with her discussion of Rushdie and to the concluding remarks. Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz’s ‘Paradise Regained? The Harem in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood’ reads the memoir as a response to the Orientalist myth of the harem as a place of passive, erotic females meekly awaiting the Western male. Mernissi writes about a place of repressed but active women, some of whom were determined to defy the gender constraints imposed on them. The paradise motif is used to contrast the misconception Western males cherished of the harem in comparison to the daily routine of Mernissi’s women, who cross imaginary borders through the “verbal transcendence of their physical imprisonment” and the discovery of “alternative modes of bonding” (155). Ulla Ratheiser undertakes a close reading of a single poem, in her excellent essay ‘The Scent of Paradise: Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler”’, in which she raises multiple issues, including the link between paradise and food, and proposes various readings of the poem. Its ambivalence allows it to be read on several levels but the predominant theme of the poem, given its title, suggests a diasporic understanding of paradise through the strong link between cinnamon and Sri Lanka. The male persona narrates its colonial history and the reconquering of a woman’s body which, in turn, comes to represent the island itself and thus constitutes an act of neocolonialism: “The return to paradise is to be found in (an elusive) past, retrieved in an act of nostalgic resuscitation” (173). Michael Ondaatje features again in Ursula Kluwick’s essay ‘Waters of Paradise: The English Patient’. Water serves both to redeem and to destroy in the temporary paradise that the characters create in the Tuscan villa in the last months of World War II. It metaphorically stands for their human interactions and “fertility, healing, rejuvenation, purity, physical and spiritual cleansing, nourishment and refreshment” (191). The bombing of Hiroshima and the thunderstorm work together to arouse Kip’s anger, which leads to his leaving the villa-paradise. Kluwick concludes that “salvation lies not within artifical national and ethnic boundaries, but within the nucleus of personal relationships” (196). Human relations figure prominently in Derek Coyle’s reading of one of Derek Walcott’s best known poems in his essay ‘“I Got Raptures Once, and I Saw God”: Shabine as Prophetic Shaman of Paradise in Derek Walcot’s “The Schooner Flight”’. The move across to the Caribbean singles out a liminal character in the shape of the sailor who undertakes the shamanic role of “providing insight and healing for his society” (200). In fact, the paradisical vision with which Shabine’s voyage ends is read as “an experience of genuine human closeness, solidarity, or communitas, despite his criticism of that society” (215). Janne Korka takes readers to the Canadian prairies in his essay ‘“I Feel ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 195–200· issn 0210-6124 reviews 199 the Land”: Contradictions of Place in Rudy Wiebe’s Mennonite Novels’. Korka provides a comprehensive background to the Mennonite history of migration emphasising the community’s relations to place. Paradise is invariably never attained as the migrants are perpetually on the move even though the quest for an ideal locality features as a central motif in Wiebe’s work. The final essay in the volume, Helga Ramsey-Kurz’s ‘Glimpses of Paradise: Hope in Short Stories of Migration by M.G. Vassanji, Cyril Dabydeen, and Janette Turner Hospital’ analyzes three texts by three authors of different backgrounds from the perspective of the trauma undergone by migrants. As Ramsey-Kurz perceptively notes, the short story genre cannot enter into detailed explanations of this drama but instead implies how modern day migrants cope with the upheavals of uprooting and displacement. She also makes the vital distinction between migrants and simple travellers, people who have been obliged to leave for good and those who can return: “To ignore this difference is to ignore the trauma of separation suffered by migrants and their families” (253). Ramsey-Kurtz’s concluding remark that for migrants in our postcolonial world, home, “the place impossible to (re) possess . . . proves but a fantasy, a vision, a dream” (254), sums up many of the notions of paradise that the authors of the essays have presented. Moreover, the irony of the ideal elsewheres of the title of the volume is admirably conveyed by her view that “the migrant can be physically back in paradise and yet feel excluded from it . . . [and also experience] a sense of homeliness even in moments of utter displacement” (255). This volume covers several authors and countries and diverse migrant experiences. Interestingly, the authors of the essays have not suggested that writers who live in the West may be tempted to resort to paradise motifs that prove to be attractive to Western readers despite the fact that this entails self-exoticisation. They have perhaps been excessively benevolent as regards the writers’ use of the paradise trope and have overlooked the role played by the publishing industry where the postcolonial book market is concerned. However, the essays are engaging and well researched, but perhaps tighter editorial control could have eliminated unnecessary repetitions, in particular concerning the origin of the term paradise, and have unified the length of the essays, which range from ten to twenty-eight pages. There are also several typographical errors which could easily have been avoided with more conscientious proof-reading. The index is helpful and a complete bibliography might have been a better choice rather than the separate listings at the end of each chapter as, again, this would have avoided many unnecessary repetitions. The overall impression of the volume is positive as the authors have tackled an intriguing theme in a very convincing and stimulating way. Works Cited Benson, LeGrace 2011: ‘Haiti’s Elusive Paradise’. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies. Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford up. 62-79. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 195–200· issn 0210-6124 200 felicity hand Boehmer, Elleke 2005 (1998): Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford up. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley 2011: Postcolonial Ecologies. Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford up. Ghosh, Amitav 2005: The Hungry Tide. London: Harper Collins. Gunesekera, Romesh 1994: Reef. London: Granta. Gurnah, Abdulrazak 1994: Paradise. London: Bloomsbury. —2001: By the Sea. London: Bloomsbury. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara 2009: Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: u of Minnesota p. Morton, Stephen 2012: ‘Metaphors of the Secular in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie’. Jonathan P. A. Sell, ed. Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 151-69. Rushdie, Salman 2006: Shalimar the Clown. London: Vintage. Wood, Michael 1997: ‘The Death of Paradise’. Philosophy and Literature 21.2, October: 245-61. Received 16 March 2012 Revised version accepted 3 May 2012 Felicity Hand is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She teaches postcolonial literature and history and culture of the British Isles. She has published articles on Vikram Seth, Ved Mehta, Salman Rushdie, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, M.G.Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah and a full-length study of the Mauritian author Lindsey Collen (Edwin Mellen p, 2010). She is head of the research group Ratnakara Address: Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística. Edifici B. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona. Tel.:+34 935811567. Fax 935812001. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 195–200· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 201–06 issn 0210-6124 Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona 2010: Alejandro González Iñárritu. Contemporary Film Directors. Champaign: u of Illinois p. xiii + 154 pp. isbn: 978-0- 252-03569-2 (cloth), 978-0-252-07761-6 (paper). Juan Antonio Suárez Universidad de Murcia [email protected] Because of widespread migration and generalized capital and information flows, cultural production nowadays unfolds in the hyphen that conjoins East-West, North-South, center-periphery, that is, in that interstitial threshold that Homi Bhabha famously called “in-betweenness” (1994). As hybridity and liminality have become the norm, or as we have grown more aware of their ascendancy, a figure such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, an internationally successful Mexican director who works in his native country, in the United States, as well as in Europe, North Africa, and Japan, funded by various national industries and with an array of multinational actors and actresses, is clearly symptomatic of our times. To navigate these times and their culture, it becomes more and more necessary to overstep the traditional frontiers of our fields. This is exactly what Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona do in their monograph Alejandro González Iñárritu. Deftly combining history, sociology, and cultural analysis, they practice a brand of American studies that brings together both sides of the Mexican-American border and both halves of the continent, while exploring cultural genealogies further afield. Their book is, in this regard, similar to other significant critical projects such as Benito and Manzanas’s Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (2002), Fregoso’s MeXicana Encounters (2003), or Maciel’s El Norte: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema (1990). In line with these titles, Deleyto and Azcona purvey a fascinating case study of transnational cultural production that is also an index of the transformation of our disciplines in recent years and an aid to their renewal. Deleyto and Azcona’s volume is the first extended study of the director to date. Rather than stake out and open up a field, as ‘first’ works tend to do, Deleyto and Azcona mine their subject exhaustively and come close to shutting it down to further inquiry on account of their thoroughness and detail. The study appears in the prestigious Contemporary Film Directors series, published by University of Illinois Press. Created in 2002 by James Naremore, who also directed it until recently, the series has published, to date, over thirty monographs by well-known international scholars on a significant array of international filmmakers (Sterritt 2010). Many of these filmmakers are central figures in peripheral cinemas and on the festival circuit, and were previously crying out for substantial critical treatment in English, something the collection has finally provided. The launch of the —201— 202 juan antonio suárez series coincided with the start of similar projects by the British Film Institute, I.B. Tauris, Wallflower, and Manchester University Press, among other publishers, and shows that, more than four decades after Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault certified the death of the author and the beginning of “writing” —or free textual play— auteurism remains a productive point of entry into the study of film. This is the case because the auteur of contemporary film criticism is no longer the exalted individual who recollects in tranquility, self-propelled by ineffable genius —the target of post-structuralist critique. Instead, the current auteur is a force-field where cultural and iconographic repertoires, historical trends, material forces, collaborative effort, and individual idiosyncrasy converge, and where this convergence crystallizes into text (Naremore 1990,1999). True to this complex view of authorship, Deleyto and Azcona locate González Iñárritu within both recent Mexican cinema and transnational film, they analyze the director’s style and ideology, and describe the contributions of his collaborators: script-writer Guillermo Arriaga, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and musician Gustavo Santaolalla. Deleyto and Azcona make excellent use of previous contributions on the director, whose work has been addressed mostly in reviews and interviews, but they clearly surpass them in depth and scope. While earlier studies by Smith (2003), D’Lugo (2004) and Cameron (2006), had a narrower range, Deleyto and Azcona take on the entire output of the director which, at the time of their writing, consisted of three feature films collectively labeled a “trilogy of suffering” Amores— perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006)— and a short in the omnibus 11’09’’01—September 11 (2002). Deleyto and Azcona dig deeper and go further than their predecessors by researching more fully the intellectual genealogy of González Iñárritu and the conceptual and formal dimensions of his work. By placing genre —the multi-protagonist film, whose first extended treatment was by Azcona (2010)— at the center of their analysis, they endow their study with considerable cohesiveness, and show that many of the Mexican director’s thematic and narrative concerns are characteristic of the genre as well. As is the case in all the books in the series, the critical analysis is followed by a detailed filmography and an original interview. The opening section situates González Iñárritu in his time and place, as part ofa group of, for lack of a better term, alternative Mexican filmmakers whose work has had international resonance. The best-known figures in this group are Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón. They have achieved critical and commercial success by combining recognizable generic molds with a personal approach. Unlike the previous batch of internationally known Mexican directors, such as Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Paul Leduc, Felipe Cazals, or Arturo Ripstein, all of whom got their start in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the younger filmmakers work transnationally. They combine Mexican and foreign funding and commute between their countries of origin, the United States, and, occasionally, Spain, where both del Toro and González Iñárritu have filmed some of their work. Such globalism makes the exploration of national identity less of an issue than it had been for the earlier generation or even for contemporaries such as Carlos Reygadas or Fernando Eimbecke, who, despite overseas recognition, have retained ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 201–06· issn 0210-6124 reviews 203 Mexico as their production base and privileged subject matter. And yet, Deleyto and Azcona maintain that describing González Iñárritu or del Toro as transnational directors does not do justice to their fiercely affirmed Mexicanness, nor to the fact that many of their expressive resources stem from Mexican popular culture. The emotional intensity and multiple storylines of González Iñárritu’s films, for example, stem from the tradition of the Mexican melodrama and the telenovela. And the director’s concern with loneliness, unreliable public institutions, and social polarization are fully aligned with the thematic core of Mexican national cinema (see Ramírez Berg 1992). Simultaneously, González Iñárritu’s films incorporate a number of non-Mexican artistic idioms: the photographs of American Nan Goldin, rock music, and independent European cinema, such as the Macedonian film Before the Rain (Milcho Manchevsky 1994), an influence on Amores perros. Moreover, rather than locality and static belonging, Iñárritu’s stories dramatize border crossing and nomadic citizenship —not roots but routes, to invoke Paul Gilroy’s pun (1993: 19-29). They make us see that the national and the transnational need not be stark opposites, as Néstor García Canclini had already pointed out (2001) and Deleyto and Azcona endorse. National identities are often migrant, recombinant identities that have forgotten their history. And cultural globalization does not necessarily erase locality; it only makes it more mediated and multi-layered. ‘Nomadic’ citizenship and the ‘fractal’, networked storylines of the multiprotagonist film have their own peculiar temporality and spatiality, and the largest section of the book is devoted to them. The films in the “trilogy of suffering” reject straightforward chronology. González Iñárritu and co-writer Arriaga, structure their narratives by cross- cutting between different stories and locales Amores( perros, Babel) and by scrambling the temporal sequence, mixing present, past, and future (21 Grams). While on first viewing the films may give the impression of randomness, Deleyto and Azcona show that they are in fact carefully pieced together. What looks like chaos is an alternative inventorying of events and relations that downplays temporal linearity and cause-effect in favor of more conceptual links. Amores perros shifts from the fratricidal rivalry of two young brothers, to the story of a hired assassin, to the decline of a fashion model bodily and mentally disabled as the result of an accident. In this film, cross-cutting relativizes the suffering in each separate story, highlights echoes and parallels between the various strands of the plot, and evokes the vastness of Mexico City as an endless tapestry of grief. 21 Grams edits together moments and images on the basis of their shared affect, building up emotional atmosphere rather than seamlessly rendered events. And Babel explores the unpredictable ricocheting of a mishap —caused when two children mischievously fire a rifle at a tourist bus in Northern Morocco— through the oddly interconnected stories of an illegal Mexican immigrant in San Diego and forlornly hedonistic teenage girls in Tokyo. As in Amores perros, cross-cutting in Babel is the source of striking contrasts: between the impoverished boys in North Africa and the wealthy Tokyo teens who spend their afternoons in drugged abandon; or between the material comfort of an American upper- middle class family and the precarious circumstances of their Mexican house-servant. In ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 201–06· issn 0210-6124 204 juan antonio suárez addition, editing in Babel brings together two contemporary temporalities. The smooth shifting across stories recalls what sociologist Manuel Castells has called “timeless time”: the instant availability of events, stored and circulated in various media and easily retrievable by a click on a computer keyboard or the push of a button (2010: 460-98). Yet inside each story, characters are subjected to the inexorable unfolding of “chronological” or “traditional” time (again, Castells’s terms). Some examples of the latter are the slowness of ‘Moroccan time’ that enrages the American tourist waiting for medical help that never seems to arrive, or the irreversibility of misfortune that will neither bring back a killed Moroccan child nor return the Mexican house servant to her former American life. Parallel to the contrast between timeless time and chronological succession, Castells has developed a distinction between “spaces of flows” and “spaces of place”, that is, between nodes for multiple trajectories, connections, and data streams, on the one hand, and locations for personal habitation, on the other (2010: 407-53). Deleyto and Azcona show that all of González Iñárritu’s films showcase these two types of space. When locations act as sites of connection and transfer, they become “spaces of flows”, and when they are settings for relationships, dwelling, and affect, they act as “spaces of place”. Each of these spaces is constructed by means of different formal strategies. Connectivity and flow are communicated in all the films through movement across different storylines. Babel, for example, uses false eye-line matches and matches on action that give the impression that an action in a given story is completed in the adjoining one, or that the object of an off-screen stare in a sub-plot is in the one that follows, even if this last takes place at the other end of the world. In Amores perros, flow is additionally conveyed through the fleeting coincidence of characters in a given spot. At the site of a car crash, perhaps the central event in the film, the three strands of the plot and its main characters momentarily converge, and on other occasions, characters pass each other in the streets, mutually unaware of tenuous connections that are only visible to the film spectator. The spaces of place are constructed through a variety of devices. Amores perros combines depth of field and wide-angle lenses to deepen interiors and emphasize clutter and emotional entrapment, as in the various scenes that show the brothers’ cramped dwelling. In Babel, color and camera angle transmit, by turns, the blessings and occasional servitudes of home. And in a wedding scene in Tijuana, slow motion and shallow focus communicate intimacy, and shift what had been an eminently realistic sequence into the registers of memory or dreaminess. 21 Grams depicts intimate space through shallow focus and a hazy, over-exposed cinematography achieved by means of the bleach-bypass process, a stylistic choice whose significance in the film is painstakingly explored by Deleyto and Azcona. As is the case in Babel, these devices subjectivize the world of 21 Grams, and so do, in addition, the predominant close-ups and medium shots, and the numerous sequences that revolve around face-to-face encounters and exchanges. The detailed formal analysis provided by Deleyto and Azcona is rather exceptional in studies of national and peripheral cinemas, more frequently treated as symptoms of social and historical forces than as aesthetic statements in their own right. But for Deleyto and ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 201–06· issn 0210-6124 reviews 205 Azcona form is not an end in itself, nor an index of González Iñárritu’s particularity as a creator, but rather a conduit to explore the films’ ideology. This may be summarized as a profound humanism that shows the inevitability of suffering and the ephemerality of happiness, but also the resilience of the human spirit and the periodic availability of affection, understanding, and support. As comments on our beleaguered (late-? post-? post-post?) modernity, González Iñárritu’s films assert a balance between the conjunctive and disjunctive effects of connectivity and flow. In a world defined by quick circulation and instability, the possibilities for disunity and atomization are great, but so too are the chances for random kindness and unexpected alliance. Overall Deleyto and Azcona’s study leaves little to be desired. Theoretically sophisticated, encompassing, and luminous in its readings, the monograph will be an essential reference for anyone interested in the filmmaker and in transnational cinema, as well as a sound model of interdisciplinary scholarship. Works Cited Azcona, María del Mar 2010: The Multi-Protagonist Film. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Benito, Jesús and Ana Manzanas, eds. 2002: Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Bhabha, Homi 1994: The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Cameron, Allan 2006: ‘Contingency, Order, and the Modular Narrative: 21 Grams and Irreversible’. The Velvet Light Trap 58: 65-78. Castells, Manuel 2010: The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. D’Lugo, Marvin 2004: ‘Amores perros/Love’s a Bitch’. Alberto Elena and Marina Díaz López, eds. The Cinema of Latin America. New York: Wallflower: 221-29. Fregoso, Rosa Linda 2003: MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: u of California p. García Canclini, Néstor 2001: Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. 2nd. ed. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Gilroy, Paul 1993: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard up. Maciel, David R. 1990: El Norte: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema. San Diego: Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias, San Diego State U. Naremore, James 1990: ‘Authorship and The Cultural Politics of Film Criticism’. Film Quarterly 44.1: 14-23. —1999: ‘Authorship’. Toby Miller and Robert Stam, eds. A Companion to Film Theory. Oxford: Blackwell: 9-24. Ramírez Berg, Charles 1992: Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983. Austin: u of Texas p. Smith, Paul J. 2003: Amores perros. London: British Film Institute. Sterritt, David 2010: ‘Contemporary Film Directors’. Film Quarterly 64. 1: 65-69. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 201–06· issn 0210-6124 206 juan antonio suárez Films Cited 11’09’’01—September 11(Youssef Chahine, Amos Gitaï, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Shōhei Imamura, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Samira Makhmalbaf, Mira Nair, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Sean Penn, Danis Tanović, 2002) 21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003) Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) Before the Rain (Milcho Manchevsky, 1994) Received 1 March 2012 Accepted 30 July 2012 Juan Antonio Suárez is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Murcia. He is the author of the books Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (u of Illinois p) and Jim Jarmusch (u of Illinois p), among others, and of numerous essays on experimental literature and film and queer theory. He is currently an associate editor of the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Facultad de Letras. Universidad de Murcia. Plaza de la Universidad s/n. 30071 Murcia, Spain. Tel.: + 34 868 88 31 80. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 201–06· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 207–13 issn 0210-6124 J. Isaías Gómez López, ed. 2010: Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos. Estudio preliminar, traducción y notas. Almería: u de Almería. 369 pp. isbn 978-84-8240-955-9. Yolanda Morató Agrafojo Universidad Pablo de Olavide [email protected] The publication ofRoy Campbell. Poemas escogidos signals a major change in the traditional approach not only to reading but also to teaching the literature of Modernism, at least in Spain. Now, more than a hundred years after Modernism started to crystallize, if we take as the time-reference Virginia Woolf ’s famous claim in her essay ‘Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown’ (Bowlby 1992: 69-87), we still think of Modernism in England as a fascinating catalogue of works by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, the authors generally included in undergraduate syllabi. Of course, the Auden circle, the Sitwell clan and even the modernist little magazine culture may come as appealing side orders to complete the banquet. However, Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, Nancy Cunard, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford and Roy Campbell, to quote a very few relevant names, do not ever get a tenth of the space and time devoted to this canon when, in fact, they are the essential pieces with which to complete an intricate jigsaw whose main figures cannot be fully understood without their presence. The consolidation of a Modernist canon from an early moment, often established by contemporary critics and friends of those who were ‘canonised’, has certainly been a problem for its opening up to different voices. Somehow, the famous literary family tree, Fry-Woolf-Bell-Strachey-Grant, and those ‘relatives’ attached to it, from Eliot, Spender and Coward to Carrington, Sackville-West and Sitwell, have overshadowed those who were equally remarkable writers. Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell (1901-1957), born in the Natal District of South Africa, soon became an eccentric figure in British intellectual circles, but, like his close friend Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), he participated in both anthologies and informal meetings. Many years later, in Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher (1979), Henry Regnery remembered how T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell had been the key figures to change the literary scenario in London. And yet, the two latter have remained outcasts, not because of a lack of talent but due to their ideological and character flaws. Over decades, scholars such as David Wright (1961), Rowland Smith (1973), John Povey (1977), Peter Alexander (1989) and Joseph Pearce (2001; 2004) have published a number of studies mostly based on the traditional approach of ‘life and work’, but Campbell’s work, it must be admitted, has not enjoyed many followers in the academic world. In fact, a search in the British Library Integrated Catalogue reveals —207— 208 yolanda morató agrafojo only two Ph.D. dissertations. The fact that they were finished in 1977 (P. F. Alexander) and 1982 (Geoffrey Laurence Haresnape) demonstrates that the South African poet has not been a favourite subject for scholarly research in many years. In Spain, as far back as 1958, poet and translator Aquilino Duque published Poemas de Roy Campbell in the distinguished series Adonais, printed by Rialp, but his edition has been out of print for some time. Apart from these translations into Spanish, which certainly do justice to Campbell’s poems, the only contribution to the field, España y la guerra de 1936 en la poesía de Roy Campbell, was published in 1959 by Esteban Pujals Fontrodona. In 1957, the year Roy Campbell died, Pujals had presented in King’s College (University of London) his second thesis, Spain and Spanish Themes in Modern English Poetry, Campbell being one of the main authors included in his study. Now, more than fifty years later, Gómez López’s bilingual compilation manages to demonstrate that the literary production of some of these lesser known figures of Modernism was rich, profuse, and fruitful. One of the main virtues of Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos is, as its Spanish title indicates, a balanced selection of poems, chosen from nine of Campbell’s books, which results in the outstanding figure of almost one hundred pieces printed in English, each with its Spanish translation on the facing page. As in Roy Campbell. Selected Poems (2001) by Joseph Pearce, Gómez López has organized his selection in chronological order, which helps the reader to follow not only the poet’s changes in poetical moods and patterns but also in his trips to South Africa and around Europe, particularly during the inspirational periods he spent in France, Spain and Portugal. This collection is, therefore, comprehensive and —given the recent history of absences described— well timed. Campbell’s right-wing ideology and his support of Franco are responsible for the Spanish readership’s general lack of acquaintance with his work. Gómez López’s suitably developed ‘estudio preliminar’ or introduction (35-84) chaperons the reader, unfolding a well-documented narrative. Given the significance of Spanish culture in Roy Campbell’s work, this compilation has an added value for those readers interested in the poet’s interpretations of the Spanish mental and physical landscape. Big cities such as Barcelona, but also smaller cities like, for instance, Toledo, where Campbell met Laurie Lee, fascinated the poet, and the evidence of his constant attraction to the country can be easily traced in his poems. The compiler’s choice of six poems from Talking Bronco (1946), four of them related to a Spanish subject, reflects this. From ‘San Juan de la Cruz’ to ‘On the Martyrdom of F. G. Lorca’, Campbell’s unconditional love for Spain is developed both through his poems and his generosity towards Spanish culture. As a consequence of the hostile atmosphere prior the Spanish Civil War, the Carmelites of Toledo gave Campbell the manuscripts of St John of the Cross, which he preserved on their behalf. As they had tragically sensed, seventeen brothers were killed and their suffering is bitterly portrayed in the poem ‘The Carmelites of Toledo’. When the Popular Front killed the monks, they searched Campbell’s house but were unable to find the manuscripts, which he had hidden in a truck and fortunately managed to keep safe. When the Campbell family fled Spain, ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 207–13· issn 0210-6124 reviews 209 however, they were not so lucky and had to leave everything behind. The poet’s life of flight ended in 1957, when he died in a car accident in Portugal. Campbell’s life was as intense as his poetic works. The first book Gómez López has chosen for Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos is The Flaming Terrapin (1924), using a fragment starting from the second paragraph of part II consisting of four stanzas. This was Campbell’s first published book, and was very well-received (it was published simultaneously in England and in the United States). In this work, Campbell’s verse retains much of the flavour of John Milton’sParadise Lost, with powerful descriptions of a utopian world and biblical poetic imagery: The Ark is launched: cupped by the streaming breeze, The stiff sails tug the long reluctant keel, And Noah, spattered by the rising seas, Stands with his great fist fastened to the Wheel. Like driven clouds, the waves were rustling by Feathered and fanned across their liquid sky, And, like those waves, the clouds in silver bars Creamed on the scattered shingle of the stars. (90) El Arca ha sido botada; impulsada por la llorosa brisa las tiesas velas tiran de la reticente quilla, y Noé, salpicado de la creciente mar, con su gran puño permanece al gran timón pegado. Como nubes pilotadas, las olas iban susurrando, plumadas y aventadas por su líquido cielo, y, como aquellas olas, las nubes en lingotes de plata adornando los dispersos guijarros de las estrellas. (91) French Symbolism is also palpable in the lines of this first book, however “bad Rimbaud” Campbell considered them later on. The second book in this compilation is The Wayzgoose (1928), from which Gómez López has translated a section of its rhyming couplets. Its title, a word of unknown origin, describes the annual summer dinner that master printers gave their employees, typically around St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August). But in this satirical long poem, Campbell brings the reader face to face with racism in Africa and the lack of African representation in the world: “My words, O Durban, round the World are blown/ Where I, alone, of all your sons are known”; “Mis palabras, ¡oh! Durban, por el Mundo vuelan/ donde yo, solo, de todos tus hijos soy conocido” (96-97). Adamastor (1930) is the third book in order of appearance, a work that embodies Campbell’s identity dilemma. Poems about the African peoples (‘The Zulu Girl’ and ‘A Veld Eclogue: The Pioneers’, the latter not included in this collection), exotic animals (‘The Zebras’ and ‘To a Pet Cobra’) and English high society (‘Home ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 207–13· issn 0210-6124 210 yolanda morató agrafojo Thoughts in Bloomsbury’) draw both a mental and physical map of Campbell’s comings and goings. The year Adamastor was published Lewis had cast Campbell in the amusing role of Zulu Blades in his polemical novel The Apes of God (1930), a fierce satire on the London literati, “intellectuals without intellect” (17), in the words of the South African poet in The Georgiad. Campbell wrote a review praising this caustic novel, for publication in The New Statesman, but it was rejected. Following this, the two friends launched Satire and Fiction, the first issue in the series ofEnemy Pamphlets, which never went beyond number 1 and included a prologue, ‘The History of a Rejected Review’, by Campbell. Actually, The Georgiad (1931), a fragment of which Gómez López has chosen as the fourth section of Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos, can be read as a verse sequel to The Apes of God. Both caused uproar in British intellectual circles but a deadly silence among those who were so harshly attacked. Campbell vividly invoked their attitudes in various fragments of The Georgiad (not included in this bilingual edition): “For vainly may a Lewis sweat his brains, / The masterpiece in darkness still remains” (14), and “when Lewis writes, suppresses the reviews” (54). This is, in fact, what happened to the proofs of Wyndham Lewis, a book by Roy Campbell scheduled to appear in 1932 in the Dolphin Books series published by Chatto and Windus. Withdrawn from publication in June 1932 (page proofs were printed in April 1932), the book was lost for decades; until the 1980s there was no record of a single surviving copy and the first edition was only published in 1985, edited by Jeffrey Meyers. The close friendship between Roy Campbell and Wyndham Lewis and its significance in the most combative section of Modernism in the British Isles are, sadly, underrepresented in the introduction to this edition. Gómez López concentrates on Campbell’s hatred towards the Bloomsbury Group, basing the roots of his intense loathing on the sexual relationship between the poet’s wife, Mary, and Vita Sackville-West. His narration of facts is consistent and well documented regarding the Nicholsons, but The Georgiad again speaks for itself: “How Nicholson who in his weekly crack /. . . At the mere thought of Lewis goes quite blue” (54). As can be read in Lewis’s first autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), beyond Mary’s relationship with Vita, both writers had despised most personalities from the Bloomsbury Group for a good number of years. Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos also includes a sound selection of poems from Flowering Reeds (1933) and Mithraic Emblems (1936), such as ‘Toledo (July, 1936)’, ‘After the Riots, Toledo, March, 1936’, ‘Poems for Spain’, ‘To my Daughters in the Bullring’ and ‘The Alcazar Mined’. Very personal interpretations of the Spanish situation are exemplified by ‘Christs in Uniform’ and ‘To all Fascists and Communists from a Vaquero’, which caused a great scandal amongst English left-wing writers.Flowering Rifle (1939), the book of poems where Campbell’s radical right-wing ideology is confirmed, is present in this collection through the translation of fragments from parts one and four. His support to Franco was undoubtedly a source of disgust. Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that various conservative, right-wing writers of the time have all been judged under ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 207–13· issn 0210-6124 reviews 211 the same light whereas differences among them were in fact substantial. For instance, contrary to Pound, both Lewis and Campbell explicitly expressed their hatred of Hitler in both written and oral forms before the Second World War started; both also abhorred Communism. Lewis donated a picture for the Spanish Republican cause and wrote a book in 1939, The Hitler Cult, to apologise for what he had written in the 1930s; Campbell enlisted in the Second World War against Germany. Thus, the historical situation is too complex to be reduced to labels. While it is a fact that both writers were reactionaries (Campbell was anti-Semitic, and both scorned homosexuals), this should not prevent accurate editing and documenting of their works for present and future reading and study. From the twenty-nine poems contained in Talking Bronco (1946) Gómez López has selected six: ‘The Clock in Spain’, ‘San Juan de la Cruz’, ‘On the Martyrdom of F. García Lorca’, ‘The Carmelites of Toledo’, ‘Snapshot of Nairobi’ and ‘Luis de Camões’. These poems are directly related to Campbell’s work as a translator (he also translated Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal). And, as a special feature, Campbell also included his translation of ‘En una noche oscura’, by St John of the Cross, in this volume. ‘Talking Bronco’, from the homonymous book, contains some of the most intense lines written by Campbell, such as the opening couplet of the poem: “In human history, and rightly so,/ The Final Word is with the knockout blow”. The final section of Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos contains three poems from The Collected Poems of Roy Campbell II (1957), ‘La Mancha in Wartime’, ‘Ballad of Don Juan Tenorio’ and ‘Félibre’, a poem dedicated to French poet Frédèric Mistral (1843-1914), who wrote his poetry in Occitan. As far as the editing of Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos is concerned, a proof-reader would have spotted some minor errata. The most important of them are only noticeable because they are related to the titles of books, such as The Flaming Terrapin, printed in Spanish with two different translations throughout the book La( tortuga de mar en llamas and La tortuga de mar llameante), and Talking Bronco (Hablando bronco, Hablando blanco and “hablante bronco”). The title of this later book, which rather translates as “caballo salvaje parlante”, has special significance since, as Roy Campbell himself explained in a section called ‘Glossary for Civilians’, included in the final pages in the Faber and Faber edition, it was an “epithet used to describe the author by a leading poet of the Rear” (1946: 91). Gómez López traces the epithet to Stephen Spender’s callous criticism of his previous book, Flowering Rifle (1938), from which Campbell took the insult to transform it into the title of his 1946 book. The publication of Roy Campbell. Poemas escogidos is as provocative as it is necessary, an essential work in Spanish that gives an inclusive picture of Modernism in England but also in the various countries where Campbell lived. An author absent in Andrew Sanders’s The Short Oxford History of English Literature (1994) —a much used textbook in Spanish universities— as well as from many libraries and collections, Campbell is well presented in Gómez López’s comprehensive introduction, which comforts the unacquainted reader while broadening lesser-known aspects of Campbell’s life and literary experiences. This edition also contains a bilingual prologue by Terry Risk, one of Campbell’s American ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 207–13· issn 0210-6124 212 yolanda morató agrafojo editors. Endnotes are illustrative and a concise bibliography is included. It is not difficult to appreciate Gómez López’s painstaking work in introducing through his own compilation an unfamiliar author to the Spanish readership. It is indeed a meritorious effort. Works Cited Alexander, P. F. 1977: Life and Work of Roy Campbell 1901-1936. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Cambridge u. —1989: Roy Campbell. A Critical Biography. London and Oxford: Oxford up. Bowlby, Rachel, ed. 1992: ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. A Woman’s Essays. London: Penguin. Campbell, Roy 1924: The Flaming Terrapin. London: Jonathan Cape. —1928: The Wayzgoose: A South African Satire. London: Jonathan Cape. —1930: Adamastor: Poems. London: Faber and Faber —1930: ‘The History of a Rejected Review’. Wyndham Lewis, ed. Satire and Fiction. Enemy Pamphlets No 1. London: n.p. —1931: The Georgiad (A Charlotade). London: Boriswood. —1946: Talking Bronco. London: Faber and Faber. —1957: The Collected Poems of Roy Campbell. London: Bodley Head. —1985: Wyndham Lewis. Ed. Jeffrey Meyers. Pietermaritzburg: u of Natal. Duque, Aquilino, ed. 1958: Poemas de Roy Campbell. Madrid: Rialp. Haresnape, Geoffrey Laurence 1982: The Writings of Roy Campbell, William Plomer and Laurens Van der Post, with Special Reference to their Collaboration in Voorslag (#Whiplash) Magazine in 1926. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. u of Sheffield. Lewis, Wyndham 1930: The Apes of God. London: Arthur. —1937: Blasting and Bombardiering. Autobiography (1914-1926). London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. —1939: The Hitler Cult. London: J. M. Dent. Pearce, Joseph 2001: Roy Campbell. Selected Poems. Johannesburg: Ad Donker. —2004: Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell. Wilmington, Delaware: isi. Povey, John 1977: Roy Campbell. Boston: Twayne. Pujals, Esteban 1957: Spain and Spanish Themes in Modern English Poetry. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. King’s College, u of London. —1959: España y la guerra de 1936 en la poesía de Roy Campbell. Madrid: Ateneo. Regnery, Henry 1979: Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Sanders, Andrew 1994: The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon p. Smith, Rowland 1973: Lyric and Polemic: The Literary Personality of Roy Campbell. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s up. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 207–13· issn 0210-6124 reviews 213 Wright, David 1961: Roy Campbell. London: British Council and National Book League / Longman, Green & Co. Received 24 January 2012 Accepted 22 October 2012 Yolanda Morató (BA Huelva; BA Seville; MA Birkbeck, London; MA Seville; European PhD, Seville) took postgraduate courses on Modernism and taught at Harvard University (2002-04). She currently teaches at Universidad Pablo de Olavide. She has published articles and translations on English and North American Modernism in national and international journals, among them an annotated edition of Wyndham Lewis’s first autobiography,Blasting and Bombardiering, which won the aedean 2008 Translation Prize. Address: Universidad Pablo de Olavide. Edificio14 , 2ª planta, nº 43. Ctra. de Utrera Km. 1. 41013 Sevilla, Spain. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 207–13· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 215–20 issn 0210-6124 Patricia Fra López, ed. 2011: Edith Wharton: Back to Compostela/Regreso a Compostela. Santiago de Compostela: u de Santiago de Compostela and Xunta de Galicia. 191 pp. isbn 978-84-9887-721-2. Teresa Gómez Reus Universidad de Alicante [email protected] For American scholars in Spain, and in particular for those who are interested in Edith Wharton, the publication of Edith Wharton: Back to Compostela/Regreso a Compostela is exciting news. Lavishly illustrated, this elegantly edited book includes a facsimile of Wharton’s ‘Last Spanish Journey with W. : Spain 1925’, otherwise known as the ‘Spain Diary’, together with an undated manuscript piece, ‘Back to Compostela’, also in facsimile, written some years later. The book is the outcome of a research project undertaken by Patricia Fra López, in which she contextualizes material stemming from two extensive trips Wharton made in 1925 and 1928 along the Way of St James, which culminated in an emotionally charged visit to Santiago de Compostela. The facsimile edition has been carefully transcribed and profusely annotated by Patricia Fra. Moreover, in addition to the original English, the volume contains translations of all its contents into Spanish and Galician. The colourful preface by Marta González is also published in trilingual form, as is the informative introduction by the author of the project, entitled ‘The Woman, The Writer, The Way: Wharton’s Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela 1925-30’, which discusses Wharton’s trips along the Way of St James and the unpublished texts that emanated from this experience. Edith Wharton’s relationship with Spain is both intriguing and hard to pin down. She lived in Europe from her fourth to her tenth year, travelling extensively with her family across Spain, France, Italy, Germany and England, with long periods of residence in Rome, Florence and Paris. As an adult, Wharton came to believe that her intellect and her artistry might expand more readily in Europe than in the United States, and for this reason in 1907 she set up residence in Paris, where she found the community for which she yearned —a community that “stimulated [her] intellect, fed her craving for enlightened conversation, and provided a place where her talents were praised and where she herself was valued” (Benstock 1986: 63). Wharton felt a special affinity for France and Italy and she used various strategies to explore the “background of beauty and old established order” (Wharton 1934: 44) she felt she had found in these countries. She wrote a historical novel about Italy, The Valley of Decision (1902), an aesthetic description of Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), two cultural travel books, Italian Backgrounds (1905) and A Motor- —215— 216 teresa gómez reus Flight through France (1908), and an appreciative account of the nuances and intricacies of France in French Ways and their Meaning (1919). The writer’s unquestionable love for France, her country of adoption, and the admiring accounts she wrote about France and Italy have led critics to believe that her European interests encompassed only these two countries, bypassing Spain altogether. Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, for example, has remarked that “Spain [was] a country that Edith Wharton found it hard to make her way into, imaginatively” (1975: 362). Eager to put Spain on the map of Wharton scholarship, in 1993 I wrote an article in which I called attention to the extended trips the writer had made to this country, in particular in the last fifteen years of her life, and speculated about the possible reasons for this later interest. The article, which disclosed the existence of a four-page typescript called ‘A Motor-Flight through Spain’, held at the Beinecke Library in Yale University, argued that the cultural collage we call Spain, with its “hybrid and overlapping cultures” (1993: 203), appealed to what Lewis had called the two contradictory sides of Edith Wharton, “the nun and the wild woman in her” (1975: 510), or, put in another way, her religious and her sensual nature. Patricia Fra’s beautiful edition calls attention to the mystical side, which is never far from the epicurean and the secular. By making available these unpublished materials, Fra has enlarged our view of Wharton’s engagement with Spain, while throwing a sidelight on the writer’s interest for the Catholic faith and its rituals. As Fra reminds us, Wharton, an alleged agnostic, was overwhelmed by the “mysterious power” of Compostela (Wharton 1934: 371), and there exists a previously unpublished letter, reproduced in this volume, that suggests that, in her old age, Wharton felt tempted to convert to Catholicism (Fra López 2001: 34). Patricia Fra touches upon this intriguing question in the introduction, without reaching any conclusion for lack of documentary evidence. Although Fra remarks on the fact that Wharton attended several religious ceremonies, like the Angelus at Santiago Cathedral (34), there is little in the ‘Spain Diary’ and in ‘Back to Compostela’ that suggests that Wharton’s interest in the Way of St James went any deeper than the historical and the artistic. Of particular curiosity to the scholar is the complete publication of the ‘Spain Diary’, now in possession of Lilly Library in Indiana University. The journal documents a motor-expedition Wharton undertook with her long-time friend Walter Berry in September 1925, in which they toured Aragón, Navarra, Lérida, Guadalajara, the North of Castille, León, Asturias and Galicia. Although written in a rather terse manner, the diary displays in a rudimentary form what has come to be considered the hallmark of Wharton’s most compelling travel writing: her cultural expertise, her rare erudition, her distrust of restored monuments (which she had inherited from Ruskin), her tenacity of purpose and her appreciation of nature. As usual in her travelogues, Wharton does not follow the familiar sight-seeing routes; on the contrary, she practises what she describes in Italian Backgrounds, as “one of the rarest and most delicate pleasures” (1905: 85) of the tourist and the traveller: to circumvent the guidebook —that ubiquitous intertext that funnels travellers through a preordained set of places— and take instead the “by ways”, ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 215–20· issn 0210-6124 reviews 217 the “parenthesis” of travel in search of the recondite or unexpected treasure. And she uses the motor-car as her accomplice, occasionally supplementing it with a horse or a mule to gain access to those neglected places that would allow her to instil some novelty into the (then already) hackneyed genre of travel writing. Wharton’s ability to fuse “the excitement and unpredictability of exploration . . . with the pleasure of historical and aesthetic knowledge” (Schriber 1991: xlv) infuses her Spanish diary with energy and insight. Not without interest are the more personal details that crop up in the course of her journal, such as the writer’s comments on the quality of the food and lodgings, which we rarely find in her published travel writing. ‘Back to Compostela’, the other manuscript Fra has rescued from oblivion, was presumably going to be part of a travelogue Wharton considered writing about Spain. We do not know exactly when this essay was written —Fra suggests that it was in 1930, after the writer’s second visit to Compostela in 1928. It is held among her papers at the Beinecke Library, together with the already mentioned typescript called ‘A Motor-Flight through Spain’, whose title clearly mimics that of A Motor-Flight through France. It is difficult to conjecture why the project of a book on Spain was begun and never completed. Fra suggests that the effort of composing a book on Spain shortly after the death of Walter Berry, the man Wharton called the “love of her life”, may have proved too painful for the aging writer (32). It could also be, as Sarah Bird Wright surmises, that Wharton tried to relive the pleasure she had experienced in composing A Motor-Flight through France, but then became too busy with fiction to complete it, or she simply lost interest in it (Wright 1997: 69). Or perhaps Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis was right after all and Spain was a country Edith Wharton “found it hard to make her way into, imaginatively”. Both the ‘Spain Diary’ and ‘Back to Compostela’ are full of Wharton’s admiring comments on Spanish art and architecture. The medieval churches, cathedrals, paintings and sculptures she found on the Pilgrims’ Way gave her endless aesthetic delight. In Oviedo, for instance, she considered the Holy Chamber “one of the most beautiful [rooms she] ever saw” (Fra López 2011: 82) and in Santiago, after a visit to the cathedral, she wrote: “I saw eternity the other night —applied to the portico” (163). Yet we never find in these texts the kind of elated remarks about contemporary life which abound in her French and Italian travel books. Astorga, she found: “indescribably squalid, dusty, degenerate with streets unpaved or miserably cobble-stoned, filth everywhere —& rising from all this misery, a glorious rosy-red cathedral, tinged with gold like a pomegranate tree growing in a dung-hill. I have never seen anything more typically Spanish than that contrast!” (92-93). When visiting the old cathedral of Salamanca she exclaimed: “one beautiful tomb after another . . . What riches —again in a dung-hill!” (95). And in Santiago she found her way to the “curious little Romanesque” church of Sta. Maria de Sar “through usual slums” (88). Nothing in these pages suggests the presence of what she most appreciated in a European culture: an aesthetically coherent world, a world made up of a constant interchange between life and art, the past and the present (see St Laurent 1993: 172-73). This symbiotic relationship between the life of a country and its artistic productions she felt she had found in Italy and ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 215–20· issn 0210-6124 218 teresa gómez reus France allowed her to generate the texts she called Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight through France. What she saw in many Spanish towns and villages in no way confirmed her idea of a harmonious culture, and the enormous contrasts she experienced there may have prevented her from writing Spain into shapes that were meaningful to her. For Fra, comments such as those above should not be read as signs of cultural snobbery; on the contrary, she reminds us, Wharton “had the ability to appreciate beauty in its just value, but she was also capable of denouncing what was ugly and wrong” (32). A final contributing factor in Wharton’s apparent lack of empathy with some of the towns and villages she visited must have been her inability to speak or understand Spanish. Incapable of communicating with the people, her impressions of Spain are largely confined to the visual. Patricia Fra’s scholarly introduction provides the reader with valuable information both about the manner in which Wharton travelled along the Way of St James as well as about the sites she visited. She brings together a rich array of both published and unpublished material to appraise Wharton’s trips in northern Spain and its textual implications. She documents the careful way in which Wharton planned and undertook these tours: always well-equipped, as was her habit, with art books, such as Georgiana King’s The Way of Saint James (1920) and Arthur Kingsley Porter’s voluminous Romanesque Sculpture in the Pilgrimage Road (1923). Fra also explores the role that the motorcar plays in these narratives, liberating Wharton as it does from the tedium of the beaten track. She discusses with acumen Wharton’s preference for little-visited places, her aesthetic discrimination and her deep distrust of restoration, which emerges in Wharton’s disapproving comment on the “over-restored” church St Martin de Tours in Frómista, Palencia (31, 76). Some minor biographical inaccuracies may have escaped the author’s attention: Edith Wharton, for example, did not rent an apartment in the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain in 1906, as Fra states (28), but in 1907, and she settled permanently in France before, not after her divorce from Teddy Wharton. In spite of these imprecisions and the lexical errors that have eluded the proof-reader of the English version, the introduction will prove useful both to those who are interested in Wharton’s travelogues and to those who wish to see the Way of St James through the eyes of a great American writer. The volume has been complemented with an impressive array of illustrations. Apart from some snapshots of Edith Wharton and Walter Berry in the introduction, in the section containing the Spanish and Galician translations of the manuscripts Patricia Fra has inserted a compendium of photographs and postcards from the 1920s. These illustrations have the effect of transforming the book into a kind ofBaedeker , and one Edith Wharton would have approved of: competent, tasteful, erudite and useful. The abundant footnotes offering a wealth of information on the historical and artistic significance of the places the writer visited further contribute to this effect. It may be argued that a number of these footnotes are redundant and of dubious critical relevance, elaborating on the Pilgrims’ Way rather than on Wharton and her voyage. Nevertheless, in general I found Fra’s manner of integrating the three elements, “the woman, the writer and the way”, rather effective. With ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 215–20· issn 0210-6124 reviews 219 her unusual book, Patricia Fra has been in part pilgrim, re-enacting Wharton’s tour, in part guide, inviting us to follow Wharton’s steps, and in part scholar/archaeologist, excavating unknown texts, itineraries and works of art. One of the main motivations for editing Edith Wharton: Back to Compostela/Regreso a Compostela is, as Fra herself states, “to try and add another page to Wharton’s scholarship regarding her relationship with Spain” (24), and I have no doubt that this handsome volume will serve its purpose. Last but not least, Patricia Fra has been anxious to “vindicate the existence —and the relevance— of women who came to Santiago, as pilgrims or as tourists” (25), such as Georgiana King or Edith Wharton herself, whose names, as the author reveals, do not feature in any literary chronicle of the city, in striking contrast to Hemingway or Torrente Ballester. When Wharton paid her visits to Spain in the 1920s she was already a well-known writer on the international scene and The House of Mirth (1905) had been translated as Los millonarios de los Estados Unidos, o el país del placer (n.d.), with a review by Carmen de Burgos (1912).1 However, her visits to this country aroused no public interest. By making available this forgotten material Patricia Fra has done much to rectify the previous neglect while at the same time broadening our view of Wharton, the inveterate traveller and the travel writer. It is to be hoped that the appearance of this volume will provide an impulse for further enquiry into Wharton’s pilgrimages in Spain and the contrasting manners in which this country both stimulated and put a dampener on her creative powers. Works Cited Benstock, Shari 1986: Women of the Left Bank, 1900-1940. Austin: u of Texas p. Burgos, Carmen de 1912: Rev of Los millonarios de los Estados Unidos, o el país del placer, by Edith Wharton. El Correo Literario, 15 May: 17. Crane, Stephen 1895: The Red Badge of Courage. New York: D. Appleton. Gómez Reus, Teresa 1992: ‘Responses to Wharton in Spain’. The Edith Wharton Review 9.1: 22-24. —1993: ‘Mapping the Contours of a Forgotten Land: Edith Wharton and Spain’. Katherine Joslin and Alan Price, eds. Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: Peter Lang. 201-15. James, Henry 1880: Washington Square. New York: Harper. —1888: The Aspern Papers. The Atlantic Monthly, March-May. King, Georgiana Goddard 1920: The Way of Saint James. New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s. 1 It would be interesting to observe that Edith Wharton was translated earlier than Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane or Scott Fitzgerald. The first work by James that appeared in Spain was The Aspern Papers (1944), followed by Washington Square (1952). Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage did not appear until 1954 (see Gómez Reus 1992: 23). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 215–20· issn 0210-6124 220 teresa gómez reus Lewis, Richard Warrington Baldwin 1975: Edith Wharton: A Biography. London: Constable. Porter, Arthur Kingsley 1923: Romanesque Sculpture in the Pilgrimage Road. Boston: M. Jones. Schriber, Mary Suzanne 1991: ‘Introduction’. Edith Wharton. A Motor Flight through France. Illinois: Northern Illinois up. xvii-xlix. St Laurent, Maureen E. 1993: ‘Pathways to a Personal Aesthetic’. Katherine Joslin and Alan Price, eds. Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: Peter Lang. 165-79. Wharton, Edith 1902: The Valley of Decision. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —1904: Italian Villas and their Gardens. New York: Century. —1905: The House of Mirth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —1998 (1905): Italian Backgrounds. Hopewell, nj: Eco. —1934: A Backward Glance. New York: Appleton. —1908: A Motor-Flight through France. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —1919: French Ways and their Meaning. London: Macmillan. —n.d.: Los millonarios de los Estados Unidos o el país del placer. Madrid: La España Moderna. Wright, Sarah Bird 1997: Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur. New York: St. Martin. Received 20 September 2012 Accepted 30 October 2012 Teresa Gómez Reus is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alicante, where she teaches American literature and women’s fiction. Her current research focusses on women’s writings from the First World War and she has recently published a study of Mary Borden’s war memoir The Forbidden Zone (1911) and the edited book Mujeres al frente: Testimonios de la Gran Guerra (2012). Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Universidad de Alicante. Campus de San Vicente del Raspeig. Ap 99, 03080 Alicante, Spain. Tel.: +34 965203591. Fax: + 34 965903800. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 215–20· issn 0210-6124 ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34.2 (December 2012): 221–26 issn 0210-6124 Henry Sussman 2011: Around the Book. Systems and Literacy. New York: Fordham up. 319 pp. isbn 978-0-8232-3283-3. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen Centro Universitario de la Defensa-Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected] “Leggere è andare incontro a qualcosa che sta per essere e ancora nessuno sa cosa sarà” Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. Textual display is transforming itself constantly and at high speed: from the first hyper- textual fiction created with Hypercard and Storyspace software, such asAfternoon, a Story, by Michael Joyce (1990), or his later Web work Twelve Blue (1991), both authored using Storyspace (Eastgate System’s proprietary hypertext authoring program) (Hayles 2008: 60), to the latest e-book platforms that offer readers hundreds of thousands of online books in dozens of formats, from .azw, to .pdb, there is a world of distance. Amidst this constant metamorphosis of the book medium, one may ask where the persistent core of the book lies, if it is material, perceptual, cognitive or textual. The fact is that the book does persist, but it is not what it used to be, and, if the medium is the message (McLuhan 1964: 8), new reformulations of the production/consumption of texts and of visual communication must be made. As Jay D. Bolter has observed, academic humanists are attempting both to use and to theorize about new media, but they tend to keep use and theory separate. In a sense, the humanities in the second half of the twentieth century became media theory, that is, the study of technologies of representation and communication, beginning with (but no longer limited to) printed books and the literary form of print (2004: 16). However, such theories may be inadequate to the task of understanding twenty-first century media, since they were occasioned by earlier technologies and were not designed to improve the practice of these technologies (Bolter 2004: 16); hence the need to rethink the theories involved in the understanding of the relation between the new media and the humanities. Henry Sussman, the author of this sustained reflection on such matters, is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. His extended career as a critic includes works such as The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust and James (1982), a discussion of the formal laws of Hegelian texts, and High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy (1989), an inquiry into the dimension of exteriority constructed by philosophical systems and literary works. He has also written Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture —221— 222 jessica aliaga lavrijsen (1993), a work combining a variety of related artifacts, models, and productions, such as the theories of Freud, Lacan and Derrida with works such as Othello or The Silence of the Lambs, in a meditation on the possibilities of subjectivity and representation. More recently he has published The Task of the Critic (2005), where he analyzes the language of poets and thinkers —Deleuze, Guattari, Benjamin and Derrida— to trace the various dimensions of critical writing. Around the Book. Systems and Literacy is his latest publication: a “book about books” (Sussman 2011: xvi), a volume about new systems and media, both of which constitute a cultural and economic phenomenon (Bolter 2004: 15). It is a necessary update on the book medium, which regularly transmogrifies in response to unstoppable technological advances, and a perceptive investigation of book culture and modern systems theory. As Sussman observes, all works of literary criticism are books about books. This one, however, constituting first and foremost a zone of intensity in textual processing, effecting both the scrambling of its input and the possibility of surprise or uncertainty in its output (Derrida 2006: 99), circles around exceptional instances in textual history and inquires into current borderline cases and prospects for the book medium, exploring its possibilities and its limits, as well as its relation to other cultural systems. This is in absolute accordance with Sussman’s view on language, as stated in his article ‘Prolegomena to any Present and Future Language Poetry’ (2003): language comprises the building blocks of any communicative or cultural production. It in turn incorporates its own materiality, he states, and to speak to the materiality of language at once addresses its non-ideational, non-metaphysical dimensions, and emphasizes its place within an economy of production and reception, within economy per se (2003: 198). Language, the concrete handling of words and word fragments, could, then, be understood as a generative system. As the author himself states, Around the Book owes its structure to several theories of criticism: neo-Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, rhetoric and deconstruction (Sussman 2011: xvii). The prospects and format of the book are central to a sequence of system formats arising in the positivism and hardwiring stemming from Kant and Hegel and culminating in Deleuze/Guattari’s polymorphic strain and resistance to the intersecting centrisms and overdeterminations of late capitalism —which is defined as a book and whose indeterminacies demand to be read as intensities and accelerations, as nomadic flows of deterritorialization (18-19). Consequently, readers will be asked to contend with theoretical constructs such as faciality, the rhizome, the supplement, digital and analogue organization, turbulence and chaos. In the first chapter, titled ‘Introduction: Around the Book’, Sussman states that although the latest cybernetic phenomena may still be bound to the same degree as a traditional paginated book, the rhizomatic electronic universe that a computer device accesses is vaster and even more ‘open’, in terms of data capacity and storage, as well as in the ramification of links between those pieces and stores of information, than the most elaborate encyclopaedia ever printed (10-11). Furthermore, the book has embraced from its very outset the contingencies and proliferating network of possibilities, now ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 221–26· issn 0210-6124 reviews 223 unavoidably invading, disrupting, and tempering large-scale systematic organization (11). Subsequent chapters reveal the devices employed by a number of writers —Derrida, Kafka, Benjamin, and others— when approaching a variety of systemic impasses, ranging from Gregory Bateson’s double binds to how the selections inevitably executed by Niklas Luhman’s social systems are used in their process of differentiation. Processing, zones, intensity, display, translation or draft are among the terms in which the prospects for the book may be couched at the present juncture (14). The second chapter, ‘Extraterrestrial Kafka: Ahead to the Graphic Novel’, addresses the irreducibly visual component of Kafka’s imagination, and extrapolates its features and potentials toward powerful and memorable innovations in writing, painting, photography or cinema (50). As Sussman further states, the instability and imminent collapse that Kafka intuited in imperial, national and municipal institutions of his day had tangible repercussions for the present-day book, both as a communication medium and as an institution, in an age of cybernetic technology and comprehensive overload in the systems and infrastructure of communications, demographics and critical resources (52-53). This leads into an analysis of works of graphic fiction (specifically those of Ben Katchor, Luc and Fraçois Schuite, Leo Leonhard and Otto Jägersberg), which Sussman reads as a weather map of inscriptive possibilities from one historical moment or epistemological configuration to another —as he explains, in Leonhard and Jägersberg’s Rüssel in Komikland, for example, Hieronymus Bosch’s apocalyptic landscapes are combined with the gaudy colours of contemporary advertising (Sussman 2011: 79). ‘Kafka’s Imaginary: A Cognitive Psychology Footnote’ follows and develops the line set out in the previous chapter. Sussman takes Kafka’s The Trial (1925) as “the very book implicated by the unanticipated figurations orchestrated by the mutations of his Imaginary” (86). The novel, he states, is the labyrinthine medium in which mutually disqualifying perspectives, inferences, and explanations coexist in a condition of growing dissonance and unease (87). The author continues by analysing a number of other works by Kafka, such as the fable ‘The Great Wall of China’ (written in 1917 and published in 1931), where the Czech writer employed the figurative resources of the sublime and fragmentation in the service of fantastic literature. As Sussman explains, the fable is surely the cornerstone of Kafka’s standing/role as an important political theorist although it is a largely neglected narrative of thinking, perception, and corporeal experience under the regime of late capitalism (96-97). The exception of Deleuze and Guattari’s hybrid account, expounded in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia diptych and elsewhere —where energy and activity (language, information, money, desire, etc) are interpreted as flows (1983: 20) is, however, acknowledged. Sussman stresses the importance of Kafka’s work in this respect by stating that it “revises, corrects and contributes to the prevailing . . . imaginary when the work augments how its audience will henceforth see, think or process images and words, and when the work facilitates cultural access to new conditions with fundamental bearing on climatic and socio-political experience” (105). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 221–26· issn 0210-6124 224 jessica aliaga lavrijsen The fourth chapter, ‘Booking Benjamin: The Fate of the Medium’, firstly ponders the vertiginous convergence of the design and the text encompassed in books, focusing on Walter Benjamin’s love for the book medium, which he sees as the very “volume, space, forum, foyer, scene, and abyss for cultural articulation and public discussion and for critical apprehension” (111), which is subject to progression —a line he sets out in The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (2008). Further to this, the chapter also examines the destructive as well as generative forces and flows of literary works: from Benjamin’s “illuminated book”, or his “mystical book”, to “the dissolving book” (the book that provides for its own marginality and dispersion) (136). As the title of the fifth chapter, ‘Pulsations of Respect, or Winged Impossibility: Poetic Deconstruction’, indicates, deconstruction theorists are aware of the dual potential of books to codify and facilitate the structures of ideology, thus making them binding, on the one hand, and, on the other, prompting/forcing them to fan outward toward impossibility (140). This interest is further developed in the following chapter, ‘Hegel, Glas, and the Broader Modernity’, where Derrida’s most architectural work, Glas (1986), is analysed. As settled in Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1998), the Book, as theocratic, canonical, and juridical instrument, pushes up against its limits when becoming a medium for unfettered and unconditional thinking. Philosophy and literature have, for Derrida, a supplemental relationship, and in Glas, he explores this relationship through its bicolumnar structure. In Sussman’s own words: “Glas, in its typographic architecture and its motifs of splitting, reverberating, ringing, and castrating . . . performs the relation between the ideology of Western culture(s) and its margins, the reflexive achievements of speculation and ‘the mirror’s tain’, the dialectical, organic, and consummate fate for the West that Hegel envisioned and Genet’s gay-criminal ‘underworld’” (164). That is, Glas’ architecture situates an interiority of Western idealism in the Hegel text that is counterpointed by the Genet text, which traces out the emptying or in-difference of the ‘same’ tradition. As such, the typography and the textual architecture of Glas engages new artifacts and transpires in a zone characterised, in arbitrary turns, by totalitarian closure and untrammelled possibility (189). In the seventh chapter, ‘Systems, Games, and the Player: Did We Manage to Become Human?’, Sussman delves further into system theory, and conceives of the game as a system that is slanted in such a way as to afford players the illusion of control, allowing them to participate in the programming and output of the system (195). So play, he argues, turns out to be a core concept related to whatever freedom prevails in any number of interconnected domains: our personal liberty and a matrix of cybernetically implemented systems. Complexity, adaptation, self-reference and autopoiesis are revealed as key elements in contemporary systems theory which help in the understanding of literature and game. Sussman argues that thinkers such as “Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida demonstrate that systems are also the interface to open- ended networks of signification that proliferate, disseminate, verge toward no specific point or destination” (211). He continues by stating that random dispersions and haphazard coincidences of the constitutive signifiers make systems playful. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 221–26· issn 0210-6124 reviews 225 The next chapter, ‘Atmospherics of Mood’, reveals the ethical call of critical options mentioned in the previous chapters. The normal citizen, Sussman explains, devotes most of his/her time and energy to negotiating systems that are, in their irreducible configuration, arbitrary and intransigent. In this context, he goes on, “art and critique are indispensable media of noise and resistance introduced into systems whose momentum and efficiency are only too well entrenched” (219). In this way deconstruction could be envisaged as an alliance with turbulence (or noise) in checking the multifarious momentums of executive and judgmental systems. However, he claims, there are multiple occasions upon which it is perfectly clear that the smooth functioning of the systems of which we are part (educational, informational, professional, economic, etc.) demands our compliance, which consists in giving up our ‘noise’ and ceasing and desisting from our inscription (240-41), as part of the system’s very openness is its resistance to the mutating static. Therefore, “criticism is situated in the very systole and diastole of movements and conditions making systems possible and enabling the environmental discourse that would seem to lend them coherence” (243). In ‘Thinking Flat Out: Back to Bateson’, the book’s closing chapter, the different paths signposted in preceding chapters converge. Starting with Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1987) and his analysis of systematic arrangements of societal life, readers are offered an overview of both loose and strict scientific thought, which clearly undermines Cartesian either/or models. Bateson’s reading of (Balinese) culture as a system throws some light onto communicative processes, which structure cognitive and interactive processes. Close reading, Sussman argues, is “tantamount to meticulousness in the pursuit of circuits and what transpires along their compass, as well as acuity with regard to the architectural housing of systematic components” (2011: 272). This messianic aspiration marks the point at which the writing of systems swerves unmarked into the metaphysics of ethical perfectibility and redemption (273). This comprehensive and complex book is a must-read in contemporary criticism on literature and systems. Perhaps not every one of the aspects dealt with in this work will appeal to each and every reader, as the chapters are varied and dense. The style can also at times be opaque for non specialists, even if they are experienced readers. The fact that they are obliged to contend with complex theoretical constructions in a sustained manner might limit the book’s accessibility to those already familiar with the fields of both literary theory and system theories. However, taken as a whole, Around the Book. Systems and Literacy speaks for the importance and relevance of deconstruction in system theories. Useful and thought-provoking, this book is a most thorough examination of the readings and uses of systems and literacy. Works Cited Bateson, Gregory 1987 (1972): Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Northvale and London: Jason Aronson. ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 221–26· issn 0210-6124 226 jessica aliaga lavrijsen Benjamin, Walter 2008: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Harvard: Harvard up. Bolter, Jay David 2004: ‘Theory and Practice in New Media Studies’. Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison and Terje Rasmussen, eds. Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital Domains. Cambridge: mit P: 15-33. Deleuze, Gilles and Féliz Guattari 1983 (1972): Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: u of Minnesota p. Derrida, Jacques 1986 (1974): Glas. Lincoln: u of Nebraska p. —1998 (1967): Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up. —2006 (1994): Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge. Hayles, Katherine N. 2008: Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: u of Notre Dame p. Joyce, Michael 1990 (1987): Afternoon, a Story. Watertown, ma: Eastgate Systems. —1991: Twelve Blue Received 2 December 2011 Revised version accepted 15 October 2012 Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen is Lecturer at the Centro Universitario de la Defensa (Zaragoza). In June 2010 she completed her PhD on the work of Brian McCabe with the dissertation entitled The Redefinition of Scottish Identity and the Relation Self-Other(s) in the Fiction of Brian McCabe (to be published by Peter Lang, 2013). She is also a literary publisher at Jekyll&Jill Editores. Address: Centro Universitario de la Defensa. Academia General Militar. Ctra. de Huesca s/n. 50090 Zaragoza. Tel.: +34 976 73 98 82 (ext. 6982). ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 34.2 (December 2012): 221–26· issn 0210-6124 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 1,500 and 2,000 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. —227— 228 editorial policy, instructions to contributors and abridged guidelines 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 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. 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 poems, songs, chapters and sections of books, lectures and unpublished works other than dissertations; b) to enclose quotations within quotations; c) (usually 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’). reviews 229 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. 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. 230 editorial policy, instructions to contributors and abridged guidelines 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›