Angles New Perspectives on the Anglophone World

3 | 2016 Angles and limes Examining and challenging research in Anglo-American studies

Pascale Antolin (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/1610 DOI: 10.4000/angles.1610 ISSN: 2274-2042

Publisher Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur

Electronic reference Pascale Antolin (dir.), Angles, 3 | 2016, « Angles and limes » [Online], Online since 01 November 2016, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/angles/1610 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/angles.1610

This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.

Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction to issue 3 Angles and limes: Straddling the borders of our research practices Pascale Antolin

From a Stylistic Angle: Methodological Issues and Liminal Creativity Sandrine Sorlin

Angles and “limes” in American Studies: Ecofeminism in the research field Margot Lauwers

Reading, Writing and the “Straight White Male”: What Masculinity Studies Does to Literary Analysis Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

Graphic Interlude Angles and Limes Georgia Kuhn, Andrew J. Russell, Walker Evans, Carol M. Highsmith, Robert Bakewell, John Timbs and Jack Delano

Partying Critics: A Dual Take on Duality in Graham Greene’s “The End of the Party” Nathalie Jaëck and Arnaud Schmitt

Tammy Berberi on Disability studies Interview by Pascale Antolin Tammy Berberi and Pascale Antolin

Varia

Andrew Wyeth and the Wyeth Tradition, or “the Anxiety of Influence” Helena Lamouliatte

Racism and Violence in Gar Anthony Haywood’s P. I. Fiction Nicole Décuré

Is Equal Protection a Language Game? Anne-Marie O’Connell

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Introduction to issue 3 Angles and limes: Straddling the borders of our research practices

Pascale Antolin

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.” Thomas Ligetti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

1 While curricula in French modern language departments remain structured by the traditional triad—literature, linguistics, and “civilization” (in itself a debated concept) —our actual research practices have significantly evolved under the effect of new theoretical tools and of the way they have spread in (especially) American and British academia.

2 The relationship between the “established” disciplines is not always easy, often for reasons less lofty than epistemological ones. Disciplines do not only organize research questions and results, they establish turfs, markets, niches and thus jobs, publication opportunities, research grants and everything which makes research more than a purely disinterested practice. Disciplines discipline the mind and the bodies and define the realm of the possible. Even a cursory glance at a scholarly publisher’s shelflist or sitting on a reviewing committee gives a very quick and clear idea of what “the realms of the possible are.”

3 This is the stuff the (American) culture wars were made of. In their wake, academia underwent sometimes drastic, sometimes more subtle restructuring, even in countries which have remained less exposed to the social and political implications of those cultural struggles, such as France. The French humanities and even modern language departments working in close contact with foreign colleagues have long remained impervious to the epistemological inventions and imperatives common in the English- speaking world, even treating them with sarcasm for a long time. The “studies” movement (which is not to be mistaken with the older “area studies” movement) was the most visible institutional product of these culture wars.1 The welcome—but perhaps overly radical—critique of “history from above” led to the balkanization of the social

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sciences and humanities which lost their “universalist” objectives to focus on their own micro questions. The result may have been a deepening of certain aspects of knowledge —although the assessment of the “studies” movement remains to be made—but it has also undoubtedly led to a form of intellectual numbness and sometimes even monomania, or solipsism. This is not to say that all was fruitless in the “studies” movement, but to point at a potential drying up of the research imagination, and correlatively at a desire by scholars who were not intellectually hostile to the reconfiguring of the field but felt a little constrained by it, to look for something else.

4 The “way out” that they chose was neither inter- nor transdisciplinary, two postures inherited from “big science” and based on the idea that human sciences, and even more social sciences, work like physics, biology, earth sciences (viz the term “laboratory” which has become standard in France to name a research group) and can be divided rationally among a workforce of researchers whose only quality is their professionalism (such an approach to innovation is now completely undermined not only by start-up but also by mega companies like Google, but is still dominant in academic research). We felt on the contrary that a movement started to emerge where scholars made a partial but real move towards other disciplines, fields, and questions within their own epistemological frame, within their own personal queries. Far from being the result of a taylorization of research, which is often the intellectual basis of inter-disciplinary research, this approach is something akin to a trip, a journey or a move towards the limes of one’s field, a displacement out of one’s comfort zone. So the idea was born for this third issue of Angles, the French Journal of Anglophone Studies, whose mission statement is precisely to investigate new practices, in-between spaces, and research questions which do not immediately fall into clear-cut slots.

5 Making it happen, as the phrase goes, was a whole different ball game. The rolling ball proved extremely difficult to catch and the rules of the games were quite fuzzy at best. We thought it would be a challenge, and it was one. We believed, however, that it was a necessary challenge, one that needed to be met and met now, in a moment of deep transformation of our research practices. This is why despite the difficulty we experienced gathering articles—many colleagues expressed interest but felt they could not actually write a piece on it—we felt that we had to make it happen, and after rescheduling we managed to collect a sufficient number of contributions which passed the rigorous process of peer reviewing.

6 When we write “the rigorous process of peer reviewing” we do not mean to say that peer reviewing is not always rigorous for the writers. Here it was rigorous for all: reviewers who often did not know what to make of “bastard” pieces, editors who chose the reviewers, discussed with the writers and felt that their classical ways of assigning reviewers was not adapted to scholarly un-identified objects, and of course writers who had made a tremendous effort to tread out of their usual paths and received negative evaluations of their work. As we felt that reviewers always diverged in their appreciation and that we, as editors, often did not agree with the reviewers, we realized how challenging the challenge was. It was a long and hard process, much more than anything we had ever experienced editing other “standard” publications. But it was precisely the name of the game. Displacement and limes come at a cost.

7 We want to thank the reviewers for their patience and understanding, the authors for going way beyond the traditional revisions required in journals, and also mention the anonymous authors whose papers we did not publish: the “quality” of their work was

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generally not at stake, it was just a case of their not quite tackling the issues we wanted to debate in this issue. All—whether or not their submissions are actually published— need to be warmly thanked for their courage and dedication.

8 We also had a few surprises. While articles from scholars specializing in “civilization”— a field where various disciplines naturally interact—were expected, there was no submission in this field. Only literature and linguistics are represented in this issue, and bridges built between them—for instance by Sandrine Sorlin. In her article, she focuses on stylistics, which, she writes, “has gained disciplinary legitimacy by paradoxically dismantling disciplinary partitions” between literature and linguistics. Margot Lauwers and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin argue in favor of new tools to approach literary texts: ecofeminism, a joint concern for feminism and environmental degradation, can be applied to the study of some texts, Lauwers writes, for “research to be fully representative of the planet’s cultural and biological diversity.” Pellerin promotes masculinity studies since, he writes, questioning the traditional straight white male’s viewpoint can profitably “renew the approach to certain literary texts.” Nathalie Jaëck and Arnaud Schmitt further advocate transdisciplinarity in their joint article as they combine and confront both their respective studies of Graham Greene’s short story, “The End of the Party,” and their favorite research tools.

9 Authors who finally made it to the “printed” page are prudent. They do not argue for an epistemological revolution that they would be heralding, nor do they believe that their questions apply to all texts. They are modest and highly personal, thus exemplifying a move away from the Grand Theory and a return to the subject, that of the critic this time, not to promote her subjectivity but her specific place in the greater field of criticism.

10 One of the contributions here published is an interview. Tammy Berberi’s testimony and her presentation of disability studies exemplify the trend towards dividing up the critical field into little operational fields defined by a single-issue preoccupation. It will no doubt stir up reactions and elicit responses triggered by some of the ideological premises that Berberi puts forth. We would like to pursue the conversation with Barberi and our readers in the form of further dialogue by inviting follow-up contributions in the Varia section of upcoming issues. Only by being challenged in our critical practices and challenging others will we be able to move beyond the worst possible predicament of science, the infinite repetition of the same. « On doit échapper à l’alternative du dehors et du dedans : il faut être aux frontières. La critique, c'est l’analyse des limites et la réflexion sur elles. » Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (2001: 1393)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Foucault, Michel. « Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ? ». In Dits et écrits, 1954- 1998, vol. II. Eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris : Gallimard, 2001.

NOTES

1. As proof of the popularity of this movement, see the unveiling of a recent academic blog dedicated to a conference on this issue: https://studies.hypotheses.org/

ABSTRACTS

This issue of Angles investigates new practices, in-between spaces, and research questions which do not immediately fall into clear-cut slots.

Ce numéro de Angles se penche sur les nouvelles pratiques, les espace entre-deux, et les domaines de recherche qui ne rentrent dans aucune case pré-établie.

INDEX

Mots-clés: recherche, humanités, sciences sociales, théorie, épistémologie Keywords: research, humanities, social sciences, theory, epistemology

AUTHOR

PASCALE ANTOLIN Pascale Antolin is Professor of American Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University. A specialist of early 20th century fiction (notably F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, modernism and naturalism), her research now focuses on illness in American biographical and fictional literature. She is the author of L'Objet et ses doubles. Une relecture de Fitzgerald (2000) and Nathanael West. Poétique de l'ecchymose (2002), and edited Pratiques et Esthétiques de la Déviance en Amérique du Nord (2012) and La Figure du Passeur. Transmission et mobilité culturelles dans les mondes anglophones (2013). Contact: Pascale.Antolin [at] u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr

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From a Stylistic Angle: Methodological Issues and Liminal Creativity

Sandrine Sorlin

Introduction

1 If a “legitimate” field of study is a discipline that is represented in the competitive examinations for the national recruitment of teachers (CAPES/Agrégation), then it must be acknowledged that English stylistics has not found a legitimate place in the university syllabus of English departments in France.1 Yet at a national and international level, research in stylistics is well rooted. It is promoted by firmly established learned societies counting more and more members, such as the French Society of English Stylistics (Société de Stylistique Anglaise, SSA)2 or the international Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) 3 that publish articles in the field of stylistics through peer-reviewed journals (such as Études de Stylistique Anglaise and Language and Literature). From being a sub-discipline to linguistics, (international) stylistics has grown into a well-established, mature, coherent discipline in its own right whose field is well defined, as is shown by the recent publication of handbooks in prestigious British publishing houses.4 The dichotomy between scarce courses in stylistics and intense research activity in the French context is all the more paradoxical as stylistic approaches have proved beneficial for the study of English grammar in context and the practice of creative writing by non-English speakers.5

2 This paper aims at questioning the borders of stylistics. Academically, it suffers from being stuck in-between two well-established disciplines: linguistics and literature. By bringing linguistic tools to work out literary interpretations, stylistics can be perceived as muddling the academic waters. The field will first be apprehended from external angles: through an exercise in polyphony, I will try to give voice to how the more academically implanted disciplines typically construe stylistics. These external examples of criticism will be uncompromisingly acknowledged and answered in a

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defence of the inherent specificity of stylistics. Rather than being built on a dismissal of what is outside, stylistics prides itself on fuzzy and permeable borders that enable it to remain open to other disciplines. Its “give and take” capacity (see Sorlin 2014b) makes it a bridging discipline that can absorb other enriching fields of language study (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics or Conversation Analysis) and bring its own expertise to other disciplines. The very last section will give a short illustration of how stylistics can penetrate new disciplinary borders (e.g. film and TV series studies) with the hope of furthering research.

1. The “legitimacy” of stylistics: Playing the devil’s advocate

3 Applying linguistic tools to the literary text, stylistics can be conceived as illegitimately playing in different fields. As this issue of Angles invites head-on clarification of the angles and limes that delimit a field of knowledge, I will put up a fake trial, highlighting the limits of stylistics from the points of view of its external limits: linguistics and literature. Successively an uncompromising literary critic and a linguist will be brought to the witness box on behalf of the prosecution in response to three charges each.

1.1. Stylistics from the literary angle

4 Here are the three main reproaches that the literary advocate could address to the delinquent stylistician stepping on her fieldwork: 1. Stylistics is too “text-bound” and does not seem to have gone beyond its formalist origins. 2. Stylistics offers overly mechanical linguistic text analysis. 3. Stylisticians are disrespectful of geographical areas and aesthetic periods.

5 In sticking to morphological, phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic aspects of texts, stylistics has not taken the “cultural turn” and does not always sufficiently bring “form” in tune with cultural and historical contextualisation. Besides, stylistic analysis often comes close to theoretical linguistics, taking the form of arid hypotheses producing boring results. Quantitative corpus stylistics, for instance, in its rigorous counting of recurrent forms, transforms the literary text into disembodied statistics that cannot pay tribute to the subtlety of the work of art. Lastly, stylisticians claim to be language specialists of texts belonging to different times and cultures. They tend to overlook the dividing up of the literary field in terms of geopolitics (Scottish literature, Irish literature, post-colonial literature, etc.) or aesthetic movements (Victorian studies, modernism, postmodernism, etc.).

6 The difficult dialogue between literature and linguistics is no news. “Would I allow my sister to marry a linguist? It is a good question. And I suppose, if I am honest, I must admit that I would much prefer not to have a linguist in my family.”6 Here is, in the 1960s, how far the literary critic F.W. Bateson was ready to go to disqualify what he perceived as the useless and even detrimental role of the linguist in the study of his life work: literature. For him, the critic has a sensitivity to the literary material that can only be marred by the linguist’s mechanical approach. He had in mind one of Roger Fowler’s books, Essays on Style and Language (1966). For Bateson, there is altogether a natural incompatibility between the minds of the linguist and the literary critic: “If he

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is a natural grammarian he will divide and subdivide the verbal material; if he has been a literary critic, he will synthesise and amalgamate it” (Simpson 151). Only the sensitive and synthetic critic can be the guardian of the sanctity of the work of art. Descriptive linguistics fails to understand the humane values that inhabit the literary material. Of course, this debate must be understood as being part of the liberal humanist tradition of the time that saw in the goodness of literature a possibility to be better oneself. But by expelling the stylistician from true literary criticism, Bateson concludes on the impossibility of dialogue: “let us agree to be different” (Simpson 152).

7 To be fair to my literary witness who has agreed to come to this mock trial, literary critics have long gone past some kind of sacralisation of creation. However, there remains the fact that, in their perception, the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of the work of art is something that must be celebrated rather than formalised. But a cultural difference must be marked out here between the French literary scholars’ and their British counterparts’ attitude towards stylistics, especially given how hard a time British stylisticians had to make the literary critic understand what they were doing. Until very recently, stylisticians were on the defensive, as evidenced in Stockwell’s following remark, which sounds like a claim of territory. For him a complete reversal of perceptions should actually be operated as stylistics is the discipline which has remained true to literary language while “literary studies” have drifted away from central language questions: “In fact it is the range of practices in literary scholarship in the institutional mainstream that is interdisciplinary: literary studies draws on history, or sociology, or economics, or politics, or philosophy, or creative art. Only stylistics directly faces the literary work on its own terms” (Stockwell and Whiteley 607). He goes as far as saying that literature should be construed as a branch of applied linguistics rather than stylistics be confined to the application of linguistics on the literary text: “It strikes me as odd now that we used to think of stylistics as the application of the discipline of linguistics to the separate field of literary studies: since literature is fundamentally a matter of language in its broadest conception, essentially literary studies should primarily be regarded as a special form of applied linguistics!” (ibid.).

8 Although there has lately been a renewed attention to “form” in UK literary studies, there still remains there an “uneasy complementarity” between stylistics and literary studies (Stockwell and Whiteley 3-4). In France, it seems to me that the dialogue has always been easier for historical reasons: although literary studies are becoming more context-based, they never severed the deep-rooted link between text and context.7 However, the reluctance of the literary critic regarding stylistics lies in the degree of scientificity that is allowed to be brought into the analysis of language. As it happens, here comes the linguist-witness, asking contrariwise for more scientific proof.

1.2. Stylistics from the linguist’s viewpoint

9 The linguist’s arguments against the legitimacy of stylistics could take the following forms: 1. Stylistics is too eclectic. 2. Stylistics lacks in methodology and scientific rigour. 3. Stylistics fails at bringing out generalizable results and theories.

10 Stylistics does not abide by an exclusive linguistic school: stylisticians fire on all cylinders instead of sticking to one theory that they would develop (or criticise) in

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order to further its explanatory force. They thus (unfairly) borrow linguistic theories from different sources in order to suit their purpose. Moreover, they lack a clearly stated methodology that could be systematically and rigorously applied to any text. By focusing on different markers in the same text, different researchers will possibly draw different interpretations, rendering stylistic interpretation an overly subjective enterprise. Stylistics makes it rarely possible to work out theoretical generalisations from its linguistic analyses. In short, pecking at all theories without furthering any, stylistic research is fragmentary and incomplete.

11 Some of our witness’s arguments have been heard and even anticipated by the more scientifically-oriented stylisticians in the large field of stylistics. Wishing to prove that stylistics does not lack method and is not all practice, they are striving towards one ideal: researching the most objective cause-to-effect link between the formal features that compose a text and the interpretation that can be given of them. Only plainly stated criteria based on clearly identified linguistic elements can provide the surest evaluation of a literary text. Some steps in this scientific direction have been taken by researchers like Willie van Peer in his attempt to apply a unified methodology to a variety of texts in order to come up with the most objective interpretation and evaluation. Although he concedes that readers’ tastes differ and that “their concrete goals and expectations, their past reading experiences and personal biography, or their knowledge of certain genre conventions, may all drive their evaluative process in one direction or another” (van Peer, 2008 1), he still believes that the evaluation of a work of art on linguistic criteria is possible. In his formal and semantic analysis of two roughly contemporary texts with similar themes and contexts, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, he stylistically demonstrates why one of them has been positively evaluated and has entered the canon and why the other has faded into oblivion (see van Peer 1995).8 His edited book, The Quality of Literature. Linguistic Studies in Literary Evaluation (2008), is a further attempt at setting up criteria for literary evaluation beyond variations of cultures and readers, spelling out objective measures “that can be independently checked and replicated by other researchers” (ibid. 7). Falsifiability is indeed the one scientific concept that the stylistician should hold dear: truly scientific literary interpretations are interpretations that are falsifiable, which means that they can be proven false.

12 So ends the plea for more methodological rigour. The defence may now speak.

1.3. Defence speech

13 From the arguments developed just now by my fictional critical linguist, there is one that stylisticians would refuse to discuss (we’re off to a good start!): the argument concerning the eclecticism of stylistics (in both choice of corpus and theories). Indeed, stylistics does not take any oath of allegiance to a particular linguistic school. Since it is not focused on the units and parts of speech that constitute the English language but on how language works and functions in context, stylistics does not believe in one and only linguistic prophet. This purposefully unfaithful attitude is a position of principle that constitutes its dynamic force (Jeffries and McIntyre 24). Freedom in the choice of theoretical tools is the one prerogative the stylistician will not relinquish. If in British stylistic analyses M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics is favoured over Chomskian generative-transformational grammar, it is not regarded as embodying

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some superior truth that needs to be sacralised. Thus the response to argument 1 in the linguist’s list would run as follows: from a stylistic angle, linguistic theories are not seen as solid rocks on which to cling but as useful tools to be tested.

14 Argument 3 can be dealt with right away as it seems to be an entailment of the first argument. Although stylistics does aim at drawing general theoretical conclusions from a diversity of cases, it is faced with a complex challenge. Its scale of analysis differs from that of general linguistics. Where the latter intends to draw overarching principles at the level of the whole linguistic system (of English dialects), stylistics deals with intricate phenomena that defy absolute formalisation. The metaphor of the linguistic map adopted by Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1990, 2016) is here useful to make visible the different scales embraced by general linguistics and stylistics: if we do need a general map of the language system, when we go down into the concreteness and complexity of phenomena, this general map is bound to be inadequate. The study of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of a text demands narrowed-down instruments of analysis. Like Mandelbrot’s fractals which are too irregular to be apprehended in traditional geometrical terms, stylistic phenomena need to be approached through grammars that can only be “local.” As Sinclair points out, the best linguistic theory can never be detailed and flexible enough to explain the complex relationships between form and content in literary contexts: “There was, and is, no lack of ingenious application of linguistic categories to literary works […] but there is no theory to explain how the patterns relate to meaning […] no detailed, comprehensive descriptive apparatus that is flexible enough to accommodate the extremely varied language of literature” (Sinclair 4). Some linguistic patterns and their textual functions cannot be explained by general grammatical categories. For example, Mahlberg9 (258) analyses structural features in an area of meaning that does not feature prominently in general grammar, that is the presentation of fictional speech (namely through the manner of speaking and body language) via a corpus analysis of patterns of words and their functions in texts. The functions are called “local” because “they do not capture general functions, but functions specific to a (group of) text(s) and/or specific to a (group of) lexical item(s)” (Mahlberg 253).

15 Now argument 2 is a strong claim that deserves to be addressed carefully. Stylistics aims at making explicit demonstrations based on the rigorous tracking of linguistic elements that have been defined beforehand in the most consensual manner possible. The different steps of the demonstration can be retraced by other researchers and criticized, although some may focus on other combinations of markers that seem more relevant to them. Yet, however explicit and evidenced stylistic analyses try to be, they still face methodological issues. The scientific aspirations of stylistics do need to be qualified. I do think that literary interpretations need to be more explicit than they sometimes are: a researcher should be able to state what she perceives in the text, linguistically speaking, and do so in a way that is retraceable by another analyst. It is true that some literary analyses are based on shaky linguistic descriptions out of a lack of sufficient linguistic background. However, I also maintain that the path from spotting out linguistic (ir)regularities to producing an interpretation cannot be scientifically insured. I believe Michael Toolan has come the closest to explaining why the falsifiability criterion needs to be used with a pinch of salt in a field of application that ultimately produces interpretations that are bound to be subjective: If, for example, analysts agree as to what an English modal verb is by reference to various criteria (invariant in form or unmarked for tense; leftmost in the verb

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phrase; requiring, prior to ellipsis, an infinitive form of a lexical verb or have or be to their right; attracting negation; etc.) then a claim that the first sentence of this paragraph contains a modal verb (might) while the second does not is a falsifiable claim. But in practice, since stylistics typically involves a hermeneutic circle or spiral of grammatical description and textual interpretation, it crucially brings in commentary that is not falsifiable. (Toolan, 2014 28-9)

16 Because the last step will always depend on the subjective interpretation of the stylistician, no matter how explicit, evidential and systematic her argumentation is, I would tend to agree with Toolan (1990 28 and passim) that stylistics is not a “method” but a means of explaining how a crafted writer’s linguistic choices manage to produce specific effects on a wide variety of readers.

17 Some stylistic interpretations can simply not be proven false. What best undermines the claim to falsifiability in literary stylistics is and remains the complex category of Free Indirect Speech (FIS). No matter how hard the linguist tries to establish rigorous linguistic criteria, some FIS utterances resist smooth patternings. As Monique de Mattia-Viviès shows, this is due to the fact that there are no markers of FIS per se; there are at best markers of point of view. In one of her examples (see de Mattia-Viviès 142-145, also Sorlin, 2014a 140-41), drawn from Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, “Why these people stood that damned insolence he could not conceive,” the evaluative adjective “damned” indicates that the text is here situated from the character’s point of view (Richard). However, there is a discrepancy between this informal adjective and the more formal semanticism of the verb “conceive.” Besides de Mattia-Viviès shows that the topicalisation of the indirect interrogative clause (versus the canonical “I could not conceive why these…”) is a structure that the narrator often uses when other characters are centres of conscience. Blurring the cards between narrator’s verbalisation and character’s attitude, this single utterance can give birth to plural interpretations that cannot all be entirely proven wrong.

18 The devil’s advocate that I have been playing is well aware of the unfairness of the trial for all participants involved. For one thing, it presents both literature and linguistics as unified fields with homogeneous methods and positions, where what prevails in these fields, as elsewhere, is a wide diversity of approaches, tools and corpora. It also ends up harming the angel’s advocate for stylistics, as it tends to present the discipline as illegitimately squeezed in between two well-established fields, struggling to conform to the constraints and prerequisites of both. The trial form gives the impression that stylistics is still at the defence stage, having nothing else to offer but defensive counter- justifications to ascertain its existence. Those days are gone. Specialists of stylistics do need to hear the critical remarks coming from its adjoining borders however—in this respect, the discipline is well guarded, with linguistics on one side correctly reminding them of their duty to rigour and literature on the other abating their scientific ambitions by highlighting the extreme malleability of language. Rather than establishing its territory on the construction of excluding borders, stylistics has paradoxically ascertained its field by removing disciplinary partitions. Part 2 will attempt to show why this constitutes its hermeneutic strength. My fictitious literary critic will find out along the way why some of her arguments in her plea above cannot hold for long.

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2. The creative liminality of stylistics

2.1. Stylistics: a welcoming field

19 The eclecticism of stylistics can be construed as a weakness (see 1.2.) or a strength. The breadth of the stylistician’s field is the price to pay for its openness to multiple theoretical approaches and to the diversity of its objects of study. Stylistics occupies a large path along a continuum between literary stylistics at one pole and linguistic stylistics at the other. The former is more literary-minded as it operates on the “form” of the text to come up with an interpretation of a piece of work as a whole, while the latter exploits the vast wealth of literature to further more linguistic-oriented issues.10 It is true that more literary-minded stylisticians might be less sensitive to more linguistically-oriented analyses (and vice versa) but for stylistics to remain the welcoming land it is, where dialogue can take place between different theories, this heterogeneity should be construed as an asset rather than a liability. As Jean-Michel Adam puts it, stylistics is certainly the only (remaining) place where literary people read linguistics and linguists read literature.11

20 The liminal place occupied by stylistics between linguistics and literature could also be seen as precious in the promotion of the more general field of what is known in France as l’anglistique. In its joint practice of both grammar and style, stylistics applies (meta)linguistic knowledge to a variety of styles from Old-English texts to 21st-century literature. The literary critic (see 1.1.) may perceive the use of this wide literary corpus as disrespectful of aesthetic partitions, but I would readily retort that the more diversified the texts the students are exposed to, the more agile they become in stylistic gymnastics. By training students to read (and write in) different styles, stylistics renews with the old rhetorical tradition of imitation, that is, writing a text by adopting an author’s style. This will not add up to the literary critic’s interpretation of the text but it will definitely raise awareness among students of the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the text she is reading and help her understand what stylistic choices have prevailed in the writing and to what potential effects (see Sorlin, 2014a 49-51). Stylistic practice is the place where the two established academic disciplines mentioned above can shed light on one another: this is the bridging power of stylistics.

21 The openness of stylistics to a variety of theories and approaches is not a mere ideological stance. Theoretical and methodological choices stem from the object of study chosen by the stylistician. Depending on the question the researcher asks herself and that she wants her research to answer, the choice in corpus and ways to treat it will invariably differ. In cognitive stylistics for instance, the researcher might be interested in real readers’ reactions to certain texts. Questionnaires might be the best way to go about gathering data. Stylistics does not a priori drive a wedge between practices in the humanities and in empirical science. Although one might not agree with van Peer’s apprehension of the literary text (see 1.2.), one should not discard the help science can provide. Van Peer et al. (19) give the example of the evaluation of fairy tales by real readers: “Psychoanalysis holds that the semantic content of literary texts allows readers to come to terms with feelings of repressed sexuality in early childhood and puberty.” One of van Peer’s students put the claim to the scientific test by having people read fairy tales and then questioning them on whether those feelings emerged.

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The results showed that no readers reacted the way Freud had predicted, as van Peer et al. conclude: What this empirical investigation shows is that Freudian theory about reading is wrong when it comes to this aspect dealing with the reading of fairy tales. It shows that the theory makes claims about reality that are obviously false when one observes how real readers go about reading. (19)

22 As often with scientific testing, we should be careful with the artificial reconstruction of the reading conditions and acknowledge the difficulty of obtaining truthful answers to intimate questions—besides Freudians would probably argue that “real readers” would be unaware of the psychoanalytic issues raised by fairy tales before work (between analyst and analysand) is done to elicit the said interpretations, but I cannot see why one should avoid the application of methods employed in empirical sciences, especially if they are likely to question what has always been taken for granted in the humanities. Maintaining a wall between the two cultures may be the safest way never to shake the entrenched certitudes of both fields.

23 I started this paper by mentioning that English stylistics does not enjoy the same institutional recognition as French stylistics in departments of Lettres modernes, for instance, where the discipline is present in educational competitive exams. Yet I would concur with Cécile Narjoux’s conclusions about the paradoxical inventiveness of English stylistics. Although I hope stylistics takes further academic space for the reasons evoked above, it might well be at the price of some of its creativity. Institutionalisation seems to have an inevitable stifling effect for Narjoux: Le dynamisme de la stylistique littéraire anglaise semble donc d’autant plus remarquable que, dans le cursus universitaire d’anglais de France, elle ne bénéfice pas de cours dédiées et n’est abordée que dans les cours de littérature — les études d’anglais se départageant déjà entre littérature, civilisation et linguistique, ou dans le cadre de cours de stylistique comparée adossés ou non à un cursus de traduction. Cependant, ne pourrait-on plutôt mettre en question la stylistique institutionnelle « travaillant explicitement sur des corpus relevant de valeurs indexées comme telles par la culture nationale » (Bordas) et incliner à penser que [les] « contraintes institutionnelles françaises » (Adam) amenées par l’optique des concours d’enseignement contribuent à forclore le champ de la réflexion. La liberté de penser la stylistique ne serait-elle pas justement permise par l’existence d’une réflexion en tous points excentrée, au-delà des frontières établies—géographiques, linguistiques, disciplinaires, de corpus ? (11)

24 Do the French concours tend to format disciplines in a way that may be detrimental to their free development and influence? The question would warrant another full-length article.

25 It is true that English stylistics has moved off centre, instituting dialogues with other practices within the field of language study and extending the results of these dialogues to other disciplines. This is what the last section will try to evince.

2.2. Stylistics: a migrating land

26 Not only can stylistics welcome researchers of diverse linguistic and literary observance but it can also participate in other areas of knowledge. Besides literature, stylistic techniques have been exported to other fields like politics and media studies (Jeffries 2010, Benoît à la Guillaume 2012, Davies 2013 among others), dance and music (Vincent-Arnaud 2006, 2008). Besides, within the science of language, stylistics has a

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propensity to “hyphenate” with other domains of language study. This is the case in what has come to be called “pragma-stylistics,” the linking hyphen testifying to a dialogue between pragmatics and stylistics, combining the two disciplines to shed light on aspects of language that used to be separated. It shows how disciplinary lines can be redrawn to liberate knowledge obstructed by disciplinary barriers. Hence the oxymoron that serves as a title to this section, stylistics being a field that does not rest content with once-and-for-all established boundaries. A short pragma-stylistic illustration is in order.

27 Pragma-stylistics is a relatively new field12 which takes the best of the two worlds. Pragmatics “is concerned with how language users interact, communicate and interpret linguistic behaviour” (Chapman and Clark 1) and (literary) stylistics focuses on an author’s linguistic choices so as to account for how her text can be interpreted. Pragma-stylistics pays attention to the illocutionary dimension of discourse and the inferential conception of interpretation as well as the idiosyncratic linguistic choices of the speaker (in keeping with the extralinguistic conditions and context). This approach is particularly useful in the study of dialogue, whether in novels or plays, to assess how utterances are understood and how meaning is/can be inferred by the various participants. It can also be exported to another field of study which has so far neglected the linguistic aspects of dialogue: film and TV series. Dialogue in film studies has until recently been considered as “transparent”, unworthy of attention, the focus being generally on the technical complexities of the editing and producing process. Film reviews sometimes comment on the language of films but often lack in scientific rigour. According to Kozloff, this neglect of discourse/language is partly explained by the fact that films were originally silent: “Film reviews fall back on vapid clichés—the dialogue is ‘witty’ or ‘clumsy’—without specifying the grounds for such evaluations. The neglect of film dialogue by more recent film scholarship actually reflects the field’s long- standing antipathy to speech in film” (6). Pragma-stylistics offers another angle of approach to this established field.

28 The extract below is taken from the American TV series House of Cards. Those who have seen the political series will know that Austin’s performative acts are mostly infelicitous in politics as, according to the ruthless protagonist Francis Underwood, Congressmen and women cannot resist breaking promises. What is also specific about the main character in this series is his ability to play with the agentive power of language to produce diverse illocutionary and perlocutionary effects that suit his political ambitions. The pragma-stylistic study of the protagonist’s linguistic choices and manipulative moves reveals the degree of power he succeeds (or not) in exerting over others (see Sorlin 2016). In this passage from season 3, President Francis Underwood tries to persuade his reluctant Democrat team to push for his big employment plan for America in the House in preparation for the 2016 presidential election: Francis: Then let’s not pretend to unite the party, let’s unite the party behind this legislation. Bob (Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives): We’ll never get it past the Republicans. Francis: We are not here to negotiate! You want forward-thinking, Bob? Then think forward. ↑ You want a fresh face for 2016? You wanna work together? Then present my program to Congress. And if it dies there, so be it. But I want us to FUCKING try! ↓ I am prepared to vacate this chair. Meet me halfway. (House of Cards, Season 3, Episode 28)13

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29 The exchange depicts a linguistic trick used by the protagonist to produce the effect he intends to create on his audience. He plays on a fall in register (“fucking”) designed to produce the perlocutionary effect of surprise, jarring as it is with the civil language one commonly associates with a President of the United States. This is typical of a character in the series who does not hesitate to use the whole stylistic gamut to reach a diversity of audiences. Through a rising prosody, he offers a controlled “performance” of anger as he tries to scare his audience into compliance. Bob’s reaction of surprise is non- verbal: Frank’s shift in register and loud voice have the perlocutionary effect of making him sit back in his chair. The protagonist’s deliberate use of a linguistic formulation that falls short of his political ethos in the short extract above must be analysed within his more general stylistic capacity to “stylise” different selves in different contexts, to take up sociolinguist Nikolas Coupland’s notion of “stylisation” (2007).14 In the TV series, in enacting or performing different selves, Underwood evinces the different (false and fake) personas that politicians can assume. In so doing he attests to the force of the performative that can break free from social conventions and assume new contexts. The double approach linking stylistic and pragmatic tools of analysis can thus contribute to a more complete analysis of dialogue in TV series.

30 The study of style also helps to explain the audience’s attraction to the series in general and the main protagonist in particular, in spite of the sundry crimes he commits. The series unconventionally breaks the fourth wall through the direct address to the viewers: the involving quality of the second person pronoun forces some form of complicity between Francis and the viewers (see Sorlin 2015). Creating a teaching relation, the direct address places the viewer in the position of the learner. In the following aside, for instance, Francis comments on his knowing his home constituents well, the better to manipulate them: “What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It’s their strength, their weakness, and if you can humble yourself before them, they will do anything you ask” (Season 1, Episode 3). Furthermore, the semantico-syntactic structure of Underwood’s asides contributes to creating an “effect of authority” that might be appealing to audience members. Devoid of doubts or hesitations, they are assertive self-confident utterances that very often take the form of proverbs: “Proximity to power deludes some into believing they wield it” (Season 1, Episode 9). Those de-subjectified aphorisms that are usually in the present tense and start with the zero article appear as indisputable arguments of authority that implicitly call for consent. What is more, Underwood’s either/or rhetoric divides people and things into Manichaean exclusive categories. As he puts to death his neighbour’s dog that has been run over by a car, he asserts his rhetoric of certainty: “There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, the sort of pain that’s only suffering, I have no patience for useless things. Moments like this require someone who will act, who will do the unpleasant thing, the necessary thing. (He then kills the dog)” (Season 1, Episode 1). This extract is typical of Francis’s strategy that consists in hoisting a local meaning/situation to a general, universal level which can hardly be contested. In the pragmatic face-to-screen game, the protagonist engages in a fake dialogue with the audience who cannot participate. The rhetorical questions he sometimes asks the viewers elicit (obvious) answers from them: “There are two types of Vice Presidents: doormats or matadors. Which do you think I intend to be?” (Season 2, Episode 16). Pretending to seek their complicit assent, in fact he pragma-rhetorically manipulates their critical thinking.

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31 These extracts serve to illustrate both the potentially fruitful extensions of stylistics into other fields (i.e. pragmatics) and across other disciplinary thresholds (i.e. film/TV series studies) but also, and above all, its essential specificity that makes it an identifiable, albeit migrating, field: its irresistible attraction to language play of any kind. “If you don’t like how the table is set, turn over the table,” says Frank Underwood (Season 2, Episode 2). This audacious piece of advice could become the motto of stylistic practice, empowering students to play with a wide range of linguistic possibilities to achieve varied purposes and create the best effects.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam, Jean-Michel. “Le continu du langage: langue et discours, grammaire et stylistique.” In Cécile Narjoux (ed.), Au-delà des frontières: Perspective de la stylistique contemporaine. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. 187-196.

Benoît à la Guillaume, Luc. Quand la Maison-Blanche prend la parole: le discours présidentiel de Nixon à Obama. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012.

Black, Elizabeth. Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005.

Burke, Michael, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London: Routledge, 2014.

Chapman, Siobhan and Clark, Billy, eds. Pragmatic Literary Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Coupland, Nikolas. Style. Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Davies, Matt. Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

De Mattia-Viviès, Monique. Le Discours indirect libre au risque de la grammaire. Le cas de l’anglais. Aix- en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2006.

Fowler, Robert. The Languages of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.

Jeffries, Lesley and McIntyre, Dan. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Jeffries, Lesley. Critical Stylistics. The Power of English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Hickey, Leo. “Stylistics, Pragmatics and Pragmastylistics.” Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire 71.3 (1993): 573-586. DOI : 10.3406/rbph.1993.3890

House of Cards, (2013- ), Seasons 1-3, Network: Netflix. Writers: Beau Willimon, Michael Dobbs, Andrew Davies (among others). Directors: Robin Wright, David Fincher, James Foley, Joel Schumacher, Charles McDougall.

Kozloff, Sarah. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley: U. of California P., 2000.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. The Violence of Language. London: Routledge, 1990.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, and Sandrine Sorlin. Convictions philosophiques et plaisirs linguistiques. Entretiens avec Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2016.

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Mahlberg, Michaela. “Grammatical configuration.” The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Ed. Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 249-262.

Maingueneau, Dominique. Pragmatique pour le discours littéraire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2005.

Narjoux, Cécile. “Introduction.” Au-delà des frontières: Perspectives de la stylistique contemporaine. Ed. Cécile Narjoux. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012. 7-25.

Simpson, Paul. A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge, 2004.

Sinclair, John. “The exploitation of meaning: literary texts and local grammars.” Challenging the Boundaries. Ed. Isil Bas and Donald C. Freeman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 1-35.

Sorlin, Sandrine. La Stylistique anglaise. Théories et Pratiques. Rennes: PUR, 2014a.

Sorlin, Sandrine. “The ‘indisciplinarity’ of stylistics.” Topics in Linguistics 14.1 (2014b): 9-15, DOI: 10.2478/topling-2014-0008

Sorlin, Sandrine. “Breaking the fourth wall: The pragmatics of the second person pronoun in House of Cards.” The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns. Eds. Laure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, coll. Studies in Language Companion Series, 2015. 125-145.

Sorlin, Sandrine. Language and Manipulation in House of Cards. A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Stockwell, Peter and Whiteley, Sara. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Ed. Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 1-9.

Stockwell, Peter and Whiteley, Sara. “Coda: the practice of stylistics.” The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Ed. Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 607-15.

Toolan, Michael. The Stylistics of Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990.

Toolan, Michael. “The theory and philosophy of stylistics.” The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Ed. Stockwell and Whiteley. 13-31.

Van Peer, Willie. “The historical non-triviality of art and literature. A rejoinder to Jerome Stolnitz.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 35.2 (1995): 168-172. DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/35.2.168

Van Peer, Willie, ed. The Quality of Literature. Linguistic Studies in Literary Evaluation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2008.

Van Peer, Willie, Frank Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier. Scientific Methods for the Humanities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2012.

Vincent-Arnaud, Nathalie. “Regards sur un paysage anglais: ‘Seascape,’ de W. H. Auden à Benjamin Britten.” LISA e-journal IV 4 (2006): 158-169. DOI: 10.4000/lisa.1969

Vincent-Arnaud, Nathalie. “‘JAZZ, baby / from every rebound’ : la forme renaissante du haiku dans Jazz from the Haiku King de James A. Emanuel (1999).” Bulletin de la Société de Stylistique Anglaise 31 (2008): 33-44.

Sotirova, Violeta, ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. London: Continuum Publishing, 2016.

Watson, Greg and Zyngier, Sonia. Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners. Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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NOTES

1. This is not the case in the departments of Lettres modernes in France where stylistics is represented in the CAPES. To be fair, it has started to change in the English CAPES competitive exam as linguistics is now interrelated with textual concerns brought about by translation, in the passage from English to French or vice versa. 2. See http://stylistique-anglaise.org. 3. See http://www.pala.ac.uk/. 4. See The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (2014) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics (2016) for instance. 5. See Watson and Zyngier 2007 for an illustration of the application of stylistics to a language learning context for instance. See also Sorlin 2014a for a dialogue between grammar, style and writing. 6. This quotation and the following ones are extracted from Simpson (2004, 148-157) in which is replayed the “Fowler–Bateson controversy,” through the reprinting of passages from R. Fowler, The Languages of Literature (1971). 7. One reason for this profound attachment to form may be found in historical pedagogical formulae adopted in the French system from the 19th century on after Jules Ferry’s educational reforms (the French explication de texte has been a prerequisite exercise in secondary and high school since that period, and is still practised all the way up to the university level today). 8. Among the stylistic differences between the two texts, the author points out the greater variety and multi-layered complexity of Shakespeare’s language that presents a higher diversity of styles and registers. 9. The author gives “local grammar” a slightly different meaning from Sinclair. For Mahlberg, “the main features of a local grammar are its applicability to a specific area of the language and the emphasis on the kind of functional interpretation that addresses the negotiation of meanings in texts” (257). 10. In practice the distinction is never as decided. 11. “La stylistique est devenue le dernier espace où des littéraires lisent encore des ouvrages et des articles de linguistique et où des linguistes s’intéressent à des textes littéraires” (Adam 189). 12. See Black, Chapman & Clark. The term has been in the air for a while though, see Hickey’s 1993 definition: “Pragma-stylistics pays special attention to those features that a speaker may choose or has chosen, from a range of acceptable forms in the same language that would be semantically, or truth-conditionally, equivalent, but might perform or achieve different objectives or do so in different ways” (Hickey 578). See also Maingueneau in France. 13. The vertical arrows transcribe a rising/falling tone. 14. In Style. Language Variation and Identity, Coupland highlights the power of the individual to style-shift across diverse social situations or with different recipients and thus construct identities in talk that tend to transcend social constraints.

ABSTRACTS

Stylistics can be said to borrow tools from one well-established discipline (linguistics) and step on the disciplinary toes of another (literature). The question of the legitimacy of its borders in the academic landscape in France can deservedly be raised. In this article which questions the

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frontiers of stylistics, the author sets up a mock trial, bringing to the witness box specialists of adjacent disciplines, linguistics and literature, uncompromisingly probing the legitimacy of stylistics. After offering a defence speech, the author shows how unfair this trial is to all participants involved, the reason being that the liminal issue applies to the field of stylistics in a specific way. The perimeter of stylistic studies has not been built on the construction of exclusive borders. The author shows why the field should be construed as both a welcoming and a migrating land that must be understood in this paradox: it has gained disciplinary legitimacy by paradoxically dismantling disciplinary partitions. Stylistics is a ‘connecting’ discipline that can further research by reviving dialogues between distinct fields of knowledge. In a very last section, a concrete illustration is given to the bridging capacity of stylistics, as it brings new light to another discipline, film/TV series studies that have been passed over from a pragma-stylistic angle.

La stylistique anglaise emprunte les outils d’une discipline bien établie (la linguistique) tout en marchant sur les plates-bandes d’une autre (la littérature). La question de la légitimité de ses frontières dans le paysage académique français se pose donc à juste titre. Dans cet article interrogeant les bornes de la stylistique, l’auteur a recours au mode du (faux) procès qui lui permet d’amener à la barre un critique littéraire puis un linguiste questionnant sans compromis la légitimité de la discipline. Après un plaidoyer pour la cause de la stylistique, l’auteur montre en quoi ce faux procès est injuste pour l’ensemble des participants, la raison étant que la question des seuils et des frontières ne s’applique à la stylistique que d’une manière éminemment spécifique. L’auteur montre en effet pourquoi le champ de la stylistique est à la fois une terre d’accueil et de migration qui doit être appréhendée dans et par ce paradoxe : la stylistique a paradoxalement acquis sa légitimité dans le démantèlement de cloisons disciplinaires. Elle est une discipline-passerelle qui renouvelle le savoir en renouant des dialogues entre champs de savoirs séparés. L’article offre pour finir une illustration concrète de la capacité de la stylistique à éclairer un domaine jusqu’alors peu étudié d’un point de vue pragma-stylistique (les études de cinéma/séries télé).

INDEX

Keywords: legitimacy, Frontier, methodology, creativity, paradox, bridging discipline, literature, linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, pragma-stylistics, philosophy of language, TV series Mots-clés: légitimité, frontière, méthodologie, créativité, paradoxe, discipline-passerelle, littérature, linguistique, stylistique, pragmatique, pragma-stylistique, philosophie du langage, série télévisée

AUTHOR

SANDRINE SORLIN Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English language and linguistics at Aix-Marseille University and a fellow member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Specialized in stylistics and pragmatics, she has published books on linguistic defamiliarisation in English literature (La Défamiliarisation linguistique dans le roman anglais contemporain, PULM, 2010) and on language and authority in a historical perspective (Langage et autorité: de l’ordre linguistique à la force dialogique, PUR, 2012). She is also the author of a handbook of stylistics (La Stylistique anglaise. Théories et Pratiques, PUR, 2014) and the co-editor of The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns with Laure Gardelle (John Benjamins, 2015). She has recently published a monograph on an American political TV series (Language and

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Manipulation in House of Cards: A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is the current chair of the Société de Stylistique Anglaise. Contact: sandrine.sorlin [at] univ-amu.fr

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Angles and “limes” in American Studies: Ecofeminism in the research field

Margot Lauwers

Introduction

1 Ecofeminism emerged on a global scale during the second half of the 1970s from cross- linking research on social justice and environmental health. At that time, several groundbreaking texts shed light upon the commonalities of oppressive structures based upon gender, ethnicity, species and the environment, notably The Lay of the Land by Annette Kolodny and New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation by Rosemary Radford-Ruether, both published in 1975. These books were followed three years later by Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, and Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Then, in 1980, Carolyn Merchant published The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution.1

2 The ideas put forward by Mary Daly are often classified as pertaining to the radical side of feminism, despite the fact that she established a clear link between feminist thought and environmentalism. In her title, Daly already laid bare a liminal reflection on the concepts of women and ecology. By recalling the persecutions women suffered from in various historical eras and cultural areas—such as Chinese foot-binding, genital mutilation in Africa or witch-hunting in Europe—she underscores the existence of a link between environmental and feminine health problems. Daly also calls attention to another issue: language, a topic she deems far more insidious and difficult to expose because it is all too often put aside as being a fruitless contention. Daly exhibits what she considers to be the three facets of a single problem: the male-dominated medicalization of women’s bodies, the need to reconceptualize our relationships to women as well as to the environment, and the imperfection of language to which Daly opposes the necessity of a gyno-centered orientation of language and of thought.

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3 The same year, in a somewhat similar spirit, Susan Griffin published Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. In a manner reminiscent of Daly, Griffin broke with the traditional academic style and produced an impassioned prose poem in which she exposes the hypocrisy of Western industrial thinking as regards women and the environment. Throughout the book, the author paraphrases and weaves into her own writing texts from very different origins such as gynecological treatises, forestry handbooks, poems and scientific essays. The result is a powerful denunciation of the idea—present from the beginning of Western Antiquity—that women are, supposedly, closer to nature and, as a consequence, are bound to be, like nature itself, subjected to male domination.

4 Like Daly, Griffin tackles patriarchal structures head-on. She deconstructs patriarchy’s voice from the inside, demonstrating how it can be full of prevarications, prejudice and metaphysical dishonesty. Here too, the author attacks language, which she considers as the pillar of the patriarchal system. By exposing the incoherencies of patriarchal discourse and the presumptions it managed to create through language, Woman and Nature reveals the absurdity and the authoritarianism of the discursive association which helped subordinate everything that did not fit into the “white male” category. Within her work, Griffin blurs traditional dualistic categorization through a polyphonic method as well as through the very nature of the book itself: partly academic treatise, narrative, and poem. These characteristics are both the strength and the weakness of this work.

5 What happened with this book was similar to what happened with the ecofeminist movement as a whole. The fact that the book was not clearly classifiable as being either an essay, a novel or a poem—but rather all these at once—forced the reader into rethinking his or her relationship to reading and to his or her tools for critical analysis. Studying this book in a fragmented way by concentrating, for example, only on its poetical or its essayist side is possible, of course, but something is then missing. This text should be approached in a trans-generic way, and the same goes for the movement it comes from. This all-encompassing perspective hindered the book’s entering academic circles: looked upon as not conventional enough, considered as too “radical” or, worse, as “essentialist”—because it dealt with the problem in the round—the book’s history is highly representative of ecofeminism’s pathway.

6 In a totally different but no less interdisciplinary style, Carolyn Merchant published The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution in 1980. Its author is a History of Sciences and Ethics professor at the University of Berkeley in California. Merchant defined the Enlightenment as being the time when science undertook to fragment and dissect nature. She claimed this resulted in nature’s conception as inert and empty, a simple vase ready to welcome human colonization, reminiscent of the feminine body often regarded as an empty vessel awaiting male semen to produce the miracle of life. By drawing from the cross-linking studies of social feminism and environmentalism, The Death of Nature allows for a complete historical panorama of the reason why the domination of women and the exploitation of nature have common roots within the scientific and economic rationalism that has existed since the Middle Ages.

7 Merchant’s work, with its solid historical documentation, was then at the premises of what is now referred to as “material feminism”. Although their ideas are basically analogical, it appears to be the form that Daly and Griffin gave to their works that has proven problematic. This is particularly true for Griffin’s Woman and Nature, which is

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grounded in thorough historical research work, and a comprehensive analysis of historical data (her sources are often similar to Merchant’s). Sadly, the fact that Griffin’s writing was not representative of traditional essay writing undermined the effect of the data she used. Her writing exploited subjectivity, for a large part, by pushing the reader into feeling the injustice it discusses by imitating it within the writing style. This gave way to a poetic text of great potency, but it also quelled the understanding of the subject the author was addressing. The form of the book is as multiple and heterogeneous as the subjects tackled by ecofeminism, and some of the latter’s branches might seem somehow cultish. However, the academic works provided by ecofeminist scholars from various fields, as well as fiction and non-fiction ecofeminist narratives, constitute a strong basis for a transdisciplinary ecofeminist research field, though the very question of transdisciplinarity is the real bone of contention.

Not enough angles and too many “limes”?

8 As Griffin’s example showed, ecofeminism's transdisciplinarity has been deemed problematic from its very beginnings. Retrospectively, it appears that this misunderstanding did not come from the movement’s illegitimacy or its insignificance but rather from its transdisciplinarity. In other words, the attack on ecofeminism’s transdisciplinarity was part of a general attempt to disqualify the ecofeminist approach as a whole. For example, in June 1992, the editors of Signs, a journal, refused an article on ecofeminism with the following arguments: “ecofeminism seems to be concerned with everything in the world […] [as a result] feminism itself seems almost to get erased in the process [,] when [ecofeminism] contains all peoples and all injustices, the fine tuning and differentiation lose out” (reproduced in Gaard 1993: 32-3). This example illustrates the fact that the variety of ecofeminism’s approaches and applications represented a problem for traditional modes of thinking.

9 However, a couple of years later, ecofeminist theory began solidifying globally, especially in the United States. Several groundbreaking anthologies were published, the first of which was Reclaim the Earth, edited by Leonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland in 1983. This first truly transdisciplinary volume allowed to grasp the astonishing diversity which constituted ecofeminism: Caldecott and Leland’s volume bridged the later division between theory and activism, offering poetry as well as scholarship, and work by a diversity of feminists, including Wangari Maathai (Kenya) on the Green Belt Movement, Rosalie Bertell (Canada) on nuclear power and health, Wilmette Brown (UK/US) on black ghetto ecology, Marta Zabaleta (Argentina) on the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Manushi Collective (India) on female infanticide, and Anita Anand (India) on the Chipko Andolan. (Estok et al. 2013: 29)

10 Although they have similar goals, theory and grassroots movements used to function in distinct manners until then. Reclaim the Earth was the first work to establish long- lasting links between the two spheres of action: activism and theory. Two articles published in that same period demonstrate the “global trait” of the ecofeminist movement. In “Deeper than Deep Ecology: the Eco-Feminist Connection” (1984), Australian Ariel Salleh offers a broadening of the reflection of the Deep Ecology movement which she considers too human-centered. Her arguments outlined what a combined approach to environmentalism and feminism could bring to ecology as a

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whole as she explained that it would allow for a more ethical treatment of all living beings. In 1986, German sociologist Maria Mies published “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale” in which she enhanced the theory she had only applied to her studies of the living conditions of women in India. Six years earlier, Mies had published a book in which she denounced the difficulties met by Indian women in fighting the extremely active patriarchal spirit of the country (Mies 1980). This interest in applying ecofeminist analyses to the Indian country allowed for the collaboration of Mies with another well-known ecofeminist, Vandana Shiva.

11 Both representative of the geographical scattering of ecofeminist scholars, these articles also opened the way to two others which were crucial for the movement: “Ecofeminism: an overview and discussion of positions and arguments” (1986) by Val Plumwood, and “Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections” by Karen Warren. Both contributions concentrated on the necessity of understanding the links between feminism and ecology and started to establish a more coherent ecofeminist thinking. Thanks to these works, Karen Warren later developed her “logic of domination” (Warren 1990: 126-132), which Val Plumwood described as the “master model” theory (Plumwood 1993: 23). These ideas were central to ecofeminism for this is how the links that existed mainly within capitalist patriarchy between environmental degradation and oppression due to gender, ethnicity, social class or sexual orientation were made visible through an environmental and feminist analysis.

12 This analysis shed light on a double relationship between nature and women (or other beings considered as “Feminised Others”). First, in a larger part of the world, women seem to suffer harder from environmental degradation because of the sexual division of labor that imposes the role of caretaker on women. The fact that these women are in charge of finding firewood, bringing water to the home, scavenging or finding food, and so on, places them at the forefront of feeling the increasing constraints of environmental change (by having to walk further and further for wood and water for example). This analysis is confirmed by data collected and presented in Women and Environment in the Third World (1988), by Joan Davidson and Irene Dankelman and in Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1989) by Vandana Shiva.

13 The other link between women and nature is said to exist on a conceptual level. This connection was articulated in very diverging ways, which is why it is hard to explain as a whole. The heart of the problem allegedly resides in the hierarchical and binary mode of thinking of Western societies, or societies influenced by the West. These conceptual structures have an ascendancy on the way the world is perceived and organized. Binary structures create pairs in which one is always conceptually devalued compared to the other. What is more, the devalued other is almost always perceived as being closer to nature and more feminized than the other half of the pair (e.g. reason/emotion or civilized/wild for example). These binary structures appear to be justified, sometimes even natural, whereas, according to ecofeminists, a re-evaluation of our philosophical and conceptual perception allows for a better understanding of the way they have, in fact, been socially and culturally constructed and are mutually reinforcing.

14 By the 1990s, ecofeminism was no longer a field in its infancy but rather a critical theory that could be applied to various fields, be they philosophical, sociological or semantical. Under Murray Bookchin’s influence, Janet Biehl and Ynestra King started to develop a “social ecofeminism”, a notion very close to what is nowadays referred to as “bioregionalism”. In 1989, Carolyn Merchant published Ecological Revolutions. Nature,

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Gender and Science in New England; Barba Noske, Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology and Judith Plant, Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. The first two retraced, in a classical essayist fashion, the evolutions of ecofeminist thought as well as the movement’s desire to fight the binarism traditionally at stake in Western societies in order to make the interrelated patterns of domination visible. In doing so, these writings took forward what the works of people such as Merchant, Plumwood, Salleh, Radford-Ruether and Mies had started to do, by showing how enriching a vision conjointly focused on gender and the environment could be.

15 Anthologies published in 1989 and 1990 have confirmed the importance of some of its participants, whose work quickly became keystones within the ecofeminism movement: Shiva (1988), Kheel (1988), King (1989), Spretnak (1982), Starhawk (1979, 1982) or Radford Ruether (1983). Both works offered essays pertaining to the deconstruction of binary thinking as well as poems, academic papers, philosophical myths and so on. Other works continued reinforcing these ideas, such as The Dreaded Comparison by Marjorie Spiegel (1988), The Rape of the Wild by Andrée Collard and Joyce Contrucci (1989), in the footsteps of Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land (1975). By focusing on the correlative structures of science and technology, of militarism and hunting, of slavery and domesticity, Collard and Contrucci report on the way language, monotheistic religions and patriarchal cultures legitimate a relationship to the world which is based, even constructed on, domination and conquest.

A hindering ‘all-encompassingness’

16 The last decade of the 20th century witnessed a regular flow of publications which both reinforced and weakened ecofeminism. The diversity of standpoints turned ecofeminism into an ideology that had to be broached as a whole, which was exactly what discouraged people initially interested in its ideas. The few people who had been advocating what has been termed as “cultural ecofeminism”2 discredited the entire movement by making it appear as an essentialist celebration of a biological/natural link between women and nature: Focusing on the celebration of goddess spirituality and the critique of patriarchy advanced in cultural ecofeminism, poststructuralist and other third-wave feminisms portrayed all ecofeminisms as an exclusively essentialist equation of women with nature, discrediting ecofeminism’s diversity of arguments and standpoints […]. (Gaard 1992: 32)

17 However, a large number of writings continued what the works from the previous decade had begun, namely: condemning the association between women, femininity and nature, and exposing this as the result of a social construction. Academic works brought proof of the fact that these social constructions, like the society which they originate from, are contextually anchored and mobile, rather than ahistorical and fixed as cultural ecofeminists claim them to be. Taking a newly materialist standpoint, the work of thinkers such as Lori Gruen (1993), Donna Haraway (1991), and Irene Diamond (1994) analyzed the structuring of the conceptual connection between women and nature. As such, the ecofeminist theory of the 1990s went one step further not only by bringing to light the various links that existed between oppressive structures, but also by focusing its analysis on the very structure of oppression.

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18 All this research tended to point to the fact that there existed a single logic of domination applied in analogical ways to varied groups, identified according to the dualistic disjunctions upon which Euro-American patriarchal capitalistic thinking was based. This logic of domination was at the heart of colonialism, racism, sexism and of what is now referred to as “speciesism” or “naturism.”3 Since all these forms of oppression are bound by the conceptualization that underpins them, ecofeminists claim that issues such as feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, etc. should all be fought for together: Ecofeminists insist that the sort of logic of domination used to justify the domination of humans by gender, racial or ethnic, or class status is also used to justify the domination of nature. Because eliminating a logic of domination is part of a feminist critique—whether a critique of patriarchy, white supremacist culture, or imperialism—ecofeminists insist that naturism is properly viewed as an integral part of any feminist solidarity movement to end sexist oppression and the logic of domination that conceptually grounds it. […] Because, ultimately, these connections between sexism and naturism are conceptual—embedded in an oppressive conceptual framework—the logic of traditional feminism leads to the embracing of ecological feminism. (Warren 1990: 130)

19 According to Karen Warren, this is one of the reasons that serve to justify the common fight of environmentalism and feminism in the form of ecofeminism. Another reason can also be found in the manner in which gender and nature have both been conceptualized within Western patriarchal society: Just as conceptions of gender are socially constructed, so are conceptions of nature. Of course, the claim that women and nature are social constructions does not require anyone to deny that there are actual humans and actual trees, rivers and plants. It simply implies that how women and nature are conceived [of] is a matter of historical and social reality. These conceptions vary cross-culturally and by historical time period. As a result, any discussion of the “oppression or domination of nature” involves reference to historically specific forms of social domination of non-human nature by humans, just as the discussion of the “domination of women” refers to historically specific forms of social domination of women by men. […] [And] involves showing that within patriarchy the feminization of nature and the naturalization of women [within language and concepts] have been crucial to the historically successful subordinations of both. (Warren 1990: 131)

20 However, in spite of the apparent solid theoretical foundation of ecofeminist ideas, earnest antagonisms started appearing with charges of essentialism. Some authors were classified as “dangerous” because their work was deemed too universalizing or because it seemed to uphold the idea that there was a universal feminine nature or a biologically-determined femininity.

21 The precise points of controversy concerning the essentialist bent of ecofeminism have become so complex that rehearsing every detail of the controversy would divert us from the purpose of this paper. In an effort to keep at bay the essentialist allegations, a large number of feminist and ecofeminist scholars belittled ecofeminism in general. In “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Greta Gaard offers an interesting synthesis of the various discussions on the supposed essentialism of some ecofeminist approaches of the 1990s. In another article, “Misunderstanding Ecofeminism,” she explains how the repeated attacks ecofeminism has had to suffer stem, she argues, from a misunderstanding: The refusal to take ecofeminism seriously within circles of standardized feminist discourse has taken two forms: first, ecofeminism is wrong; second, ecofeminism is

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not taken seriously because to do so would require rethinking the entire structure of feminism. Since these explanations are mutually exclusive, they cannot both be true. It is worth noting that simultaneously holding two conflicting beliefs as true is a kind of doublethink which characterizes oppressive systems, and serves to keep the underclass paralyzed by paradox. That establishment feminism is now using this strategy is testimony to the hegemonic status feminism has achieved—and therefore, a signal of caution for how much credibility it should have. […] Ecofeminism is generally thought to be “wrong” because critics have portrayed the theory as premised on the woman/nature connection: […] But this charge can only be made by simple misunderstanding, sheer ignorance, or willful misrepresentation […] (Gaard 1992: 21)

22 By setting the charges of essentialism which ecofeminism suffered within the larger historical context of the feminist movements of the past fifty years, one notices that a similar debate was waged within feminist currents of thoughts from which ecofeminism originated. Among the many branches of feminism4 some currents are called ‘differential’ or ‘cultural’ as they predicate a biologically-determined nature (as opposed to the social constructionist standpoint put forth by other feminisms), and advocate a necessary recognition of a feminine life-experience.

23 Although more general feminist movements have endlessly disowned these ideas, they have to be taken into consideration when trying to historically contextualize feminist movements in general—be it just to acknowledge that they are but a small part of a much larger whole, and that they should by no means be substituted to it. It is important to bear in mind that the same is true for ideas held up by cultural ecofeminism which represents only a small part of a larger movement. In the same way that one cannot reject all forms of feminism on the pretext that some of its branches are differential or cultural, one cannot reject the whole of ecofeminist ideologies for the sole reason that some of its advocates base their premises on the “existence of a presupposed link” (Brugeron 2009: 1) between the “eco” and the “feminine” which binds together nature and women's biological characteristics.

24 Using specific characteristics of a distinctly cultural or spiritual branch of a movement in order to present these as being inherent qualities of the more general current of thought is a move that could itself be called essentialist, since it amounts to “misrepresenting the part for the whole” (Gaard 1992: 21). As such, it appears that most of the feminist movements which rejected ecofeminism in its entirety because of a conflation between a part and the whole actually applied the same patriarchal systems’ thinking they have been trying to fight from the beginning.

25 This illustrates what the ecofeminist movement blames the feminist and environmentalist movements for: they reproduce the exact dualistic thought structure (and thus also the underlying logic of domination) that they are intending to fight in patriarchal and anthropocentric systems. This reproduction of the “value-hierarchical dualities,” a term used by Warren (1993: 255), imitates the dichotomies rejected by most feminist movements such as body/mind, woman/man, emotion/reason, etc. and which ecofeminist scholars have extended to other dualistic structures such as nature/ culture, white/non-white, human/non-human, etc. If we follow Warren and Plumwood's theories, among others, according to which a classification in one category or the other prompts a conceptual coalescence of the various components of these dichotomies, the essentialist/constructionist dichotomy brings about the discrediting

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of the entire ecofeminist movement since it is then associated with the natural (a category which is generally berated) as opposed to the cultural.

26 In the same way as a solely socialist or feminist analysis might be considered reductionist in that it tackles only one side of a question which obviously has different facets, we have to ask ourselves, in light of the current social and environmental crisis, if the essentialist/constructionist dichotomy remains legitimate as an approach to ecofeminism. This question was put forth as early as 1989 by Diana Fuss in her book Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference, but the importance of Fuss’s ideas was swept up by the turmoil of fear that the word “essentialist” created around the ecofeminist movement. Fuss advocated a withdrawal from the opposition between essentialism and constructionism because she considered this to be the root of many negative reactions as regards feminisms and ecofeminisms in the past decades: “[…] it can also be maintained that this same dispute has created the current impasse in feminism, an impasse predicated on the difficulty of theorizing the social in relation to the natural, or the theoretical in relation to the political” (Fuss 1990: 1).

27 According to her, the problem brought up by this dichotomy did not come from the actual essentialist quality of an idea, but from the suspicion of essentialism, which completely paralyzed the pursuance of the analysis: Few other words in the vocabulary of contemporary critical theory are so persistently maligned, so little interrogated, and so predictably summoned as a term of infallible critique. The sheer rhetorical power of essentialism as an expression of disapprobation and disparagement was recently dramatized for me in the classroom when one of my most theoretically sophisticated students, with all the weight of recent feminist theory behind her, sought to persuade me that the Marxist-feminist text I had assigned did not deserve our serious consideration. […] My response to this student’s charge might also serve as the keynote to this book: in and of itself, essentialism is neither good nor bad, progressive nor reactionary, beneficial nor dangerous. The question we should be asking is not “is this text essentialist (and therefore ‘bad’)?” but rather, “if this text is essentialist, what motivates its deployment?” How does the sign “essence” circulate in various contemporary critical debates? Where, and how, and why is it invoked? What are its political and textual effects? These, to me, pose the more interesting and ultimately the more difficult questions. (Fuss xi)

28 In short, if one understands ecofeminist theories as the tacit avowal of a biological link between women and nature, the movement might of course appear as detrimental to both a change in the status of women and an evolution in the abusive exploitation of nature within industrial Western societies. However, rather than turning away from new theories under the pretext that some of its advocates could, maybe, display essentialist ideas, it might be more interesting to ask the question from a critical perspective in order to know if this essentialism could be of interest in the necessary renewal of our world conceptions. If the answer is no, then we would have a solid reason not to show any interest in the ideas expressed in these texts. But, if there exists the slightest possibility that the answer be yes (“yes, even this essentialist-ish texts could be of interest in renewing our world conceptions”), are we not risking losing an important element by rejecting a whole current of thought simply because of a few “free spirits” in its midst? Seeing the hostility with which ecofeminism has been welcomed, at time, it did indeed seem as if the academic world was willing to take the risk of losing important elements within ecofeminist thinking, in short, it appeared as though academe were willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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When literature allows making amends

29 In 1998, Patrick D. Murphy and Greta Gaard co-edited Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, an enriched version of the special issue they had edited on the same subject for the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment in 1996. This convergence of activist and literary theories offered a diversity of analysis which drew from the feminist ecological history in order to multiply the ways in which ecofeminist literary criticism could be put into practice. Contrary to other theoretical works which silenced the problematic “essentialist” side of cultural ecofeminism, both editors addressed the broad variety of standpoints within the movement and referred to these problems that have arisen as regards cultural ecofeminism as early as the Foreword of the book. However, rather than considering that these problems should be dismissed in order to better understand the rest of the movement, the editors focus on the fact that variety is a necessary ingredient within the ecofeminist movement which should not be discarded because of some diverging viewpoints.

30 The literary criticism that has since developed from ecofeminist social theory had a specific importance for various reasons: first, it offered the possibility of leaving behind the aforementioned fruitless debates concerning essentialism, and, more importantly, it raised those questions which, according to Diana Fuss, might make our critical approaches more comprehensive, and thus, more suitable to a new way of inhabiting the world. Whereas a growing number of scholars seemed to turn away from ecofeminism—or they seemed at least to avoid the use of the term in order not to be brought into disrepute—, this new use of ecofeminist theories allowed a return to favor of the movement as a whole. Although the vast diversity of possible approaches and uses had pushed some to predict the end of ecofeminism, the turn of the 21st century witnessed a use as yet unexplored.

31 Even if Gaard and Murphy were at the origin of the so-called “ecofeminist literary criticism” and have been the first to use ecofeminism as a new means of practicing critical literary analysis, it is important to note that Annette Kolodny (1975, 1984) and Susan Griffin (1978) had both already produced literary analyses that took ecofeminism as a starting point.

32 It is true that literature offers what we could call a closed realm within which it is possible to put into practice ecofeminist theories in a way that seems less problematic to our critical minds. When applied to literature, the angles of the categories our minds function with are less torn into liminality than when applied to the practical social philosophy of ecofeminism. Given the reduced field of application—be it for ecofeminist literature or literary criticism—, it seems easier to accept these ideas when they apply to a text rather than when they pertain to a global world-view. The subjectivity (the word should not make us tremble) that comes into play (be it in writing or analyzing a text, or even in the mere choice of a text) allows ecofeminist ideas to be accepted in a less problematic manner. Indeed, what is taken into account is one author’s perception of the world. As such, it can be considered less controversial since accepting these words as truthful, exact or valuable then becomes a subjective question, a personal one. On the one hand, analyzing a text allows us to simplify the way one approaches the

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ecofeminist movement, and on the other hand, it also allows for a better understanding of the ideas put forth by ecofeminism: Literature, by its very definition in our society, has been used to make the theoretical practical, to transform complex philosophy into concrete experience through the imagination. Since ecofeminism proposes to be a way of life more than a theory, literature seems a natural medium for disseminating its ideas and practices. By incorporating the tenets of ecofeminism into literature, people can discover avenues for discussion leading to practical application of its theories. But the first step is making people aware of the problems and the interconnectedness of life, of cause and effect, and of the need to take personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions. (Bennett 2012: 10)

Literature as the starting point for a new transdisciplinarity

33 The creation of literary stories containing ecofeminist ideas flourished5 whereas the theory that tried to hold the socio-critical movement together appeared to be struggling. The disputes that raged inside the ecofeminist movement because of the problem of language and the dichotomies it keeps conveying, led some of its advocates to scatter under various new denominations: material feminisms, queer ecology, feminist environmentalism, global feminist environmental justice, etc. Although their methodological approach may differ slightly from what ecofeminist theory started as, it is important to note that the core ideas remained unchanged. Their main purpose is still a focus on the interrelated nature of oppressive and discriminatory structures as regards social class, gender, sexual orientation, environmental justice, or inter-species relations in order to condemn systems of oppression and categorization which are at the core of today’s social and ecological crisis. If there is one field in which ecofeminism continued to exist in spite of the apparent scattering of its original? practitioners, it is within the literary environment that unfolded around it, within which it reinforced itself so as to be taken seriously by academia and academic circles, starting in the United States, partly thanks to the fact that a great number of its writers and advocates are active teachers as well. By avoiding ecofeminism’s social theories as a point of entry into the movement, the literary environment around ecofeminism eludes the essentialist controversies which affected the theoretical side: Rather than simply critiquing or reversing binaries, affective narration creates a foundation for a redefinition of the human; focusing on experiences that involve complex interaction between mind and body, or between human and environment, destroys the illusion of their separation and allows for considerations of human participation in dynamic relationships with non-human nature. (Estok et al. 2013: 11)

34 As a young scholar working on ecofeminism, I have witnessed an important change within my own research field, namely American and Anglophone studies. My work has gone from being received as something totally alien and potentially dangerous to a new fashionable topic, the next best thing. This newly-found success is confirmed by the fact that ecofeminist texts are entering (albeit slowly) the academic corpus or by exciting new projects such as the new collection “Sorcières” of the Cambourakis publishing house which illustrates how literature can prove helpful in disseminating ideas. A large number of conferences and international symposiums have dealt with subjects pertaining to ecocriticism, feminist ecocriticism and thus, by extension,

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ecofeminism as well—and more are being organized. Ecofeminism can be regarded as a promising transdisciplinary critical tool which continues, whether it be on a literary, social or environmental level, to insist on the plurality of angles and on the liminality of limes, in order for research to be fully representative of the planet’s cultural and biological diversity.

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Warren, Karen, ed. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996.

NOTES

1. For more information on these writings and on the grassroots beginnings of the ecofeminist movement, see International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, 1-16 (see reference section infra). 2. Cultural ecofeminism is the spiritual branch of the movement, also sometimes referred to as Goddess Spirituality. The adjective “cultural” refers to “cultural feminism”, also known as “differential feminism”, which advocates a feminine and masculine fixed biology. 3. The term “speciesism” is usually used to refer to “human supremacy”: the idea according to which being humans is enough to have stronger moral rights over other species. “Naturism” has been defined as synonymous of the word “speciesism”. Both pertain to a value-hierarchical thought according to which one species has more value than another. A human would thus be more important than a dog, but a dog (given its use and relation with humans) would have more value than an ant, for example. In short, naturism corresponds to thinking that the cultural has more value than the natural, as in the dichotomies nature/culture and body/mind. 4. To name but a few: Marxist, liberal, liberal egalitarian, postmodern, radical, materialist, radical materialist, black, and lesbian feminisms. 5. See for example the works of Brenda Peterson, Linda Hogan, Terry Tempest Williams, Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver or even Nicholas Evans's popular novels (see reference section infra). For more information on ecofeminist literature, see Scheherazade's Daughters (see reference section infra).

ABSTRACTS

As an activist and research movement, ecofeminism is concerned with the interrelations between sexism, racism, speciesism and environmental degradation. Thus, from its beginning in the 1970s, the ecofeminist movement has argued that angles and “limes” between disciplines were not always as definite as one might think. This article proposes to draw on the latest evolutions in the field of ecofeminist studies—namely the fact that ecofeminist literary criticism has successfully used literature out of its literary limits as an inter-space between practice and theory —and from my own experience as a young scholar working on ecofeminism, in order to clarify

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the ecofeminist approach to limits and angles on the one hand. It also aims to demonstrate how the problems ecofeminism encountered in successfully dealing with its problematic transdisciplinarity might serve to help further other interdisciplinary research in Anglo- American studies.

En tant que mouvement activiste militant et universitaire, l'écoféminisme s'intéresse aux corrélations entre sexisme, racisme, spécisme et dégradation environnementale. Depuis ses débuts dans les années 1970, la mouvance écoféministe a mis l'emphase sur le fait que les angles et les lignes séparatrices entre les disciplines n'étaient pas toujours aussi évidents qu'il apparaît. Cet article propose de puiser au sein des dernières évolutions dans le domaine des études écoféministes—notamment le fait que la critique littéraire écoféministe s'est, avec succès, servi de la littérature comme d'un espace tampon entre pratique et théorie—et au sein de ma propre expérience en tant que jeune chercheuse spécialisée en écoféminisme, afin d'illustrer l'approche que l'écoféminisme fait des limites et des angles. Il vise aussi à exposer comment les obstacles dépassés par la mouvance écoféministe en matière d'interdisciplinarité pourraient s'avérer utiles à l'évolution d'autres recherches interdisciplinaires dans les études anglo-américaines.

INDEX

Mots-clés: écofeminisme, écocritique féministe, transdisciplinarité, sexisme, spécisme, philosophie environnementale Keywords: ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, transdisciplinarity, sexism, speciesism, environmental thinking

AUTHOR

MARGOT LAUWERS Margot Lauwers holds a PhD in American Studies from the English Department of the University of Perpignan Via Domitia. Her thesis dissertation “Amazons of the Pen: the literary manifestations of contemporary ecofeminism” lays forth the way literature has helped fuel the activist side of the ecofeminist movement of the past twenty years. Her research focuses on environmental literature and justice, feminism and ecofeminism and the way literature may help bring about societal changes. Contact: margot.lauwers [at] gmail.com

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Reading, Writing and the “Straight White Male”: What Masculinity Studies Does to Literary Analysis

Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

“To be a successful reader in the academy, it was argued, was to learn to read as a straight white male, at the cost of fidelity to one’s actual experience of life.” Geoff Hall (95)

1 Drawing on feminism, gender studies and queer theory, the field of masculinity studies emerged in American academia in the early 1990s, mostly as a reaction against the anti- feminist men’s movements that were then enjoying a significant popularity in the United States. Its avowed goal was to map out in detail the history of a gender that had not received the critical attention necessary to a better understanding of gender relations. As it had been the center, the norm from which all other gender identities had been defined, masculinity had always remained invisible as such, an invisibility that had been central to its successfully maintaining a hegemonic and privileged position. Rooted in the assumption that gender is historically contingent and culturally constructed, scholars in the field set out to refine our understanding of the normative principles, narrative strategies, epistemological categories and power relations which have structured the experience and representation of masculinity. In particular, they insisted on the performative, relational, prosthetic, homosocial and plural dimension of masculine identity. Yet, since masculinity studies has been predominantly concerned with establishing a historiographical account of men as men, its impact on literary studies has remained somewhat limited.

2 Reading both male- and female-authored texts from this particular vantage point enables to raise a series of questions that cast literary analysis in a new light. What does it mean to write or read as “a straight white male”? What gendered assumptions are entrenched in our interpretive practices? Haven’t we all, men and women, black and white, straight and queer, learned to interpret texts as “straight white males”? And

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what does it mean to read otherwise? What is significantly lacking from contemporary literary analysis is a questioning of the way we continue, as readers of literary works and authors of literary analysis, to heavily rely on definitions of notions like sign, style, trope, genre or narrative that were developed within a critical tradition that was blind to questions of gender and uninformed by queer theory. Especially in France, where the intellectual sway of structuralist thought, the universalist ideals of Republicanism and the post-May 1968 backlash against theory have worked together to maintain women’s studies, LGBT studies, gender studies, feminist theory and queer theory in a marginal status, literary analysis has been constituted as an autonomous, self-legitimating field with specific questions and methods, often at the cost of social or political import and impact. I would suggest that a more refined understanding of masculinity and of the way it has shaped literary epistemology can produce insightful and refreshing readings.

3 The point here, therefore, is not to rehash the now formulaic idea that the literary canon is mostly composed of “dead white European men” as the phrase goes (and as true as it may be), or to simply analyze the “representation” of masculinity (though it may prove fruitful), or to be satisfied with just “contextualizing” literary works in a gendered perspective (however useful it may prove), but to underline the importance of disciplinary disaffiliation and deterritorialization in order to question and transform our textual practices as readers, teachers and researchers. Since masculinity studies only exists as a supplement to feminism, gender studies, LGBT studies and queer theory (and a whole series of other disciplines), it participates in further de- compartmentalizing academic fields without ever successfully reclaiming a critical master-narrative. Viewing literary texts through the prism of masculinities (and vice versa) opens up new questions and provides crucial answers which can reinvigorate the field of literary analysis and challenge our most deeply rooted assumptions about reading and writing.

1. Masculinity studies, or reading the norm

4 Although it is possible to trace antecedents in the late 1970s and 1980s (Joseph H. Pleck’s The Myth of Masculinity published in 1981 and Harry Brod’s The Making of Masculinity in 1987), masculinity studies only emerged as a separate and autonomous field of research in the mid-1990s.1 It originated first and foremost in American academia, finding few echoes in Europe (with the exception of Scandinavian countries), and it originally was essentially the product of the work of historians, sociologists and psychologists. Since then, various encyclopedias about men have been published; several publications are dedicated to the study of men and masculinity; associations of scholars working on the question have been created around the world; book series have been launched on the subject; and more recently, under the direction of Michael Kimmel, the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities was established at Stony Brook University where the first Master’s Degree in Masculinity Studies was launched in September 2016.2 In France, with the notable exceptions of Pierre Bourdieu’s La Domination masculine (1998), Elisabeth Badinter’s XY: de l’identité masculine (1992) and several sociological studies by Daniel Welzer-Lang, all of which met with extensive and justified criticisms, there was only sporadic academic research on the question until the mid-2000s, leaving the field of masculinity open to uninformed approaches like Eric

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Zemmour’s Le Premier sexe (2006). Though a significant amount of research has been done in France since then, it has overwhelmingly originated from the area of film studies, practitioners of literary analysis remaining largely uninterested in the question.3

5 Besides the analysis of what feminist historians and philosophers had already described in so many terms—from “patriarchy” or “phallo(go)centrism” to “masculine domination” and “male hegemony,” here are the interrelated paradigms that have defined the field of masculinity studies: • Masculinity is the privilege of invisibility. By being the center, the norm from which all other identities proceed, masculinity has remained largely invisible as such. Although library shelves are packed with books that narrate the “great deeds” of “great men,” those historical narratives never questioned the way being male has influenced and structured the lives, actions and thoughts of these men. To put it differently, men had no history as men and the aim of critical studies of men and masculinities, therefore, has been “to turn attention to men in a way that renders them and their practices visible, apparent and subject to question, and to undertake this examination with an explicit political intent” (qtd. in Flood 402). • Masculinity is a historical construct. As such, it encompasses a wide array of representations and experiences that differ from one culture, historical period or social class to another. As historian Rotundo puts its, “manhood is not a social edict determined on high and enforced by law. As a human invention, manhood is learned, used, reinforced, and reshaped by individuals in the course of life” (7). In other words, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir’s famous claim, one is not born a man, but rather becomes a man. Masculinity studies thus argues that the masculine gender has little to do with the male biological sex or with physical phenotypic features, but is essentially the product of cultural codes, social norms and ideological imperatives which vary across time and space. • Masculinity is multiple and variable. Masculinity studies emphasizes the multiplicity of masculine identities at work in any culture, something which was for a long time hidden by the somewhat homogenizing and reductive terms used by 1970s feminist theory like “patriarchy” or “phallocentrism.” It is thus more pertinent to talk of masculinities in the plural form, not only to show how it is shaped by competing or mutually reinforcing identities, but also to account for the dominant position of hegemonic models of masculinity over subaltern, marginalized identities. It thus refines, rather than invalidates, the feminist premise of “masculine domination.” • Masculinity is a homosocial enactment. Besides being constructed in opposition to femininity, masculinity is also to a large extent the result of male bonding, of socialization between men. If one is not born a man, but rather becomes a man, historians of masculinity have tried to analyze the various social processes by which this becoming is achieved, as well as the myths and rituals that regulate it. They have identified how, especially in exclusively male spaces like fraternities, boy gangs, sports teams and gentlemen’s clubs, male-to-male relationships structure masculine identity by encouraging certain behaviors and excluding others. In particular, the suspicion of homosexuality that hovers over those homosocial ties requires homophobia in order to safeguard an otherwise threatened heterosexual identity. • Masculinity is a performance. In keeping with Judith Butler’s influential proposition that “gender is always a doing” (33) rather than a fixed identity and that it is performatively constituted through “a repeated stylization of the body” (44), theories of masculinity have posited that any attempt at grounding masculine identity in biological sex, in Oedipal anxiety or in trans-historical archetypes amounts to a conceptual fallacy. Masculinity has

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little to do with the male body and is essentially prosthetic, so much so that it can be said to be “all the more legible when it leaves the white male body” (Halberstam 2) as is the case with “female masculinity”—that is, biological women assuming masculine gender.

6 Before we see how those various paradigms can help redraw the contours of literary analysis, a few comments should be made as to the disciplinary status of masculinity studies. Though it has surely participated in the fragmentation of disciplines and the hyperspecialization of academia, masculinity studies cannot really be said to be an autonomous field or to have explored a no-man’s-land. Not only has it heavily borrowed from both queer theory and gender studies, but it has always had an uneasy relationship to both feminism (as the awkwardness of the term “pro-feminist” suggests) and to the mythopoetic men’s movement (to which it was meant to be a critical reaction). It does not have a methodology of its own, but has relied on the epistemological tools taken from sociology, psychology, historiography, philosophy and various other disciplines. Besides, masculinity studies has experienced many developments since its inception—like boyhood studies or black masculinity studies— further deterritorializing a disciplinary field that has no separate, independent existence.

2. Genre, gender and the fictions of masculinity

7 When social historian Arthur Schlesinger published “The Crisis of American Masculinity” in the November 1958 issue of Esquire, the idea that men in the United States were going through an identity malaise and that society was becoming more and more feminized was far from new and already had a long history.4 What is far more interesting is how Schlesinger, though not a literary critic, resorts to literature in his analysis of masculinity and retraces a short genealogy of the virility of the male hero in the American novel—from certainty about what masculinity meant until the Civil War, to the first cracks and doubts in male protagonists at the beginning of the 20th century and the then-contemporary confusion about what made a man: For a long time, [the American male] seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity. The frontiersmen of James Fenimore Cooper, for example, never had any concern about masculinity; they were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it. Even well into the 20th century, the heroes of Dreiser, of Fitzgerald, of Hemingway remain men. But one begins to detect a new theme emerging in some of these authors, especially in Hemingway: the theme of the male hero increasingly preoccupied with proving his virility to himself. And by mid-century, the male role had plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline. (Schlesinger 292)

8 Though Schlesinger’s wide-ranging meta-narrative approach to the relationship between masculinity and literature in the United States lacks contextual specificity and conceptual accuracy, his intuition that fiction betrays or reformulates the tension between the experience and the ideal of masculinity is highly useful.5 What is enabling in this way of understanding the history of literary forms is that it goes beyond simple structural or formal typologies and allows to account for the social norms and gender codes which affect aesthetic categories and determine poetic choices. Yet, genre and gender are bound together in intricate ways that require a refined work of contextualization. Narrative strategies, stylistic choices, rhetorical effects and diegetic realms reflect generic concerns that are often built on specific assumptions about what

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a man should be. By bringing attention to masculine identities in its multiple forms, masculinity studies has enabled to draw out an archeology of literary masculinity that goes beyond the relation of binary opposition to a purportedly unified feminine tradition and can account for the ways in which definitions of literary genres are fraught with gender implications.

9 In that perspective, several studies have focused on specific genres such as the crime novel, a genre which includes the roman noir, the hard-boiled novel and the detective novel, and encompasses the “highbrow” novels written by Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett and the more popular fiction found in dime novels. In the context of anti-homosexual panic, virulent anti-intellectualism and anti-feminist discourses, the protagonist of crime novels—“the white man wandering the urban streets, threatened and alone”—offers a figure “whose compulsive representation can help to examine the troubled and troubling consolidation of white masculinity in pre-and post-World War II American culture” (Abbott 5). Chandler’s defining essay on the genre does not leave any doubt as to the gender or sexual identity of characters like the Continental Op: “He must be a complete man and a common man, yet an unusual man,” “a man of honor” who “is neither a eunuch nor a satyr” and who “will take no man’s dishonesty, and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge,” “a lonely man” whose “pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him” (qtd. in Kimmel, 2006 141). Confronted with stock characters like the femme fatale or the “homosexual pervert” and defined in opposition to the emasculating conformity of the “man in the grey-flannel suit,” this independent, violent and affectless character is resolutely straight and excessively masculine, as well as systematically white. Popular sub-genres like sports fiction, travel narratives and war accounts, which were the stuff of men’s adventure magazines during the heyday of pulp publishing, offer similar narrative codes, stock characters, textual motifs and narrative strategies that reflect the sexual anxiety of their exclusively male readership and of society at large. They all draw a rather strict line between winners and losers, rugged individualists and domesticated family men, real men and wimps, hard-boiled and soft men, straight and queer, brave men and sissies. As such, they produce and reproduce representations about what men are, can be or ought to be.

10 Another revealing example of the unlikely connections between literary genre and masculine gender is the opposition that structured novel writing in the late 19th century in the United States with, on the one hand, the cult of virility among self- declared realist writers like Frank Norris, Jack London, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, and, on the other hand, the local-color regionalism of female writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman or Constance Fenimore Woolson and its supposedly feminine sentimentality, abstraction and idealism. As Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous description of late 19th-century female novelists as a “damned mob of scribbling women” (304) reminds us, male novelists then feared that women were colonizing the field of novel writing, a loss of privilege that also meant a threatening feminization of their status and identity as practitioners of literature. “Fiction is not an affair of women and aesthetes,” Norris writes, before adding that “[o]f all the arts it is the most virile” (1155). Not only was novel writing a man’s game in which women had no part, but his conception of the female muse was far removed from any hint of femininity: she was not a “chaste, delicate, super-refined mademoiselle of delicate roses and ‘elegant’ attitudinizing, but a robust, red-armed

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bonne femme who rough-shoulders her way among men” (1155), a butch, masculine woman who significantly differs from the femme fatale of English Romantic poetry (like John Keats’s Belle Dame sans Merci). As Michael David Bell puts it in his influential study of American realism, “[t]o claim to be a ‘realist,’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, was among other things to suppress worries about one’s sexuality and sexual status and to proclaim oneself a man” (37).

11 Like fiction, poetry has also been troubled by gender controversy. Postwar literary communities in the United States are a case in point. Whereas European bohemia of the early 20th century offered women important venues for artistic creation and collaboration, American poetic circles in the 1950s did not provide much recognition or support to women writers who had to define themselves largely within male circles. Allen Ginsberg remarked that “[t]he social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang, not society’s perfum’d marriage” (80), opposing the joyful carelessness and freedom of schoolboys and bachelors to the institution of marriage which can only stifle the poet’s creativity. Similarly, Robert Duncan referred to the San Francisco Renaissance as “the champions of the boys’ team in Poetry,” a team that was divided between “star players, bench sitters and water boys”, while the only women allowed were Helen Adam as a maternal poetic figure of sorts—“team godmother”—and Joanne Kyger—“[she] could play on the team, but she was a girl” (qtd. in Davidson, 1989 175). Literary communities have indeed been mostly conceived on the model of gentlemen’s clubs, most often excluding, or at least belittling, women’s literary ambitions. They could be muses, lovers, prostitutes, mother figures, monsters of virtue or of bitchery, but rarely authors in their own right.

12 Besides, competing definitions of masculinity were often at stake in poetic debates. For instance, the distinction made by Robert Lowell between two schools of poetry in his 1960 National Book Award acceptance speech is symptomatic of the conflicting tension between two radically diverging perceptions of male authorial identity: on the one hand, the “raw” poetry of Black Mountain, Beat Generation, San Francisco Renaissance and New York School poets—“blood dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience […] dished up for midnight listeners,” “a poetry that can only be declaimed,” “a poetry of scandal” (qtd. in Staples 13)—and the “cooked” poetry of the New Formalists like Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht and Elizabeth Bishop—“marvelously expert,” “laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar,” “a poetry that can only be studied,” “a poetry of pedantry” (13). The latter is more aristocratic and elitist, civilized and domesticated, influenced by European modernism and denounced as effete intellectualism by its opponents and as downright “castration of the pure masculine urge to freely sing” by Jack Kerouac (1993 56); the former is crude and rugged, spontaneous and primitive, and purports to convey an all-American feeling of energy, freedom and virility. The homosocial nature of literary communities, the correlative marginalization of women and the uncritical celebration of masculine qualities thus provide an interesting background for reading certain literary texts through which writers of both sexes defended their respective poetics and transformed the field of literature. Instead of a grand narrative based on the loss or conquest of the Phallus, one has to follow the local relations of intertextuality and the way writers have revised gender representations. Diane di Prima’s “The Practice of Magical Evocation,” a sardonic response to Gary Snyder’s somewhat misogynist poem “Praise for Sick Women,” or Denise Levertov’s “Hypocrite Women,” an equally scathing poem that

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constitutes a poetic reply to Jack Spicer’s celebration of male beauty and love in “For Joe,” are two cases in point in that regard (Davidson 1989).

3. Writing masculinity: from the pen(is) to the mask

13 In their groundbreaking work on 19th-century female novelists, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar begin their analysis by insisting that “[t]he poet’s pen is in some sense (even more figuratively) a penis” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1984 4). In their eyes, this means that women who wanted to write had to seize the pen from male authors, adopt the phallic power it confers, before adapting it to their own purposes.6 Yet, as Michael Davidson remarked in his influential study of masculinity in American postwar poetry, such a proposition raises a certain number of questions and its theoretical flaws have to be deconstructed in the light of gender and queer theory: Is the penis a penis, and can it stand up, as it were, to the work of masculinity in its multiple forms? Is the possession of biological signs of masculinity the same as being masculine? At what point does the penis become the phallus, a free-floating signifier of authority capable of being possessed by both biological males and females? (Davidson 159)

14 This series of questions opens up multiple perspectives of inquiry that do not equate sex, gender and sexuality and can renew our approach to the relationship between masculinity and writing. By drawing out a history of the masculine gender, masculinity studies does not only allow to contextualize the representation of male characters, but also allows to account for the way in which certain stylistic characteristics are perceived, at a certain place and time, in a gendered perspective. The act of writing is not an idiosyncratic expression or a trans-historical artifact that takes place in the intimate space of the author’s study room and reflects his inner self or his hidden psyche, but a performative act that takes place on a socio-political stage and constitutes the identity that is said to pre-exist. Masculinity is not a question of sex, of a biological body, of a nature or of an identity that would predate writing or that writing would express or complete. It is performative in the sense that it is articulated, achieved and conveyed through the act of writing itself. There is no “masculine writing” and the pen is not a penis; there are textual effects of gender that result from the stylized reiteration of, and in, writing.

15 Several interconnected consequences follow. First, gendered metaphors of style should be deconstructed and seen as what they are—namely, tropes which are given materiality through stylistic devices. Let’s take the example of “muscular prose,” best embodied by Ernest Hemingway’s lean, sparse, unadorned style. It is characterized by the use of few adjectives and tropes, short sentences, simple syntactical structures, asyndetic parataxis and minimal dramatization. What is “masculine” or “muscular” about it remains unclear, though it certainly has to do with the emotional detachment and the sense of restraint that it supposedly conveys. Yet, by virtue of its being associated with Hemingway’s heroic masculinity and literary persona, it has represented a model for many writers (one can think of James Baldwin’s praise of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead [1948] and Philip Roth’s admiration for Saul Bellow’s Augie March [1953], both explicitly mentioning their “muscular prose”). Yet, when applied to Willa Cather’s novels by a magazine writer in Vanity Fair in 1927, it has to be read as a way of legitimizing a female writer for writing “like a man” and entering the “man’s game” of novel writing, incidentally reaffirming a long tradition that

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associates aesthetic profusion (as well as sentimentality and regionalism) with femininity.7 However, terms such as “muscular” are subjective, connoted and potentially reversible. For 1950s poets like Michael McClure, who claimed that his writing obeyed the “muscular principle” which “comes from the body—it is the action of the senses—[…] it is the voice’s athletic action on the page and in the world” (vii), muscularity came to be associated with the very opposite qualities, namely dramatization of enunciation, lyricism, polysyndeton, accumulation of adjectives, multiplicity of tropes and an expressionist aesthetic.

16 The second consequence is that the connection between writing and masculinity is historically contingent and pragmatically constituted. Writing does not take place ex nihilo, but is intricately woven with a network of social, cultural and aesthetic norms which precede and exceed the writing subject. Authorial identity does not emerge on the corner of a blank page, but on the public stage of literature. The author is well aware that his identity is going to be perceived through the reader’s eye and inferred from the stylistic characteristics of his prose. In the context of post-World War II anti- homosexual paranoia in the United States for instance, a period that witnessed the emergence of endless talk about a perceived “crisis of masculinity,” the suspicion of effeminacy loomed large over the literary scene. Considering the close ties that bind one’s writing to one’s literary persona, building a resolutely masculine identity meant writing in a way that denoted manly skills. Especially in first-person narratives and poetry, stylistic virtuosity became a way of conveying virility. Writing about what one had experienced was a guarantee of authentic authorship, a badge of honor, as if “real men” wrote about “real life” in “real prose.” Writing, in that context, had to convey the sense of danger and implied taking risks, and this is how we should read the popularity of a certain brand of realism in the postwar era. Hemingway’s fascination for bullfighting and his vision of the bullfighter as the epitomic model for the writer— because “bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor” (Hemingway, 2000 80)—participates in his attempt to build a virile literary persona. Likewise, Kerouac’s comparing himself to an athlete or his writing to running a sprint, a football game or boxing match, is revealing in a context in which Americans were thought to be too “soft” by President John F. Kennedy himself. For Kerouac, writing had to convey the sense of speed and movement that stirred the writer at the typewriter, as well as the sweat, tears and blood that it had cost him to write On the Road in three weeks and The Subterraneans in three days. In his eyes, this physical feat made him a literary hero of masculinity and attested to his belonging to the hard-boiled tradition of American novelists.

17 Thirdly, considering that the pen is not a penis, figuratively or otherwise, results in recognizing that masculinity is not the exclusive preserve of males. The performance of masculinity has to be read as a series of prosthetic effects, of cultural markers without which masculinity becomes undecipherable. In Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam brilliantly demonstrates how masculinity should not be reduced to biological men and was all the more legible when it was not attached to the white male body. The “inverts” who people the narrative of modernist women writers like Virginia Woolf or John Radclyffe Hall are examples of women who lived “their lives as, if not men, wholly masculine beings, […] did effectively change sex inasmuch as they passed as men, took wives as men, and lived as men,” and “satisfied their desire for masculine identification through various degrees of cross-dressing and various degrees of overt masculine

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presentation” (Halberstam 87). In The Well of Loneliness (1928), Stephen—a young woman named with a boy’s name, who dresses like a man and falls in love with a woman named Angela—and the eponymous protagonist in Orlando (1928)—a young nobleman who wakes up a woman and dresses alternatively as both man and woman—are well-known instances of literary performances of gender which raise essential questions as to the nature of masculinity.

18 Finally, performative approaches to masculinity in literature are helpful in so far as they enable to identify narrative masquerades and the staging of the writing self—the props, the masks and the postures that convey the sense of a properly masculine performance. One revealing example in that regard is the gendered use made by white male authors of African-American vernacular English, cultural codes and myths. This tendency to borrow elements from black culture for purposes that vary from comic parody—as in blackface minstrelsy—to serious pastiche—in jazz-influenced poetry for example—has been a constant feature of American culture. Passing for black was often a way to make up for what was perceived as the lack of vigor and potency of white middle-class culture. Many writers saw black culture as the expression of a primitivist ethos that denoted a libidinal energy and a virile strength in which they could drape themselves in order to stand out from the conformity of their social class and liberate themselves from their cultural milieu, often indulging in downright racial stereotyping. Norman Mailer’s notorious essay “The White Negro” (1957), in which the American novelist celebrates a new breed of white men who have “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro” and go out at night “with a black man’s code to fit their facts” is a revealing literary example of white-to-black passing and the racial clichés that inevitably arise in such a performance: “in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom” (341, 348). Beat Generation writers’ endorsement of bebop jazz as developed by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzie Gillespie must be read in this way. Although these writers’ desire to put on a black mask most certainly participates in an attempt to transgress the codes of a segregated society and to betray one’s cultural heritage, this cultural re-appropriation also expresses a desire to gain visibility and adopt the supposed virility of African- Americans at the cost of racist stereotypes. When the narrator of On the Road walks the streets of a black neighborhood in Denver, “wishing [he] were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy […], wishing [he] could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (Kerouac, 1998 169-170), he unwillingly expresses how the revitalizing of white middle-class masculinity through racial passing only idealizes the living conditions and overlooks the political situation of African-Americans.

4. Beyond Oedipus: desire and masculinity in narrative

19 Before the emergence of masculinity studies, masculine identity was often understood through the prism of psychoanalysis. Analyses focused on the Phallus as the master signifier of masculinity and the Oedipus myth as its main structuring narrative. From Vladimir Propp (1968) to Jurij Lotman (1979), Marthe Robert (1980) and Roland Barthes (1977), the Oedipus complex has played a central role in early analyses of masculinity in narratives. In Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984), queer theorist Teresa de

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Lauretis herself conceives of desire in narrative structure as essentially male since its object is woman, an active/passive configuration of gender roles which, according to her, raises problems of identification for female readers. Like a specter, Oedipus is summoned again and again by literary theorists and functions like the return of the repressed—the Law, Authority, the Other, the Name of the Father, castration. Consequently, in this theoretical context, writing, like desire, is always viewed as patricidal (or incestuous), a transgression of the Law, a rebellion against tradition; and as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argued in Anti-Oedipus (1972), projecting the familial neurotic triangular logics of “Daddy-Mommy-Me” onto social functions, cultural logics or legal fictions does not essentially affect the psychoanalytical perception of the male subject who remains caught in the same dialectics—father and son, law and transgression, jouissance and symptom.

20 The point here is not simply to rehearse an age-old argument against psychoanalysis per se, though it has undeniably tended to reduce gender identity to sexual difference, a binary distribution which stems from the double bind of incest and patricide in the Oedipal triangle. The main concern is that psychoanalytically-influenced literary critiques often tended to lay male novelists, poets and playwrights on the analyst’s sofa, presenting their texts as personal confessions or family narratives in which they could detect the symptomatic expressions of repressed primal scenes and unconscious desires. Particularly in the cases of autobiographies and of first-person narratives, the net result of such an approach was to transform authors into little boys expressing the regressive desire to return to the maternal realm and condemned to repeat immature acts of transgression against paternal authority or great precursors. As Alice Ferrebe noted in her thorough analysis of masculinity in late 20th-century British literature, “[i]dentification with this constantly alienated and superior attitude—reading male- authored texts as listening to little boys bolstering their egos—is […] problematic for a contemporary reader” (5). This tendency to infantilize authors and readers not only prevents literary critics from taking certain literary works seriously, but more importantly, it treats non-normative expressions of masculinity as boyish (for they fail to accept the castration inherent to adult masculinity) and thus tacitly reproduces heteronormative accounts of gender.8 For instance, though Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) could be considered as one of the first full-length literary study of masculinity, in particular for its groundbreaking analysis of male bonding in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884), it fails insofar as it relies on uncritical definitions of masculinity and homosexuality inherited from Jungian archetypes. This leads Fiedler to frame American literature within the confines of regression and immaturity, regarding it as children’s literature that avoids the representation of sexuality.

21 Masculinity studies, following the findings of queer theory in that regard, has revised this perception and shown the theoretical deficiencies on which it is founded. In her crucial study of male homosocial desire in British literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick based her analysis on René Girard’s mimetic (rather than Oedipal) approach to desire to show that, “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power” (Sedgwick, 1985 26). She goes on to explain how this structural congruence can take the form of “ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the

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two” (26). What emerges from her work is the double-bind of masculine identity—the way male writers and characters have had to navigate between prescribed forms of homosocial bonding and proscribed forms of homosexual desire: “For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being ‘interested in men’” (89). In this perspective, several plays in the vein initiated by William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), in which male characters’ measures of success are either a marriage in which one is not cuckolded, or how many husbands one has cuckolded, come out as works about male subjects’ struggle for mastery against other men, rather than for female objects of desire. Besides, if same- sex desire has historically been the love that dares not speak its name, one shall maybe lend a careful ear to oblique, indirect expressions of same-sex desire. William Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVII (1609), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are well-known instances that call for other works to be read in that perspective.

22 What follows from this is a renewed understanding of the textual function of homophobia which, like homosexuality, has often been the object of an Oedipal reading that has obscured its working in fiction. In what has become one of the most influential articles written about masculinity, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” Michael Kimmel explains how homophobia is not so much the fear of homosexual men as the etymology of the word seems to suggest, but “the fear of being perceived as gay,” a feeling that leads men to exaggerate all the traditional codes of masculinity (from sexual predation to physical violence or emotional containment) for fear of being perceived (and shamed and marginalized) as “soft” men, “sissies,” or “faggots”: “[m]asculinity has become a relentless test by which we prove to other men, to women, and ultimately to ourselves, that we have successfully mastered the part” (Kimmel, 2005 41). Interpreting signs of homophobia as symptoms of an author’s repressed same-sex desire and transforming him into a closeted or repressed homosexual opens speculations that do not carry very far and only reveals open secrets that one already knew about all along, most often by resorting to biographical data that supposedly support the uncovering of an Oedipal logic.

23 In contrast with those paranoid readings, homophobia as Kimmel defines it allows to account for its narrative function—regulating the spectrum of male-to-male relationships by reinforcing fraternal feelings of virile comradeship while condemning homoerotic feelings, particularly in historical contexts which saw the rise of discourses about the so-called “crisis of masculinity.” Homophobia serves the function of purging male friendship, bachelorhood and attachment to mother figures of any suspicion of homosexuality: Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and Mailer’s An American Dream (1965) are well-known examples of narratives which present protagonists whose uneasy relationship to women (ranging from pornography, prostitution to excessive maternal attachment, chastity or wife-killing) and homosocial environment require explicit homophobia to save them from being identified as homosexuals. Jake Barnes, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises (1926), who, like many of Hemingway’s characters, lives in a world of “men without women” to borrow the title of one of the author’s collections of short stories, can only confess his failure to embody heroic masculinity—“it is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing” (Hemingway, 2006 42)—by asserting at the same time a homophobic vision of the world: “Somehow they [gay men] always made

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me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure” (28). Besides, in the case of autobiographical narratives, one should pay attention to the way the author’s anxiety about being perceived as homosexual often contaminates the narrative. Kerouac’s well-known fear of being identified as gay —“Posterity will laugh at me if it thinks I was queer […] I am not a fool! A queer! I am not! He-he! Understand?” (Kerouac, 1995 167)—has to be read in parallel with his deleting from the published version of the novel the scene in which the narrator watches the hero of On the Road prostituting himself with a gay man, a scene that appears unedited in the original scroll published in 2007. Yet, rather than serving an account of Kerouac’s homophobia which would present him as a closeted homosexual pathologically attached to his mother, this act of self-censorship ought to be seen in the historical context of the persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s (which historian David K. Johnston terms the “lavender scare”) and the anti-homosexual paranoia that haunted poets, novelists and playwrights in the early 1950s (see Johnson 2004).

Conclusion: Is there a theory in this class?

24 De-compartmentalizing academic fields is not only desirable to improve and refine one’s respective disciplinary practices—in France, Anglophone studies are typically divided between “linguistique,” “civilisation,” “littérature” and “traductologie,”. Within the field of literary studies in France, for instance, it has become a vital necessity to make a stronger case in favor of grounding the analysis of style, narrative and genre in questions of race, class, gender and cultural identity. In particular, the current development and partial success of gender studies in the different established disciplines tends to both disrupt epistemological frontiers and lead to unlikely and often fruitful connections and tensions. Since the sphere of literature is not separate from the world outside literature (if such a distinction can actually be made), it is urgent that French academics such as myself consider our interpretive practices and their cultural assumptions, in particular the supposed scientific objectivity of structuralist approaches and the universalist ideals inherent to France’s particular brand of republicanism (see Scott 2005).

25 Literary studies used to play a central role in intellectual and scientific debates in France. The fact that language was its raw material and that writing was its organizing principle seemed to naturally grant it a privileged position in the comprehension of human life. It attracted students and researchers from other disciplines who looked at literary analysis as a model for reformulating disciplinary practices and methods. Later, those thinkers whom American colleagues call post-structuralists and often group together under the label “French Theory” could not devise a philosophical system that did not make room for literature. In this context, to say that literary studies has lost its power of attraction is an understatement. Though critical theory has been legitimately criticized for the way in which it has occasionally supplanted the analysis of literary texts and led to normative readings—one thinks of Stanley Fish’s critique Is There a Text in this Class? (1980)—, it has also instilled a lively atmosphere of emulation and creativity which François Cusset aptly described in French Theory (2003).

26 The point, though, is not to lament over the glory days of literary theory in France, nor to apologize for its supposed excesses on the other side of the Atlantic, but to find new

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ways of reading that can help us account for the world in which we live. For a long time, literature has been read as if it were essentially concerned with itself. Form was the main concern and object of literary analysis, reinforcing in the process the autonomous and differential status of the field. Since literary studies needed to be legitimated as a scientific enterprise, it drew precise boundaries and set up specific methodologies that have then limited its scope and influence. If we have all learnt to read as “straight white males,” then maybe reading otherwise means rethinking the epistemological and hermeneutic tools we have been using. However useful and precise, these tools make us blind to larger and more crucial questions, especially in the classroom. Saying that form is content or that the world itself is a matter of formal organization is not enough. Metaphors, narratives, characters, styles and genres tell us about individual and collective identity at least as much as they tell us about literature and aesthetics. Ecopoetics and ecocriticism, care and disability studies, queer theory and gender studies are just a few examples of lines of inquiry which have already played a central role in reconnecting everyday life with the world of literature. Thanks to their close ties with English-speaking academia, English language departments in France are arguably well positioned to bridge this gap and revive the sense that literature is crucial to us all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, Megan E. The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity and Urban Space in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002.

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows my Name. New York: Vintage, [1961] 1993.

Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, [1966] 1977.

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism. Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Caroll, Brett E. American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia. New York: Sage, 2003.

Cusset, François. French Theory. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: La Découverte, 2005.

Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Davidson, Michael. Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari. L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972.

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Fergusson, Gary, ed. L’Homme en tous genres. Masculinités, textes et contextes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009.

Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950-2000: Keeping It Up. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. London: Paladin, [1960] 1970.

Fish, Stanley. Is There A Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Flood, Michael, Judith Keegan Guattari, Bob Pease, Keith Pringle, eds. International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.

Ginsberg, Allen. Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties. New York: Grove Press, 1977.

Gubar, Susan, Sandra M. Gilbert. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.

Gubar, Susan, Sandra M. Gilbert. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.

Hall, Geoff. Literature in Language Education. Basingstroke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Vol. 16. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, [1926] 2006.

Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. London: Vintage, [1932] 2000.

Hocquenghem, Guy. Le Désir homosexuel. Paris: Fayard, [1972] 2000.

Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the State Department. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, [1957] 1998.

Kerouac, Jack. Good Blonde and Others. San Francisco: City Lights, 1993.

Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters I. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

Kimmel, Michael. “Masculinity as Homophobia.” 1994. The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 25-42.

Kimmel, Michael, Amy Aronson, eds. Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004.

Lauretis, Teresa de. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Lotman, Jurij. “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.” 1973. Poetics Today 1 (Autumn 1979): 161-184. DOI: 10.2307/1772046

Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” 1957. In The Portable Beat Reader. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 1992. 581-605.

Mcclure, Michael. Rebel Lions. New York: New Directions, 1991.

Messner, Michael A. Politics of Masculinity: Men in Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997.

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Norris, Frank. “Novelists of the Future.” 1901. Ed. Donald Pizer, Novels and Essays. New York: Library of America, 1986. 1152-1156.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: U of Texas P, [1928] 1968.

Robert, Marthe. Origins of the Novel. Brighton: Harvester Press, [1972] 1980.

Roth, Philip. “Writing American Fiction.” In The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977. 32-47.

Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: BasicBooks, 1993.

Schlesinger, Arthur. “The Crisis of American Masculinity.” 1958. In The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. 292-303.

Scott, Joan W. Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Staples, Hugh B. Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Cudahy, 1962.

“An American Pioneer—Willa Cather,” Vanity Fair, July 1927: 30. https://archive.vanityfair.com/ article/19270701039

NOTES

1. The mid-1990s saw the almost simultaneous publication of Manliness and Civilization (1996) by Gail Bederman, Masculinities (1995) by R. W. Connell, Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America (1996), Anthony E. Rotundo’s American Manhood (1993) and Michael Messner’s Politics of Masculinities (1997). 2. Among the encyclopedias, see for instance Flood (2007), Carroll (2003), and Kimmel and Aronson (2004). Academic journals include the Journal of Men’s Studies (since 1992), the Journal of Men and Masculinities (since 1998) and Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies (since 2006). The American Men’s Studies Association and the Nordic Association for Research on Men and Masculinities are two examples of active scholarly societies. As for book series, the Sage Series on ‘Men and Masculinities’ and Palgrave’s Series on ‘Global Masculinities’ have played a decisive role in publishing research in this area. 3. See for instance Fergusson (2009). It should also be noted that an international conference entitled “Performing the Invisible: Masculinities in the English-Speaking World” was organized at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 on September 25-26, 2010, following a two-year research project on masculinity which brought together young researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds, including literary studies. 4. This recurrent discourse is symptomatic of the cyclic fear that masculinity is in danger of decline. The fact that a distinguished intellectual like Schlesinger took up the question is yet another proof of the deep roots of this thesis in the minds of Americans and, in particular, among the American elite. According to Schlesinger, gender roles have been blurred, both at home and in public life. The American male has become feminized and domesticated, performing “female” duties like changing diapers or cooking meals, thus transforming himself into “a substitute for wife and mother” (Schlesinger 292). Women, by contrast, are described as the “new rulers,” as an “aggressive force” or a “conquering army” (293), a military simile which presents men as victims of emasculating women.

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5. First, his choice of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo as a starting point is rather problematic, the protagonist of the Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) being what David Leverenz calls the first embodiment of the “Last Real Man in America,” which is far from being representative of the American colonists of the second half of the 18th century. Also, putting in perspective Natty Bumppo and, say, Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925), or Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises, 1926), leads Schlesinger to draw a questionable picture of literary masculinity. Besides, one should not forget that novels like The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and their rugged, manly characters, merely reflect the fantasies of a Paris-based author who belonged to the Manhattan elite, an irony which was not lost on D. H. Lawrence who described Cooper as “a gentleman in the worst sense of the word” (52). 6. In their following work, No Man’s Land, the two feminist critics actually presented the literary field as a battleground where both “sexes” had fought a war for hegemony, from Mid-Victorian writers “dramatiz[ing] a defeat of the female” to slowly “envision[ing] the possibility of women’s triumph,” a tendency which culminated in the modernist era, when “both sexes by and large agreed that women were winning,” before “postmodernist male and female writers, working in the 1940s and 1950s, reimagined masculine victory” (Gilbert and Gubar 1991: 5). 7. The article about Willa Cather published in the July 1927 issue of Vanity Fair is entitled “An American Pioneer—Willa Cather” (30). James Baldwin’s comment about Norman Mailer’s prose in The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore is from “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (228), an essay published in Nobody Knows my Name. Philip Roth characterizes Saul Bellow’s Augie March as “nervous muscular prose” (Roth 1977: 43). 8. The Oedipus complex has indeed played a central role in psychoanalytical accounts of homosexuality, often depicting same-sex desire as an immature and regressive libidinal impulse, which Guy Hocquenghem aptly named the “oedipianization of the homosexual.” After originally presenting homosexuality as the expression of the constitutive bisexuality of men and women, then connecting it to narcissism later in his career, Sigmund Freud finally accounted for same- sex desire through the Oedipal logic, a theory that was widely disseminated by popular psychology: unable to give up the mother as a love object, to identify with the father-rival and to substitute another woman of his choice, the now homosexual male seeks other men as his love object. By reducing it to an arrest in the child’s sexual development, this etiology of homosexuality ineluctably leads to pathologizing same-sex desire as “abnormal.”

ABSTRACTS

This article aims at mapping out some of the ways in which masculinity studies has recently renewed the critical approach to certain literary texts. It argues that this fairly new disciplinary field has helped to de-territorialize literary inquiry and challenges deep-rooted assumptions about reading and writing. Essentialist notions like “masculine writing,” bodily analogies between the pen and the phallus, and psychoanalytical tools such as the Oedipus myth have tended to obfuscate the multitude of masculine identities at work in literature. Combined with the textual and performative approach developed by queer theorists, the work done by historians of masculinity enables, for instance, to shed light on the pressures that burdened authorial identity in a context of homophobia like the Cold War period in the United States, to delineate the ways in which the constitutive homosociality of poetic circles in the 1950s fashioned their aesthetic norms and practices, and to deconstruct the narrative codes and the

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fictions of masculinity which structured certain literary genres like the crime novel and the adventure novel.

Cet article se propose d’examiner la façon dont les études sur la masculinité ont récemment permis de renouveler l’approche de certains textes littéraires. Il défend l’idée que ce champ disciplinaire relativement nouveau a permis de déterritorialiser l’épistémologie littéraire et d’interroger certains présupposés qui structurent l’approche critique de l’écriture et de la lecture. Qu’il s’agisse de notions essentialistes telles que « l’écriture masculine », des analogies corporelles entre stylo et phallus ou de certains outils psychanalytiques comme le mythe d’Œdipe, l’analyse littéraire du genre est parfois restée aveugle à la multiplicité d’identités masculines à l’œuvre en littérature. Conjugué à l’approche textuelle et performative formulée par les théoriciens queer, le travail des historiens de la masculinité permet par exemple de rendre visible les pressions qui s’exercent sur l’identité auctoriale dans un contexte d’homophobie généralisée comme celui de la Guerre froide aux Etats-Unis, de comprendre comment l’homosocialité constitutive des cercles poétiques des années 1950 façonne leurs normes et leurs pratiques esthétiques et de déconstruire les codes narratifs et les fictions du masculin qui structurent certains genres littéraires comme le roman noir et le roman d’aventure.

INDEX

Keywords: masculinity, critical theory, literary analysis, homosociality, homophobia, queer theory, Oedipus, writing, narrative Mots-clés: masculinité, théorie critique, literary analysis, homosocialité, homophobie, théorie queer, Œdipe, écriture, récit

AUTHOR

PIERRE-ANTOINE PELLERIN Pierre-Antoine Pellerin is a lecturer in English studies at the Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3, where he teaches American literature and translation. His PhD focused on the experience and representation of masculinity in Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical cycle. He has published several articles on Beat Generation authors, most recently “Masculinité, immaturité et devenir-enfant dans l’œuvre de Jack Kerouac” in Leaves 2 (2016). His other research interests include ecocriticism and animal studies (“Jack Kerouac’s Ecopoetics in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels: Domesticity, Wilderness and Masculine Fantasies of Animality”, Transatlantica 2 / 2011). Contact: pierre-antoine.pellerin [at] univ-lyon3.fr

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Graphic Interlude Angles and Limes

Georgia Kuhn, Andrew J. Russell, Walker Evans, Carol M. Highsmith, Robert Bakewell, John Timbs and Jack Delano

Georgia Kuhn (British), Untitled, from the series Ways, 2013

© Georgia Kuhn, with permission of the photographer.

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Georgia Kuhn (British), Untitled, from the series Ways, 2009

© Georgia Kuhn, with permission of the photographer.

Andrew J. Russell, Citadel Rock, Green River Valley, Wyoming, 1868

Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.03147.

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Walker Evans, Bethlehem graveyard and steel mill, Pennsylvania, 1935 (Library of Congress)

Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.36750.

Carol M. Highsmith, Frontier Motel, Tuxston, Arizona, 2009

Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2010630118/.

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Carol M. Highsmith, Young peach trees in the orchard-filled town of Palisade, outside Grand Junction, Colorado […], 2015

Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2015633533/.

Robert Bakewell, An Introduction to Geology, illustrative of the general structure of the earth; comprising the elements of the science, and an outline of the geology and mineral geography of England, London, 1813 (p. 49)

British Library, http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_0000000360DE.

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John Timbs, Curiosities of London ... A new edition, corrected and enlarged, 1871 (p. 793)

British Library, http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_0000000018EA.

Jack Delano, A view of the old sea town, Stonington, Connecticut, 1940

Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017877377/.

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Andrew J. Russell, Shadow Lake, Uintas, c.1868-1870

Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2005689270/.

ABSTRACTS

This graphic interlude features a selection of photographs which can illustrate the topic of this issue: “Angles and limes”.

Cet interlude iconographique comporte une sélection de photographies illustrant à leur manière le thème de ce numéro: « Angles et limites ».

INDEX

Keywords: angles, limes, border, photography Mots-clés: angles, limites, frontière, photographie

AUTHORS

GEORGIA KUHN Georgia Kuhn is a contemporary British photographer who specializes in open-air photography and “industrial-natural landscapes”. She currently resides in North Wales.

ANDREW J. RUSSELL Andrew J. Russell was a 19th-century photographer of the US Civil War and the Union Pacific Railroad.

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WALKER EVANS Walker Evans was an American photojournalist who notably documented the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration.

CAROL M. HIGHSMITH Carol M. Highsmith is a contemporary US photographer who has begun a multi-year project that involves photographing 21st Century America for the Library of Congress, picking up where Lange left off during the WPA project of the 1930s. See http://www.carolhighsmithamerica.com/

ROBERT BAKEWELL Robert Bakewell (1768–1843) was an English geologist.

JOHN TIMBS John Timbs was a 19th-century English author and antiquary. He was also known as Horace Welby.

JACK DELANO Jack Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov in Ukraine, was a Farm Security Administration photographer in the United States whose work also included documenting Puerto Rican folk material.

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Partying Critics: A Dual Take on Duality in Graham Greene’s “The End of the Party”

Nathalie Jaëck and Arnaud Schmitt

1 This issue of Angles dealing with different practices of criticism seemed to us a very welcome opportunity to do something we rarely do: look back on our practices as critics, assess the specific nature, the role and the relevance of our critical tools, measure our ability to make these tools evolve and to bring in new references or methods, and perhaps above all try to explain how the selection of specific tools reveals and clarifies our respective conceptions of our fields of expertise. Indeed, reflecting on critical practices and choices is a way to delineate what our analysis of our object and of its epistemological value is—and this is currently a crucial question as far as literature is concerned. At a time when the role and the “use” of literature are everywhere under discussion or even under scrutiny, when the dominant utilitarian paradigm often leads to questioning the pertinence of funding research in literature in universities, we thought it might be interesting to address the issue via a reflexive and double analysis of two habits of critical practices, their impact on the reading of a selected text, and what they involve in terms of our respective academic practices around literature.

2 It is probably necessary here to say a few words of our individual backgrounds. Our desire to try that critical experiment was based on the assumption that we were similar enough for informed mutual understanding in the field, and different enough in our respective methodological choices for this experiment to be stimulating and enriching. We are both trained in English studies, we both belong to the French 11th section of the CNU (Centre National des Universités) that is accountable for delineating and controlling scientific fields in France. We both chose literature as our major subject; we both studied in French Universities (mainly Toulouse 2 Le Mirail for Arnaud Schmitt, mainly Bordeaux Montaigne for Nathalie Jaëck). We also belong to the exact same generation—we were both born in 1969—, receiving the same academic training based on a post 1960’s conception of literature. Finally, we are both University Professors in

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literature, in France. As for relevant differences, Nathalie Jaëck is a specialist in 19th- century British literature, with a specific interest in the mutation of the adventure novel at the turn of the century (she wrote her PhD on the Sherlock Holmes stories); Arnaud Schmitt is a specialist of 20th-century American fiction, with a specific interest in autofiction, cognition and Pragmatism. Though we both value narrative studies, we favour that angle from rather different perspectives: Nathalie Jaëck remains very indebted to French classical narratology, and Gérard Genette’s categories that have informed her early grasp on literature remain essential tools in the elaboration of her critical discourse on literature. As for Arnaud Schmitt, he studied the categories of narratology from wider, more numerous perspectives, and has been engaged in an enduring theoretical discussion with the concepts used by leading contemporary narratologists, particularly as regards cognitive and pragmatic narration. As to great general lines, Nathalie Jaëck’s critical culture owes much to French theory: she is specifically a close reader of Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze, and favours a structural approach to literary texts, while defending the idea that literature is a hermeneutical tool to approach central human issues linked to the construction of identity through language.

3 We decided to operate in three steps: to select a common text, to each write an independent analysis of it, and then to produce a joint commentary on both our texts, and more specifically on what the whole process reveals about our respective discourses on literature. When we started on the project, our hope was that such an enterprise, one which was completely unusual for both of us, accustomed as we are to working in our own zone of critical comfort, would be a way to help illuminate what the contemporary stakes are, and perhaps the points of debate, when studying literature. We hoped it would be a way to question, put into perspective and also energize our respective methods.

4 We elected to work on “The End of the Party” published by Graham Greene in 1929, for two major reasons. Firstly, it is a text that belongs to neither of our usual corpora, it is a modernist short story, in-between our two respective periods and our two favoured systems of representation (Victorian Realism and post-modern contemporary American fiction); in fact, none of us had read it before embarking on this venture. Secondly, we decided upon a short story rather than an extract from a novel: we thought it would be better to comment upon a whole, self-sufficient work rather than on a fragment, as this would leave no possible interpretative ambiguity owing to the difficulties raised by an incomplete text; it might also give easier access to the readers of this paper, who might want to try their hands and complement our analyses with theirs. Thirdly, we decided, against our typical practices, not to read any other analysis of “The End of the Party” before embarking on ours: we thought getting direct documentation beforehand would skew the exercise.

5 The first part of the paper thus juxtaposes our two respective analyses of “The End of the Party.”

“The End of the Party”: a modernist short story reflected in its Victorian double (Nathalie Jaëck)

6 On the face of it, “The End of the Party,” written by Greene in 1929 and one of his most famous shorter works, is the tragic modernist short story of a muted child, 9 year-old

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Francis Morton. The dismissal of the voice of the child by indifferent trivializing adults, his inability to access direct speech and voice his intimate fears lead to his dropping dead from a heart-attack at the end of the story after an ominous day of agonizing and increasing panic, despite the efforts of his twin-brother Peter to help him out of his cooped-up self. Fiction comes here to the rescue: summoning free indirect speech, Greene allows the voice of the child to be heard. He gives full scope to Francis’s impressions, to his idiosyncrasies and fantasized alternative planning of reality, as symbolic denunciation of, and compensation for, the authoritative framing of the child’s voice, as fictional reparation.

7 Yet, “The End of the Party” is also a very ambiguous and unsettling story of twins, taking line in the long tradition of Gothic stories about doubles: the open charge against adults’ deafness to children’s voices and the efforts of the text to make them heard cover another classical, more disquieting and uncanny subtext, that explores Peter’s ambivalence towards his younger twin-brother. It is difficult not to notice that all the steps Peter consciously takes to help his brother tragically contribute to his eventual death, up to the final decisive touch. The story starts and ends with Peter, and the more problematic twin is perhaps not the one we initially thought: by the end of the story, Peter eventually stands the narrative ground alone, and he has got rid of the weaker “other” as he regularly calls his brother—but as Gothic tradition has it, getting rid of the double amounts to self-destruction, as in the process, Peter deprives himself of the convenient back base his brother embodied for him. Dispossessed of the possibility to retroject in his brother the weaker parts of himself he refuses to recognize as his own, he is left in schizophrenic dissociation, in “obscure self-pity” (189)—unable to make the difference between the inside and the outside, mistaking his brother’s heartbeat with his own.

8 Story and discourse thus follow the same treatment in Greene’s short story: “The End of the Party” is a story about duality, but also a dual text, or rather a text that proposes a fruitful confrontation of dual literary codes: a modernist experiment with voice twinned with a rewriting of a classical Gothic motif—the Double displaced and reflected in the cracked textual modernist mirror. The interest of such duplicity is that it illustrates the fact that voice and identity are intimately linked. Francis’s troubles in language—his aphasia, his echolalia, the dissociated opposition between his intimate voice and what he actually utters—are not only literary food for a dashing modernist experiment with discourse. They hark back to other texts, and as opposed to Francis and Peter whose duality proves destructive, “The End of the Party” embraces the creative possibilities of textual duality: it incorporates antagonistic literary codes in a gesture of literary coexistence and tries to access the evading voice of childhood not as picturesque anti-climax but as an excessive, unrecognizable other voice that leads to a reinterpretation of self and otherness.

9 The short story first reads as an attempt at textual amends and compensation: Greene denounces the minoring of the voice of children, inherited from classical humanist tradition that has marked the child as an incomplete and therefore lacking sub-adult, whose incoherent babble and burble need to be disciplined into coherent logos, a minor muted being by definition infans—infantis in Latin precisely indicate the inability to speak, a speaking child thus being an etymological oxymoron. This tradition is referred to in the story by the opposition between Francis’s “unreasoning fear” (185) and the regular return of “that adult refrain, ‘There is nothing to fear in the dark’” (186) or “‘

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You know there is nothing to be afraid of in the dark’” (184). Reason vs. impressions: armed with knowledge, strengthened by the dialectic force of logic, adults use logos as an imperative instrument of power to dismiss from above children’s “unreasoning” fears as “childish,” the dismissive suffix invalidating their voices. Francis, dealt with in the imperative mode, told about, told off, has thus no alternative but self-repression, “blocking his mouth” (181) as soon as he wakes up, as he expects to be muted by the imperative “cold confidence of a grown-up’s retort. ‘Don’t be silly. You must go. […] Don’t be silly’” (184). The whole short story thus reads as a sort of sub-version that aims at re-empowering children through exclusive free indirect speech: it is solely the voice of children that is heard in these long sections, and adults are relegated to a background where direct sentences become stale automatic common phrases that are totally inefficient to grasp the complexity of reality. Greene thus writes a tribute to what Henry James called “the picturing, personifying, dramatizing faculty of infancy, the view of life from the level of the nursery-fender:”1 he levels the viewpoint indeed, replacing authoritative certainties with tentative impressions, the overhanging controlling standpoint of adults with the fragmented horizontal shifting stance of children, and the unquestionable mimetic indicative mode with experiments on potential and fictive present.

10 The central stakes of the modernist agenda are pretty clear from the second sentence, “Through a window he could see a bare bough dropping across a frame of silver” (181): a limited fragmented perspective, literally framed by the window, a highlight on modalized vision and individual perceptions, and a process of “fictionalization” through language. Entrusted to children, reality becomes unfamiliar and mobile, and language no longer serves to duplicate reality, but to open up more desirable alternatives.

11 Peter and Francis take rank among those “literary impressionists” Julia Van Gusteren defined: “The Literary Impressionists, like the Impressionists in painting focused on perception. They attempted to formulate reality by breaking it into momentary fragments, selected intuitively and subjectively. They relied on sensory (ap)perceptions” (28). Indeed, their day starts with an immediate colonization of solid and measurable reality (“It was January the fifth” [181]) by distorting impressions, subjective memories, imagination, sensations, and uncontrollable dreams: “It amused him to imagine that it was himself whom he watched” (181) or “To Peter Morton, the whole room seemed suddenly to darken, and he had the impression of a great bird swooping” (181) while Francis is caught by the perseverance of the nightmare (“I dreamed that I was dead” [182]) and it takes him a while to allow “the fragmentary memories to fade” (182), though “a sick empty sensation” (182) does not leave him. The Positivist conception of reality, the illusion that one can have a direct understanding of objective facts, as it is quoted in the direct assertive speech of the nurse—“Wind will blow away the germs” (183)—yield under the joint pressure of these subjective distorting stimuli. But the text illustrates the modernist conviction that they are all cognitive clues, that these obscure fears, memories and impressions are all to be trusted, much more than the hackneyed certainties of the parents: the mother’s smug logic leaves her wide off the mark, as she wrongly deduces that Francis’s making light of his cold is due to his desire to go to the party. Trusted to Francis and Peter, reality thus becomes mobile, girls are animalized as “cats on padded claws” (182), their animated pigtails fantasized as so many aggressive devices, carpets are on the move, darkness becomes populated with squatting bats; Alice-like, Francis distorts

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proportions and sizes, and fantasizes himself very small to Mrs Henne-Falcon’s “enormous bulk” (185). Defamiliarisation here celebrates the innocence of children in a rather conventional, deludingly reassuring way as it creates comic relief in a growingly ominous and oppressive story—as when Francis reveals he has a different order of priorities, and hopes he might “cut himself or break his leg or really catch a bad cold” (183) rather than go to the party, or when he elaborates many “plans” to escape reality: “They flew too quickly to plan any evasion” (184), “a dozen contradictory plans” (185), “a few extra minutes to form a plan” (186). But these endearing touches are anecdotal: children crucially deterritorialize reality and replace the reliable uniqueness of the fixed indicative mode with endless possibilities of mutations. The potential mode and fictive present replace the authoritative indicative, and both children fantasize a potential reality of what might happen. “Would” and “might” become the rule, by far the dominant temporal markers in the story, and reality opens up as a totally blank space: “Anything might happen” (183). This creation of a potential soothing double for a reality that is cruel and thus inassimilable is analyzed by Clément Rosset in terms of what he calls “an oracular illusion”2 (21): “Reality is admitted only under specific conditions and only up to a point: if it exaggerates or proves unpleasant, tolerance is suspended”3 (8). Indeed, Francis’s planning voice amounts to an oracle: possibility turns into certainty, “might” becomes “would” as the confident appeal to God reinforces the oracular nature of the child’s voice: “God would manage somehow” (183). Facts are dissolved by fantasy: reality can be hallucinated as other, ad libitum.

12 The treatment of time by Peter and Francis reinforces the sense of relativity: chronological collective time, just like solid reality, is deconstructed by random individual perceptions—the very repetition of the date, three times in the first two pages, turns an objective neutral landmark into a double obsession, much desired by Peter, much dreaded by Francis. The story builds a variety of temporal distortions, particularly of the narrative category of duration: objective diachronic time is deconstructed by effects of synchronic short-cuts as the two children superpose in their minds the day of the narration and the same day the year before. Peter “could hardly believe that a year had passed since Mrs. Henne-Falcon had given her last children’s party” (181), while the two parties, last year’s and next night’s, overlap in Francis’s mind, leaving absolutely no autonomy to the present. The repressed past returns as prediction of the future and contaminates the present: “Time regresses backwards and runs forwards. It mixes up times and tenses, it goes through them in all directions, it unshackles itself”4 (Pontalis 13). Similarly time becomes flexible, either extensive when it seems to Francis that the evening is extremely far away (“There was all the morning before him and all the afternoon until four o’clock” [183]) or intensive when the party draws near. The sense of emergency and inescapability is here rendered by the repetitions (“the minutes flew. They flew too quickly” [184]) and above all by the two successive ellipses that engulf part of the precious interval, and time catches up with out-timed and unprepared Francis: “all unready, he found himself standing on the doorstep” (184)—and then, cutting through the journey between the two houses, he finds himself instantly transported to the other hall, without textual notice. The predictable, measurable continuity and causality of diachronic time are here replaced by intensive discontinuous fragments, and children experience what Jean-François Lyotard called their essential “passibilité,” that could translate as “liability”: they are both necessarily passive and fundamentally “all unready” to what is going to occur,

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they experience a reality that exceeds and overspills their possibility of understanding it—a reality that is perceived on the mode of permanent irruptive imminence.

13 As Greene gives children a voice back, reparation is thus not his only intention: children also embody an essential relation of primary heteronomy: “liable” to the event, they are invariably exceeded by a sense of estrangement both from the world and from language, and as such, they appeal to the writer as formal models: their dissident infant tongue challenges the normative mother tongue, they invent what Gilles Deleuze called “a minor use of the major tongue [that] traces within language a sort of foreign tongue, which is not another tongue, but ‘a becoming-else’ of that tongue, a minor use of that major tongue”5 (Critique 15). Writing thus becomes the paradoxical anamnesis of childhood, the effort to rediscover that liminal state of estrangement, as Lyotard suggested: “No one can write. Everyone, the ‘older’ one mainly, writes in order to catch through and in the text something that he cannot write. Something that will not be written, as he knows it. Let us call that thing ‘infantia,’ what does not speak, what cannot be spoken. A childhood that is not an age in life, but haunts the discourse of adults and escapes its control”6 (6).

14 Still, as far as reparation is concerned, the text does not go all the way: the voice of children is limited to free indirect speech, apart from a few automatic answers and a few tentative aborted questions that the adults remain absolutely deaf to. In “The End of the Party,” Greene marks the typical embedding of the voice of children within an overhanging third-person narration that frames and disciplines the words of the child. Free indirect speech is thus also a stylistic boundary, a way to insist that words cannot be spoken out, that children are not allowed free direct speech. The only solution for Francis is to fantasize what he might have said if he could speak, while remaining morbidly aphasic and obedient. The imperative mode used by the mother cannot be answered, save potentially: “He would answer: ‘You can say I am ill. I won’t go. I am afraid of the dark.’ […] He could almost hear himself saying those final words” (184). There is thus a pathological dissociation between what we could call his inner voice, what he imagines he could say, and the actual words that automatically come out of his mouth, the way speech is prescribed by the adults’ codes. Francis is thus self-muffled, caught in a schizophrenic derailment of symbolisation: “oneself as someone else” indeed. His direct speech opposes his inner voice, or what he allows himself to say when he is alone with his brother. Whereas if he could, “he would answer: ‘You can say I am ill. I won’t go. I am afraid of the dark’” (184), what he voices is the exact contrary, as he conforms to the image of the obedient child: “I’ll get up” (183), “I’m coming” (184), “Good evening, Mrs Henne-Falcon. It was very good of you to ask me to your party” (185). Whenever he tries to address the issue of his fear, once more his language fails him, as he is only able to mimic the form of adults, to opt for a distanced impersonal analysis, and he becomes an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari called “the dried-up child […] who acts as a child the better when no flux of childhood emanates from him”7 (Plateaux 42): “I think it will be no use my playing” and “I think I had better not play” (186). Francis’s words are not his own, they are at odds with the freer “jump-jump” (39) he pronounces in his head, they are the echo of the words of a specular ideal double that he fantasizes and imitates. As opposed to the other children, whose speech is characterized by grammatical mistakes and easy oral forms, “Oh, do let’s” (186), and “don’t let’s” (185), Francis is caught in morbid echolalia, in the oppressive structures of grammatically correct discourse: he frames his experience through these controlling structures, which owes him the automatic approval of adults

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—“Sweet child” (185)—but the rejection of other children: “in the precise tone that other children hated, thinking it a symbol of conceit” (186). These troubles in language, either the failure or the alterations of speech, are of course presented as the result of the typical adult muting of the voice of the child. But “The End of the Party” also opens another line of analysis and turns into a case of identity, as it insists that these troubles in symbolisation might also well be symptoms of a more serious case of self- dissociation provoked by the dysfunction of the twins.

15 Peter and Francis present the reader with a classic case of contrasted twins: as René Zazzo developed in his liminal study Les Jumeaux, le couple et la personne, twins are not so much two of a pair as the complementary elements of a couple, with a rigid distribution of roles. As the elder twin, Peter is also the dominant twin: active Peter vs. passive Francis, bold Peter vs. fearful Francis, talkative Peter vs. aphasic Francis, “self-relying” Peter (181) vs. dependent Francis. Peter is in charge, and thus plays the role of the major helper to his brother, moved by “an instinct of protection” (181): he speaks for and about his brother (“Francis has got a cold. […] Hadn’t he better stay in bed” [183]), and constitutes his brother’s only prop-up, as when he delays the dreaded moment of hide-and-seek in the dark by eating another piece of cake and sipping his tea slowly. Peter and Francis thus seem to stand together against adversity: “the brothers came together to the hall” (186). Yet, this sentence reads against another rather different textual network of contradictory clues. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Peter’s desire to help his brother is fundamentally ambivalent and obviously counterproductive: not only do all his attempts fail as he himself notices (“It was his third failure” [186]), but every step he takes towards the supposed relief of his brother is a step nearer his loss. From the beginning of the story, hints of such ambivalence are numerous: Peter seems to prey upon his brother from even before he wakes, “with his eyes on his brother” (181). He corners him with the humiliation of publicly revealing his fright thus actualising one of Francis’s worst fears, and his move to join Francis behind the bookcase decidedly reads like an animal hunting a crouching prey: “he moved silently and unerringly towards his object” (188), “he led his fingers across his brother’s face” (188), “feeling down the squatting figure until he captured a clenched hand” (188), until the oxymoronic form, “to bombard with safety” that inscribes unconscious ambivalence in the forms of language: “he bombarded the drooping form with thoughts of safety” (189). For Peter “his brother” quite revealingly twice embeds and unveils a more estranged and antagonistic form, “the br/other”: “the other who was afraid of so many things” (181) and “grasping the other tightly” (188).

16 At that point, the modernist text becomes the echo of a canonical infratextual double, and the story of Peter and Francis takes rank among famous Victorian pairs—Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dorian Gray and his portrait, but also Maupassant’s Horla, or Dostoyevski’s Double. Killing the other becomes a way to get rid of one’s weaker, abject8 or inassimilable part—just as Dorian Gray destroys his unbearable flawed version. Peter seems to reproduce and heighten the same moves Francis dreaded so much—just like the girls “on padded claws,” he “ben[ds] and unt[ies] his laces” (188) to approach Francis in his stockings, as silently as possible, and while Francis “had screamed when Mabel Warren had put her hand suddenly upon his arm” (182), it is “at the touch of his brother’s hand” (189) “across his face” (188) that he drops dead.

17 But it is, of course, no efficient murder, since as in all these canonical cases of duality, Peter mixes inside and outside, self and other—which is naturally favoured by the fact

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that the two brothers are mirror-images of one another as both acknowledge, though it is worth noting that Francis’s analysis of duality is much more elaborate than his brother’s. While Peter simply fancies they are the same, without any mediation—“It amused him to imagine it was himself whom he watched, the same hair, the same eyes, the same lips and line of cheek” (181)—Francis’s perception makes room for ambivalence and personal dissociation, as he metaphorizes the mediating role of the mirror and the importance of the specular double, of the fantasized image: “To address Peter was to speak to his own image in a mirror, an image a little altered by a flaw in the glass, so as to throw back less a likeness of what he was than of what he wished to be, what he would be without his unreasoning fear” (185). Francis acknowledges the process of projection, the difference between the self and the ideal self, and his brother embodies for him the role of ideal double. The relationship is not so much dual as treble: there is Francis, Peter and the pulsional mediating image, where ambivalence and rivalry can be mediated without directly involving the persons. He makes the difference not only between the self and the other, but above all between the self and the image of the self, and the typical prop of the mirror helps him mediate his relation to his own self—his twin is a way to confront his own fears, to recognize them as his own, and thus to address duality and ambivalence as intimate part of the psyche. In his own development, his brother plays the structural role Jacques Lacan isolated for the mirror: Peter symbolizes the successful relation between the Imaginary and The Real, and he is well identified by his brother as such.

18 We should point out that Francis’s perception of the world is in fact structured by duality—and in this respect as well, “The End of the Party” can read as a mirroring tribute to Victorian literature. Indeed, it is not only his brother that is a desirable other: girls and women also contribute to the delineation of his self through stereotypical ambivalent dialectics of opposition and desire. Francis is a typical little boy, characteristically disgusted by girls, by their superiority, confidence, even their hair—as in any proper Victorian novel, it is automatically the hair of females that strikes fear and desire in males: “Their long pigtails swung surreptitiously to a masculine stride” (182), “She came striding towards them, pigtails flapping” (183). Joyce and Mabel are two avatars of Medusa, petrifying Francis by their outward self- confident sexual attraction, by their combination of softness and violence (“padded claws” [182]), by their usurpation of masculine power—“their sex humiliated him” (182). But Joyce and Mabel are still imperfect underdeveloped females, still rather harmless, while bosomy Mrs Henne-Falcon is much more dangerous. Her very name is a parody of all the tag-names of Victorian literature: both a hen and a falcon, both harmless and protective and potentially lethal—a domestic bird and a bird of prey. Quite tellingly, Francis is torn between decorous politeness and overwhelming desire, and he cannot help the fixation on her breasts, fantasized as enormous: “his strained face lifted towards the curve of her breasts” (185) and “his eyes focused unwaveringly on her exuberant breasts” (186). Mrs Henne-Falcon is thus reduced by Francis to the two typical roles of women, a hen-like mother, surrounded by “a flock of chicken” (185), and a dangerous (because seductive) female. She is, in Mélanie Klein’s categories, both the “good breast,” nourishing and protecting, and the “bad breast,” potentially lethal as pulsional partial object: the breasts fuel Francis’s concomitant desire and fear. What is certain is that women are anything but protective in the story, though they are typically reduced to their caring role-functions, and the adults failing the child are all women: a nurse, a mother, and a hostess, presumably life-giving, protective and caring,

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and yet all equally incompetent to protect the child, rushing him to his death. In his intentionally regressive portrayal of that bunch of dangerous females, Greene reactivates the Victorian conception to mark it as a fantasy, but also to highlight the fundamental role of such fantasies in the construction of the self for little boys: othering the opposed sex as a path to difference, desire—and danger.

19 As opposed to Francis’s fine confrontation with the process of duality to elaborate his own identity, Peter’s treatment of duality is fairly basic, and meant as self-protection: he has simply retrojected onto his twin what he refuses to confront in himself. He will not recognize vulnerability as his own and “ab-jected” Francis thus becomes a convenient outward projection where he can circumscribe and deny his own fears. Compulsive repetition of the same oracular formula—“Then he remembered that the fear was not his own, but his brother’s” (186); “but it wasn’t his own fear” (187); “He knew that it was his brother’s fear and not his own that he experienced” (188)—reads like self-persuasion: it is meant as a performative speech-act, but reads as ironic misapprehension. Indeed, “self-reliance” (181) and “self-sufficiency” (184) are marked as illusions, and the distribution of roles as a schizophrenic temporary way out: when Peter is alone in the dark, his fear starts proliferating, and as he hallucinates squatting bats on hooded wings, the reader realizes that he desperately needs Francis to unburden his fears on him. Killing the double thus does not solve any problem, and Peter’s “flaw” (185), diagnosed by his younger brother, surfaces as soon as Francis dies: psychotic syndromes take over, and Peter is no longer able to distinguish the inside and the outside, as he can now feel in himself “the pulse of his dead brother’s fear” (189), and grief is tellingly reinterpreted as “an obscure self-pity” (189). Fear is now here to stay, though he cannot figure out its intimate origin. The crisis of identity is thus double, and the projection onto his brother amounts to an alienation to himself: according to Paul Ricœur’s categories, the crisis of idem, i.e. the crisis of sameness, now amounts to a crisis of ipse, i.e. the crisis of selfhood. As Peter cleaved part of himself, and dramatized on the scene of the unconscious the difference between self and other, the mortal blow affects him too: “As it is refigured in narration, the self is in fact confronted with the possibility of its own annihilation”9 (Ricœur 189). It is as if the stage of the mirror had completely failed, and Peter’s perception were fixed at a stage when the separation of his own body from the reflection were not yet achieved: he returns to a fragmented body with disorganized aperceptions and sensations, and his inner, presumably autonomous, voice regresses to a mere quotation of an adult phrase, as final sentence of the story.

20 “The End of the Party” thus presents the reader with a multiple surface of a text. It is a brilliant illustration of the literary standpoints of Modernism, where “Infancy” is turned into a concept that leads to the deterritorialization of dominant semiotics: it is remarkable how French theory has made childhood, because of its inherent relation of estrangement with language and the world, both a creative literary potential and an ethical injunction—Deleuze with the “the becoming-child” (“le devenir-enfant”), and the active concept of the “infant tongue,” Lyotard with the idea of the passibility of children and the way childhood remains active throughout life as a reminder of our indebtedness to otherness. It is also a more classical case of dual identity, paying a tribute to a long literary tradition and illustrating its relevance to contemporary psychoanalysis. Greene explores and experiments on the correlations between language and identity without claiming to find a literary solution (the liberation of language still leads to one child’s death, and to the other child’s experimenting

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psychotic syndromes) but highlighting their complex interconnectedness. Literature stands here to be a relevant way to address major human issues by stressing the importance of language in human self-definition: language troubles, failures in symbolic representation, the relative unreliability of one’s voice all reinforce Greene’s desire to address the ethical problem of the recognition of otherness as an intimate injunction.

Weak Plot and Big Surprise in Graham Greene’s “The End of the Party” (Arnaud Schmitt)

21 The historical index inherent in this short story is quite low. There are no references to any particular historical context and only a few details allow the reader deprived of paratextual elements to anchor precisely this text to any particular period: for instance, the dated use of the word “nurse” (here, a person employed or trained to take care of young children) and the quaint reference to people giving a “children’s party,” even though this does not lead to a specific time anchor. For two researchers working on different literary periods, we could say that Graham Greene’s short story represents a form of mimetic neutral ground.

22 A majority of short stories open in medias res, with a sparseness of contextualizing details; subsequently, they have more leverage when it comes to strategies of defamiliarization, since disorientation is maybe more sustainable in a short text than in a novel. Indeed, “reading is a kind of ‘skillful coping,’” because, as Wolfgang Iser noted, “literary texts are full of unexpected twists and turns, and frustration of expectations” which allow us “to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections—for filling the gaps left by the text itself” (Iser 1980 in Tompkins 55). Short stories, more than novels, resort to our ability to fill the gaps as quickly and efficiently as possible. Mimetic elements need to be assembled as early as the first page, whereas in a novel, one can make do with a prolonged state of uncertainty. Doležel wrote that from “the viewpoint of the reader, the fictional text can be characterized as a set of instructions according to which the fictional world is to be recovered and reassembled” (489). A “set of instructions”… It is quite fortunate that recent developments in literary theory have seen the notion of play return to center stage. According to Biederman and Vessel, the “brain is wired for pleasure” (Armstrong 51) or so it seems. Furthermore, “the brain’s ability to go back and forth between harmony and dissonance is evidence of a fundamental playfulness characteristic of high-level cortical functioning” (Armstrong 51). This short story perfectly illustrates this balance, as we will see. But it is important to note that, apart from the loose historical context mentioned above, “The End of the Party” does not display any particular anti-mimetic strategies. Two of the key realistic bases are covered: who (the characters are onomastically and psychologically identified) and what (Francis’s fear of the upcoming party). As for the where element, quite minimalist here, it has always seemed to me the least important element of the realistic apparatus, one that every text can reasonably do without.

23 Since I believe that what represents the very core of the experience of reading, affects and percepts (“Art does not think less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts”),10 drive our hermeneutical acts, but are extremely hard to formalize and do not represent scientific materials for a majority of researchers in the humanities, and since I have limited interest in thematic criticism (unless it focuses on what Jean-

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Marie Schaeffer called “mimetic modelization”),11 I keep falling back on a single, but broad and complex, interpretive stance: cognitive narratology, which aims at reconciling a transcendental approach (reader-response theory) with an immanent one (structuralism). However, more often than not, for lack of scientific data, my reader- response approach is unfortunately limited to my own approach.

24 Thankfully, I think that a lot of readers would have a similar experience of “The End of the Party,” and this experience could be described as “teleological,” which in my opinion can best be analyzed through structuralist eyes. Greene’s text is destined to accompany the reader all the way to a particular event, or more precisely to a particular end. It mostly concentrates its literary resources on building up narrative momentum in order to create a sense of expectation, a form of tension—something which I will come back to. With this short story, “plot is the internal logic of the discourse of mortality” (Brooks 22). As early as the first two pages, there is a strong sense of foreboding that definitely influenced my reading (I am of course referring to reading #1, and I think it is a major shortcoming of plot analyses not to distinguish between this reading and the subsequent ones, conducted mostly by academics for research purposes). The first ten lines are devoted to the traditional stage of mimetic orientation (Peter waking up and being the focalizer of a scene in which his brother, Peter, is soon mentioned), but beyond line ten, the narrative shifts into gear: “But the thought soon palled, and the mind went back to the fact which lent the day importance” (181). The “fact” is made explicit a few lines below for the reader who understands that Mrs. Henne-Falcon’s children’s party is an annual affair, taking place that very 5th of January, the mimetic date of the narrative. From this moment on, the plotting engines start running and they run on lexical fuel: “Peter heart’s began to beat fast […] with uneasiness […] the whole room seemed suddenly to darken […] a great bird swooping […] ‘I dreamed that I was dead,’ Francis said” (181-182). These words and expressions are arguably meant to convey at least a growing feeling of “uneasiness,” if not outright fear. Do they achieve this goal? As Roland Barthes pointed out, we keep misunderstanding the effects of language and we often believe that the word “suffering” conveys suffering.12 He wrote elsewhere that “the message [of a text] is parametrically linked to its performance.”13 As far as I am concerned, the term “uneasiness” does not create actual uneasiness, but it does alert me, too overtly maybe—and this overtness might betray a certain literary tradition—to the strategy of the performance Greene wants me to experience. The lexical field used by Greene in this passage creates a meta- experience: I am aware of fear as a narrative technique, but not as an affect since at this point, my empathy with the characters is too limited for any form of identification to take place. All narratives rely on “reading as an anticipatory and retrospective process of building consistency and constructing patterns” (Armstrong 54). Similarly, Wallace Martin underlined the fact that “we read events forward (the beginning will cause the end) and meaning backward (the end, once known, causes us to identify its beginning)” (127), or at least the beginning as we remember it (especially for a 800-page novel). This echoes Husserl’s description of any moment as characterized both by retentional and protentional horizons (Armstrong 93). But when it comes to short stories, and especially to short stories like Greene’s, “the reading motion” is mostly protentional since the retentional horizon is logically limited by the actual size of the text. According to Iser, reading implies a “continual interplay between modified expectations and transformed memories” (Act 111), but the interplay is of course indexed on the length of the book. With “The End of the Party,” the main reading strategy revolves around

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“expectations,” moderately modified since the structure is mostly binary here, or more precisely consecutively binary: will Francis manage to avoid going to the party or not? Will he overcome his fear at the party or not? (Or as an alternative plot: will the party end well this time or not?) I believe that plots reveal what can be called the “structural soul” of a fiction, its narrative balance. Instinctively, I was immediately drawn to this aspect of Greene’s short story and none of its other features were compelling enough to redirect my analytic attention.

25 Peter Brooks noted that “we have, in a sense, become too sophisticated as readers of plot quite to believe in its orderings” (314). This is not exactly true: it is not a matter of believing in its orderings—plot is not linked to verisimilitude but, as we have seen above, to effects and to a drive to carry on with a narrative—it is more a question of accepting its orderings, of letting them work on us. But Brooks was right to mention the advantage that some readers have over the plots of their time: they see through them, they know them all, they can anticipate every twist the author painstakingly crafted. And this is true for every literary era, there is always a need for a renewal of plot patterns, even if it means recycling ancient patterns. What was Greene’s strategy to throw off-balance the most jaded readers in 1929 and prevent critics from drawing an obvious comparison with Edgar Allan Poe’s stories? Two words: dual focalization, which was a very modernist thing to do and not a very surprising one for an ambitious writer at that time. Thus, the narratological appeal of this story does not stem from its duality in terms of plots, but in terms of psycho-narration (even though, as we will see, it is not strictly dual).

26 Let us turn back to the first two pages: they are seen (in the broad literary sense: seen, felt, thought) through Peter’s eyes until the end of the first dialogue and the line which ends with Francis’s answer “Did I?” and signals a brief and momentary shift in focalization: “Francis accepted his brother’s knowledge without question, and for a little the two lay silent in bed facing each other, the same green eyes, […]. The fifth of January, Peter thought again” (182). This passage perfectly illustrates the modus operandi of this short story: a constant shift between Peter’s Point of View (PoV), Francis’s PoV and a form of external focalization, at least in the first part. What I call ‘the first part’ can be characterized by the anxiety of the looming party (from the beginning to the middle of page 185, where Francis is eventually forced to leave his home with his nurse to go to Mrs. Henne-Falcon’s). Its main stake is: will Francis manage to find an excuse not to attend the party? But the structure of the psycho- narration aforementioned is also meant to introduce the stakes of what I call ‘the second part’: will Peter manage to protect Francis? Indeed, the narratological logic induced by the shifts in focalization creates a closeness/remoteness dialectics. The fact that the brothers are twins is mostly used as a strategy of focalization. They seem to know each other so well and yet there is a fundamental distance around which the short story revolves: Francis is isolated in his fear. In addition, one of the subplots of the first part obviously is: if Francis cannot find excuses to avoid attending the party, will Peter be able to protect him? Below are some examples of • their closeness: “It amused him to imagine that it was himself whom he watched, the same hair, the same eyes, the same lips and line of cheek” (181); “Already experience had taught him how far their minds reflected each other” (182); “Francis accepted his brother’s knowledge without question” (182);

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• their remoteness: “But he was the elder, by a matter of minutes…” (182); “And last year… he turned his face away from Peter” (182); “But though he was grateful he did not turn his face towards his brother. His cheeks still bore the badge of a shameful memory…” (182); • Peter’s sense of responsibility towards his brother (and Francis’s reliance on him): “[…] had given him self-reliance and an instinct of protection towards the other …” (182); […] “Peter said with decision, prepared to solve all difficulties with one plain sentence…” (183); “When the nurse came in with hot water Francis lay tranquil leaving everything to Peter” (182); • and finally his brother’s helplessness (and the limits of Francis’s protection): “[…] the other [Francis] who was afraid of so many things” (182); “Their sex humiliated him…” (182); “‘I’m sorry,’ Peter said, and then worried at the sight of a face creased again by misery and foreboding…” (183).

27 Another sign of Peter’s inability to protect his brother (and this is a hint of things to come) is how, as a last resort, Francis entrusts his fate to God.

28 Moving from one mind to the other both reflects and generates the dynamics of protection/helplessness, embedded in the closeness/remoteness dialectics. But as noted above, there is also a neutral PoV in this story. The notions of external and zero focalizations are highly problematic, perhaps more than any other narratological concept. I will not go into the specifics of their various definitions (too often, the history of narratology has been characterized by a string of minor alterations to a notion that was satisfactorily defined in the first place; although of course, sometimes, it is necessary to redefine a term). However, when it comes to focalization, it would be ill-advised to overlook Alan Palmer’s major contribution to the representation of thoughts in literature. This short story’s use of psycho-narration would be described by Palmer as “contextual thought report,” a technique consisting in describing “an aspect of a character’s mind […] combined with descriptions of action or context” (Palmer in Herman 331). Palmer goes on to write that “contextual thought report plays an important role in the process of characterization” because “constructions of fictional minds are inextricably bound up with presentations of action. Direct access to inner speech and states of mind is only a small part of the process of building up the sense of a mind in action” (Ibid). In the case of “The End of the Party,” the balance tilts heavily towards thought report rather than towards action and yet the description of the latter still plays an important role in the story. And of course, within this category of “neutral phrases,” dialogues must be included. Is this neutral focalization? Let us consider a few examples in the first part: “The tall starched woman laid the towels across the cans and said […] and she closed the door behind her” (182); “‘I’m coming,’ he called with despair, leaving the lighted doorway of the house; […] He comforted himself with that, as he advanced steadily across the hall […]” (184-185). They give the impression of being perspective-free, or at least as seen from a distance. One knows, of course, that there is no such thing as a perspective-free phrase. Every word in a text is at least materialized through the perspective of the reader. Furthermore, as underlined by Alan Palmer, “narrative fiction is, in essence, the presentation of fictional mental functioning” (Fictional 5). Palmer goes even further to suggest that arguably any information in fiction is seen through a character’s eyes. I agree with him, since even “no-narration” passages contribute to the psychological effort of building characters in our mind. It might not be direct psycho-narration but simply indirect psycho- narration, or to use Palmer’s terminology, a loose form of thought report: information that ultimately can be attributed to a character, even though no perspective is made

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explicit. Marie-Laure Ryan wrote that “we see the characters, but we also see with them” (234) and it might be the case when we read “she closed the door behind her.” To me, this is seen by Francis, we see with Francis. Neutrality in fiction is counter- productive as a concept. Or it could mean something totally different from what we usually understand by it, that is to say a passage implying a lack of perspective; so- called perspectival neutrality simply is low intensity, that is information your mind skims through without generating the same level of psychological involvement as, for instance, when the word “fear” is mentioned. I could not agree more with Peter Rabinowitz when he claims that “[a]lthough many critics argue that in literature everything is significant, we know from experience that when we read literature (as opposed to the single sentences so many critics offer as examples), it is impossible to keep track of, much less account for, all the details of a text” (19). As far as my reading of this short story is concerned, “she closed the door” implies a low level of affective and emotional intensity, but it is certainly not neutral in terms of perspective, nor comparable to stage directions in a play for instance. My experience of the first scene is then mostly defined by the aforementioned dual psycho-narration and the dialectics whose sole purpose is to build up the tension that will climax in the second part.

29 A possible counter-argument is that the neutrality that I refuse to see is here to disrupt the binary narratological model of the first part of the story. What would be the point of disrupting this duality? Offering an adult perspective, for instance? I am not opposed to this interpretation, but the text simply does not work like this for me. You see through Peter and Francis, you see with Peter and Francis and you possibly see Peter and Francis, but the latter case contributes to the psychological portrait of the two brothers and their interaction. Even if you consider that the “neutral statements” are a weak form of focalization, they still echo the distance/proximity dialectics characterizing the two brothers’ relationship. Once again, we waver between two flows of information, but this time between a quasi-neutral and a highly personalized one.

30 As soon as the reader understands that there is no way out for Francis and that he will have to attend the party, the first part loses some of its interest and one of the main narrative merits of “The End of the Party” is to move quickly and seamlessly to the actual party (185), where the stakes become suddenly different but still dual and still with a subplot: will Francis avoid playing the much dreaded hide-and-seek in the dark? If not, will he overcome his fear? Although the remoteness/closeness dynamics between the two brothers still holds, the constant flow between the minds of the two brothers is no longer as systematic as in the first part, especially since at the end of this part, Peter disappears, leaving Francis to fend for himself. But it remains highly relevant because their bond and differences as twins are soon reintroduced: “As a twin he was in many ways an only child. To address Peter was to speak to his own image in a mirror, an image a little altered by a flaw in the glass, so as to throw back less a likeness of what he was than of what he wished to be […]” (185). And as seamlessly as the transition from part one to part two, Francis finds himself in the space of a few lines in the situation that has racked him with fear since he woke up and that he has spent the whole day trying to steer away from. It is worth noting that the two events Greene’s plotting strategy is hinged on happen in the blink of an eye, without the reader’s attention being overtly alerted: “Without looking at this brother, Francis said, ‘Of course I’ll play. I’m not afraid, I only thought…’ But he was already forgotten by his human tormentors and was able in loneliness to contemplate the approach of the spiritual, the more unbounded torture” (187). As Francis’s sentence is interrupted and

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cut short, so is the dilatory space, the sense of fate, part and parcel of what I call “doom plots,” characterized by the likelihood that something bad might befall one of the main characters and energized not by actual events but by virtual ones, i.e. what might happen.

31 It is Francis’s turn to disappear in the second part, and Peter’s turn to be isolated, not in fear but in his inability to protect his brother. As soon as the game starts, the narrative mostly inhabits Peter’s psyche: “Peter, too, stood apart, ashamed of the clumsy manner in which he had tried to help his brother” (187). For a few paragraphs, the reader literally follows Peter in the dark, unaware of Francis’s whereabouts and reactions, even though Peter—and of course the reader since this darkness is what the narrative has been homing in on since the beginning—tries, if nothing else, to put himself in his brother’s shoes (“Now he could feel, creeping in at the corners of his brain, all Francis’s resentment of his championing. […] Then darkness came down like the wings of a bat and settled on the landing” [187]). It appears at first that there will be no disruptions in the last section’s focalization strategy as Peter sets his mind on finding his brother but the opposite happens; there seems to be a blending of voices and feelings on page 187, which results in a form of telepathic communication between brothers. We suddenly shift from Peter’s to Francis’s PoV: “Peter stood in the centre of the dark deserted floor […] waiting for the idea of his brother’s whereabouts to enter his brain. But Francis crouched with fingers on his ears […]” (my emphasis). The sudden focalization on Francis appears external but soon we reenter his psyche, with one notable difference as it is done through Peter’s: “The voice called ‘Coming,’ and as though his brother’s self-possession had been shattered by the sudden cry, Peter Morton jumped with fear. But it was not his own fear. What in his brother was burning panic […] was in him an altruistic emotion that left the reason unimpaired” (187). This key passage re-enacts the remoteness/proximity dialectics, a combination of telepathic proximity and fundamental distance (Peter is not afraid). The closing of this paragraph ironically bolsters this dynamics, as the narrative audience is told that certainly “between the twins there could be no jargon of telepathy” and that “[t]hey had been together in the womb, and they could not be parted,” while knowing that the plot relies on the fact that they can never be together. The blending of voices and of PoVs is an illusion, as Francis’s fear is imagined by Peter, who nevertheless can never feel his brother’s fear. Once again, Francis disappears as Peter resumes his search for his “younger” brother but even when he eventually finds him, the narrative will never adopt Francis’s PoV again, thus narratologically foreboding the dramatic ending. Indeed, Francis only exists through Peter’s perception of him, which, as the last two pages reveal, is fundamentally insubstantial. Take the following examples from page 188: “Francis did not cry out, but the leap of his own heart revealed to Peter a proportion of Francis’s terror”; “[…] and he was aware of how Francis’s fear continued in spite of his presence”; “He knew that it was his brother’s fear and not his own that he experienced”; “He did not speak again, for between Francis and himself touch was the most intimate communion”; “He could experience the whole progress of his brother’s emotion […].” When set against the dramatic finale and the external realization that he involuntarily killed his brother (“But she was not the first to notice Francis Morton’s stillness, where he had collapsed against the wall at the touch of his brother’s hand” [188]), all these excerpts retroactively (i.e., during the second reading) convey a grim irony which is the outcome of Greene’s PoV shifts or, in the second part, illusionary shifts.

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32 In terms of focalization, the story’s final paragraph is the only time we undoubtedly inhabit a PoV that is neither Francis’s nor Peter’s. It appears at first to be Mrs. Henne- Falcon’s as her scream indicates that she is the first one to realize what happened, but it is not. Actually, the first part of the last paragraph is a form of unnatural narratology14 and of ironical focalization: as it happened in the dark, no one was in a position to know that it was the “touch of his brother’s hand” that caused Francis’s death. Especially not Peter, as we finally realize that, when it comes to his brother, Peter knows nothing, not even that his brother is dead: “It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, yet wondered with an obscure self-pity why it was that the pulse of his brother’s fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had been always told there was no more terror and no more darkness” (189). It goes “on and on” because all along, he has been feeling his own pulse, nothing but his own pulse; there has never been any connection. The end of the story is when the reader finally realizes the madness of pretending to know what the other thinks, let alone feels.

33 But the former sentence is a philosophical flourish diverting attention away from what I perceive as being the core of this story: the structural interaction between plot (what I called dual plots) and focalization, and more precisely the way Graham Greene orchestrates his story’s psycho narration in order to give the illusion of proximity while maintaining the fundamental distance between the brothers, a pattern characterized by the figures below (Fig. 1 and 2), in which we see how we oscillate between different focalizations in the two parts of the short story:

Figure 1. Part one of the story oscillates between Peter’s and Francis’s Point of View (PoV)

There is a constant flow between the minds of the twin brothers, although at the end of this part Peter disappears, leaving Francis to fend for himself.

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Figure 2. Part two of the story is almost exclusively set from Peter’s PoV and ends with a ‘neutral’ focalization in the last sentence

The end of the story is when the reader finally realizes the madness of pretending to know what the other thinks, let alone feels.

34 Like any plot, whether or not it creates genuine surprise at the end of its unfolding, the real interest lies in how the author underpins its structure and what it reveals about his perception of his narrative audience. The dialectical energy used by Greene in this story is particularly subtle. As for his use of focalization, it is in keeping with the most sophisticated representations of consciousness found in the works of some of his most famous contemporaries, such as Woolf or Joyce. It also explains why the end of the story may appear to some readers as being disproportionate with regard to the narrative structure upon which it is built. It almost seems unnatural for a character to be literally scared to death. And the narrative stakes (attending a party or not, overcoming one’s fear or not) finally seem at odds with the story’s macabre outcome. Indeed, as remarked upon several times in this article, what Umberto Eco called “signals of suspense” (52) are quite dim and limited to one’s child excessive fear. In terms of narrative tension, we have seen that Greene’s devices are mostly narratological and circumscribed to the psychological interaction between the two brothers. In La Tension narrative, Raphaël Baroni analyzes the three modes of exposition outlined by Meir Sternberg: “surprise” is defined as the “temporary concealment of a crucial information,”15 “curiosity” as an “only partial erasure in the discourse of a crucial event”16 and finally “suspense” as “an initial event having the potential to lead to an important result (good or bad)”17 (107, 108). Similarly, Baroni distinguishes between “prognosis” and “diagnostic” (110); the former refers to a low form of anticipation based only on the premises of a narrative development whereas the latter rests on actual clues allowing the reader to have an uncertain understanding of a narrative situation presented only partially. Greene’s peculiar take on plot is a mix of “surprise” and “curiosity,” or more precisely a weak form of “curiosity” (since to most readers, myself included, Francis’s fear of the party never appears as potentially

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hazardous for the health of the boy) seemingly only able to trigger off a tenuous level of reader involvement in terms of “prognosis,” and unconnected to the genuine “surprise” closing it. Admittedly, the story’s main “surprise” stems from the disconnection between “curiosity” and “surprise.” In other words, we never go through the “suspense” stage, or the more advanced hermeneutical form of “diagnostic” since the clues to the possible outcome are simply not there and we never realize that Francis’s fear is “an initial event having the potential to lead to an important result (good or bad)”—at least not that bad.

35 As a conclusion, through this unexpected and hyperbolic outcome, Green seems to tell his reader that while pretending to build a minor plot, he was building something else, a major surprise. His strategy is a very modernist way of telling us that plot is not what we think it is—or at least, his plot is not what we think it is—while making sure that we keep in mind what it normally is, so that we realize that what he has been doing all along is not what we think he has been doing: it is the narratological pattern that makes this play with the narrative audience worthwhile. I am convinced that this discrepancy between expectations and outcome is exactly what the author wanted us to focus on.

A joint analysis, or joining our analyses

36 The present undertaking is not aimed at criticizing another critic’s take on a text, in the sense of indicating the faults of someone else’s analysis. It would be in total contradiction with the very nature of literary analysis which is but one area of a broader category, literary theory. On the topic of a so-called critical subjectivity, Umberto Eco’s Interpretation and Overinterpretation serves as our reference, including Eco’s but also Culler’s, Rorty’s and Brooke-Rose’s perspectives on the particularly contentious topic of what constitutes a sensible interpretation. Eco, as broad-minded a critic as could be, believed that certain analyses can be seen as “unlimited semiosis” (23). In other words, textual interpretations that do not seem connected in any way to the text they pretend to analyze. For Eco, there is a textual reality we cannot jettison: “Between the mysterious history of a textual production and the uncontrollable drift of its future readings, the text qua text still represents a comfortable presence, the point to which we can stick” (88). This “comfortable presence” we can “stick to” is what American philosopher Joseph Margolis called the “inviolable constraints” (82) we believe works of art possess. The fact that the two main characters in “The End of the Party” are named Francis and Peter certainly is an “inviolable constraint”, and the fact that Francis dies at the end is another, although less inviolable than the first, since we are certain that one could convincingly argue that Francis cannot die since he does not actually exist. Greene’s short story would then be interpreted as the account of a child’s schizophrenic fixation on a non-existing twin. But Eco is certainly right to contend that a text has a factual being and not everything can be said about it as, for instance, to take an extreme example, that “The End of the Party” takes place in China in the Middle- Ages and that the characters are Nà and Jing. Eventually, Eco sensibly challenges “Valéry’s statement according to which ‘il n’y a pas de vrai sens d’un texte,’” but accepts “the statement that a text can have many senses,” although he categorically refuses “the statement that a text can have every sense” (Eco 141). Briefly, we think Eco should have differentiated between what you say about a text (the names of the

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characters), and what you say about your interpretation of a text (the nature of the relationship between the two brothers). To put it differently, it is similar to distinguishing between reading and interpreting, but we are far from convinced that this distinction always stands.18 When it comes to what is said about a text, “the critic who ‘recovers’ the meaning of any given work always does so by establishing a relationship between the work and some systems of ideas outside it” (Scholes in Rabinowitz 19). To conclude this brief ideological contextualization, we have both been using, in our respective interpretations of Greene’s story, different tools coming from distinct “systems of ideas” but, as we will see, we also agree on some unquestionable features. Now comes the stimulating dialectical part in which we will delve into our differences and similarities and try to account for them, while attempting to elaborate on what they might reveal of our respective critical positions about the link between literature and criticism. The result is somehow what we hoped it would be: we are presented with two largely different outlooks on the same short story, which allows us quite a lot of scope and material for comparison and analysis. It is a fact, mentioned in our introduction, that we belong to a similar generation and that we trained academically in Anglophone literature and French theory (structuralism, including Genette’s narratology, and philosophy, including Lacan). But it is also fair to say that, along the way, we have developed different theoretical proclivities. Nowhere is this more visible than in our “Works Cited” sections. Nathalie Jaëck’s reflects her strong intellectual involvement with contemporary French theory, and Arnaud Schmitt’s mirrors his growing interest in a “scientific” approach to literary theory. In a way, to quote Scholes again, our systems of ideas are doubly “outside”: outside the work under study, of course, but also quite dependent on adjacent critical fields. Beyond our differences, our analyses also emphasize a fact that many critics choose to overlook when they decide to make authoritative claims on the nature or the ultimate meaning of a particular work: that once we have opted for a particular critical angle—and we are primed to do so by our cultural, intellectual influences—we tend not to pay attention to critical alternatives and we inevitably hyperbolize our critical claims, be it simply by privileging them over alternatives. Such an enterprise crucially forces us to materially acknowledge and confront these alternatives, and to read our respective analysis against these new critical data; we will give examples of this below.

Common points

37 Let us first concentrate on what we have in common. In Graham Greene’s “The End of the Party,” we both see a considerable amount of duality. Actually, we analogously based our interpretations on the analysis of complex dual structures, whether formal, thematic or intellectual. Jaëck’s reading of the story hinges on Greene’s elaboration on the Gothic motif of the double that relies on the dual nature of dialogicity in the text, and on the hybrid nature of the use of free indirect speech. She eventually addresses the psychological and discursive nature of the relationship between twin children, and more generally of the dis/similar other. She links these different dualities to a more wide-ranging dialectics, one that lies at the very heart of her current research: the minor/major dialectics. As for Schmitt, his dualities are more narratological as he turns his attention to the interaction between dual focalization and double plots, and to the dialectical impact it has on the unfolding of the narrative from a reader’s perspective. He uses this perspective also to reflect on zero focalization, and perhaps to question the

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fact that there is one in the text: he concludes that we mainly “see with” the children, even when we do not see directly through them—which, of course, we both agree upon. Jaëck reckons that dual focalization serves Greene’s purpose in this typical story of twins, how the technical process of dual perspective and the dialectics of closeness/ remoteness it allows constitute a very adequate stylistic way to approach Peter’s ambivalence—to her it has got the role of a formal clue, leading her to interpret the text, and in this case to highlight an underlying structure of, indeed, closeness and remoteness that is relevant to the case of Peter and Francis as twins. In other words, Jaëck is also interested in what the text says about duality—but is it what Schmitt calls “thematic criticism”?19 Perhaps this is an interesting element of further discussion worthy of another article: literature as interpretation of the world, or rather as alternative way to approach knowledge. In all cases, we both acknowledge the importance of structure in itself because of what it does to the reader (mainly Schmitt) and what it says about the self and the world, as relevant cognitive discourse (mainly Jaëck).

38 We both saw an overriding pattern in this text, one that we might have been prepared to see for various reasons, but also one that is certainly embedded in the textual features of the text: the choice of twin brothers as main characters and the mostly dual focalization, going back and forth between the brothers’ differently tormented minds. This aspect of the story might not be an “inviolable constraint,” but from our (professional) perspective, it is difficult to miss it. Besides, once you strip the story of this aspect, i.e. the dual focalization (as a narratological technique and a psychological and discursive dimension), “The End of the Party” loses its main stake and a substantial part of its narrative interest. Of course, there is always the possibility of being mistaken and we may be missing out on another major feature of the text.

39 Another common point of interest is the treatment of time: we both note Greene’s production of a sense of ominousness in the text, and link it to his treatment of time in the story. We both deal with the formal manipulation of diegetic time, note the gaps in narrative time, and interpret it basically in the same manner, though there would be an interesting notion to discuss—Schmitt argued there is no real suspense, but Jaëck is not so sure, a discrepancy due to a different take on focalisation zero. The major reason why Jaëck sees suspense in the story is probably linked to the fact that what Schmitt calls “the weak plot of the text,” which Jaëck agrees on and understands, immediately collided, in her first reading, with the archetypal 19th-century Gothic plot of the stories of Doubles. For her, suspense is thus indeed not created so much by Greene in the actual, mimetic plot of the story, but in its playful incorporation of a literary pattern. It is thus of a metatextual nature: Is Greene reworking the pattern of duality? Are the twins going to follow the destiny of their fictive forebears? What kind of twist, what kind of “surprise” (in Schmitt’s terms), is the modernist rewriting going to allow? Comparing the analyses of two specialists is also a way to delineate the places where analyses diverge, or do not totally converge—it is a way to see which categories leave room for interpretation. In this case, it seems to further Schmitt’s idea that focalisation zero is indeed a concept that needs ampler development in general narratological criticism.

40 Jaëck was very interested in the notions of retentional and protentional horizons, and also the notion of expectation as concepts, because to her they are effective, and allow a further development of, or at least a more detailed approach in, her analysis. It seems

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to her that the dynamics described by Schmitt can also be embedded and applied to Peter himself: when she argued that Peter was stuck in-between past memories and anticipation of the future, it could be usefully rephrased as stuck between the retentional and the protentional horizons. Jaëck thinks she will use these categories, because the notion of a horizon and the dynamic nature of the process it defines, seem very adequate and operational to her. In “The End of the Party,” Francis is both blocked back by the retentional horizon and utterly panicked by the protentional horizon: there is no stability, no autonomy of the present, dynamically torn and deprived of any solidity or reality. It thus seems an adequate concept to address the issue of temporal dilations: it definitely adds meaning to the more common notions of analepses and prolepses by adding the dynamic notion of process; it is not just a self-contained jump in or back in time, it is a way to name the active attraction of the two horizons. It makes it possible to reinterpret the conception of time in a dynamic rather than a static manner, and the two children’s parties not as static points before or after, but as active lines that draw Francis both ways. In Deleuzian terms, they are not lines of escape; on the contrary they are morbid lines of reterritorialisation of the present in an overhanging, controlling and oppressive time structure. To Jaëck, these terms are thus truly efficient, because their technicity permits to inscribe intention and meaning. It is here interesting to note that widely different tools (cognitive narratology and psycho- philosophy) enable the authors to draw relatively close textual interpretations of the treatment of time.

Differences

41 And now for differences. Though we both decided to privilege the duality inherent in the psychonarration of the twins, and also focused on Greene’s treatment of time, our paths parted: what we decided to make out of this duality, for instance, was surprisingly different. At the very core of this difference lies one of the key questions every critic should ask himself/herself regularly: what is it that we do with texts? To which one must add a series of corollary questions: how does it enlighten the text? What purpose does it serve? What does it reveal about us as readers? What does it reveal about the community we belong to? The answers to these questions go a long way towards a better understanding of the not-necessarily-natural link between fiction and the discourses it generates. After reading our respective analyses of Greene’s story, anyone can see that we do very different things with texts.

42 A good way to grapple with the fundamental differences in our readings of the same text is perhaps to focus on what we didn’t see or pay attention to. Indeed, duality is just a cornerstone on which many different stones can be assembled. For instance, Schmitt obviously overlooked the importance of the “Gothic stone”—we assume here that one of the purposes of interpretation is to recover some of the hypertextual influences of the text, to insert the text where it also belongs, in a textual network it explicitly addresses and comments upon. This might be easily accounted for: even though Gothic literature it is a major influence in America, it simply is not the area Schmitt works on. Although he is aware of what American Gothic means in terms of literary and (more generally) artistic history, his knowledge of this specific field is too limited for him to make any noteworthy contribution on the topic. He nevertheless broached the matter of influence, Poe being an obvious one (as well as Henry James, but he only realized this

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after writing his first part). His interest lay more in the question of the readers’ narrative expectations in 1929 and how Greene could have positioned himself with regard to them when he designed his macabre tale of twins.

43 Conversely, Jaëck’s stress and keener grasp on literary history (working on 19th-century literature, she is more used to integrating such aspects into her critical modus operandi than Schmitt who mostly works on authors who, more often than not, are influenced by other contemporary authors, the historical dimension playing a more limited part in their aesthetic practices) would be a perfect stepping stone (to carry the “building metaphor” further) to a better understanding of Greene’s technique to renew the genre, or at least to provide an alternative reading and rewriting to past Gothic narratives. Jaëck chose to focus on different facets of this short story’s historical frame: according to her, the close and unexpected interplay between an earlier genre—the Gothic—and a dynamic literary period spanning several decades turns this “dual text” into an elaborate palimpsest, superposing Gothic motifs with modernist experiments. Without having access to the same depth of historical contextualization, Schmitt nevertheless points out that Greene’s peculiar plotting strategy stems from a modernist representation of streams of consciousness.

44 We both agree on this necessary stage of analysis: ascertaining how a text is shaped by a literary or cultural tradition, and also how it contributes, in turn, to changing this very same tradition; quite logically, this stage implies uncovering hypertextual traces. Besides, our different tools also lead us to draw the same conclusions about the metatextual nature of the text: for both of us, it is a text that stages its own writing process. For Schmitt, it is visible in the overt nature of the narrative technique; for Jaëck, in the explicit signalling of by-the-book modernism: “impressions,” “frame,” “fragments” are all there, highlighting the fact that the children’s voices are also experiments in Modernism as a way out of a stifling controlling voice—a dissident offspring of authoritative Realism. Both “sets of tools” conduce us to be aware of the central fact that the text is also a self-conscious artefact, and that texts stage their own writing processes. However, we do not produce the same discourse with that textual fact. Jaëck’s interest lies in this respect mainly in characterizing the movement the text belongs to, the literary stance of the author, and through the awareness of metatextuality she attempts to delineate the characteristics of the text that might link it to a literary context, to a literary intention that she is interested in historicizing. For Jaëck, the text takes rank in the modernist movement, and reading this text is a way to improve one’s understanding of modernist intentions—notably in what literature then originally proposed in terms of an exploration of the links between the configuration of narration and the configuration of the self. Schmitt sees this historicizing process as a necessary and fascinating stage, but he believes a text’s main semantic influence does not spring from the period during which it was written but from the period(s) during which it is read (of course, to return to Eco’s intentio operis, the former has inevitably an influence on the latter); in other words, how contemporary readings activate the meanings of older texts.

45 One could argue that picking out duality as the narrative balance and essence of this text and considering the contextualizing stage as a necessary one sum up the extent of our “agreement” on “what to do” with this story. But it is also fair to say that both our analyses also demonstrate a fair share of close reading (mostly of the structural implementation of psychonarration) and a modest one of traditional thematic reading

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(interpreting the psychology of characters as if they were real human beings). But, to come to the main point of the self-reflective part of our article, our conclusions diverge when it comes to deciding the type of discourse we want to extract from the text.

46 We both use the text for different purposes: as her conception of what it centrally means to study literature implies, Jaëck sees the text as a double opportunity: to progress in knowledge within the scientific field of literary criticism—precisely here to address and qualify the appropriation of the motif of the double by new-born Modernism, through elaborate manipulation of focalisation—and to see how literature constitutes an alternative cognitive tool, how it serves to illuminate a better understanding of the link between language and reality. As far as the second aspect is concerned, “The End of the Party” illustrates a persistent interest in her current research, the minor/major dialectics, the way a major mode of representation is challenged, or not, by the advent of a minor dissident mode. Using a Foucauldian approach, she sees literature as embedded in larger discursive stakes and fictional texts as alternative actors in wider philosophical, social, political debates. As outlined in the Deleuze and Guattari quote used at the beginning of Schmitt’s analysis, he believes one of the most essential points ever made about literature is that the way fiction “thinks” is fundamentally different from the way philosophy reflects on life. In fact, the other key quote he confesses to having overused in his own research echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s remark: “Literature is something other than reality.” (Hamburger 9) The type of experience induced by literature is, for Schmitt, mostly about intimacy and most of what comes out of this fundamentally private dialogue is not academic material. But what constitutes fascinating scientific material is the study of how texts work on readers and of how we work on texts, and what it reveals about the multiple cognitive processes of “dealing with literature.”

47 Finally, Jaëck proposes to raise the issue of the “scientificity” of literary criticism, because she believes it is one of the central questions that such a critical endeavour as this double paper raises: the aim is not so much to “check” every single point of each other’s analysis, as to be able to illustrate the reasons for the possibility of mutual validation beyond partially different results—not out of mutual complacency, but simply because there exists a scientific method in literary criticism, and because we feel it was respected by both participants. The preceding remark may sound defensive: but all too often literary critics are faced with the disparaging argument—even among their own ranks—that they may virtually say anything on a text, that their analyses are “far-fetched,” over-straining the text, imposing on it personal obsessions or central interests, or that they are simply “purely descriptive,” sterile tautologies. There are some such analyses—but then, they are easily marked and dismissed as such. This paper tries to address the idea that not any analysis of a text is valid, but that it needs to be validated by the community of critics—a community that, just like any other scientific community, is duly constituted by diplomas, scientific productions and academic positions. Here, as in any science, experts do come across different results, and luckily so, because this is the way to progress in the way we circumscribe our object, and how we devise evolving methods. The history of literary criticism amply proves how mobile critical stances on texts are, but such differences are certainly not proof that anything is valid—on the contrary, these differences stimulate greater scientific awareness. To accept each other’s alternative results, which is always a challenging task, we need to resort to an objective, informed, critical assessment of the method: I did not “find” that, but am I convinced of its validity; in other words, was it

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obtained through a correct use of the tools? Common discourse establishes a discrimination between “hard sciences” and “soft sciences,” or “Sciences” and “Humanities” in an Anglophone context—and many critics in literature are engaged in giving their methods an increased level of scientificity, be it to protect the field from ongoing assaults, or because they are themselves annoyed at what they often perceive as self-indulging a-theoretical commentary on literary works. Jaëck tends to read in Arnaud Schmitt’s cognitive references such a claim for “scientificity,” precisely modelled on theoretical models, on the desire to create more and more refined models to deal with texts as opposed to analyses that otherwise run the risk of being either descriptive and “thematic,” as Schmitt has it, or vastly subjective. As he himself says in this paper: “Schmitt’s mirrors his growing interest in a ‘scientific’ approach to literary theory.” It seems to Jaëck that such a claim leads him to integrate and take rank in the adjacent field of narrative pragmatism and cognition, that is indeed more rigorously fenced, and where he can engage in a debate with well-identified authoritative interlocutors about a promising new development in literary criticism—perhaps a scientific field within the broader literary field.

48 Jaëck, however, believes that literary criticism definitely stands as a valid and transmissible scientific field in itself. It is as unstable as every scientific field but shared and agreed-upon at a given time by the scientific community. It is based, like any other field of research, on a corpus of analyses that have been validated by the community of scientific researchers, and that constitute the body of critical reference anyone working on any author should endeavour to be extensively aware of, should be able to refer to, and confront his/her own work against. As is the rule in any scientific field, criticism in literature relies on scientific methods, as it proceeds by researching the existing literature on its object, advancing propositions, endeavouring to prove them, and then submitting the results to those with authority in the field—as we are doing with this joint reading, though “the scientific community” is here drastically reduced to two people! As for Schmitt, he does not think that one approach is more scientific than another nor is he particularly in pursuit of a higher degree of “scientificity;” he even remains sceptical about the benefits of regarding literary theory as a scientific field; he actually distinguishes between literary theory and literary analysis: he sees the former as an offshoot of philosophy, a very specific branch mostly focusing on how literature contributes to the more general study of essential phenomena such as, for instance, reality, existence, knowledge whereas the latter is restricted to the study of literary texts, thus displaying far less epistemic scope. As regards the issue of what falls under “scientificity,” Schmitt agrees with Jaëck on the potential for validation inherent in literary criticism, but he is highly dubious about the criteria used to “enforce this scientificity.” He even sees this urge to “validate” as intrinsically opposed to what constitutes the very nature of the act of reading. This last point leads him to the reason why he is currently more interested in using tools traditionally belonging to cognitive sciences: first and foremost, it is not because he perceives them as more scientific, and thus more reliable or simply “valid.” It is only because, being primarily destined for the study of our psychological inner workings and reflexes, they are more adapted to analysing what he regards now as his main research topic: reading (or experiencing literature) as opposed to literature. He is keen to stress that resorting to a more scientific approach has never crossed his mind and remains irrelevant as to what he is trying to achieve in his research. Nevertheless, he is surprised by the extreme prudence of the French humanities, and its persistent unwillingness to simply try something

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different and take (very limited) risks. For instance, he is puzzled by the fact that literary criticism has neglected major cognitive phenomena, which directly influence the semantic encounter between text and reader. He quite certainly is willing to use different tools, borrowed from different fields, cognitive sciences being one, but he does not see one approach as prevailing over the others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam-Smith, Janet. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.

Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. “Unnatural Narratives. Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic.” Narrative 18.2 (May 2010): 113-136. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/40856404

Armstrong, Paul B. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Baltimore : The John Hopkins UP, 2013.

Baroni Raphaël. La Tension narrative: suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris: Seuil, 2007.

Barthes, Roland. Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Seuil, 1977.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z, Œuvres complètes, Tome 2. Paris: Seuil, 1994.

Brooke-Rose, Christine. “Palimpsest History.” Umberto Eco. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 125-138. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511627408.007

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot, Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Culler, Jonathan. “In Defence of Overinterpretation.” Umberto Eco. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 109-123. DOI : 10.1017/CBO9780511627408.006

Deleuze, Gilles. Critique et clinique. Paris: Minuit, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles. Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie ? Paris: Minuit, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1981.

Doležel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.

Hamburger, Käte. The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP (1973) 1993.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading, A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 50-69.

Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” Reader Response Criticism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Klein, Mélanie. The Psychoanalysis of Children. London: Hogarth Press, [1932] 2011.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

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Lyotard, Jean-François. Lectures d’enfance. Paris: Galilée, 1991.

Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.

Palmer, Alan. “The Mind Beyond the Skin.” In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003. 322-348.

Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 2004.

Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Ce Temps qui ne passe pas. Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1997.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1988.

Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1990.

Rorty, Richard. “The Pragmatist’s Progress.” Umberto Eco. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 89-108. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511627408.005

Rosset, Clément. Le Réel et son double. 1976. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cognitive maps and the construction of narrative space” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003. 214-242.

Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Pourquoi la fiction ? Paris: Seuil, 1999.

Van Gunsteren, Julia. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990.

Zazzo, René. Les Jumeaux, le couple et la personne. 1960. Paris: PUF, 2009.

NOTES

1. James wrote an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, and thus praised his “Child’s Garden of Verses.” (Adam Smith 69). 2. “Une illusion oraculaire.” All French to English translations are mine. 3. “Le réel n’est admis que sous certaines conditions et seulement jusqu’à un certain point : s’il abuse et se montre déplaisant, la tolérance est suspendue.” 4. “Le temps régresse vers l’amont et galope vers l’aval. Il mêle les temps, les parcourt en tous sens, il délie le temps.” 5. “Un usage mineur de la langue majeure [qui] trace dans la langue une sorte de langue étrangère, qui n’est pas une autre langue, mais un devenir-autre de la langue, une minoration de cette langue majeure.” 6. “Nul ne sait écrire. Chacun, le plus ‘grand’ surtout, écrit pour attraper par et dans le texte quelque chose qu’il ne sait pas écrire. Qui ne se laissera pas écrire, il le sait. Baptisons cette chose infantia, ce qui ne parle pas, ne se parle pas. Une enfance qui n’est pas un âge de la vie, qui hante le discours adulte et qui lui échappe.” 7. “L’enfant ‘tari’ […] qui fait d’autant mieux l’enfant qu’aucun flux d’enfance n’émane de lui.” 8. To Peter, Francis is indeed “abject” in the way Julia Kristeva defined the concept: he represents the threat of a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and “object,” a word often used by Peter to refer to Francis. Francis is more a hallucinated double of all he cannot assimilate in himself than an autonomous subject. He is what “is radically excluded and […] draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). 9. “Le soi refiguré par le récit est en réalité confronté à l’hypothèse de son propre néant.”

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10. “L’art ne pense pas moins que la philosophie, mais il pense par affects et percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 64; my translation). 11. “La modélisation mimétique” (Schaeffer 122). 12. “Ce qui bloque l’écriture amoureuse, c’est l’illusion d’expressivité : écrivain, ou me pensant tel, je continue à me tromper sur les effets du langage: je ne sais pas que le mot ‘souffrance’ n’exprime aucune souffrance et que, par conséquent, l’employer, non seulement ce n’est rien communiquer, mais encore, très vite, c’est agacer (sans parler du ridicule)” (Barthes, Fragments 114). 13. “Le message est lié paramétriquement à sa performance” (Barthes, S/Z 698). 14. See Alber et al (2010). 15. “La dissimulation provisoire d’une information cruciale” (my translation). 16. “Un effacement seulement partiel dans le discours d’un événement crucial” (my translation). 17. “Un événement initial ayant la potentialité de conduire à un résultat important (bon ou mauvais)” (my translation). 18. Furthermore, on the aspect of interpretation, Schmitt totally agrees with Richard Rorty’s reply to Eco and, more generally, with the Pragmatist ethos: “He [Eco] insists upon a distinction between interpreting texts and using texts. This, of course, is a distinction we pragmatists do not wish to make. In our view, all anybody ever does with anything is use it. Interpreting something, knowing it, penetrating to its essence, and so on are all just various ways of describing some process of putting it to work” (Rorty 93). 19. It is, but Schmitt does not mean to discard thematic criticism, although according to him it has given rise to a form of criticism that, more often than not, is too remote from the experience of the text. As we all know, and this is exactly what Eco dreads, anything can be said about any text. But Schmitt acknowledges the fact that thematic criticism, when it is well done, can also be a very enlightening way to connect our experience of a text to our experiences in the world.

ABSTRACTS

In this article, two French scholars look back on their practices as critics via a double, reflexive analysis of Graham Greene’s short story, “The End of the Party.” While they belong to the same generation, they were influenced by different theoretical backgrounds: French classical narratology and French theory on the one hand, post-classical narratology and cognitive poetics on the other. This approach was a means for them to assess the nature and relevance of their critical tools, figure out how these tools impact the reading of a selected text and what they reveal about their respective academic practices of literature. From a practical point of view, they worked on the same short story, each writing an independent analysis, and then produced a joint commentary in order to see what the process revealed about their respective approaches to literary theory. The purpose of this strategy was to better understand their critical methods but also the stakes inherent in literary interpretation at the beginning of the twenty first century. Eventually, they hope that this dual analysis will contribute to renew their respective methods.

Dans cet article, deux universitaires français reviennent sur leurs pratiques en tant que chercheurs en littérature par le biais d’une double analyse de la nouvelle de Graham Greene « The End of the Party ». Bien qu’appartenant à la même génération, ils ont été influencés par des champs théoriques différents : la narratologie classique et ce qu’on appelle la French theory pour

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l’une, la narratologie postclassique et la poétique cognitive pour l’autre. Cette analyse fut l’occasion pour eux de faire un bilan de leurs outils critiques, d’interroger la nature et la validité de ces outils et ainsi de comprendre dans quelle mesure ceux-ci influencent leur lecture d’un même texte, et ce qu’ils révèlent de leurs méthodes herméneutiques en général. D’un point de vue pratique, ils ont travaillé sur la même nouvelle, en ont proposé chacun une étude, et produit en dernier lieu un commentaire commun, en tentant de mettre en évidence ce que cette façon de travailler révèle de leurs approches respectives de la théorie littéraire. Cette stratégie visait à mieux comprendre leurs méthodes critiques mais aussi les enjeux inhérents à l’interprétation littéraire au début du vingt-et-unième siècle. In fine, ils espèrent que cette double lecture contribuera à renouveler la méthode de chacun.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Greene Graham, enfance, littérature, narratologie, parodie, gémellité, dualité Keywords: Greene Graham, childhood, literature, narratology, parody, twins, duality

AUTHORS

NATHALIE JAËCK Nathalie Jaëck is Professor of nineteenth-century British literature at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne, and head of the research group CLIMAS. Her PhD was on the Sherlock Holmes stories, and she is interested in the turn of the century and literature of adventure. She wrote two books, Les histoires de Sherlock Holmes: une affaire d’identité (Pessac: PUB, 2008) and Charles Dickens: l’écriture comme pouvoir, l'écriture comme résistance (Paris: Ophrys, 2008), as well as numerous articles on the authors of the period. Contact: nathalie.jaeck [at] u-bordeaux3.fr

ARNAUD SCHMITT Arnaud Schmitt is a professor at the University of Bordeaux. His field of research is American literature, philosophy, and narratology, but he has also worked extensively on the concept of “autofiction” (he has devoted a book and several articles—both in English and French—to “autofiction” and “self-narration”). He is currently writing a new book on the phenomenology of reading autobiographical texts. Contact: arnaud.schmitt [at] u-bordeaux.fr

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Tammy Berberi on Disability studies Interview by Pascale Antolin

Tammy Berberi and Pascale Antolin

EDITOR'S NOTE

This interview was carried out by email in April 2016.

Pascale Antolin: Tammy Berberi, you are an American specialist in “Disability Studies.” How is it that you developed such an interest in this particular field? Tammy Berberi: I am a person with a disability (Cerebral Palsy, or IMC in French) who spent two years in an incredible school environment before joining the ranks of kids whose abilities were more conventional than mine. My “special” ed. teacher was a political radical who was determined to equip us for life, and we did that through a lot of creative interdependence and play. Other formative experiences of course included studying French (and other languages) and traveling. The first time I traveled to France in 1983, I was fourteen and I only knew a few hundred words of French. I immediately noticed different attitudes toward me and gorgeously inaccessible architecture. These early instances of awareness and context certainly fed a sense that ideas and identity are contingent and confluential, rather than fixed. That to me seemed interesting from the start!

PA: When did disability studies appear in the US, and why? TB: Disability studies emerged in the 1980s on the heels of the American civil rights and women’s movements of the 1970s, as we began thinking more about America comprising specific histories, unique to groups of people. But, of course, disability history in the U.S. and France extend back much further than that. The influence of French disability history on U.S. history is quite clear: American Thomas Gallaudet traveled to France where he learned about Deaf and Blind education methods; his youngest son founded one of the only predominantly Deaf universities in the U.S., Gallaudet University. I recommend the work of American historian, Kim Nielsen, who recently published a terrific intersectional history, A Disability History of the United States (2013).

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PA: How do you define disability studies today? TB: Simply put, disability studies seeks to challenge “deficit models” that define a person as “less than” based on some sort of physical or cognitive difference, and to afford full humanity, rights, and participation to people with disabilities. Deficit paradigms locate disability in the body, as a problem that ought to be remedied through medical, pharmaceutical, or other intervention. In contrast, the social model of disability locates the problem in an environment that is ill-suited to some people and calls for removing barriers in the broadest sense: these barriers may be physical (i.e. inaccessible buildings), economic, attitudinal, or other. In fact, these barriers mutually support each other: a lack of physical access is usually a symptom of preconceived notions of who “belongs” in society, who best represents the interests of the state or who is most productive. Likewise, a highly inaccessible environment serves to reinforce these preconceived notions. People simply aren’t called to question their own ideas until they encounter something or someone that challenges them. This has been true for millennia, as has been shown by French scholar Henri- Jacques Stiker, whose first book, Corps infirmes et sociétés, was published in 1982, translated as A History of Disability (1999), and other scholars working in French disability studies. I should add that many have critiqued the social model, which does not adequately reckon with the experiences of disabled embodiment. Within disability studies, this does not imply a return to medical discourse. These are two predominant paradigms, but I see them as neither mutually exclusive nor adequate in themselves to the experiences of people with disabilities.

PA: Are there different specific fields in disability studies? TB: Disability studies is a broad, interdisciplinary field spanning many academic disciplines: history, literature, rhetoric, life writing, film studies, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies. And of course, it intersects with vibrant work in religious studies, women’s studies, critical race studies, Native-American studies, migrant studies, queer studies, and Deaf and Blind studies. These perspectives neither sync nor completely agree with each other: it’s a lively area of the American academy that is growing quickly by every measure: each passing year marks the establishment of new book series and new graduate and undergraduate programs in disability studies in the U.S. Syracuse University keeps an up-to-date list here: http:// disabilitystudies.syr.edu/programs-list/ [archived: https://web.archive.org/web/ 20190218212656/http://disabilitystudies.syr.edu/programs-list/]

PA: How do you account for the recent development of this field of research in your country? TB: This momentum has been building for some time. Of course, I am delighted with the increased infrastructure around disability studies in the U.S., not only in terms of programs of study, but also in the diversity of events fostering exchange: symposia, conferences, etc. A small group of scholars in the 1990s began building this field with a great sense of purpose and method, urging scholarly organizations such as the Modern Languages Association to revise and expand key research terms in order to bring disability into being through lenses other than medical. We likewise urged scholarly organizations to improve and diversify access to knowledge and events.

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The Society for Disability Studies (SDS, founded 1982) has had a transformative impact on the development of disability studies, seeding research and collaborations and setting the standard for access and full participation for attendees. An organization of some four hundred members, when SDS gets together, it’s a big deal! We commandeer every single accessible sleeping room. SDS captions all plenaries and concurrent sessions and provides ASL [American Sign Language], revoicing, social facilitators, and print materials in alternative formats upon request. Members local to the annual conference typically prepare a guide to accessible venues around the conference as a way of raising awareness and encouraging local businesses to make improvements.

PA: Do you have any idea why disability studies does not exist in France and other European countries? TB: I challenge the notion that disability studies does not exist in France or Europe, although it may enjoy less visibility in France than it does in the U.S. and in the UK simply because knowledge is organized differently. A relative lack of visibility is due to epistemological differences as well as the predominance of research—writ large— in English. There is a vibrant interest in disability issues and studies in France: in terms of timeline, its development more or less parallels that of disability studies in the U.S. While a good many scholars have been working in French disability studies for decades, it has enjoyed renewed interest since Julia Kristeva’s landmark appeal to then-President Jacques Chirac, Lettre au Président de la République sur les citoyens en situation de handicap (2002) and the 2005 “Loi handicap.” It was around this time that American historian Cathy Kudlick published with Zina Weygand a translation of a memoir, Reflections, by Thérèse-Adèle Husson, a young blind woman living in post- revolutionary France (2002), a manuscript found serendipitously in the Library of the Association Valentin Haüy. There is also the 2007 special issue of Scandinavian Journal in Disability Research dedicated to French Disability Studies: Differences and Similarities; ALTER: a European research group in disability studies, and its journal, European Journal of Disability Research, have been around for quite some time. Consider too the spate of recent French-European films thematizing disability that have garnered international acclaim: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), The Intouchables (2011), and Amour (2012). On the whole, it seems to me that France’s faith in republicanist values has resulted in a rejection of multiculturalism, American-style, that contributes to the invisibility of the field for scholars who are accustomed to navigating knowledge by a logic of affiliation, or so-called “identity politics.” For example, although there is a great deal of research on, and by, women in France, one won’t find a shelf dedicated to women’s studies in France. Moreover, on the whole, one does not imagine that the research is undertaken “for” them. The specificities of disabilities and experiences calls for greater imaginative reach than current paradigms on either side of the Atlantic allow: in the U.S., analogies with the experiences of other minoritized groups consistently fall short, while in France, legislation did not until 2005 allow for the possibility of discrimination on the basis of disability.

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PA: The first sentence of Tom Couser’s 2004 book Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics and Life Writing goes as follows: “This is not a book about bioethics.” What is the difference between bioethics and disability studies? TB: Bioethics is one field within disability studies, and some ethicists take positions that are absolutely antithetical to any stance in disability studies. These fields overlap, they are in dialogue. I offer the captivating encounter of Australian bioethicist, Peter Singer, and author, lawyer, and disability activist Harriet McBryde Johnson (published in the New York Times, 2003). As something of a counterpoint, I offer the work of blind bioethicist, Adrienne Asch. French scholar Stiker also takes up disability and bioethics in his terrific book, Les Métamorphoses du handicap de 1970 à nos jours (2009).

PA: Trauma studies, by contrast, are popular in France. Do you have any idea why they have developed while disability studies have not? TB: I’m not sure my answer—as a seasoned outsider—is adequate to the question, but to me, the experiences of Europeans in the First and Second World Wars—and the many authors and artists who were inspired by them—spurred an interest in trauma studies that may not be as salient in the U.S. because most Americans experienced these events quite differently. European scholarly traditions continue to rely upon psychoanalysis as a useful lens for understanding human actions and interactions. Unfortunately, in my view, an American perspective tends to emphasize self- determination at the expense of lenses that may seem outmoded to many in the U.S. I can think of a few exceptions: the influence of psychoanalysis in the work of scholars like Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, and Sander Gilman is manifest.

PA: What are the links—and differences—between disability studies and trauma studies TB: They are two huge and various fields. Trauma studies and disability studies intersect, but they are not the same. Not everyone who experiences disability experiences trauma; not everyone who is traumatized experiences disability. I refer you on this point to a very interesting article by James Berger, “Trauma without Disability, Disability without Trauma, a Disciplinary Divide” (2004). http:// jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol24.3/berger-trauma.pdf

PA: From what I know, disability studies focus on life writing. Are there specialists in disability studies focusing on fiction? Or does this field of research belong in another category TB: Sure, many people focus on disability in representation, including fiction. Consider the work of Hannah Thompson, a scholar of 19th-century French literature teaching at Royal Holloway in London. In France, the work of Simone Korff-Strauss has greatly impacted my own thinking about the representation of physical difference in literature. It seems to me that the work of Charles Gardou is also quite germane to literature, though the lens he takes up in formulating a collective cultural imaginary is broader. A forthcoming issue of the bilingual journal, Esprit Créateur, guest-edited by Steven Wilson at Queen’s University, Belfast, is dedicated to French Autopathography (summer 2016). Many scholars in the U.S. and the UK likewise study disability in British and American fiction.

PA: Fiction is increasingly concerned with illness, be it mental or physical, and not just as a background phenomenon but as a major dramatic element—think of Jonathan Franzen’s novel, The Corrections, Barry Levinson’s movie, Rain Man, the TV series The Good Wife, Darryl

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Cunningham’s graphic stories, Psychiatric Tales, to name only a few. How do you account for this phenomenon? TB: Twenty years ago, when I approached a graduate professor to let him know that I would be studying disability in one of the novels we had read, he quipped, “I can’t think of any examples of disability in French literature.” Of course, there are hundreds of examples worthy of analysis. I chose to study Hippolyte and the (failed) corrective surgery of his clubfoot as elements that are central to Flaubert’s method and aesthetic in Madame Bovary. My professor, a Flaubert expert of considerable renown, had never noted Hippolyte’s disability, even though the surgery itself is situated in the literal heart of the novel, midway between Homais’ sycophantic triumphalism and Emma’s suicide. This is to say that I don’t think this phenomenon is a particularly new aspect of literature and popular culture—we simply may not notice it as an element worthy of analysis. These examples suggest that an increasing number of people are taking note of its presence and impact on stories… but with varying degrees of ethical or political engagement. I’m a huge fan of The Good Wife and I am always glad to see Hollywood hire actors with disabilities. On the other hand, Michael J. Fox’s character [as formidable lawyer Louis Canning and regular opponent of the leading character] seems to rest on so many clichéd assumptions about people with disabilities. Do viewers understand the self-reflexive irony in his goofy underhanded tactics [to garner the judge and jury’s sympathy for his clients]? I’m not sure.

PA: What do you make of so-called memoirs like Lauren Slater’s Lying. A Metaphorical Memoir (2000), in which the author both asserts and questions that she suffers from epilepsy? In Tom Couser’s 2009 book, Signifying Bodies. Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, he calls Slater’s book “a postmodern memoir.” Isn’t this phrase paradoxical? Does such a narrative belong in the category of disability studies? TB: It seems to me that anyone who holds either authors or bodies to a standard of truth is bound to miss something. Disability studies strives precisely to be non- essentialist in its consideration of embodiment.

PA: America even had a disabled president—F. D. Roosevelt—would that be possible in another country? Or does America stand apart? TB: FDR seems to have done what he could to minimize the visibility of his disability, and of course lived in an era predating media saturation, so it was easier for him to pass as conventionally able-bodied. As a globe-trotteuse, I question narratives of American exceptionalism… yet, as a nation, we may be exceptional because we haven’t elected more of them! Leaders around the world cope with chronic health issues and disabilities, the symptoms of which may or not be as manifest as those of FDR’s polio. His legacy around disability may be amplified by the paradox of his choosing to minimize his own impairment while engaging in highly visible advocacy for others with polio. Your point about underrepresentation is well taken: it’s not the same as garnering broad support among voters, but the Obama Administration has intentionally appointed many people with disabilities to various posts in the federal government and has improved access standards in federal programs in an effort to cultivate leaders with disabilities.

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PA: How do you see the future of disability studies in the US? Is it likely to continue developing? TB: Sure. What’s interesting is how many job sectors are enriched by disability studies perspectives: education, health professions, social work, community outreach and organizing, etc. I think it’s here to stay. On the other hand, given the political climate today in the U.S.—rhetoric is at the moment quite set against any notion of the “common good” or shared, public resources—any interdisciplinary field struggles to maintain recognition and funding, especially in the public university system.

PA: What about disability studies in Europe and other English-speaking countries—do you think disability studies has a future there? TB: In my view, Europe is doing quite well! I have been absolutely bedazzled by the emergence over the past few years of collaborative efforts to make meaning through language difference. In 2012, CIEE organized a 10-day faculty seminar on disability in Paris. There I met many prolific scholars and activists and engaged in dialogue and exchange in four languages: French, English, Langue des Signes française, and British or American Sign language (BSL/ASL). I had a similar experience last November at a conference in Paris: we were active polyglots in our efforts to learn from each other and make meaning. As Quebecois scholar, Alexandre Baril, notes in his forthcoming essay, “Doctor, Am I an Anglophone Trapped in a Francophone Body?” (JLCDS summer 2016), language pluralities add a new dimension to “crip time.” As a language teacher, I feel quite “at home” in the ambiguity and effort of those exchanges. Another example of these kinds of collaborations is the conference spearheaded by a group of scholars working in Blind Studies in France, the U.S. and the UK. Zina Weygand organized its first iteration, Colloque Histoire de la cécité et des aveugles in Paris (2013), and Hannah Thompson, its second, Blind Creations, in London (2015). Cathy Kudlick is slated to organize the third in San Francisco in 2018. It is this kind of collaboration and exchange that will spur new perspectives and greater equity in their representation within transnational, multilingual disability studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Academic resources

ALTER European Journal of Disability Research.

Baril, Alexandre. “Doctor, Am I an Anglophone Trapped in a Francophone Body?” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 10:2 (2016): 155–172. http:// online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/jlcds/10/2

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Berger, James. “Trauma without Disability, Disability without Trauma, a Disciplinary Divide”. In Jac. A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture and Politics 24:3 (2004). http://jaconlinejournal.com/archives/ vol24.3/berger-trauma.pdf

Couser, Tom. Signifying Bodies. Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan P., 2009.

Couser, Tom. Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 2004.

French Disability Studies: Differences and Similarities. In Scandinavian Journal in Disability Research. 9: 3-4 (2007). http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/sjdr20/9/3-4

Kristeva, Julia. Lettre au Président de la République sur les citoyens en situation de handicap. Paris: Fayard, 2002.

McBryde Johnson, Harriet. “The Disability Gulag”, New York Times, November 23, 2003. http:// www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/magazine/the-disability-gulag.html?pagewanted=all

McBryde Johnson, Harriet. “Unspeakable Conversations”, New York Times, February 16, 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html? pagewanted=all

Nielsen, Kim E. A Disability History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques. Corps infirmes et sociétés (1982). A History of Disability, Transl. by William Sayers. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan P., 1999.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques. Les Métamorphoses du handicap de 1970 à nos jours. Grenoble: P. U. de Grenoble, 2009.

Wilson, Steven, ed. French Autopathography. Esprit Créateur 56:2 (summer 2016). https:// muse.jhu.edu/issue/33719

Fiction, Biography and other

Cunningham, Darryl. Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1857.

Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

Husson, Thérèse-Adèle. Reflections: The Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Post-Revolutionary France. Transl. Catherine Kudlick and Zina Weygand. New York: NYU Press, 2002.

Slater, Lauren. Lying. A Metaphorical Memoir. New York: Random House, 2000.

Other authors mentioned: Adrienne Asch, Lennard Davis, Charles Gardou, Sander Gilman, Simone Korff-Strauss, Tobin Siebers, Hannah Thompson.

Film and TV

Haneke, Michael. Amour. Feat. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert et al. 127 mn. (2012).

King, Michelle, and Robert King. The Good Wife. Feat. Julianna Margulies, Chris Noth, Josh Charles et al. Produced by CBS (2009-2016).

Levinson, Barry. Rain Man. Feat. Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise et al. 133mn (1988).

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Nakache, Olivier, and Eric Toledano. The Intouchables (Les intouchables). Feat. François Cluzet, Omar Sy, Anne Le Ny et al. , 112 mn. (2011).

Schnabel, Julian. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon). Feat. Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze et al. 112mn. (2007).

ABSTRACTS

This interview of Tammy Berberi, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, discusses the advent and challenges of disability studies in the United States and in Europe.

Cet entretien avec Tammy Berberi, Associate Professor à l’Université du Minnesota, aborde l’apparition et les défis posés par les études sur le handicap aux États-Unis et en Europe.

INDEX

Keywords: disability studies, trauma studies, fiction, France, history, academia, research Mots-clés: recherche sur le handicap, trauma, fiction, France, histoire, université

AUTHORS

TAMMY BERBERI Dr. Tammy Berberi is an Associate Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Morris, a liberal arts college in rural, western Minnesota, United States. She has engaged in disability advocacy in higher education since she served as the first graduate-student member on the MLA Committee on Disability Issues (1997-2000), and recently served a two-year term as president of the Society for Disability Studies (2012-2014). Along with Elizabeth Hamilton and Ian Sutherland, Berberi co-edited Worlds Apart? Disability and Foreign Language Learning (Yale UP, 2008) and has published a number of articles related to the representation of disability in the poetry of Tristan Corbière. With Christian Flaugh, Berberi also co-edited a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on Disability in French and Francophone Worlds (summer 2016).

PASCALE ANTOLIN Pascale Antolin is Professor at the University of Bordeaux III.

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Varia

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Andrew Wyeth and the Wyeth Tradition, or “the Anxiety of Influence”

Helena Lamouliatte

1 Andrew Wyeth, one of the most famous painters of 20th-century figurative American art, was both vilified by a vast majority of critics, and praised by the American (and Japanese) public. When he died in January 2009, the case was far from being settled. Most of Wyeth’s obituaries underlined the discrepancy between public and critical acclaim. He was described in turn as a master technician, an artistic anachronism, a sentimental or even reactionary artist, mostly because of his depiction of bleak rural scenes.1 Most of the newspaper obituaries also referred to the “Wyeth dynasty” of American painters, in which his father N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), his sisters Henriette (1907-1997) and Carolyn (1909-1994), and his father’s teacher, the famous illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911), were usually included, which further strengthened the impression that he did not belong to the avant-garde. In a recent academic publication, Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, David Cateforis points out that Andrew Wyeth mostly received critical acclaim until the mid-1960s, as a master of magic or poetic realism (viii), but in the second half of the 1960s, many critics turned against him because of his stubborn reliance on what seemed, at that time, an antiquated form of subjective expression (ix).

2 However, two comments hinted at another dimension in Andrew Wyeth’s art. Marina Vaizey stated that: “One of the canniest assessments is that of Robert Rosenblum: Wyeth was ‘at once the most overestimated painter by the public and the most underestimated painter by the knowing art audience [...] a creator of very very haunting images that nobody who hates him can get out of their minds.’”(Vaizey 2009) In the Los Angeles Times, Jamie Wyeth (1946- ), one of his sons, declared: “At one level, it’s all snowy woods and stone walls. At another, it’s terrifying. He exists at both levels. He is a very odd painter.” (Nelson 2009) Cateforis also notes the “dark poetry of Wyeth’s imagery” (5), which has been frequently underlined by reviewers since his first solo exhibitions in the mid-1940s.

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3 Our contention is that the lingering effect of his dismal images stems from a very specific combination of American and European influences, quite unique in American art, inherited in part from his father, N. C. Wyeth, and the illustrator, Howard Pyle. These conflicting attractions exemplify what Harold Bloom called The Anxiety of Influence, which was the title of his 1973 famous book on the subject. Indeed, Bloom’s analysis of the dynamics between tradition and the individual artist in the literary text, can easily be adapted to art history: The profundities of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images. Poetic influence [...] is necessarily the study of the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet. When such study considers the context in which that life-cycle is enacted, it will be compelled to examine simultaneously the relations between poets as cases akin to what Freud called the family romance. (Bloom 8)

4 Since Bloom’s theory is built on the classic Freudian model of father/son relationships, it seems particularly relevant to Wyeth’s case, as this struggle shaped his maturation as an artist. Sean Burke explains that the artist’s “anxiety of influence” is due to “his fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings” (155). Indeed, Wyeth’s images can be seen as an intimate “battlefield of psychodynamic forces” (Loreck 24) on which he tries to overcome past influences (his father’s and Pyle’s) while re/claiming his subjectivity as an artist.

The “Wyeth tradition”

5 Andrew Wyeth is thus often associated with “a dynasty of American artists” (Meyer 15), the Wyeth tradition, or sometimes, The Wyeths, which refers to a specific style of painting, placed under the tutelage of the illustrator of classics, Howard Pyle, who was N. C. Wyeth’s teacher and mentor in the early 20th century. Andrew Wyeth developed a very personal relation with the art of Pyle, which pervades his own art in a subtle and distorted manner, dating back to the days when he learned drawing techniques by copying Pyle’s images (Meryman 1996: 89).

6 In her introduction to the February 1975 special edition of American Artist, entitled “Three Generations of the Wyeth family,”2 Susan E. Meyer writes that there are more differences than similarities among these artists, and that the only things they share in the end is a figurative style of painting and a very intense and emotional attitude towards their art (35). Even though her article does not give any substantiated definition of the Wyeth tradition, it clearly establishes the fact that N. C. Wyeth’s art was strongly indebted to Pyle’s influence, and as a result, it introduces the expression “The Brandywine Tradition.”3 This approach to painting relies on what Meyer calls “corporeal identification” between the artist and his/her subject: “an empathy in which the artist and subject would palpitate with the same life force, would actually become the same” (94). According to David Kunzle, this form of mysticism was extolled by Pyle, who was influenced by the theories of the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg,4 claiming that complete emotional “immersion” in the subject was a necessary step in the creative process (650). Swedenborg’s peculiar philosophy had as strong, but largely forgotten, religious impact in America before the Civil War, and it deeply molded Pyle’s character and psyche.5 Kunzle adds that Pyle’s Swedenborgian streak is demonstrated by his choice of subject-matter: “Such spiritualization and

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idealization is in keeping with the content of Pyle’s drawings, which are largely of romantic medieval, American historical, and pirate subjects” (650). In his book on N. C. Wyeth, Michel Le Bris uses the expression “mental projection” to describe this phenomenon and points out that this form of spiritualization of art echoes the philosophical roots of German romanticism.6

7 Neo-Platonism, British and German romanticism, and the writings of Swedenborg also largely contributed to the birth of Transcendentalism, which was one of the major influences of the Hudson River School painters. N. C. Wyeth was a strong admirer of Henry David Thoreau, whom he called his “worshipped friend” (Michaelis 209), and a keen reader of Walden, according to David Michaelis’s biography (117, 227). Nevertheless, Alexander Nemerov insists on the fact that the Brandywine tradition, whose sole purpose was book illustration, strongly focused on the phantasmagoric quality of romantic imagery (7). This streak can sometimes be found in Thomas Cole’s images, such as The Voyage of Life: Youth (1842), but it was later replaced by a form of mystical rapport to nature in Hudson River School landscapes.

8 From a very early age, Andrew Wyeth studied the paintings of his father and was fascinated by the romantic and adventurous scenes that were depicted.7 He never met Pyle, but studied his works thoroughly, and was attracted to N. C’s extensive collection of costumes and uniforms inherited from Pyle.8 He was also molded by his father’s teaching with its transcendental emphasis on the importance of emotional truth for an artist: “Intensity of feeling was a quality he valued in himself and nurtured in his family: it was the lifeblood of the artists, the prize for being alive” (Meyer 43). As a consequence, Andrew became acutely aware of his feelings and attuned to his sensations. In numerous interviews he depicted the trance-like feeling he experienced when he suddenly found an object, a person, or a view inspiring. But even if he perpetuated the myth of the artist as a romantic character, he clearly departed from the Wyeth tradition of illustration when he matured as an artist, contrary to the contention of a large majority of critics, as Wanda Corn points out: Given the aesthetic hierarchies of post-World War II art criticism, when critics called Wyeth an “illustrator,” it was a dismissive critique. Tagging him an illustrator put the younger Wyeth in the same category as his father, N. C. Wyeth, who was best known for his story-telling canvases made on commission to illustrate classics in literature such as Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. (Corn 2014: 72)

9 The first exhibition officially trying to put forward common features among Andrew, his son James, N. C. and Pyle was entitled The Brandywine Heritage: Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth. It was organized in 1971 by The Brandywine River Museum and focused on what was called in the catalogue their “technical facility,” that is to say their outstanding draftsmanship,9 though the argument may seem thin. The second exhibition, Wondrous Strange—The Wyeth Tradition, at the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1998, focused on subject matter and tried to define the concept of “wondrous strange” as a common element permeating the works of these artists. In the introduction to the catalogue, David Michaelis dwells upon Pyle’s “godlike figure” and iconoclastic teaching method (11), thus molding the Brandywine generation of high- strung and emotional artists prone to melodrama. However, the influence of Pyle on Andrew Wyeth’s work is more complex than these entertaining tales and has far- reaching compositional and technical implications. Michaelis’s foreword gives a broad definition of the concept of “wondrous strange,” using the Greek etymology of the word “fantastic.” The additional texts, written for the catalogue, do not go much

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further in helping us fathom its exact meaning. Susan C. Larsen describes Pyle’s images as “violent, visionary, horrifying, and exotic” (16), and she underlines the artist’s strong taste for romance and adventure. Betsy Wyeth points out N. C. Wyeth’s ability to make fantasy emerge out of reality.10 And Theodore Wolff mentions Andrew Wyeth’s gift for depicting “the wonderful and strange, especially if they can be presented in everyday form and in as straightforward a manner as possible” (91). Although this strategy aiming to pigeonhole Wyeth as an artist deeply rooted in a century-long tradition of American illustrators was highly counterproductive regarding academic and critical reception to his work, it raised awareness about the multifaceted nature of his art.

Pyle’s technique and painterly approach

10 Larsen’s comment on N. C. Wyeth’s stylistic specificities offers more food for thought and can be used as a starting point to help us compare his compositional technique to Pyle’s. The latter perpetuated a “European” style, strongly influenced by the Pre- Raphaelites—whose art was on view close at hand, thanks to a local collector11—as can be seen more particularly in Her head and shoulders hung over the space without (1904) (Fig. 1), or Vitia and the Governor (1909), but also by Symbolism, whose influence is obvious in The Mermaid (1910), for example (Fig. 2).

Figure 1. Howard Pyle, Her head and shoulders hung over the space without (1904)

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 109 (June to November 1904)

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Figure 2. Howard Pyle, The Mermaid. Oil on canvas (1910)

Delaware Art Museum

11 Le Bris goes further and claims that this movement constituted Pyle’s main source of inspiration: “The Pre-Raphaelites were his primary source of inspiration, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Morris, and also Walter Crane and the Arts and Crafts movement, with whom he shared a taste for images inspired by Celtic legends and English folklore” (15, my translation). Moreover, the Pre-Raphaelites’ pictorial motto certainly appealed to Pyle’s philosophy, inherited from the tenets of Transcendentalism: “Instead of the artificial chiaroscuro of the Old Masters, they determined to paint their pictures with complete fidelity to nature, studying each figure from a model, and painting landscape on the spot, out-of-doors” (Wood 10).

12 If we analyze Pyle’s compositional technique more closely, we can clearly notice how his art was indebted to these movements. First of all, the technique by which the sinuous contours of figures are integrated in the overall composition (in I clutched at his ankle (1902), for example) seems to be taken from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca (1877), or The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-7) by Edward Burne-Jones. Then, the addition of diagonal patterns as a structural motif is striking in Then the real fight began (1908) (Fig. 12), or We started to run back to the raft for our lives (1902), when compared to Isabella (1849) by John Everett Millais, or Hésiode et la Muse (1891), by Gustave Moreau. In addition, the frequent use of curves as an alternate structural element, which can be observed in The gigantic monster dragged and hacked the headless corpse of his victim up the staircase (1896) (Fig. 15) or He lost his hold and fell, taking me with him (1909), is a basic compositional pattern of the Pre-Raphaelites—see, for instance, Burne-Jones’ King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884), or The Golden Stairs (1880). To finish, the occasional use of very warm and intense colors, as in An

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Attack on a Galleon (1905) or Marooned (1909), is a common defining trait of both the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolist movements (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Howard Pyle, An Attack on a Galleon. Oil on canvas (1905)

Delaware Art Museum

13 As Pyle’s biographers point out in Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art, his career reflected the dilemma faced by most 19th-century American artists, who were torn between past European influences and the desire to create a truly American art: “[Pyle’s art] also suggests the continuing U.S. cultural reliance on European norms, a dependency that the flagrantly nationalistic Pyle resisted his entire career but capitulated to in the end” (May xi). Jeanne Fox Friedman states that this paradox lies at the root of the Arts and Craft movement,12 from which Pyle borrowed many concepts (Elzea 10). It is undeniable that Pyle’s images were deeply grounded in the political and artistic principles of the 19th century: For just as the term “family values” in today’s American culture encodes a specific political and cultural agenda, so too, the deeper meaning of Pyle’s children’s stories and illustrations addressed in didactic, moral terms the development of a particular form of nineteenth-century medievalism. The style of Pyle’s books promotes the essential equation between timeless medieval virtues and modern morality. (Friedman 78)

N.C. Wyeth and the “American” stylistics

14 It took N. C. Wyeth several years to depart from the European tradition and Pyle’s stifling tutelage in order to create a more “American”13 style, based on “weighted geometries,” “unsettling spatial shifts,” and “unbroken light” (Novak1995: 230-231). After enduring Pyle’s authoritarian teaching methods, N. C., under the ever-growing

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influence of transcendental philosophy,14 felt torn between illustration, which was his bread-and-butter activity, and the higher calling of Art, which demanded a more truthful depiction of Nature: Wyeth’s dissatisfaction with the West and with illustration was thus connected to his disagreements, personal and professional, with Howard Pyle, who had taught him the dramatic techniques that he could no longer view as a “stepping stone” to fine art painting. For Wyeth, only fine art painting could depict the larger truths embodied in nature. (Nemerov 47)

15 N. C. never resolved this conundrum, since illustration was necessary to sustain his family’s expensive lifestyle, and he had to put fine arts aside—a decision which infuriated Andrew.15 However, throughout his career, N. C. Wyeth’s pictorial style remained shackled to the visual constraints of illustration,16 despite a progressive shift to a more personal technique and choice of subject matter that can be called his “American side.”

16 If we observe N. C.’s early work more closely, Pyle’s main stylistic features can be found in most Western subjects.17 We can see the same sinuous contours, warm colors, diagonal or curved patterns, and crisscross strokes of paint in Rounding Up (1904), Cutting Out (1904-1905) or Bucking (1905), for instance (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. N. C. Wyeth, Rounding Up. Oil on canvas (1904)

Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming, the-athenaeum.org

17 However, N. C.’s style evolved rapidly, and as early as 1907, we can notice a radical stylistic change in The Ore Wagon (1907), for example (Fig. 5). He started to experiment with a horizontal format, the contours became sharper—figures suddenly stood out against a flat curtain-like background—and he used a softer pastel color palette, even dark and ochre shades for night scenes.

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Figure 5. N. C. Wyeth, The Ore Wagon. Oil on canvas (1907)

Source: westernartandarchitecture.com

18 This new compositional technique can be found in The Pay Stage (1906), The Little Posse/ Trail Riders (1907), Summer (1909), and The Magic Pool (1906), and brings back to mind Novak’s definition of the American stylistic topos, encompassing the weight of compositions,18 the geometry of spatial structure, sculpted by the strong contrast between light and shade, the stiffness of figures,19 and the visible succession of parallel planes within the image.

19 Yet, throughout his career, N. C. Wyeth carefully selected each of the various stylistic options mentioned above, so as to make his images match the narratives he was supposed to illustrate, thus maximizing the need for efficiency required by his craft. In his illustrations of Treasure Island in 1911, he chose a very limited color palette, and dramatic Rembrandt-like light effects, as in The Black Spot (Fig. 6).

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Figure 6. N. C. Wyeth, The Black Spot

Illustration for Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1911). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Spot_(Treasure_Island)#/media/File:TI-BlackSpot.jpg

20 Then, he switched to a Pre-Raphaelite style, with bright and clashing colors for the Robin Hood series in 1917. And finally, for The Last of the Mohicans in 1919, we notice that he alternated different styles: American classicism in The Flight Across the Lake, stylized sharp shapes for the endpaper of the book (Fig. 8), and an unusual combination of luminism and Italian classicism in The Battle at Glenn’s Fall.

21 We note, however, that N. C. departed from Pyle’s 19th-century moral concerns to focus on the construction of American popular myths instead, as Nemerov explains: Wyeth theatrically transformed the cowboy into a rope-tossing David20 to express his own kind of realism—a realism based less on appearances than essences. Ignoring the squalor of Stuart’s ranch and depicting the cowboy as a mythical hero, Wyeth established the cowboy in his true or ‘essential’ position even while divesting him of the grimy particulars of his time and place. (Nemerov 41)

22 Despite N. C. Wyeth’s attempt at crafting a more American style of illustration, we could conclude by saying that form was irremediably subjected to narrative in his art, and he never truly achieved his objective. As Eric Rosenberg puts it: “We know nothing from the picture without the story; the visuals depend on written narrative to caption the image. More even than caption, writing must fill in every hole that stands as sign in the painting” (31). This is certainly the main argument that can be used to oppose his art to his son’s. The “signs” in Andrew Wyeth’s paintings do not connect with writing.

23 Nevertheless, it is an indisputable fact that the son borrowed a few compositional and stylistic techniques from the father.21 Nemerov analyzes a recurring feature in N. C. Wyeth’s work, which can be noticed in many of his images, despite his use of different styles: the use of a flat backdrop, suggesting a stage on which action is taking place. He

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analyses it more specifically in a painting called Gunfight (1916) (Fig. 7): “But the scene more literally evokes the theater—specifically the stage—by way of the flat backdrop, the wooden floor on which the figures stand, and the shallow space that condenses the action at the very front of the picture plane. Such stage-like spaces appear in many Wyeth illustrations” (37).

Figure 7. N. C. Wyeth, Gunfight. Oil on canvas (1916)

Denver Art Museum

24 This theatrical effect is used in numerous interior scenes, such as Wild Bill Hickok at Cards (1916), where it is emphasized by the word “stage” printed on a sign pinned to the wall, or in A Little Game of Draw (1914) where a painting on the wall is used as a mise en abyme, and like a window without a view, it seems to open up the picture space and close it simultaneously (43-44). Nemerov finds a similar technique in exterior scenes like in Fight on the Plains (1916), for example. This time, the flat blue sky is used as a backdrop and helps focus the viewer’s attention on the crouching figures. We could refer to numerous other examples like The Torrent in the Valley of Glencoe (1913) and The Death of Finnward Keelfarer (1914) in which the natural background setting is blurred so that the figures at the front of the image seem to jut out. To finish, the endpaper of The Last of the Mohicans (Fig. 8) also shows N. C.’s utter mastery of this technique, with a yellow background cut midway by a canoe dividing the picture plane into two areas, sky and water, into which the shapes of the warriors in the upper half, and their projected shadows in the lower half, seem carefully chiseled. Furthermore, the trees in the foreground, cutting vertical stripes on the picture plane, and isolating the figures into parallel rectangles, create an even more elaborate frame-within-a- frame effect.

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Figure 8. N. C. Wyeth, endpaper illustration of The Last of the Mohicans. Oil on canvas (1919)

Brandywine River Museum of Art

25 This specific treatment of background space, which cuts out the figures in a slightly “unrealistic” way, by emphasizing contours, will become seminal in Andrew’s art. He even took his father’s “backdrop effect” a step further, since it became a standard compositional effect in his art. In Andrew’s art, two recurrent motifs, echoing his father’s artifice, can be found: the sky as blank space,22 and the desiccated hillside motif.23 Both strategies have a similar impact on the picture plane. They compress perspective by blocking the viewer’s gaze. This creates a visual impression of entrapment, even more so, since the hillside motif is often associated with an isolated figure, as is the case in Winter (1946), Christina’s World (1948), or April Wind (1952).

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Figure 9. Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World. Tempera on panel (1948)

Museum of Modern Art, New York, moma.org

26 As said earlier, Andrew borrowed from his father numerous other skills and painterly effects that could be deemed his “American side,” since he studied his father’s paintings from quite an early age. He often resorted to dramatic contrasts between light and shade, particularly in his early works—The Woodshed (1944), Mother Archie’s Church (1945), Christina Olson (1947), Brown Swiss (1957), Young Bull (1960). He also developed the same taste as his father for twilight or night scenes—for example, in Night Hauling (1944) (Fig. 10), Two If by Sea (1995), Night Shadow (1978), or Night Sleeper (1979).

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Figure 10. Andrew Wyeth. Night Hauling. Tempera on masonite (1944)

Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick ME, http://artmuseum.bowdoin.edu/Obj9585? sid=27317&x=3894.

27 He frequently used the “theme of frozen movement” (Nemerov 51), of which Christina’s World is certainly the most famous example (Fig. 9).24 Lastly, Andrew borrowed the cropped format that N. C. used, for instance, in the endpaper illustration for The Last of the Mohicans (Fig. 8). This feature was essential to N. C.’s illustration technique, since it helped emphasize the depiction of action (like a photograph taken on the spot).

28 Yet, Andrew modified the cropped format to adapt it to his horizontal compositions, and it became one of the trademarks of his most famous images. The desiccated hillside motif acquired a very personal meaning in his art, since he declared twice that it was a representation of his father. He said to Richard Meryman, his biographer: “The hill [...] seemed to be breathing—rising and falling—almost as though it was my father’s chest” (19968 231). And Anne Classen Knutson quotes Andrew in the exhibition catalogue of the 2005 Memory and Magic exhibition: “Over on the other side of that hill was where my father was killed, and I was sick I’d never painted him. The hill finally became a portrait of him” (58). The recurrent motif, which was a metaphor for his father, recalls Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” with its concept of “family romance.” (8, 62) Christof Loreck interprets it in a way which is particularly relevant to Wyeth’s case: “The poet needs to free himself from the overpowering influence of his precursor in order to write an innovative kind of poetry which would guarantee his place in history” (24). In Wyeth’s images, the representation of his father has a double function: it helps him through his mourning process, but also states the fact that he has ousted his painter-father.25 This emotionally charged relationship was mentioned in Jerry Saltz’s obituary, in which he defined Andrew as: “a son with something to prove” (2009).

29 But if we look closely at the respective works of the members of the Wyeth tradition, the most striking feature remains their profound dissimilarities.26 Far from the image of a naïve folk artist, it seems that Andrew Wyeth carefully honed a highly personal and elaborate style, synthesizing various influences, among which were the few stylistic elements mentioned above, borrowed from his father, that he combined with some of

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Pyle’s painterly and compositional effects. The fact that Andrew was often described as an outstanding technician27 is worth mentioning. This ability stemmed from his father’s classical fine art teaching methods. It was also strengthened by Andrew’s fascination with Albrecht Dürer, which he developed from a very early age. The old European master’s influence pervades every aspect of his art and is manifest in Wyeth’s unrelenting interest in Pyle’s works.28 Dürer’s and Pyle’s influences constitute what we could call Wyeth’s “European side.” Throughout his career, he never strayed from a very accurate drawing technique, paying attention to every detail, and delineating sharp contours. Richard Lacayo (2009) describes it as: “a flinty, granular realism […] with the kind of brushwork that specified the world in almost molecular detail,” which could be opposed to his father’s rather more Impressionist and retinal process of representation. Michael McNay wrote an excellent description of Andrew’s specific form of realism: [Andrew Wyeth] worked in a tradition that might be called American isolationism, and that stretched back to the mid-19th century. It operated quite outside the Impressionist exploration of retinal impressions and the avant-garde movements that followed, and instead rendered appearances with a hyper-realist fidelity impossible in nature, but which gives a heightened sense of the moment and the place depicted. (McNay 2009)

30 We could object to McNay that some European artists, the Symbolists and the Surrealists, to name but a few, refused the “Impressionist exploration,” and remained faithful to the technique of “augmented realism” that Wyeth perpetuated in the United States, along with the Precisionists, and more recently the Photorealists. Nevertheless, Wyeth’s relentless exploration of figurative art and techniques, in spite of the overwhelming presence of abstraction after the Second World War, impacted his critical reception to such an extent that Wanda Corn recently coined this phenomenon “the Wyeth curse” (60). Eric Rosenberg reminds us of the persistence of Romanticism and romantic tropes well into pre-1945 American culture29 which served “as a foil to the disconcerting uncertainties of the modern and its forms of representation and aesthetic” (27). Wyeth’s choice of rural subjects, which conveyed “poetic meaning,” “nostalgic realism,” or even “poetic or symbolic qualities” according to various critics (Cateforis 5-6) was viewed as a clear rejection of modernism.30 David Cateforis also underlines the fact that the 1960s were a turning point because of the rejection of “subjective expression of the kind pursued by both Wyeth and the abstract expressionists” (ix) by pop art and minimalism. Indeed, in 1960s American culture, realism as an art form was progressively equated with political conservatism31 and considered as a backward trend. Sharon Monteith explains how, at the end of the 1950s, minimalism, with artists such as Frank Stella, started to decry painting as illusion (123), and then, in the 1960s, Andy Warhol’s “commercial realism” questioned the material of production itself (37). At that time, Wyeth’s “old-fashioned” way of figuring mimesis and deadpan form of realism, which questioned neither figuration nor the commodification of art, became an easy target.

Andrew Wyeth and the figure of Howard Pyle

31 Nemerov quotes an interview of Wyeth in which the latter talks about Pyle’s influence on his work, and comments on the specific aspects of the illustrator’s art that particularly caught his eye. Andrew was struck by Pyle’s ability to convey the “essence”

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of a scene, and his optimal use of technical effects, which made him focus on one of its most significant aspects, rather than clutter the image with an overabundance of distracting details.32 As a result, Wyeth often used a similar technique, which could be described as “shifting the focal point.” This made him choose an unexpected angle, an unconventional format, or a surprising rendering of classic subject matter, in order to strengthen the expressiveness, or complexity, of a scene. This is the reason why many of his images have a defamiliarizing quality, despite their seemingly simple subjects.

32 A more specific analysis of The Quaker (1975) will help us illustrate this point (Fig. 11), since it shows a perfect example of Wyeth’s personal use of Pyle’s technique.

Figure 11. Andrew Wyeth, The Quaker. Collotype (1975)

Source : https://missfolly.tumblr.com/post/8940445549/andrew-wyeth-the-quaker-1976

33 The painting represents a wall section, showing, on the left, a snowy landscape through an open window, and on the right, the left part of a fireplace, from which two costumes are hanging.33 We can see the back of a Quaker frock coat, and the front of an elegant and expensive-looking “fop’s coat” (Wyeth 103). The opulence of the morning coat, with its fine green, blue and red stripes on a golden background, matching buttons, and pale pink lining, shimmering in a beam of light coming from the right-hand side of the picture,34 stands in sharp contrast with the plainness of the Quaker coat, and the bare shadowy surroundings (sanded floor, wooden window frame, walls painted in olive green, carved wood and brick fireplace).

34 Although the focal point of the image is the Quaker coat, the viewer’s gaze is attracted by the open window, on the left, and by the garment standing in full light, on the right. In this image, Wyeth twists Pyle’s technique, since the multiplication of focal points makes it difficult to establish clearly on which part of the picture the viewer’s eyes and attention should focus. He thus de-hierarchizes the picture plane, and renders

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interpretation more complicated, which contrasts with Pyle’s strong focus on “the essence” of a scene. Wyeth, for his part, seems to favor an aggregate of essences.

35 The window does not offer a pleasant and warm counterpoint to the rarefied atmosphere of the room, since it opens onto a barren landscape. Leafless and spidery branches bar the foreground view, and we notice a grid of tangled naked branches, in the background. The yellow grass is covered with patches of snow. The scene is bathed in a cold winter light, sharpening contours and contrast, which is opposed to the darkness of the hearth, gaping at the viewer, like an ominous black hole. The stylistic tribute to Pyle is obvious. However, Wyeth did not choose a quiet scene, like his memory of the Quaker anecdote, and evoked the illustrator’s darker side, which enabled him to convey drama, without resorting to heavy-handed effects. One could illustrate Pyle’s mastery in this field by mentioning, for instance, the hands holding a gun, which jut out of a trapdoor, leading to the hold in Then the real fight began (Fig. 12).

Figure 12. Howard Pyle, Then the Real Fight Began (1908)

Illustration for Captain Scarfield (1921). Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main, Harper and Brothers, Plate facing p. 200, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Pg_200_-_Then_the_Real_Fight_Began_(color).jpg. Book accessible here: http://www.archive.org/ details/howardpylesbooko00pyle

36 There is also the door slightly opened and revealing a terrified figure, who echoes the viewer’s fear as he/she beholds The gigantic monster dragged and hacked the headless corpse of his victim up the staircase (Fig. 15). To finish, we could also mention a gaping door, the black rectangle, right in the middle of Catherine Duke quickened her steps (1904), situated next to the heroine’s face and allowing the viewer’s imagination free reign (Fig. 13).

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Figure 13. Howard Pyle, Catherine Duke quickened her steps

Illustrating Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s story “The Gold”. Harper’s Monthly Magazine (December 1904)

37 However, as far as Wyeth’s art is concerned, the technical device is not an efficient narrative trick, used to maximize or prolong the impact of the tale. The window on the left in The Quaker does not offer any interpretive clues, it merely enhances the pervading ominous feeling. The shadow on the floor is the plain reflection of the frame; there is no hint of upcoming drama. The exhibition of old clothes, which belonged to Pyle, may be a subtle and melancholy way of portraying the illustrator, and his taste for theatricality—something which Wyeth himself shared. Yet, the staging of the scene, the bare but intricate composition, show that Wyeth has been able to distance himself from the swashbuckling tales favored by Pyle to create his own specific atmosphere. Thus, in this sort of double portrait, the Quaker coat stands for Wyeth, while the fop’s coat symbolizes Pyle, although they seem to represent the two sides of the same coin or the two opposite poles to which Wyeth is attracted as an artist.

38 The second element borrowed by Wyeth is the meticulous rendering of architectural textures. There are too many examples in his works since it was a quintessential part of his art, but we could mention two exemplary images, in which there is a complete focus on this aspect, such as Weatherside (1965) and Cooling Shed (1953) (Fig. 14).

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Figure 14. Andrew Wyeth, Cooling Shed. Tempera on panel (1953)

Philadelphia Museum of Art

39 In Pyle’s images, architectural parts often constitute minute details, although the painstaking attention that he devoted to them shows the extent of his technical abilities. We could mention the stone house and wall, in Catherine Duke quickened her steps (Fig. 13), the stone wall of the house, and the wooden window frame in Her head and shoulders hung over the space without (Fig. 1). The door, woodwork, wooden staircase, and the walls in The gigantic monster dragged and hacked the headless corpse of his victim up the staircase are also perfect examples of Pyle’s craft (Fig. 15).

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Figure 15. Howard Pyle, The gigantic monster dragged and hacked the headless corpse of his victim up the staircase

In Ole Virginia by Thomas Nelson Page (1896), 1st-art-gallery.com

40 Yet, what seemed to be mere details, subordinated to an overarching narrative strategy, become in Wyeth’s art a systematic pattern, and a pictorial technique, verging on Precisionism. Moreover, architectural elements sometimes invade the whole picture plane and are treated as autonomous subject matters—for instance in Cooling Shed (1953) (Fig. 14), Brown Swiss (1957), Hay Ledge (1957), or Groundhog Day (1959).

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Figure 16. Andrew Wyeth, Groundhog Day. Tempera on panel (1959)

Philadelphia Museum of Art

41 These pictures reveal a strong affinity with Gothic tropes, revolving more specifically around the depictions of the Olson and Kuerner farms (though a similar pattern can be found with other buildings that were repeatedly painted by Wyeth, like Mother Archie’s Church, the Winfields’ house, or The Mill35). In a chapter of his book devoted to the study of Gothic fiction, aptly entitled “Abodes and architectural issues” (“Demeures et problèmes d’architecture”), Maurice Lévy stresses that the architectural component is an essential prerequisite for Gothic fiction.36 This rule might be applied to Wyeth’s art, since its Gothic penchant is manifest in the way the Olson and Kuerner farms became tantamount to a writer’s fictional settings.37

42 Just like the memory of his father was turned into a recurring motif, Wyeth’s fascination with Pyle reached an intimate form of symbolism that he used on several occasions to question the figure of the artist and his “painter-function,” to use Michel Foucault’s concept. Three of Wyeth’s self-portraits—Trodden Weed (1951), Dr. Syn (1981) and Break-up (1994)—betray an underlying reference to Pyle, and depict a haunted vision of himself, as a man, and as an artist.

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Figure 17. Andrew Wyeth, Trodden Weed. Tempera (1951)

The Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection

43 Trodden Weed is a very special painting in Andrew’s career (Fig. 17). In 1950, the artist had to undergo surgery, and during the operation, his heart stopped beating. He later recounted that while he was floating off, in a trance-like state, he had a vision: “He saw in the blackness a medieval figure, handsome, almost princely in his furs, moving toward him across the tile hospital floor. It was Dürer, who held out his hand to his disciple. Wyeth started forward; then pulled back. The figure withdrew” (Meryman 1996 284). The dream was certainly influenced by Wyeth’s reading at that time—his wife had just offered him a biography of the artist that he took to the hospital (Ibid). However, it had such a lasting effect on him that he pictured himself in a painting, wearing boots that had belonged to Pyle, and that he actually wore to take long, invigorating walks during his recovery period.

44 Apart from the anecdotal narrative, it is interesting to see how Wyeth merged two tutelary figures, Pyle as an intimate reference, and Dürer, the old European master, to create one of his most famous images. Several aspects of Dürer’s technique can be found in Trodden Weed. Sharp contours outline the shape of the figure, which stands out on the background (there is no chiaroscuro effect). Wyeth focuses on the depiction of textures—leather, fabric, and dry grass have replaced silk, fur, and the myriad wisps of curly hair. The booted feet stride across a hill, covered in dried yellowy grass (one of Wyeth’s famous motifs, as we have seen earlier). The destructive gesture is symbolized by a horizontal black line, picturing a blade of grass crushed by one of the boots. The headless character, moving along and wearing old-fashioned knee-length boots, might stand for the relentless march of Thanatos. As far as the artist is concerned, it could be death itself, coming to get him in the guise of one of his favorite masters.38 These boots could also stand for Pyle’s ghost striding across the Pennsylvanian hills and bringing

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back the memory of his legacy. They might represent Wyeth himself, as an artist haunted by old masters. In Trodden Weed, Wyeth depicted himself as rising from the dead, his steps guided by the secular figure of Pyle—and not by God. Using the metaphor of the boots, he reclaims his “artist-function,” showing that he has recovered his creative power by symbolically stamping the ground, so as to regain possession of “his” hill, one of his favorite motifs and also a metaphor for his father, as seen earlier. This strategy brings back to mind Jacques Derrida’s words about Van Gogh’s shoes (a text in which he criticizes Heidegger’s denial of the artist’s presence in the work of art): What Heidegger allegedly neglected, ignored (“overlooked”), is the “personal” and “physionogmic” aspect of these shoes […] here [Van Gogh] shows the shoes face-on, coming toward us, looking at the spectator (“as if facing us”), staring at us, a staring or stared-at face, with individual traits, wrinkles, a “veridical portrait of aging shoes.” […] The reattachment is so tight (absolute) that […] they are Vincent Van Gogh from top to toe. To shoe equals to be: you should restitute the full consequence of that. (Derrida 370)

45 The overpowering desire of possessing the object, which is usually associated with the creative drive, is pictured in its utmost ambiguity in Van Gogh’s and Wyeth’s paintings. Michel de M’Uzan coined the concept of “narcissistic expansion” (141) to describe this psychological urge.

46 Beyond the metaphor of the artist, or a tribute to one’s elders, Derrida sees in Van Gogh’s shoes a way of “figuring painting” (“figurer la peinture”). This metaphor could easily be used for Trodden Weed, which might then represent Wyeth’s own self-portait- cum-manifesto: — [...] the shoes are there in painting, they are there for (figuring, representing, remarking, de-picting?) painting at work. [...] — painting at work, like the painter in action, like pictorial production in its process? (Derrida 372)

47 Dr. Syn is another enigmatic self-portrait, staging more specifically the scopic drive this time (Fig. 18). Wyeth admitted that this strange painting was a self-portrait39 and he painted it in the aftermath of another surgical episode.

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Figure 18. Andrew Wyeth, Dr. Syn. Tempera on panel (1981)

The Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection

48 He depicted himself as a skeleton, wearing a military fitted coat belonging to Pyle, and velvet slippers, sitting on a stool in the top room of a lighthouse, and looking in the distance. On the right, a cannon is pointing towards the ocean through an opening in the wall. Wyeth gave some interesting information about Dr. Syn; he didn’t use a random skeleton as a model but an x-rayed image of his own.40 He even went so far as to represent the different and numerous parts of his skeleton, even the ones hidden underneath the clothes.41 Michael Taylor contends that Wyeth was inspired by Symbolist painter James Ensor—an artist who often used the skeleton motif, as in La Mort et les Masques (1897) or Squelettes se disputant un hareng saur (1891)—or by the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (see for example La Vénus Endormie, 1944). Yet, these works rather belong to the more general category of the “danses macabres” (or “dance of death”). Indeed, the skeleton motif was used differently by the Symbolists and the Surrealists. In Wyeth’s image, the introspective pose, and implicit reference to the artist himself, evoke the memento mori tradition, a sub-category of vanitas paintings. According to Ingvar Bergstrom, the genre of vanitas painting requires the presence of three specific categories of objects: symbols of terrestrial life,42 symbols of the transience of things and/or death,43 and references to an afterlife or resurrection.44

49 Wyeth’s self-portrait combines elements from the first two categories (a skeleton, a military jacket—a symbolical armor—and a cannon), which place his work within a European tradition. Indeed, memento mori are quite rare in American art, and William Harnett was one of the few to use the genre.45 Thus, Wyeth combined various sources in Dr. Syn: architectural details, such as the marble tiled floor, which seem to belong to a Dutch painting; motifs borrowed from European art history, like the Symbolist movement; and both European and American references in terms of subject matter, the

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tradition of vanitas paintings, through the skeleton and other symbols standing for the painter’s mortal condition, and the transient nature of his art. The fact that Wyeth used, once again, clothes that used to belong to Pyle, might indicate his need to ponder on old masters’ legacy, as if he was taking stock of his place in American and Western art. The observation platform, the cannon and the reflective pose of the skeleton represent the scopic drive, a subject that Wyeth began to explore in The Revenant (1949). Wyeth comments on the artist’s deadly desire to absorb reality in its minutest details, even though, this wish is doomed to failure. The act of seeing is pictured as a weapon: the artist watches and destroys reality at the same time.

50 The title is also interesting (beyond the obvious homophony with the word “sin”) since it is taken from the adventure novel by Russell Thorndike, published in 1915, in which the main character, the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn—a former pirate known as Captain Clegg—leads a double life, and also goes by the name of Scarecrow, as the head of a fierce gang, The Night Riders (Taylor 40). The title of the painting is a further reference to Pyle and to illustration, but mostly alludes to duplicity and guilt, which strengthens the reflexive power of the memento mori: faced with impending death, a man solemnly reflects upon his life and his mistakes. The reflection upon the function and obsessions of the artist is coupled with a moral questioning, which ties the image to the ancient codes of the vanitas genre, based on an internal duality, as Norman Bryson said: “The interest of vanitas pieces may in fact lie in their fully self-conscious acceptance of their ‘internal flaw.’ The genre changes at once if we begin with the hypothesis that the vanitas is deliberately built on paradox, and that the conflict between world-rejection and worldly ensnarement is in fact its governing principle” (116-117).

51 Our last example is Breakup (1994), which belongs to the category of the “covert self- portrait,” since, without additional information, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the image (Fig. 19). Contrary to the other examples, this painting does not contain any obvious reference to Pyle, except the depiction of a dramatic and macabre scene that the latter particularly enjoyed, as shown earlier.

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Figure 19. Andrew Wyeth, Breakup. Tempera on panel (1994)

Private collection, Source: https://theartstack.com/artist/andrew-wyeth/breakup-2.

52 Wyeth painted a bronze sculpture of his hands, surfacing out of an ice block, floating on the thawing Brandywine River (Knutson 54). The hands are in the foreground of the picture, leaving fingerprints in the snow, which suggests movement. In the middle of the picture, we can see water, and blocks of ice, breaking loose, because of thawing. In the background, we notice a yellowish field with patches of snow; and in the distance, a forest and a small stripe of grey sky. Breakup exudes a cold and bleak atmosphere, despite the hopeful title. The image might allude to Pyle’s painting, Then the real fight began (1908), in which a man’s hands, one of them holding a gun, spring from a hatchway, so as to shoot pirates (Fig. 12). However, the effect produced by Wyeth’s scene is quite striking, and mildly horrific, contrary to Pyle’s dramatic depiction of an assault. Wyeth, who generally avoided the genre of self-portrait, once more used an oblique way and the reference to a genre—the fantastic—to portray himself in this picture. He reduced his body to mere limbs, but, quite symbolically, chose his hands which seem to be animated by an urge to move (or, more specifically, to paint) and function without any bodily attachment. One could conveniently adapt to Wyeth’s painting an allegory used for writers by Maurice Blanchot who spoke of “persecutory prehension” for writers plagued with a “sick hand.” “The ‘sick’ hand that never lets the pencil go, that cannot let it go, because it does not really hold what it is holding; because what it holds belongs to shadow, and the hand itself is a shadow” (67-68). The description of the creative impulse, as pictured by Wyeth, is once again ambivalent. The thawing process hints at rebirth, and art is shown as a primeval drive capable of overcoming elemental powers; while the pervading gloom, and the block of ice clamping the hands like a vise, may also evoke the artist’s inner suffering and battle against an uncontrollable, but vital, urge. Despite the creative process, it seems that the artist cannot suppress a latent feeling of guilt and anguish, inherent to the act of painting. Wyeth’s transcendentalist fantasy of becoming Emerson’s “transparent

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eyeball”46 has often been quoted in his interviews: “I wish I could paint without me existing […] When I’m alone in the woods […] I forget all about myself, I don’t exist. […] But if I’m suddenly reminded of myself, that I’m me—then everything falls to pieces” (Meryman 1965: 114). Wyeth’s self-portraits show the remaining pieces of an artist, overburdened with obsessions and suffering. These self-portraits, in which the artist depicts mostly body parts or his skeleton, further demonstrate that a deep Gothic undercurrent exists in his art, as defined by Robert Miles: “The Gothic is a discursive site, a carnivalesque mode for representations of the ‘fragmented subject’” (4). Furthermore, in each of these paintings, Wyeth either resorts to Pyle’s imagery, or includes overt references to the illustrator, thus betraying both admiration and anguish towards the illustrator’s tutelage. Howard Pyle is another “aesthetic patriarch” (Burke 154) whose influence the younger artist must overcome.

Conclusion

53 Analyzing Wyeth’s stylistic influences has allowed us to grasp the complexity of his art on both thematic and compositional levels, despite disparaging criticism. This article aims at offering a more coherent understanding of the emergence of Andrew Wyeth’s compositional style and technique, as well as an aesthetic background for some of his well-known motifs. In the end, he borrowed fewer elements from his father’s art than from Howard Pyle’s, although the cropped horizontal format and the “backdrop effect” can be considered seminal structural elements of his work. And even though Pyle’s influence on Wyeth’s art is certainly stronger than what could initially be expected, it was transposed in a minor key, suffusing Wyeth’s images, but stripped from the most glaring tricks pertaining to the illustrative function of Pyle’s paintings. Reading Wyeth’s paintings in the light of Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence” may help us grasp the “haunting” quality of Wyeth’s images mentioned by Robert Rosenblum in our introduction. Wyeth was torn between the influence of his elders, his complex relationship with his father, and the construction of his own artistic subjectivity. This emphasis on the subjective side of art is certainly what may help define him as a modern painter. Donald Kuspit aptly sums up the paradoxical nature of Wyeth’s art: “reliance on tradition—both as a model for the insightful rendering of human experience and as a source of technique—is his way of dealing with modern anxiety” (182).

54 Wyeth’s self-portraits, and their numerous references to Pyle, allowed us to show that the dark side of Wyeth’s work goes beyond the generally accepted historical justification,47 and has more subjective associations for the artist than the postwar generation’s malaise. Wyeth’s images picture the intrinsic duality of life by defamiliarizing the everyday reality, according to the process described by Viktor Shklovsky in Art as Technique: The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (Shklovsky 12)

55 This strategy is combined with a subdued Gothic modus operandi, stemming from his own reading of Pyle’s works, sharing a few traits with the original canon, but re-

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configured through the prism of the artist’s obsessions. Maurice Lévy proposes an all- encompassing definition of the genre, which aptly defines the mood pervading Wyeth’s art: “The same Gothic reality which is also life, seen in the light of this other thing lurking within” (xxvi), which corresponds to the “shift from realism to the imaginary”48 (8) that is often noticed in his paintings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artists’ monographs and biographies

Knutson, Anne Classen. “Andrew Wyeth’s Language of Things.” In Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Ed. Anne Classen Knutson. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York: Rizzoli, 2005. 45-83.

Larsen, Susan C. “Introduction.” Wondrous Strange—The Wyeth Tradition. Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1998. Rockland: Farnsworth Art Museum, 1998: 15-23.

Le Bris, Michel. N. C. Wyeth, L’esprit d’aventure. Paris: Editions Hoëbeke, 2008.

McLanathan, Richard. The Brandywine Heritage: Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth. Exhibition catalog. Chadds Ford: Brandywine River Museum, 1971.

Meryman, Richard. Andrew Wyeth, A Secret Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.

Meyer, Susan. “Three Generations of the Wyeth Family.” American Artist—Special Issue 39 (Feb. 1975): 35-119.

Michaelis, David. N. C. Wyeth: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Taylor, Michael R. “Between Realism and Surrealism: The Early Work of Andrew Wyeth.” Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Ed. Anne Classen Knutson. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York: Rizzoli, 2005. 27-43.

The Wyeths, Three Generations of American Art, Bank of America Merrill Lynch collection. Paris: Mona Bismarck Foundation, 2011.

Wolff, Theodore F. “Andrew Wyeth”. Wondrous Strange – The Wyeth Tradition. Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1998. Rockland: Farnsworth Art Museum, 1998.

Wood, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.

Wyeth, Andrew and Hoving, Thomas. Andrew Wyeth, Autobiography. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1995.

Newspaper articles

Allen, Henry and Bart Barnes. “An Unmistakable Figure on the Barren Landscape.” The Washington Post, January 17, 2009. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2009/01/16/AR2009011601420.html

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Feeney, Mark. “American Artist Andrew Wyeth dies.” Boston Globe, January 16, 2009. http:// archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/01/16/ american_artist_andrew_wyeth_dies_at_age_91/?page=full

Lacayo, Richard. “Andrew Wyeth’s Problematic Legacy.” Time, January 17, 2009.

Landi, Ann. “Wyeth’s World”. ARTnews 108. 3 (March 2009): 48.

McNay, Michael. “Andrew Wyeth.” The Guardian, January 19, 2009. https://www.guardian.co.uk/ artanddesign/2009/jan/19/andrew-wyeth-obituary

Meyer, Susan E. “Special Issue. Three generations of the Wyeth Family.” American Artist 39 (February 1975): 35-119.

Meryman, Richard. “Andrew Wyeth.” Life 58 (May 14, 1965): 92-116, 121-122.

Nelson, Valerie J., and Oliver, Myrna. “U.S. artist Andrew Wyeth dies at 91.” The Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2009. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jan-17-me-wyeth17- story.html

Rohter, Larry. “For Wyeth, Both Praise and Doubt”. The New York Times, January 17, 2009. https:// www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17deba.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Saltz, Jerry. “Andrew Wyeth: A Particular Kind of American.” Vulture, January 16, 2009. https:// www.vulture.com/2009/01/saltz_andrew_wyeth_a_particula.html

Schaire, Jeffrey. “The Unknown Andrew Wyeth.” Art & Antiques (U.K.) (September 1985): 46-57.

Vaizey, Marina. “Andrew Wyeth: Painter Who Enjoyed Huge Commercial Success But Was Dismissed by the Majority of Critics.” The Independent, January 19, 2009. https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/andrew-wyeth-painter-who-enjoyed-huge- commercial-success-but-was-dismissed-by-the-majority-of-1419305.html

Academic publications

Bergstrom, Ingvar. Dutch Still-Life Painting of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Yoseloff, 1956.

Blanchot, Maurice. “The Essential Solitude.” The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1981.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion Books, 1990.

Burke, Sean. Authorship–From Plato to the Postmodern–A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995.

Cateforis, David, ed. “Introduction.” In Rethinking Andrew Wyeth. Ed. David Cateforis. Berkeley: U. of California P.,.

Corn, Wanda. Andrew Wyeth: the Man, his Art, and his Audience—Volumes I and II. Diss. New York University, 1974. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1993. AAT 76-21,335.

Corn, Wanda. “Lifting the curse.” In Rethinking Andrew Wyeth. Ed. David Cateforis. Berkeley: U. of California P., 2014: 60-85.

De M’Uzan, Michel. Aux confins de l’identité. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Bennington, Geoff & Ian McLeod. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1987.

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Dunér, David. The Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg: A Study in the Conceptual Metaphors of the Mechanistic World-View. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013.

Elzea, Rowland. “Howard Pyle’s Manuscripts: The Delaware Art Museum.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 8. 2 (Summer 1983): 10. DOI: 10.1353/chq.0.0549

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essential Writings. 1836. New York: The Modern Library, 2000.

Friedman, Jeanne F. “Howard Pyle and the Chivalric Order in America: King Arthur for Children.” Arthuriana 6.1 (Spring 1996): 77-95. http://www.arthuriana.org/access/BSubscribe/6-1/fox- friedman.pdf

Groseclose, Barbara S. “Vanity and the Artist: Some Still-Life Paintings by William Michael Harnett.” American Art Journal 19.1 (Winter 1987): 51- 59.

Kunzle, David. “Review: [untitled]”. The Art Bulletin 59.4 (Dec., 1977): 649-651. DOI: 10.1080/00043079.1977.10787502

Kuspit, Donald. “Surviving the Conceptual Collapse of Art in the Modern Age of Anxiety: Andrew Wyeth’s Place in Twentieth-century Art.” In Rethinking Andrew Wyeth. Ed. David Cateforis. Berkeley: U. of California P., 2014. 176-193.

Lamouliatte-Schmitt, Helena. Réalisme(s) et Réalité(s) dans l’art d’Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). PhD Dissertation, 2011. Univ. Bordeaux 3.

Lamouliatte-Schmitt, Helena. “Andrew Wyeth: du portrait d'architecture à la dystopie mimétique.” Art et utopie, Pensées anglo-américaines. Ed. Mathilde Arrivé. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2012, Volume V: 142-155.

Lévy, Maurice. Le Roman “Gothique” anglais 1764-1824. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.

Loreck, Christoph. Endymion and the “Labyrinthian Path to Eminence in Art.” Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005.

Mandeles, Chad. “William Michael Harnett's ‘The Old Cupboard Door’ and the Tradition of Vanitas.” American Art Journal 18. 3 (Summer, 1986): 51-62. DOI: 10.2307/1594442

May, Jill P. and Robert E. May. Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art. Urbana: U. of Illinois P., 2011.

Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy. 1993. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002.

Monteith, Sharon. American Culture in the 1960s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008.

Nemerov, Alexander. “N. C.Wyeth’s Theater of Illustration.” American Art 6. 2 (Spring 1992): 36-57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3109090

Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture. American Landscape and Painting 1825-1875. Revised Edition. New York: Oxford UP, [1980] 1995.

Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. Realism, Idealism and the American Experience. New York: Oxford UP, [1980] 2007.

Rosenberg, Eric. “Romancing the Modern: Nemerov, Wyeth, and the Limits of American Art History.” The Art Bulletin 88.1 (March 2006): 27-33.

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1965.

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NOTES

1. See the obituaries written in 2009 by Henry Allen and Bart Barnes in The Washington Post, Mark Feeney in the Boston Globe, Richard Lacayo in Time, and Marina Vaizey in The Independent. 2. She defined the Wyeth family rather broadly, and in addition to Andrew’s son James, and his father N. C. Wyeth, we can find N. C.’s two daughters, Henriette Wyeth (1907-1997) and Carolyn Wyeth (1909-1994), his two sons-in-law, John McCoy (1910-1989) and Peter Hurd (1904-1984), as well as Georges Weymouth (1936- ), the husband of his granddaughter, Ann Brelsford (the daughter of John McCoy and Henriette Wyeth). 3. “Trained by Howard Pyle, the famous master of American illustration, Newell Convers Wyeth adopted and broadened the distinctive approach to painting that has been termed ‘The Brandywine Tradition’” (Meyer 35). 4. Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a scientist who began to experience dreams and visions that he called a spiritual awakening. One of his biographers, David Duner, mentions “this influential visionary’s esoteric theology and doctrine of correspondences” (2). 5. Jill P. May and Robert E. May state that “one of the most popular ‘unconventional’ religious faiths sweeping across America before the Civil war, Swedenborgianism was founded on the prolific writings of the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, and bureaucrat Emanuel Swedenborg. Though Swedenborg faced ostracism in his native land for his radical views of heaven and earth, his creed spread to the United States in the early nineteenth-century, gaining many adherents in the Philadelphia area and engaging many artists throughout the United States” (4). 6. “Kant would have talked about ‘transcendental schematism,’ Schelling about ‘the power of transfiguration of the symbol,’ and Schleiermacher, who read the Neo-Platonicians, about ‘creative imagination’: Howard Pyle truly followed in the footsteps of this tradition, which originated in the core intuition of German romanticism” (Le Bris 15, my translation). 7. “Off the foyer was the room where his father’s greatest illustrations were stored. […] Andrew, spellbound, steeped himself in his father’s work. He lugged pictures almost his own height into the studio where NC stood painting […]. When Andrew leaned an old illustration against a table, NC stopped work and talked about the scenes and answered questions from his son, the only person in the family interested in these past pictures” (Meryman 1996: 54). 8. “For Andrew the heart of the studio was the huge collection of costumes stored in chests. Dressed in these authentic uniforms—some inherited from Howard Pyle, whose pictures Andrew was also studying—Andrew could actually be the characters that excited him” (Meryman 1996: 55). 9. “In the work of Andrew and his father, Pyle’s faith in illustration as ‘a ground to produce painters’ has proven justified. Andrew’s son, James, thanks to his father’s instruction and direction and to his own application, has more than adequately shown his command of that technical facility which Pyle took for granted as a necessary means” (McLanathan 14). 10. “The Giant (1923) […] celebrates the human power of fantasy emerging out of reality” (Larsen 17). 11. Most art historians agree on the fact that Pyle was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites. Larsen explains how Pyle became familiar with their paintings: “Within Pyle’s Wilmington community there existed a remarkable and useful storehouse of wonder and delight, the legendary Pre- Raphaelite collection assembled by Samuel Bancroft Jr.” (16). Kunzle goes back in time to the European tradition: “But the weight of the European tradition hung heavily over Pyle. He was of course conscious of his debt to the Pre-Raphaelites, the Victorian engravers generally, and Dürer —of whose works he actually made pastiches” (649).

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12. Fox Friedman says that: “Pyle embraced this paradox of a nostalgic looking back towards the Middle-Ages for a more practical foundation of American morality. The Arts and Crafts movement in America, as exemplified by such proponents as Charles Eliot Norton, helped to meld art and Victorian morality into just such a moral aesthetic. Norton, the first professor of Fine Arts at Harvard joined with his friend John Ruskin to found the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. In Norton's work, this moral aesthetic is seen in his deep-seated belief in the ethical and moral superiority of American forms of republicanism” (82). 13. As far as the question of light is concerned, Novak also adds: “Homer’s light does not, through its own tangibility, challenge the fundamental integrity of shape and matter [...] he always maintains the unbroken identity of individual shape” (American Painting 140). 14. “At this time and for the rest of his life, Wyeth read Thoreau avidly; it is not difficult to detect the philosopher’s words behind the artist's adulation of a gentle and simple nature” (Nemerov 47). 15. Andrew Wyeth supposedly said to Richard Meryman: “‘My brothers and sisters loved him dearly,’ Wyeth says angrily, ‘but I don’t think they realized how he bastardized his art to give them the life they wanted. We were wonderful until we got older. Then we ruined him.’” (1996 80). 16. As Alexander Nemerov explains in an article about N. C Wyeth: “Wyeth was an ‘obvious’ or theatrical painter because, as an illustrator, that is what he was supposed to be” (37). 17. Nemerov explains that N. C. started to sell his own work right after joining Pyle’s school and demand for this type of subjects remained strong for several years: “For the next few years, Wyeth was virtually overwhelmed with commissions for illustrations, most of them on a western theme. By 1910, however, he had become dissatisfied with western subjects” (45). 18. “The problem of weight is another challenging element in the precarious task of making distinctions between the American and European vision. There is an insistence on a geometry of spatial structure […]” (Novak 2007: 144). 19. “Homer’s figures respond to a gravitational pull similar to that of our three-dimensional world. […] Homer’s people are set like rocks […]” (Novak 2007: 142). 20. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David on view at the Borghese Gallery in Rome. 21. Wanda Corn summarizes this in a recent article: “There were other aspects of N. C. Wyeth’s practices that left traces on Andrew’s work. N. C. used traditional narrative and realist devices to tell stories: colorful period costumes, figures in vigorous action, theatricalized still-lives, and stage-set interiors. Andrew Wyeth was similarly drawn to the expressive potential of clothes, human gestures, and still-life elements. But he transformed these inheritances into a style of muted colors, precise descriptions, emptiness, and silence, N. C. Wyeth’s landscape paintings were intensely colorful and thickly painted without the sparseness, tension and moodiness of the younger Wyeth’s work” (Corn 2014: 73). 22. See Teels Island (1954), Dil Huey Farm (1941), Off Shore (1967), Snow Hill (1989), Pentecost (1989), Airborne (1996). 23. See April Wind (1952), Winter 1946 (1946), Christina’s World (1948), and Spring (1978). 24. For further details on this subject, see my Ph.D dissertation in which “frozen moment” is called “procédé de figement” (Lamouliatte-Schmitt 2011: 183-193). 25. Corn underlines the fact that the complicated relation between father and son was a trigger for Andrew’s inspiration: “He often dragged up memories from his psychologically loaded relationship with his father” (Corn 2014: 73). 26. Michael R. Taylor underlines that there were more similar features in Wyeth’s early works, when he was still using oil painting and mimicking the “Plein Air” technique: “Wyeth’s earliest oil paintings reveal a profound debt to the work of N. C. Wyeth, under whom he had received a severely disciplined studio apprenticeship, as well as artists his father admired, such as Daniel Garber, William Lathrop, and other American impressionists of the New Hope School. These oil

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paintings lacked the assurance of Wyeth’s best watercolors, however, and were rarely exhibited” (30-31). There are a few examples: Spring Landscape at Kuerners (1933) and Georges Island (1938). Wyeth briefly attempted to adapt this style to tempera painting, as for example in Charlie Ervine (1937) and Dead Gull (1938), but he quickly moved on to a more personal approach. 27. In The Guardian’s obituary, Michael McNay (2009) used these exact words: “master technician;” Valerie J. Nelson and Myrna Oliver (2009) in The Los Angeles Times also mentioned the painter’s technical skills: “master of the magic-realist technique;” Richard Lacayo (2009) in Time stressed that this ability bothered a lot of art critics: “That his technical capabilities were so apparent only made it more annoying to some critics.” To conclude, Kathleen A. Foster interviewed by Larry Rohter (2009) from The New York Times declared: “Kathleen A. Foster, the senior curator of American art and director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said, ‘There is no question that there has been a polarization of opinion’ about Wyeth and his work. ‘He was a kind of virtuoso whose work was intensely modern, with an enormous emotional resonance,’ she said.” 28. Dürer was also one of Pyle’s favorite painters. 29. He explains that “in fact, much of the history of American painting prior to 1945 has been dependent on a couching of the nascent modern in the Romantic ideology, whether the latter be called nationalism, or Americanism […]” (Rosenberg 27). 30. Ann Landi wrote in ARTnews: “For much of his career, Wyeth’s paintings were dismissed as sentimental and contrary to the avant-garde spirit that made midcentury American art great” (59). 31. From a strictly political perspective, the fact that Wyeth was suspected to lean towards the Republican Party, or in any case, to tangle with the country’s political elite, was certainly considered an aggravating factor by most art critics, as Wanda Corn explains: “There were reasons to align Wyeth, the artist, with the Republican Party […] in 1959 the artist had made a watercolor portrait of Dwight Eisenhower for a Time magazine cover, and in 1970 President Nixon and his wife hosted a one-man Wyeth exhibition in the East room of the White House. […] Wyeth had also been at the White House in 1963 to receive the Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon B. Johnson, having been nominated by President John F. Kennedy. Much later, in 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Wyeth the National Medal of Arts” (Corn 2004: 78). 32. Recalling what his father had said about the illustration classes of Howard Pyle, Andrew Wyeth told an interviewer: “For one class a student did a picture of a meetinghouse. It showed the Quakers sitting and thinking, heads bowed, as they do before one of them stand up and speak. Pa recalled, “Pyle looked at it and remarked, ‘Well, that’s a very good graphic picture of what takes place in a Quaker meeting. But, listen, in my experience at Quaker meetings […] the thing that I remember the most, which to me is the essence [emphasis added], is looking out the window and seeing a horse tethered at his carriage, his head moving up and down, and a sultry, misty landscape beyond.’ That idea conveyed more of the quietness of the meetinghouse than did the picture of all those people sitting around. And that’s where Pyle was a master” (Nemerov 44). 33. These costumes belong to Pyle’s collection of old garments (Wyeth 103). 34. On the floor we can see the projected shadow of an unseen window located beyond the right- hand side of the painting’s frame. 35. Mother Archie’s Church is the name of a church and also the title of a 1945 painting. The Winfield’s house is represented in several paintings, like Two Family (1977), Winfield’s Porch (1983), Rag Bag (1986), or Fast Lane (1987). The Mill belonged to the Wyeths’ estate, and is pictured in Night Sleeper (1979), Flood Plain (1986), and Last Light (1988), for example. 36. “L'imaginaire, dans ces romans, est toujours logé” (Lévy xxviii). 37. For a more detailed analysis of the importance of these houses in Wyeth’s art, see Lamouliatte-Schmitt (2012).

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38. Wyeth recounted the same anecdote in his 1995 autobiography, and this narrative highlighted the symbolic aspect of Dürer’s apparition: “Before the operation I had been looking at Albrecht Dürer’s Works. During the operation they say my heart stopped once. At that moment I could see Dürer standing in black, and he started coming at me across the tile floor. When my heart started, he, Dürer—death—receded. So this painting is highly emotional—dangerous and looming” (33). 39. “[Wyeth] was telling me about a self-portrait he’d made four years ago as a birthday present for Betsy. […] He painted himself as a skeleton, seated in the watchtower of a lighthouse looking out to sea. The skeleton wears a blue and gold War of 1812 naval jacket that once belonged to Howard Pyle […]” (Meryman 1996: 383). 40. “Wyeth didn’t use the old studio skeleton (which he still has) as the model for Dr. Syn, but instead used an x-ray of his own body. That disconcerting fact turns the painting into a traditional memento mori, as Wyeth, with cannon at his side, sits staring out to sea facing his own mortality” (Taylor 40). 41. “But [Wyeth] didn’t stop there: underneath the tempera of the coat, the parts of his skeleton that don’t show—his ribcage, his spine, his problematic hip—have been painted where they may never be seen at all. ‘You take the coat off and you’ll see the whole thing!’ he said. ‘If they x-ray it they’ll find them’” (Schaire 50). 42. “[…] such as books, scientific or artistic instruments, valuables or collectables (shells, coins, precious metals), tobacco and pipes, musical instruments, arms and armors, food and drink, games and plaster casts” (Bergstrom 154). 43. Bergstrom lists “skulls, human or animal bones, watches or clocks, candles, oil lamps, soap bubbles, flowers, and empty, broken or knocked-over glasses” (154). 44. According to Bergstrom: “wheat, laurels or ivy forming a wreath under a skull, or arranged on top of it, like a crown” (154). 45. Barbara S. Groseclose points out in an article about the 19 th-century American painter, William Harnett that he only made three paintings matching the criteria of the vanitas painting: Mortality and Immortality (1876; the original title was Life and Death), To This Favor—A Thought From Shakespeare (1879) and Memento Mori—“To This Favour” (1879). Groseclose points out the specificity of Harnett’s choice of subject matter: “All the items in Mortality and Immortality and Memento Mori —“To This Favour” may be classified as either “symbols of transience” (in addition to the skull, the candlesticks, hourglass, wilted rose) or “symbols of earthly existence” (books and music). Because these elements in combination were to this point rare in American art but typical of the seventeenth century, it seems permissible to assume Harnett culled them from some as yet unidentified Dutch or Flemish source” (55). Nevertheless, Harnett strictly conformed to the European tradition, contrary to the other American artist Charles Bird King (1785–1862) who made a few famous paintings resembling vanitas: Poor Artist’s Cupboard (1815) or Vanity Of An Artist's Dream (1830). However, they do not strictly follow the European rules of the memento mori as Chad Mandeles points out: “In general, King's work reflects unfavorably upon the conditions of the contemporary artist, indicating his poverty, and his vain hopes in the face of public indifference” (Mandeles 56). 46. This expression is taken from a famous excerpt of Nature by Emerson: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (Emerson 6). 47. Wanda Corn, one of the few Wyeth’s specialists, said in her doctoral thesis: “Another feature linking Wyeth to contemporary artists of the 1940s is the predominance of death and decay in his work. These themes—dark and sober—replaced the more buoyant regionalist ones of the early

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1930s. This was indicative of the changing mood of the war years [...] Sometimes these themes were handled allegorically or symbolically, sometimes expressionistically […] or sometimes, as with Wyeth’s dead birds, dried leaves, ruined and abandoned buildings, within a modified regionalist context” (Corn 1993: 86-7). 48. My translations.

ABSTRACTS

This article aims at assessing the true impact of the Wyeth tradition on the art of the American painter, Andrew Wyeth. Indeed, from an early age, the art prodigy was tutored by his father, the famous illustrator and painter N. C. Wyeth. Parallels were also drawn later between the younger figurative painter and his father’s teacher, the renowned illustrator Howard Pyle. However, we contend that the fabrication of this dynasty of American realists has done more harm than good to the critical reception of Andrew Wyeth’s art. Since the mid-1960s, Wyeth’s images have been vilified by most critics and art historians who focus on their supposedly illustrative and theatrical tricks. Nevertheless, some of them hint at a dark and less congruent dimension in Wyeth’s art, while being unable to pinpoint it precisely. By examining more closely Wyeth’s compositional strategy and pictorial technique in the light of his predecessors, this paper suggests that the artist has created a very personal and original synthesis of European and American influences, with a deep Gothic undercurrent. Wyeth’s problematic relationship with his father has also generated a range of obsessive visual tropes betraying his struggle, as a man and as an artist, with what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence”. Lastly, a thorough analysis of some of his occasional self-portraits will attempt to shed light on Wyeth’s complex and morbid depiction of the figure of the artist as a troubled soul.

Cet article souhaite évaluer l’impact que la « Wyeth tradition » a véritablement eu sur l’art du peintre américain Andrew Wyeth. En effet, le jeune prodige a été dès son plus jeune âge comparé à son père, le peintre et illustrateur N.C. Wyeth, qui a assuré l’éducation artistique de ses enfants, et en particulier celle d’Andrew. Une filiation artistique fut également rapidement établie avec le célèbre illustrateur de livres pour enfants, Howard Pyle, qui avait lui-même été le mentor de N.C. Wyeth. Nous souhaitons néanmoins démontrer que l’invention de cette dynastie de peintres réalistes américains a contribué à discréditer l’art d’Andrew Wyeth auprès des critiques et historiens d’art, en les confortant dans l’idée que ses images ne sont que des illustrations dont la théâtralité est accentuée par une mise en scène aux effets grossiers. Certains critiques perçoivent cependant parfois une dimension plus sombre et une forme de non-congruence dans l’art de Wyeth sans toutefois pouvoir l’expliquer. Cet article se propose d’étudier la technique picturale et les stratégies de composition de l’artiste à la lumière des œuvres de son père et de Howard Pyle, afin de démontrer que Wyeth a opéré une synthèse très personnelle et originale entre des influences américaines et européennes, sous-tendue par un topos Gothique. La relation difficile que Wyeth entretenait avec son père a également engendré des tropes visuels obsessionnels démontrant qu’il était sous l’emprise de ce que Harold Bloom a appelé « l’anxiété de l’influence », relation conflictuelle qu’un artiste entretient avec ses prédécesseurs. Ce réseau d’influences thématiques et esthétiques est particulièrement visible dans certains des rares autoportraits de Wyeth, où l’artiste est figuré comme un être torturé au travers de toiles complexes et morbides.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: Wyeth Andrew, art américain, Wyeth N.C., Pyle Howard, réalisme américain, narrativité iconique, anxiété de l’influence, autoportrait, Gothique, métaphore de l’artiste Keywords: Wyeth Andrew, American art, Wyeth N.C., Pyle Howard, American realism, iconic narrativity, anxiety of influence, self-portrait, Gothic, metaphor of the artist

AUTHOR

HELENA LAMOULIATTE Helena Lamouliatte is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux and a member of the research group CLIMAS (Université Bordeaux Montaigne). She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the American painter Andrew Wyeth, in which she focused on the notions of realism and reality. Her research interests lie in the area of iconic narrativity, and in intericonic relations between painting and photography in American figurative art. Contact: helena.lamouliatte-schmitt [at] u- bordeaux.fr

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Racism and Violence in Gar Anthony Haywood’s P. I. Fiction

Nicole Décuré

1 Chester Himes wrote in his autobiography: “the detective story […] is an American form. So I haven’t created anything whatsoever, I just made the faces black, that’s all” (Soitos 141). Himes certainly underestimated (or was being modest about) himself and his own importance in crime fiction. Although there had been African American writers of detective fiction before him1 they wrote little and have been all but forgotten. Himes was a far more prolific writer and acquired some fame as a black noir writer. It took forty more years for black crime fiction writers to follow in his footsteps and introduce new black faces in the detective story. By then, of course, much had changed. The Civil Rights Movement had left an indelible imprint on American society, “Black Power” and “Black is beautiful” had become world-known slogans, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had fought and died, Shirley Chisholm had run for president, African- Americans had become first-class citizens… and President Bill Clinton was about to acknowledge Walter Mosley as one of his favourite writers.

2 Gar Anthony Haywood was born in 1954, three years before Chester Himes published the first of his ten-book Harlem series, For Love of Imabelle. Haywood’s first detective novel, Fear of the Dark, appeared in 1988, four years after Himes died. So it can be said that Haywood was the African-American writer who started the nineties’ wave of crime fiction written by black authors and featuring a black protagonist, preceding Walter Mosley by two years (Devil in a Blue Dress was published in 1990). Then, black women such as Nikki Baker (In the Game, 1991), Eleanor Taylor Bland (Dead Time, 1992) Yolanda Joe (Falling Leaves of Ivy, 1992) and Barbara Neely (Blanche on the Lam, 1992) came on the scene, followed by many others, more women than men (Décuré 1999, 2001)— different times, different books, different “blackgrounds” as defined by Stephen Soitos (37). Aaron Gunner, Haywood’s recurrent hero, is a private detective, fashioned after Peter Gunn (hence the name), a white TV series character. However, the first name Aaron was not chosen with any reference to Moses’ brother in the Bible but just because it “sounded right to [my] ear.”2 His creator acknowledges his debt to Ross MacDonald who, according to him, made an art form out of the P. I. novel3 (Haywood’s website)

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rather than to Himes. Indeed, Gunner reminds us more of Marlowe and Archer than of “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones. The series, to date, comprises six novels published between 1988 and 1999 and three short stories. Haywood has written another series featuring a retired couple, Joe and Dottie Loudermil, as heroes and comprising three novels so far. He has also written a handful of standalone thrillers under a different pen name.

Aaron Gunner, a black P. I. of “good conscience”

3 As soon as he appears, in chapter 2 of Fear of the Dark (1988), Gunner is described as a “black man” (4). All we are going to learn about his physique is contained in these first lines: he weighs 208 pounds, and has been bald for a few years (thus resembling the author): The tired lines beneath his sharp brown eyes were still there, and the stubble that grew overnight along the soft angles of his chin was getting harder to see every day —because it was white, as in grey, as in dying a slow death. Gunner was not an old man, but his was a face of charm worn down by thirty-four years of exhaustion, a handsome parchment of flesh he carried like a ledger filled with dreams that had died hard and hopes he had never coaxed off the ground. (Fear of the Dark 8)

4 Thirty-four is young to be feeling so old, disillusioned and world-weary. In fact, in a subsequent book, we read that Gunner is just over 40. After that first and last description, we only perceive Gunner as a mind (and a heart) and, sometimes, an aching body after a fight.

5 Gunner is a typical P. I. who cannot really make a living at his “trade,” a loner with little private life, few friends (but of all races), no family to speak of, no ties of any sort: even the dog that is foisted on him at one point to alleviate his loneliness quickly disappears from the scene. He occasionally seduces a woman (or is seduced by one). Although he always manages to discover the truth, Gunner, like most hard-boiled P. I.s, goes about it in a rather fumbling way, making mistakes, feeling stupid, overlooking important clues, misjudging danger and people, getting into fights, getting bashed on the head, shot at, and abducted countless times. He is not averse to using violence himself, contributing his fair share to the fairly high body count in the novels.

6 Gunner is not the narrative voice, but when he is on the scene—and he always is, except for the first chapter of each book—events are narrated from his point of view; the comments come from the narrative voice rather than the authorial voice. And his point of view is given freely and abundantly, especially on issues that are of concern to Haywood who said, in a 2003 interview, that the crime/mystery genre was the best medium through which to make commentary about the world around us, adding: “Internally, my characters are very much reflections of myself” (Jordan). Thus, it is difficult to separate Gunner’s expressed opinions from Haywood’s. The third-person narrative is an attempt at neutrality but, although author and character have very different lifestyles, it cannot conceal the author’s personal opinions.

7 Haywood sees it as his responsibility, as a “black author of good conscience,” to counteract negative images of black people by proposing a “more accurate and less sinister picture of black people to the reading public” (Bailey 122). As “prejudice is abundant and here to stay,” black writers “will never want for material” and will keep on writing in this vein. At the same time, he refuses stereotyping. “We’re all

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individuals, all completely different and we make up who we are as we go, and the fact of the matter is none of us will ever create the African American character because the African American spirit is too varied” (Julien & Mills 195).

8 Haywood wants to make the readers go places they have never been to (Ibid. 189), he wants to make them think. “I want them to have questions at the end […] I want them to be asking questions that they never have asked themselves before” (Ibid. 198-9). He wants to raise their consciousness, to educate them. But see, such was, and continues to be, the state of most people’s ignorance of the black man’s plight in America. Nobody ever sees our shit coming, because they aren’t even aware of our constant proximity to The Edge, that precipice of insanity to which we are regularly and systematically subjected (Haywood, 2002).

Racism

9 Most of the questions Haywood raises concern racism and violence. The first novel, Fear of the Dark (1988), is set against a background of social violence with a threat of racial explosion, anticipating the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after Rodney King’s beating by the police. The plot revolves around black militants and white racists. Not Long for this World (1990) deals with gangbanging as a lethal mode of life among black teenagers in South Central L.A. You Can Die Trying (1993) examines the (bad) relations between the white police and the black community, and inter-relations between blacks and Asians, especially after the riots. It’s not a Pretty Sight (1996), while still addressing race issues, is strongly focused on violence against women. When Last Seen Alive (1997) discusses black people’s moral responsibility towards their community and introduces a black extremist group fighting Uncle Tomism through executions. Finally, All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (1999) takes up this thread again while broaching the subjects of AIDS and homophobia. The issue of racism is omnipresent in Haywood’s Gunner series. It is denounced, criticised, fought against, in word and in deed. The title of the first novel is revealing in this respect. “Fear of the dark” alludes to white people’s hatred of not understanding something and black people are part of that fear: whites do not understand blacks. It can also be read as “fear of blacks” themselves.

10 In Haywood’s fictional world, Gunner became a P. I. in 1974 over the issue of racism: he was training at the police academy when he witnessed a racist attack on a cadet, socked the instructor and got kicked out. He is the only black P. I. in town which explains why his clients are black too. Although Haywood clearly has an axe to grind with racists (whatever the colour of their skin), not all whites are bad and not all blacks are good— far from it—mostly perhaps because there are few white characters in the stories which are set in a mostly black neighbourhood. The whites that acquire some personality are rather unprejudiced persons, like Poole, the “decent” (You Can Die Trying 23) white lieutenant who becomes Gunner’s friend (with a little distance), or a woman public defender for whom he works. Furthermore, in the third novel of the series, Gunner tries to find the truth behind what seems to be a clear-cut case in the aftermath of Rodney King’s beating and the change of policy in the LAPD: a white policeman, a “nightstick-happy nigger hater” (Ibid. 45), shot a black kid and, later, killed himself. Gunner sets out to prove that it was the white man who was, in fact, first shot at, and that he fired back in self-defence.

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11 The issue of racism in the police runs strongly in this book. Recent debate in the United States, in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson killing, unrest and subsequent turmoil, shows us that there is still a long way to go. The harassment of black people by the police is condemned, of course. Even Gunner feels nervous around them although he may understand some aspects of the problem: cops do a hard job, “being a cop’s a dirty business” (Ibid. 207), and police find it difficult to deal with the hatred they generate. Gunner does not go for Manichean explanations and tries to get to the root of the problem. He had never gone in for the popular dictum that said no cop was to be trusted and every cop was to be feared, but he had seen enough uniformed madmen in his time to know that his next confrontation with a policeman could always be his last. A run-in with the wrong cop, at the wrong time, was all that it would take. Because many of the men and women who patrolled these streets didn’t always see things the way they really were. They didn’t think they could afford to. In the interests of staying alive, they had taught themselves to expect the worst of every situation, and to treat strangers like the enemy. It was experience-driven paranoia, coupled with a vast array of preconceived notions about whole groups of people. Notions that could get a man belonging to such a group killed or crippled for life under the right set of circumstances. (Ibid. 101-2)

12 The more militant, accusatory attitudes are well expressed in the books through secondary characters’ analyses. They are generally voiced in a confrontation with Gunner’s more nuanced opinions: although he may agree that the African-American community is oppressed in many ways, the world is not black and white, people have to be judged as individuals and not as part of a group. Truth and the law are values that rise above all considerations. Truth matters and Gunner does not “care who it condemns or vindicates” (Not Long for this World 42), and there is only one law, however unjust it may be. The police only see the bad side of humanity (crime, drugs, violence) and tend to lump everybody into the same category. They come to hate people and be afraid of them, and people, in return, hate them and are afraid of them. Gunner argues that the forest must not hide the trees. “You can die trying” expresses the difficulty of the task: staying alive, trying to do the right thing. The situation seems pretty hopeless, a vicious circle, a “no-win” situation. […] you had to prove more than your mere innocence when you were unfortunate enough to come up against [the police]; you had to prove your worth as a human being first, before anything else. Because the system in which they operated had taught them to question not only your good intentions but your right to be considered their equal, as well. Along with all the amusing names they liked to use for you came any number of misconceptions, and all you had to do to get along with them was dispel those misconceptions one by one, time and time again. While the hell that was their daily bread out on the street kept reinforcing all their fears and misconceptions against you. (Ibid. 211)

13 But there is still a tenuous hope that things might get better. “It was not inconceivable” (Ibid.).

14 Racism is a serious issue but it can also be denounced with levity. To a white woman who tells him he doesn’t sound black over the phone, Gunner retorts sarcastically: “So I’ve been told […] Must be all those big words I use. Like who, what, and where” (Fear of the Dark 102). Language is important. Words are not innocuous. Repeatedly, Gunner will fight against the matter-of-fact use of racist words like “nigger” or sexist ones like “bitch.”

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Black men and women who threw the n-word around […] were too short on brain cells to appreciate how they were embracing one of the most powerful and dehumanizing weapons ever used against their own people. They liked to say that the twist they put on the way it was spelled and pronounced made something harmless out of it, but the truth was, it just made them feel better for having bought into the white man’s contention that it was a perfectly suitable name for them. Funny, Gunner thought, but the Japanese never did take to “Jap” that well. Nor the Jews to “kike.” Nor… (It’s not a Pretty Sight 131)

15 Gunner explains the importance of words to a child: “Most of the hate in this world starts with one thing […] Names. The names we give ourselves, and the names we give to others. I’m talking about ugly names. Names like nigger and kike, and faggot and gook—and bitch and ho. Names like that. Names that do nothing but hurt people, and degrade people” (Ibid. 240).

16 When the message is not heard, he resorts to violence to be understood, first knocking unconscious a young man with the butt of his gun and then shooting a bullet through a rapper’s calf. “He really had heard all the four-letter vitriol he could stand in one afternoon” (All the Lucky Ones are Dead 111). Such methods are hardly compatible with the principle of tolerance but then we are in a world of fantasy, and while this violence seems a trifle unrealistic, it certainly expresses wishful thinking, the cathartic desire to make a point forcefully, knowing that one will not be able to act upon this kind of impulse in real life.

17 Daily acts of racism, racist attitudes and innuendoes are rarely overlooked (Fear of the Dark 44-5). Gunner does not let these go. He says to a white policeman who does not believe him: “Look. Believe what you want to believe […] You want to assume because I’m a soul brother, I must be lying to you, that’s your privilege. And your hang-up” (You Can Die Trying 44). But then, soon after, a similar act of racism against whites is exposed. Although despising racism, denouncing the differential treatment of blacks and whites, Gunner has no patience with black so-called revolutionaries. He sees black politicians, as they appear in the novels, as opportunistic and insincere, only out for the money and personal power. The Black Muslims are disposed of in a few scathing words. Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, “keynote speaker and chief organizer” of the Million Man March is presented as “brilliant and inspired one moment, delusional and paranoid the next” (When Last Seen Alive 2). Two extremist groups are portrayed as dangerous: the Brothers of Volition, patterned after the Black Panthers, in the first novel, and the Defenders of the Bloodline, intent on “ridding the black race of all Uncle Toms” (Ibid. 108) in the last two novels of the series. Both appellations are ridiculous in themselves. He certainly disagrees with the idea of a violent revolution, which he considers as “unabated madness” (Fear of the Dark 181): “We’ve spent a hundred and fifty years trying to prove to the White Man that we can handle civilization just as easily as he can, and you want to wipe that out in a week. I don’t get it” (Ibid.180).

18 These are the late 80s and early 90s. The black middle-class now has a lot more to lose. Gunner prefers “enlightenment” of white people to confrontation: “Terry Alison was shown that a dinner date with a given black man could be as thought-provoking and stimulating as one with a given man of any other race, colour, or creed” (Ibid. 185). Gunner declares himself apolitical (Ibid. 74), a position that enables him to criticize everything and everybody.

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Gunner was far from a political animal—his idea of political activism was endorsing at least one petition worthy of his signature annually—but the oxymoron that was black archconservatism had always been able to get a rise out of him. It was simply a concept he didn’t get. African-Americans like himself sharing ideologies with the far right […] But then, people had a right to believe whatever they wanted to believe, and no one was more willing to grant them the privilege than Gunner, with the single proviso that all their propagandizing be done outside the range of his faculties. Suffering the company of fools was something the investigator did best only from a distance, though this wasn’t always possible. (All the Lucky Ones are Dead 8)

19 Gunner claims independence from the black community in matters of race. He feels he is his own master and refuses to be held accountable for his thoughts and actions. This is the black man’s burden that no white man ever has to shoulder: “I’m an American. Keeping my reasons for doing the things I do to myself is my God-given birthright […] I wage my own wars” (You Can Die Trying 118)—which he does, for example by defending Korean shopkeepers in the face of black hostility during and after the L.A. riots. It is strange that Gunner, who, most of the time, is not a believer, should refer to God and not to the Constitution. He is accused of Uncle Tomism because he defends a white racist. But to him, truth is above these considerations. This also applies to battery. Although it would be convenient to accept that a husband killed his wife, Gunner prefers to find out what really happened. His ambivalence is also felt in the discussion about gangsta rap in All the Lucky Ones are Dead: he doesn’t like it and doesn’t understand how anyone might like it, but he is ready to defend is as socially relevant.

20 Haywood’s concerns are not limited to the plight of African Americans. Other minority groups get his attention—Asians, Latinos, Jews—as well as gays and women, with a particular emphasis on homophobia, which he believes is rampant in the black community, as well as on what he perceives are difficult relations between black men and women.

Violence

21 Perhaps more damning than racism in Gunner’s eyes is violence within the black community because it is self-destructing “in our little war-torn corner of the world” (Not Long for this World 15). Black men kill black men. Gunner says of gangbangers, those “juvenile fraternities of terror” (Ibid. 1): “I don’t much like their manners, or the heavy iron they’re so fond of demonstrating in public places. They kill children in sandboxes and grandmothers on porch swings in the never-ending process of killing themselves, and that kind of fatal inefficiency pisses me off no end” (Ibid. 14-5). Gunner’s way of dealing with this, again, is to stand aside. He is called “an amateur in a fucking war zone” (Not Long for this World 128). “Theirs was a dance of death, pointless and seemingly without end, and only a fool or a hero would expose himself to the insanity of it anymore than his everyday circumstances already demanded” (Ibid. 71-2).

22 As with racism, sometimes a humorous comment is enough to denounce the prevalence of violence in society. Anybody can wield a gun. “If she could pull the trigger, she could get the job done, and if she had ever watched ten minutes of prime-time television, she could pull the trigger. In her sleep” (Fear of the Dark 12). Violence is deeply ingrained in the political and economic systems. Gunner declares, at one point, that the entertainment industry “sells” violence. He feels a “mild revulsion” in a gun shop at

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the sight of young people and “innocuous” grandfathers, ordinary citizens freely buying “tools of death” (Not Long for this World 33-5).

23 “Not long for this world,” the title of the second novel, describes the hopelessness, the waste of this way of life. “All the lucky ones are dead,” another title, also indicates that living in such a violent environment is not the best option. Historical, social, political and psychological explanations are given to explain gangbanging and, at the end, Gunner’s “blissfully blind hatred,” his “pure, uncomplicated abhorrence” of this phenomenon has abated somewhat because he can now understand how it came about in the “bleak, soul-crushing, and heartbreaking […] L. A. street-gang culture” (Ibid. 180-1). Gunner’s attitude varies between a desire to “reform” the delinquents, which he does not always act upon for fear of being rejected and because it is too late anyway (You Can Die Trying 115) and a belief that things can change, that violence is not inevitable. Individuals can make choices, can decide whether they want to be gangbangers or respectable citizens. When he gets involved with a six-year-old thief and tries to change him, he acts upon this belief that, perhaps, the worst can be avoided.

24 But Gunner’s behaviour contradicts his principles. While deploring so many deaths, he himself is no angel of mercy. He does not feel safe without a gun. He threatens people with physical violence, he hits men and women although he claims he has never beaten a woman. He kills in self-defence but he is also ordered to kill (or be killed himself) and even once orders somebody to kill in his stead. He gets into fights at least three times per book. He is kidnapped, hurt in many ways. And still, like any phoenix-like P. I., he rises, none the worse for the wear and tear, ready for more “little war games, wisdom be damned, in pursuit of some non-existent, macho concept of self-respect, and for what?” This question is asked by a black woman whom Gunner falls in love with. And she adds another crucial question: “What do you ever gain that’s more valuable than all that you lose?” (Not Long for this World 137). Sometimes, Gunner does realise that his course of action is rarely smart, that he is careless, that he plays games of “one- upmanship” (Ibid. 204), that he acts out of “reckless machismo” (When Last Seen Alive 159). It is in his relations with some women that the anti-hero appears best. He is not good at sustaining relationships and, above all, most of the time, he is not a fantastic lover, even in his dreams, something that no P. I. ever admits. And this is probably the most innovative feature of Haywood’s fiction.

Conclusion

25 A male African American writer of detective fiction remains a rarity to this day. Few names come to mind. Himes, of course, and Walter Mosley. We can also cite Robert Greer, Hugh Holton or Gary Phillips. Could we apply to male black crime fiction Munt’s analysis on women’s crime fiction and argue that the genre is alien to black consciousness because it “is not a logical choice for those positioned outside the hegemonic institution of law enforcement” (Munt 85)? Black women have fared better, seemingly more able to bring new voices to the genre by creating original, less stereotyped characters.4 Haywood’s fiction is very much anchored in this new trend initiated by women writers in the 80’s in which the main hero, the P. I., abandons some of his/her Super(wo)man characteristics to become a more “normal” person. There is a semblance of normalcy in the lives of some characters in Haywood’s fiction: friendly

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neighbours gossiping at Mickey’s barbershop, Gunner’s girlfriends (even though their lives are touched by tragedy at some point). Even Gunner sometimes just hangs out at the Acey Deuce bar, simply to pass the time. Poverty is still there, in this part of the city Haywood writes about, and affects people of all colours. But, in other parts of the city, life can be led normally, in diverse ethnic communities. Some black people lead affluent lives as entertainers or business people; Gunner catches a first-class flight to Chicago to see his beloved in the sixth novel.

26 Like many of his contemporaries (men and women), Haywood uses the novel as a forum for social critique, mostly issues dealing with the question of race, as seen through the main protagonist. In Haywood’s books, Gunner is the main interest. We access the other characters, gangbangers and rappers, religious figures and dope dealers, prostitutes and wife-beaters solely through his questioning and reflections, which echo, as we have seen earlier, that of the author. The criminal elements in his novels are created “from scratch: pimps and crack dealers don’t happen to be among [his] inner circle of friends. Still, growing up in a predominantly black, inner-city neighbourhood, one manages to pick up their language and mannerisms almost by osmosis, even from a safe distance” (Bailey 123). By adopting the conventions of the genre as defined by his white predecessors (the Chandler-Hammett-MacDonald tradition), Haywood can appeal to a wide, multi-ethnic audience who recognize an archetypal figure when they see one and feel safe even while reading about violence and death. At the same time, they are given food for thought. The Gunner series, with its running commentary on human relations, its attempt at giving a balanced view of the various aspects of a question, adds an element of reflexion, anchored in realism, to a literary genre too often content with just telling a mere adventure story.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailey, Frankie Y. Out of the Woodpile: Black characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Baker, Nikki. In the Game. Tallahassee: The Naiad Press, 1991.

Bland, Eleanor Taylor. Dead Time. New York: Signet Books, 1992.

Décuré, Nicole. “In Search of our Sisters’ Mean Streets: The Politics of Sex, Race and Class in Black Women’s Crime Fiction.” In Diversity and Detective Fiction: Race, Gender, Ethnicity. Ed. Kathleen G. Klein. Bowling Green: Bowling Green UP, 1999. 158-185.

Décuré, Nicole. “Noires et noir.” Polar et féminisme, Actes de la Journée de l’ANEF (Association nationale des études féministes) 2000. Supplément au Bulletin de l’ANEF 35 (2001): 83-9.

Haywood, Gar Anthony. All the Lucky Ones Are Dead. New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1999.

Haywood, Gar Anthony. Fear of the Dark. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Haywood, Gar Anthony. Not Long for this World. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

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Haywood, Gar Anthony. You Can Die Trying. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Haywood, Gar Anthony. It’s not a Pretty Sight. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 1996.

Haywood, Gar Anthony. When Last Seen Alive. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 1997.

Haywood, Gar Anthony. “Smoke signals.” L. A. Weely, 24 April 2002. https://www.laweekly.com/ smoke-signals/

Haywood, Gar Anthony. The official website of Gar Anthony Haywood. https:// garanthonyhaywood.com/

Himes, Chester. Cotton Comes to Harlem. London: Panther Books, 1965.

Himes, Chester. For Love of Imabelle. New York: Dell, 1957.

Joe, Yolanda. Falling Leaves of Ivy. Stamford: Longmeadow, 1992.

Jordan, Jon. “Interview with Gar Anthony Haywood aka Ray Shannon.” Mystery One Bookstore, Milwaukee 2003. http://www.mysteryone.com/interview.php?ID=701 [archived: https:// web.archive.org/web/20080514052844/http://www.mysteryone.com/ GarHaywoodInterview.htm]

Julien, Claude & Alice Mills, eds. “Round Table Discussion: Paula Woods, Gar Haywood, Barbara Neely and Participants in the Symposium”. “Polar noir:” Reading African-American Detective Fiction. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2005: 117-129.

Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990.

Munt, Sally. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London: Routledge, 1994.

Neely, Barbara. Blanche on the Lam. New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1992.

Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective. A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: U. of Massachusetts P., 1996.

NOTES

1. Pauline Hopkins published Hagar’s Daughter in 1900 and Rudolph Fisher The Conjure-Man Dies in 1932. 2. Private correspondence between the author of the article and Haywood, 13 June 2009. 3. P. I. fiction is that branch of crime fiction or detective fiction in which the hero/heroine is a private investigator. It usually runs in series, with the P. I. as recurrent hero/heroine. 4. For in-depth portraits of these heroines, see Décuré (1999, 2001).

ABSTRACTS

Gar Anthony Haywood is the first African American writer, forty years after Chester Himes, to write a crime fiction series with a black hero. The main character is a rather conventional P. I. but the novels stand out because of the running commentary on issues of race, violence, sexism, and homophobia.

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Quarante ans après Chester Himes, Gar Anthony Haywood est le premier écrivain africain- américain à écrire une série policière dont le héros est noir. Le personnage principal est un détective privé plutôt conventionnel mais les romans se distinguent par leurs commentaires sur des questions de race, de violence, de sexisme et d’homophobie.

INDEX

Keywords: crime fiction, African American, racism, violence, Haywood Gar Anthony, literature, noir Mots-clés: fiction policière, africain-américain, racisme, violence, Haywood Gar Anthony, littérature, polar

AUTHOR

NICOLE DÉCURÉ Nicole Décuré is a French Emeritus professor at Toulouse University. Her fields of research are learning and teaching English as a foreign language and crime fiction. Contact: nicole.decure [at] univ-tlse3.fr

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Is Equal Protection a Language Game?

Anne-Marie O’Connell

Introduction

1 The role of law is to regulate interactions among the members of a given polity, and between these members, their governments and their institutions. Parallel to the legal acts that contribute to the evolution of society, be they parliamentary decisions, court rulings or administrative orders, the law has developed a language of its own with its concepts and procedural rules. In the context of judicial review involving the US Supreme Court, interpretation is associated with the role of the Justices in deciding which meaning to give to a constitutional clause in relation to a specific case within the jurisdiction of the Court. Discussions concern points of doctrine, and there is no clear consensus among jurists as to the origin of the meaning of the constitutional text, nor do they all agree about the role the Supreme Court Justices should play in the process: does meaning originate in the minds of the Founders? Is it only present in the words of the Constitution? Should judges restrain their interpretive powers to the literal elucidation of the text, or should they rather be more active and adapt the constitutional text to current social criteria? None of those preoccupations are of immediate concern to a philosopher of language. Even though meaning is a major issue, the legal approach does not fit into the categories developed in the field of analytical philosophy, which would rather focus its efforts on eliciting the emergence of meaning as the result of interactions between a reference,1 verbal statements, 2 and those speakers involved in the speech act. But this is the arena in which those apparently diverging interests can meet and interact.

2 The purpose of the present contribution is to provide an insight into the semantics of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution from a philosophical viewpoint. This clause has been at the root of many controversies among jurists and those directly affected by the Supreme Court’s decisions in the

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course of the United States’ constitutional history, because of its extraordinary and far- reaching influence on society and politics. It goes as follows:

3 All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (14th Amendment to the US Constitution, Section 1)

4 Since its aim is to prohibit discrimination by state action, the disputes have focused on the meaning of equality among those under state jurisdiction. Since its ratification by Congress in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause has fostered a variety of divisive issues, like the legality of racial segregation, of mixed race or single- sex marriage, of the treatment of non-nationals, of affirmative action measures in education and contracting, to name but a few of the issues that were absent from the congressional debates that preceded the ratification of the Amendment. Due to the normative nature of law, those issues not only concern legal interpretation itself, but also people and groups sharing the same interests. Moreover, equality, in itself a very broad concept to define, has been subject to so many different interpretations that the Supreme Court has often found itself in the eye of social, political and moral controversy whenever it had to decide on equal protection issues, not to mention the legal disputations its rulings have triggered in the world of legal scholars, let alone among the Justices themselves. The issue that will be discussed in the present contribution concerns the nature of the language of the law in connection with its interpretation, with reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of the language game developed in his Philosophical Investigations (1958). Many scholars have focused their attention on one particular aspect of his work, namely “rule following” in connection with the possibility of attributing meaning to law and to the rules of interpretation (Markell 805-810, Finkelstein). Whether there is such a thing as “legal truth” has been the subject of many academic discussions, notably between the Legal Realists and the Critical Legal Scholars. Both currents have elaborated contrasting theories on the relation between rules of interpretation and the law, which constitutes their verbal reference. The former have construed Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following as evidence that legal rules are fundamentally indeterminate (Arulanantham). The latter, dubbed the Anti-Realist current, argue that Wittgenstein never stated that language was indeterminate, but that our assumptions about how it operated were flawed at best, or even nonsensical (Bix), and that Wittgenstein’s views do not fully apply to the field of legal interpretation.

5 My argument offers a somewhat different perspective on the subject. I will argue that it is possible to consider the language of law as what Wittgenstein calls a language game (1958: 23)3 while contending that language being self-referential, the meaning of law can find an extra-linguistic reference in the concept of time. But what bridges the conceptual gap between the self-enclosed world of the language game and the world of history lies in a property of language that has hitherto been neglected: its metaphoric aspect. If, indeed, the meaning of legal interpretation can be approached via the exploration of its grammar, its rules, that have produced contrasted and sometimes ambiguous results as expressed in the Court’s decisions involving the Equal Protection Clause, some interpretations cannot be fully understood without taking the creativity

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of language into consideration. Because words do not point to a unique reference, and because resorting to images and synonyms can bring additional knowledge about the world thus designated (Frege),4 the language of law develops into linguistic variations leading to the creation of different concepts and different outcomes within the compass of legal interpretation, the more so as the logical structure of reasoning is based on analogy. The latter, in turn, operates on the grounds that elements from cases can be used in other instances, but, ultimately, it can only refer to the constitutional norm, which is based on an initial statement about the world as it is.

6 However, such a notion cannot be confined to a flat chronological backdrop against which history unfolds, but should be seen as the substance that shapes the identity and the memory of groups that have been differently affected by legal decisions, and judges are part of that very process. More specifically, our aim is to show how the constitutional clause, as interpreted by the US Supreme Court, is structured in relation to the two following aspects: first, its meaning and how it emerges from the statement made by the clause and, secondly, its complex relation with time, a concept that covers several dimensions, such as history, memory, or hermeneutics. In that perspective we will follow the detailed study conducted by French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1975, 1983, 1985). The meaning of legal interpretation can also be approached via the exploration of, in Wittgenstein’s words, its grammar and rules. For the sake of consistency, the analysis will be confined to the issue of racial segregation, with particular emphasis on cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board. of Education of Topeka (1954) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).

I. Structure of the language game

1. Definition of “rule” and “reference”

7 The piecemeal definition given by Wittgenstein of language games is rather disconcerting at first because he devotes many paragraphs to the impossibility of anyone knowing what the expression actually means, since it cannot be reduced to what is normally referred to as concepts; this indeterminacy encompasses all the constitutive elements of the language game, including rules, common understanding of those rules among the players, intended meaning, and the very idea of meaning itself, as exemplified in the following extracts: “How should we explain to someone what a game is? […] We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary—for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all” (1958 33)—he also insists on the inadequacy of logical categories in defining games (ibid. 33, 34, 35). On language, he states: You talk about all sorts of language games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language […] And this is true. Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all (ibid. 31).

8 He then proceeds to give a paradoxical definition of rules: What do I call “the rule by which he proceeds”? —The hypothesis that satisfactorily describes his use of words, which we observe; or the rules which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which he gives us in reply if we ask him what his rule is? —

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But what if observation does not enable us to see any clear rule, and the question brings none to light? […] What meaning is the expression “the rule by which he proceeds” supposed to have left to it here? (ibid. 38. )5

9 Of the common understanding of rules he says: But what does the picture of a leaf look like when it does not show us any particular shape, but what is common to all shapes of leaf? Which shape is the ‘sample in my mind’ of the colour green—the sample of what is common to all shades of green? (ibid. 34) Must I know whether I understand a word? Don’t I also sometimes imagine myself to understand a word […] and then realize that I did not understand it? (ibid. 39) The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. […] It throws light on our concept of meaning6 something. For in those cases things turn out otherwise than we had meant, foreseen. That is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: ‘I didn’t mean it like that’ (ibid. 50; see also id. at 39, 53 and 54).

10 This state of utter uncertainty regarding the rules that govern the conduct of speakers stands in jarring contrast with the requirements of legal adjudication and constitutional interpretation, where the predictability of court decisions and the clarity of rule-following are essential. In fact, language use is made up of an infinite number of language games and rule-following is synonymous with experience. Legal interpretation derives from a careful examination of case law, of precedents, and this close scrutiny yields two conclusions: first, that it forms a cohesive continuum and, secondly, that there is a substantive congruence between the constitutional text and the overall series of derived decisions, something that Ronald Dworkin dubbed the chain novel qualified by the criterion of fit (229-32) 7. In this language game, the reference, that which attributes a truth value to a statement, is not situated in an extra-linguistic reality, and no real life, concrete fact will be the measure of its truth or falsity; in fact, the ultimate reference is verbal, because it is the constitutional text itself. Since Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803, 8 the Constitution has been considered as the supreme law of the land as far as the duty of courts in matters of judicial review is concerned. The logical consequence of that statement is that constitutional adjudication only addresses two questions, the first one being “what does that text mean?” (Kay 706), and the second: “how does it mean it?”

11 As a preamble, let us make two remarks: first, the reference in the interpretive language game being textual, and not factual, there is no reason why the Equal Protection Clause should not be considered on a par with texts of a different kind. After all, a textual commentary can only be carried out on the assumption that there is a common, reasonable agreement on the meaning of its words and sentences (Fiss 742-43),9 albeit admitting a leeway in the manner in which meaning is to be assessed. This leads us to the second remark, namely that language exceeds explication, which can only be inadequate and mediate if we follow Wittgenstein when he argues that meaning is experienced more in language use than in conceptualization. Thus, theories that aim to assign meaning to a particular location are doomed to fail. If one adopts the mentalist’s view of the original intent as the source and location of the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, we negate the possibility for the Constitution to mean anything outside this specific context of utterance. One might wonder what relevance it would have centuries after its ratification, because one effect would be to deny History any power and influence over societies. Besides, the Founders themselves never

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laid out a particular rule that would govern the interpretive conduct of judges. Likewise, it is far from certain that rules of interpretation that focus on the meaning of words avoid such pitfalls. Constitutional meaning can be seen as continuous because it has acquired a time-honored definition through history, or affirmed with reference to what dictionaries or thesauruses have determined it should be. Additionally, making social or historical context the sole criterion in matters of interpretation would restore the correlation between objects of the world and language: if that was completely the case, then why would the constitutional text be the source of all interpretations, if it was not endowed with some permanent meaning of its own? That is the reason why Wittgenstein would say that there is no such thing as a fixed rule, because “we make rules as we go along” (1958: 38)10 and that ascribing meaning by referring to another word, and not to a fact, only demonstrates the arbitrariness of the process, and this is logically nonsensical (ibid. 7). He did stress that rules exist, but that they do not follow the logical pattern ascribed to them because these are mere reconstructions, mere fictions. However, there is no reason to doubt the existence of rules, and of meaning; but they rarely take the well-trodden paths described by philosophers. In fact, intellectual categories have rather obscured the issue, by separating and labeling texts according to type or subject-matter, as was recommended by Aristotle. These were the earliest examples of this theory of language.

12 One particular feature of this classification is to restrict linguistic structures and figures of speech to specific domains, like seeing metaphor as restricted to the domain of literature. Roman Jakobson attributes six functions to language (62) and, according to him, metaphor expresses the way in which language is used for its own sake and for aesthetic purposes. But it can be equally considered as cognitive and informative. Frege, albeit in a theory that equates logic with perfection in language, admits that the planet Venus can be equally designated by the expressions “Morning Star” or “Evening Star”: the reference remains identical (the planet), and is semantic in nature, but meanings, expressed by signs, differ from each other. Yet, it is not impossible to designate different semantic contents with one given sign (or word) in different texts: this is the case with the word person in the Equal Protection Clause, since it came to mean different things, based on what can be called the metaphoric substance of language. To illustrate this view, reference will be made to French philosopher Paul Ricœur, who devoted an in-depth analysis to the metaphoric nature of language in La Métaphore vive (1975), translated into English in 1977 as The Rule of Metaphor.11 One of the central points developed in this opus is that metaphor is not just a linguistic tool fulfilling a poetic or a rhetorical function in speech and discourse, but it is crucial in the emergence of meaning, while redefining our concept of truth along other lines: it should not be seen as partaking of logical coherence and empiric verification only. Language, through what he calls metaphoricity, can effectively create a new facet of reality that integrates a cognitive dimension distinct from reference to the objects and states of affairs. Moving from the semiotic dimension of meaning and metaphor (the one that only considers the word as the unit of meaning) to semantics (according to which the meaning of metaphor encompasses the whole sentence) to hermeneutics (an interpretation that attributes meaning to a metaphor sustained throughout a whole text, be it fictional or philosophical), the metaphor transcends and creates reality and cannot be dissociated from the thought process. Within the boundaries of a given language game, metaphoricity expands the possibilities of interpreting facts and textual

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references in a creative, yet normative manner, a process that may open perspectives in the field of constitutional adjudication.

2. The metaphor of the “person”

13 This word is emblematic of the interpretive disputes that have arisen in connection with the Equal Protection Clause, because the notion of corporate personhood was the result of the gradual metaphorization of the language of law, which provides an insight into the definition and scope of the Equal Protection Clause while allowing the creation of applications of the term to other, subsidiary contexts (Ricœur 1975: 112-14). When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, it was clear in the minds of those who pressed for its adoption that a person was a natural person and, for many of them, that the Amendment aimed to protect the newly-freed slaves from future disenfranchisement. Since then, several appeals have been heard by the Supreme Court as to the constitutionality of the doctrine of corporate personhood and the desirability of maintaining corporations under state legislative control, a point illustrated in Darthmouth Coll. v. Woodward (1819) where the Supreme Court limited the power of government to control corporations whose existence was “found” in the Constitution. In Paul v. Virginia (1868) the Court ruled that corporations were not citizens under Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution; in The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) corporations were denied the protection of the Civil War Amendments; while not deciding on corporate personhood per se, the Court reaffirmed in 1877, in Munn v. Illinois (1877) and later in the Railroad Tax Cases (1882) 12 that the Fourteenth Amendment could not protect corporations from State law. The turning point was Santa Clara County v. So. Pacific Railroad (1886) when the Chief Justice, although the issue did not concern personhood, expressed his opinion in favor of granting it to corporations, which was ruled constitutional in 1889 in Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad v. Beckwith. Not only has corporate personhood a history in which ideology and economic interests were intermingled, but it also came to be accepted by the Court, in connection with the Fourteenth Amendment, because of the structure of corporations and its analogy with individuals and citizens. The mechanism by which an entity acquires characteristics and rights normally attributed to human beings consists in extracting features from the legal semantic field of the natural person and analogically applying them to corporations (Ricœur 1975: 258). Metaphorically, corporations can be identified in the same way as individuals, via documentation that follows similar paths and has similar functions. If a corporation can be defined as property held in common by a group of people while forming a separate identity, it can live a life of its own and is free to interact with business partners and institutions by means of contracts, just as natural persons do. The latter undergo a process of progressive abstraction of their most fundamental characteristics, and thus become general entities that can, in turn, be associated with different semantic contents; the process is linguistic, not logical, and this explains why meaning fluctuates with time and circumstances, without giving the impression that some rule of consistency has ever been violated. Moreover, the legal entity, which represents the common pursuit of a group of shareholders, is the semantic image of that collectivity and comes to embody it in the same way as a metonymy would (ibid. 256). The convergence between metonymy (one element that designates the whole) and metaphor (the semantic analogy that keeps the structure together) provides the linguistic and semantic foundation for judges to grant equal protection

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and other rights to corporations, even if the outcome is not always widely sustained.13 Wittgenstein would explain the convergence between natural and corporate persons as the expression of a “family resemblance,” in which there is no clear boundary between words and concepts, so that semantic glides actually occur and polysemy generates the metaphor (1953: 32). But the semantic creativity of language is also sustained by the manner in which courts build up doctrines and legal concepts, more particularly with reference to binding precedents. Indeed, as the underlying logical structure is based on analogy, it enables judges to apply some findings in relation to a specific case to another instance, whose subject matter is unrelated in content, and similar in purpose. Thus, the definition and scope of Equal Protection can depart from its originally narrower ambit to encompass a much wider range of applications.

3. The analogical chain of interpretation

14 This interpretive path is provided by the manner in which specific cases can be generalized to whole areas of the law, and the double process of gradual racial segregation and, conversely, its progressive abolition in all its forms, is a case in point. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the question whether state legislation imposing segregated facilities in public transport was constitutional was decided, among other considerations, in relation to precedents involving school segregation (544) and interracial marriage (545), while distinguishing the case under review from other appeals directly concerning public means of conveyance, because the latter involved interstate commerce (546) or a state ban on segregated transport (546). The only case involving transport that the Court considered as a valid precedent differed in the facts but shared the same legal issue (547). Thus the chain of reasoning hinges on both form and content, but none of those features need belong to similar cases and circumstances; what matters most is the way in which the Court reaches its decision, and if segregation is constitutional for schools or marriage, it can be so for public transport. This narrow path nevertheless provided state legislatures with the power to generalize racial segregation to other areas of social life, based on the same principle of the chain of analogies that support the metaphor of race. Likewise, in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), the Court resorted to the same kind of device to reverse Plessy, when it stated that “(t)he Fifth Amendment, which is applicable in the District of Columbia, does not contain an equal protection clause as does the Fourteenth Amendment which applies only to the states. But the concepts of equal protection and due process, both stemming from our American ideal of fairness, are not mutually exclusive.” And, although Brown v. Board of Education, decided on the same day, concerns racial segregation in state schools, Justice Warren concluded on the analogy between both cases by stating that “it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government.” Many scholarly disputes have arisen as to the legal solidity of those arguments, but these controversies illustrate another aspect of legal interpretation, namely that rules may exist, but that they tend not to produce identical results, something that Wittgenstein expressed in one of his sporting metaphors: “but no more are there any rules for how high one throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too” (1958: 32).

15 What emerges from such considerations is that rules, which are part and parcel of the interpretive language game, are subject to other influences, such as political opinions or social and philosophical views that may explain the differences in results, as well as

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the plurality of opinions expressed in court decisions. There are instances in which opposite viewpoints rest on the variations in meaning of a particularly important term, which can yield diverging results, depending on which solution is adopted. Thus, in Plessy, Justice Harlan, quoting Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), dissents from the majority opinion on most points, and particularly emphasizes the semantic gap that separates his understanding of equal protection from that of the other Justices’: “We also said: ‘The words of the amendment, it is true, are prohibitory, but they contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity or right, most valuable to the colored race’” (Plessy 556, emphasis added). Whether or not necessity is involved in the process, it remains that meaning, when attributed to a word or a noun or a name, is floating, while it does not prevent propositions from being experienced as true or false, or the product of experience from participating in the future definition of a concept (Wittgenstein, 1958, 36). Ultimately, there is no way to assess the abstract superiority of one argument over another (Markell), which probably explains the persistence of controversies in matters of constitutional adjudication when it comes to Supreme Court rulings. But this discussion should not be restricted to internal debates in interpretation; if meaning is intrinsically experienced, then the social dimension of Equal Protection cases and decisions offers the perfect ground for the confrontation of different views of the constitutional language game. One element that structures and differentiates the perceived implications of the Fourteenth Amendment by the various social actors involved in the game is time in its hermeneutic dimension.14

II. The hermeneutic role of time in the adjudicative language game

16 So far, we have come to the conclusion that what sustains the coherence of interpretive rules in the legal language game is metaphoric in nature, which may explain why the existence of logically-structured rules (which maintain the cohesion of the system) may foster creativity. For Ricœur, metaphoricity belongs to discourse, which is the expression of the opinions and feelings of a conscious subject who lives in time. The paradox of time is that it is perceived as a whole, and yet, there is a clear dichotomy between cosmic, calendar time and the time of perception and experience (which he calls phenomenological time), and, within the latter, another rift between the past, the present and the future in the conscience of the subject (Ricœur 1983: 21-65) or, more aptly perhaps, the human being, endowed with existence. Making sense of this aporetic structure of time necessitates the creation of some narrative that puts time and experience in perspective: telling a story is already some sort of explication of experience, of existence and of the essence of time. Ricœur focuses his analysis on the relation between time and historical narratives, which he then closely connects to fiction. In both cases, time becomes the subject of the narrative; historians have long believed that history consists in the logical construction of the past, with a view to providing a probable explication of the course of past events in a predictive perspective called the “nomologist approach” (Ricœur 1983: 204-05) while novelists provide us with a description of history, as well as with a specific, non-neutral viewpoint. Both standpoints are not, however, incompatible, because both tend to create narratives. The historical narrative, in its relation to time, is an attempt to come to terms with such issues as personal identity, finality and the meaning of existence. The narrative

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construction of history resorts to three types of features (Ricœur 1985: 189): cosmological time (the movement of planets, the cycle of seasons), calendar time (which represents the succession of years as well as the repetition of events and commemorations), and experienced time. On the other hand, the Self experiences its existence in the presence of others who have a commonality of interests and share some common features (Ricœur 1985: 198-208). Time enables humans to think of history in terms of continuity between past, present and future generations, a process fueled by the gradual collection of archives, documents and traces (Ricœur 1985: 215-24). Such characteristics are applicable to all human groups and social activities, among which one may count legal interpretation. But memory is also a matter of point of view and perspective, and judicial review is also conditioned by history; this has generated conflicts, especially with respect to the Equal Protection Clause for two reasons: first, because the manner in which the Court construes time differs from the perception of the actors that are directly concerned by the ruling (i.e. the parties to the case), and secondly, because the issues associated with the Fourteenth Amendment are not only a matter of law and legal reasoning, but of justice, which partakes of the sphere of ethics. This concept refers to the substantive aspect of law and is more traditionally divided between corrective and distributive justice. These two elements play an important part in the debate over affirmative action, as illustrated by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Bakke case, which also reflects on the hierarchy of values in Equal Protection embodied by the three-tier scrutiny system that places race as its leading and ambiguous paradigm.

1. The Supreme Court’s narrative of Equal Protection

17 In his Bakke opinion, Justice Powell recapitulates the position of the Supreme Court regarding the meaning of Equal Protection and its relative importance within the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment (291-99). He begins with a historical overview of “the perception of racial and ethnic distinctions,” which he deems “rooted in our Nation’s constitutional and demographic history.” He then proceeds to construe the Court’s view of the Fourteenth Amendment as changing, and the importance of the Equal Protection Clause as varying in the course of US history for the benefit of the Due Process Clause, a phenomenon mirrored in case law. He sees the fluctuation in meaning and scope of the Amendment as the result of an antagonism between these two clauses, one striving to protect “the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised dominion over him” (291), while the other one had been repeatedly used to expand the meaning of property via the doctrine of so-called “substantive due process” (291-92).15 Parallel to this legal dichotomy, which we may assume he considers to be an error (an opinion reflected in his choice of words “relegated,” “desuetude,” “displaced,” “genuine measure of vitality”), Justice Powell develops his view that the demographic landscape of the United States had changed (292), and that this is something that would justify a new consideration of the Equal Protection Clause. His aim is to show that the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause has been broadened to include all minorities (292).16 But his reasoning goes beyond the statement that the United States is a nation of immigrants that have equal claims to the protection of minorities against state discrimination; he does away with the very notion of majority by supporting the view that it can be replaced with the notion of group alliances against another, and underlines that such alliances may be

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circumstantial and changing,17 and that these changes depend more on social fluctuations than on deliberate policies. Having removed the racial sting against one particular class of citizens from his analysis of the scope of Equal Protection, he then moves on to argue that the Amendment, whose reach is universal (293),18 can only be construed as applying to individuals, not groups (296),19 by virtue of his fluctuating majority theory. Accordingly, yielding to real, but circumstantial cases, would deprive the Constitution of any coherent and universal application, which would run counter to the very exercise of judicial review (297).20 This line of interpretation reads like an historical narrative of the nomological kind; it is descriptive of an interpretive process, it generalizes cases to their most abstract aspect and adopts a universal vision of persons, citizens, individuals. These words point to a subtext that contains the essential characteristics of human nature as ideals, in the same way that a mathematician would deal with symbols. Similarly, groups are presented as the mere aggregation of persons sharing identical interests and characteristics; they are abstract, anonymous, and contrast with individuals only to say that the law knows the latter, not the former. Sociological changes are equated with demography, a reference that has an objective value in the eye of the judge because it is a science, and any fluctuation in that domain is an object, a fact in relation to which a proposition can say something descriptive, according to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In that sense, these fluctuations mean something.21 In a world defined as “everything that is the case […] the totality of facts, not things […] determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts” (ibid. 31), the language of propositions makes sense if they adequately (that is, by using the correct logical symbols) describe events and objects in the world of reference, if they are analytical (or tautological) and thus, devoid of any cognitive content (ibid. 155); on the other hand, a language that would form pseudo-propositions, like most ethical or philosophical propositions, would not make any sense, because it would refer to language itself, not to facts or events: in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, there is no such thing as meta-language (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” [ibid. 189]). However, a proposition can show what it cannot say, which is the case when it is true, and this includes understanding, as well as anything that lies beyond the boundaries of the world; saying and showing are mutually exclusive even if they somehow coexist in propositions. Thus the judgment in Bakke strives to restrict its scope to following the rules of the legal language game, and rejects other sociological or ethical considerations outside its boundaries. Wittgenstein states in a famous letter to Ludwig von Ficker that the meaning of his Tractatus was ethical, but that ethics constituted its unwritten part (McGuinness 287; Engelmann 143-44). What is at stake in the Bakke ruling is precisely the ethical issue of justice—indeed, this case evidences the conflict between two language games. Opposite the language of law is the language game of a group, a community that has been shaped by history as well as by a collective, shared memory around the central paradigm of racial discrimination. In fact, in a manner similar to a Wittgensteinian proposition, the court ruling in Bakke says something about the rules of the language game and shows how the paradigm of race has deeply shaped the narrative of constitutional interpretation. It is particularly clear in the manner in which the Court has devised a differential system of scrutiny in relation to cases involving the Equal Protection Clause, which will be the focus of the next part.

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2. The three-tiered standard of scrutiny

18 In the course of legal interpretation, the Court’s attitude toward government discrimination has changed, and the case of Carolene Products (1938)22 and its now famous “Footnote 4” has been hailed a landmark decision in that respect.23 It introduces into the review process the idea that there are different types of discrimination, and that some, being more serious than others, would demand stronger accountability of the legislature or government to justify it. The Footnote includes all the provisions of the Bill of Rights in its scope, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment within a stricter standard of scrutiny. Thus, any legislative decision that would, on its face, treat groups differently on the basis of race should be considered unconstitutional unless the government justifies its action by proving it would fulfill the aims and objectives of the Fourteenth Amendment. While it is easy to understand why the Court has introduced a scale in the standards of judicial review, based on the impact and objects of that scrutiny, the question whether strict scrutiny applies to any case of differential treatment on the basis of race is much more controversial, as the Bakke case highlighted. The whole discussion hinges on the exact meaning of equality. In logic, the [=] sign is equivalent to the copula is, and it can be understood in two ways. First, it is a statement of existence, and it connects a subject (S) and a predicate (P), and this is the general form of propositions that describe objects of the world or states of affairs. However, propositions can also be analytic, in which case they are tautological, identical, and do not contain any information about the world of reference; they only describe themselves. On that basis, the [=] sign has no meaning of its own, but it has implications in law because it is closely associated with theories in which justice plays a central part. For the Court in Bakke, equality means that there should be no distinct treatment of individuals on the basis of race; one individual shares the same feature with all the others, and that entails having the same rights that are equally and uniformly protected by the Constitution. We may call this an essentialist view. On this basis, the existence of minorities is contingent because their existence may fluctuate with time; thus, it would be dangerous to attribute to one (or several) group(s) a privileged status by means of discriminatory programs, because, if we take into account the possibility of future demographic changes, that group may itself become the majority; in which case any reparative law in its favour might turn out to be discriminatory against the past majority group. But if we adopt Ricœur’s opinion on the importance of time in the shaping of a collective memory, we clearly find that communities have shaped their identity around preferential or discriminatory treatment, a phenomenon that is well-documented in the case of African-American history. Time leaves traces that are remembered and transmitted from generation to generation in such a way that pure equal treatment cannot be an appropriate response.

19 The idea that time is synonymous with progress is the direct heir to the Enlightenment, a view that is both optimistic and abstract. Identity, in that case, is rather formal, mathematical in its definition, and its semanticism is somehow merged with that of equality, because the focus for interpretation is general and universal. If it negated the existence of groups in the eye of the law, the Court’s view would run counter to history and sociology while trying to come to terms with its consequences. According to social science, identity is always shaped by the existence of antagonistic communities, an idea which is reflected in the successive rulings that have helped define the paradigm of race in the judicial arena. Indeed, major changes in the legal interpretation of “equality”

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have taken place since Plessy, and have mostly hinged on the idea of “togetherness” as opposed to “separation,” but it is remarkable that the existence of groups has always been present in the background. In Plessy, the Court contended that laws mandating that the races be “separate but equal” was constitutional; in Brown, the doctrine was reversed to races being considered as living “together and equal,” which, semantically, comes much closer to the constitutional ideal of equality, while it does not address the issue of the existence of groups and communities based on race, and how they should interact within a constitutional framework that upholds equality. In Bakke, however, there has been a shift in the definition of racial relations; individuals should compete against one another for a place in higher education, regardless of color or origin, while the promotion of hitherto minorities was considered as conforming to the purpose of the Constitution (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 438 US 265 1978: 314-316), 24 which is logically puzzling. One way of solving this paradox is to consider the Court’s view as an attempt to dissociate the concept of race from that of group by stating that race should be one factor to take into account in admissions to law or medical schools, but only as one among a variety of criteria, that should equally apply to individuals. Thus, it is possible to see the ruling as a contribution to the emergence of a color-blind society that would achieve the ideal of togetherness enshrined in the Constitution. However, resorting to strict scrutiny seems to underline the paradox of race, and its paradigmatic status in US constitutional history; indeed, it restricts the impact of legislation in racial matters for historical reasons, while government may elect to take strong incentive measures, like affirmative action, with the same aim, and for identical reasons. Incidentally, if the Supreme Court’s view prevails over government-sponsored affirmative action programs, it would, in the long term, prepare for the abandonment of the three-tier standard of scrutiny, should the ideal of color-blindness be achieved. If that was the case, it would demand a different approach to the interpretation of Equal Protection, but this speculation remains entirely hypothetical for one essential reason: the legal language game operates on its own terms, and it does not, or cannot, shape the entire US society, because the latter is based on a strong feeling of community and separate identities in terms of religion, culture, race and origin. Conversely, claiming that society exerts some controlling influence on the law is equally valid, because courts do take context into account when adjudicating a case. So, the reasonable question to ask is not whether a law that gives equal opportunities to a racial group by means of preferential treatment is required by fairness and justice, but whether it is incompatible with it.

3. The “Mortal Question” of Equal Protection

20 The heading of this paragraph is borrowed from philosopher Thomas Nagel, whose collection of essays, published under the title Mortal Questions (1979),25 discusses a series of ethical issues, including the issue of equality in chapters 7 (“The Policy of Preference”) and 8 (“Equality”). In his preface, Nagel sets the objective of his analysis: Simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true: on the contrary, they are usually grounds for thinking it false. Given a knockdown argument for an intuitively unacceptable conclusion, one should assume there is probably something wrong with the argument that one cannot detect—though it is also possible that the source of the intuition has been misidentified. If arguments or systematic theoretical considerations lead to results that seem intuitively not to make sense, or if a neat solution to a problem does not

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remove the conviction that some question is unreal leaves us still wanting to ask it, then something is wrong with the argument and more work needs to be done. Often the problem has to be reformulated, because an adequate answer to the original formulation fails to make the sense of the problem disappear. (Nagel x-xi)

21 Accordingly, the ideal form of philosophy is investigative, its purpose is to strive to find answers by asking relevant questions. In Nagel’s view, philosophy is an activity, just like language in Wittgenstein’s opinion, but making sense of a problem can often be summed up in its identification, and not its correct (or incorrect) interpretation (Wittgenstein 1953: 33), because it is extremely hazardous to establish what a true or a false statement or opinion is. When applied to Equal Protection as the Court interpreted it in Bakke, it is clear that the problem concerns not only the method, the legal approach adopted by supporters and opponents of affirmative action policies, but also the substance of the argument. In The Policy of Preference, Nagel chooses not to discuss the legal aspect of the issue but its moral implications in terms of justice, an area that overlaps and exceeds the scope of the judicial language game. The main issue is whether or not preferential treatment in favour of a member of a previously discriminated community is fair and just, and articulating such an idea is the result of a long, non-linear process (Nagel 91). It begins with the realisation that institutional discrimination is unacceptable, which generates self-conscious efforts to combat it, even if its existence is visible in many ways. That racial discrimination survives in spite of the law shows that it has been internalized in the course of history and of social development; if de jure segregation has disappeared, de facto discrimination is still visible among those who were formerly stigmatized by the law. Among those people, distinctions should be made between the direct victims of discrimination and their descendants, who may also feel that society does not treat them fairly on inherited racial grounds. Nagel argues that society should examine the existence of perceived discrimination, especially if it is supported by statistics and figures, and determine whether it is just the consequence of an otherwise liberal and unequal society, or if it is the result of a deliberately unfair treatment of racial minorities (Nagel 93). One is left with an alternative: either to decide that merit alone will determine access to socially and financially attractive positions, or to tilt the balance in favor of the affected groups and introduce a compensatory element by means of affirmative action programs. Then again, depending on one’s opinion, this should lead to a discussion on the desirability of such programs because a better representation of minorities in higher education is positive in terms of social utility and efficiency. Nagel then insists on the fact that this is a question of opinion and deliberate choice, that there is nothing clear and evident about it in terms of justice because the concept of justice itself is blurred. It is a matter of perception, the workings of memory and the manner in which political ideology sets its standards and goals for what it considers a “just” society (Nagel 97-99). Having described the logical conundrum of the policy of preference, and the impossibility of deciding if it is required by justice, Nagel (101) proceeds to examine whether it is incompatible with it. Accordingly, upholding the differential treatment of minorities with a view to giving equal opportunities to groups previously discriminated against may create adverse effects on otherwise qualified members of the majority (which is the issue in Bakke) but could be justified in terms of utility.26 If this ends up providing better access to health, education and the law for under-represented communities, while the self-esteem of white male applicants is not seriously and insidiously endangered, then this benefits society as a whole (Nagel 103). By broadening the

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perspective on equal protection, it becomes clear that the application of the rules of the legal language game is justified within its boundaries, but not if we consider the social fabric it has shaped in the course of history. Thus, interferences between overlapping language games would be at the root of controversies in equal protection. Now the question is to find a way of reconciling the apparent discordance that the notion of the language game seems to convey. Indeed, for the sake of consistency in society and in the legal system, there should be at least one common ground on which language games emerge and add complexity to all issues of meaning and truth-value that would find its justification in what binds humans together and conditions their social interaction. One possibility would be to resort to what Wittgenstein called “forms of life.”

4. Equal Protection and the “Form of life”

22 If formal logic cannot provide any sustainable explanation for the diversity of concrete, everyday situations and their correlated perception,27 there is at least one form of experience that would synthesize it, a concept that Wittgenstein calls Lebensform (“form of life”)28. The word itself is not given a clear-cut definition; it refers to what conditions reactions and capacities which are hard-wired in the human brain, as well as to the social and cultural conventions that are the consequences of such capacities. For Wittgenstein, the form of life is a framework for behaviour and conduct in which rules are followed because this is the natural thing to do. Therefore, language emerges as a coherent whole out of a stable and regular form of life, and the infinite number of language games that it generates can only be understood and followed in reference to that form of life (Wittgenstein 1958: 86). Because the latter creates the conditions for a social and intellectual consensus on the description of phenomena—language being the most fundamental of them—it can be identified with the truth-value of propositional logic except that it differs greatly in substance (ibid. 88). Applied to Equal Protection, this statement means that language games are autonomous, they set up their rules in such a way that they can be traced back to the form of life that has enabled them to flourish. It may lead us to conclude that the conventional nature of the law is somehow congenial to human nature itself, but also that it is engaged in a network of games that influence each other in many respects. Thus, the ranking of relevant criteria in constitutional adjudication can be the result of those interactions, which may vary with time and circumstances. The predominance of rules of interpretation derives as much from internal considerations (like methods and traditions) as from outside influences, like political or social theories, or even history in the way it shapes collective memory. The focus has therefore shifted from objective rule-following to accommodation with a variety of experiences that have an equal claim to legitimacy. This analysis should give coherence to the history of the interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, while underlining the impossibility of finding the most adequate judicial response to the social problems entailed by racial discrimination. It can also be seen as an attempt to dissolve the apparent inconsistencies that have accompanied the Supreme Court rulings in connection with this thorny issue, and one remarkable attempt at conciliating the requirements of law and of justice within the “form of life” of American society in its political dimension can be found in the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. Regents of the University of Michigan (2011). The issue concerns the constitutionality, under the Equal Protection Clause, of a “successful voter-initiated amendment to the Michigan

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constitution” prohibiting “Michigan’s public colleges and universities from granting, according to the text of the amendment (Michigan Constitution, art.1, §26) ‘preferential treatment to […] any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.’” (§26(2)). The Appeal Court’s approach was to examine the facts in the light of the fair political process of the Equal Protection Clause, which prevents state governments from altering the political structure of the State in a way that would impose an impermissible burden on minorities, by securing the vote of the majority in matters that would, in all likelihood, put them in an electorally-sanctioned unequal position. For the Court, this would amount to the perversion of the very notion of democracy. The Equal Protection Clause “guarantees racial minorities the right to full participation in the political life of the community. It is beyond dispute [...] that given racial or ethnic groups may not be denied the franchise, or precluded from entering into the political process in a reliable and meaningful manner” Washington v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 458 US 457, 467, 102 S.Ct. 3187, 73 L.Ed.2d 896 (1982). But the Equal Protection Clause reaches even further, prohibiting “a political structure that treats all individuals as equals, yet more subtly distorts governmental processes in such a way as to place special burdens on the ability of minority groups to achieve beneficial legislation. […] The State may no more disadvantage any particular group by making it more difficult to enact legislation in its behalf than it may dilute any person’s vote or give any group a smaller representation than another of comparable size” Hunter v. Erickson, 393 US 385, 393, 89 S.Ct. 557, 21 L.Ed.2d 616 (1969).

23 The Supreme Court’s statements in Hunter and Seattle emphasize that equal protection of the laws is more than a guarantee of equal treatment under existing law. It is also a guarantee that minority groups may meaningfully participate in the process of creating these laws and the majority may not manipulate the channels of change so as to place unique burdens on issues of importance to them. In effect, the political-process doctrine hews to the unremarkable notion that when two competitors are running a race, one may not require the other to run twice as far or to scale obstacles not present in the first runner’s course. Ensuring the fairness of the political process is particularly important because an electoral minority is disadvantaged in its attempts to pass legislation; this is especially true of “discrete and insular minorities,” who face unique additional hurdles.29 This extract from the ruling echoes the words of President Lyndon Johnson in his 1965 Commencement Address at Harvard University, in which he defines affirmative action as the endeavor to give equal opportunities to racial minorities: “We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” (Johnson, emphasis added) What is even more remarkable is the manner in which the Court uses the same famous metaphor of the two runners on the racetrack devised by Johnson to illustrate the way in which centuries of racial discrimination have negatively affected minorities. 30 However, whereas Lyndon Johnson clearly alludes to existing social injustice that affirmative action aims to combat, while political freedom is taken from granted,31 the Sixth Circuit gives a detailed definition of equality within a democratic and political framework (Coalition 619-25). Indeed the Civil Rights era motto of “One man, one vote” which insists on the political equality among individuals in the political process, must be supplemented by a thorough consideration of the place of groups in the voting process in such a way as to qualify the preponderance and scope of a majority vote. In that perspective, it is fallacious to argue that the sum of minority voters would exceed in numbers the majority group,32 as the Equal Protection Clause speaks of the protection

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of insular groups. This remark points to the necessity to see equality as a multi-faceted concept the dimensions of which must necessarily coexist in society. It can then be reasonably asserted that the form of life spoken of by Wittgenstein is the converging point of otherwise diverging language games, interests, and discourse. It constitutes the environment that nurtures language games and their rules on the one hand, and their metaphoric interactions that are shaped so as to form “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein 1953: 32), on the other hand. Supreme Court rulings in matters of Equal Protection can only mirror the complexity of those interactions and changing focus points.

Conclusion

24 Behind the controversies generated by the Supreme Court’s attempts at giving a sustainable interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause lies a deeper quest for judicial truth, a truth that seems to elude formal logic, as well as individual and collective experience. It cannot be equated to the sole narrative structure of judgments, and it cannot dissolve the competing social claims that the constitutional text has embodied and generated at the same time. The paradox of truth lies in the fact that it is an absolute necessity envisaged as something particular, because it is a powerful but elusive ingredient of language. To ask whether legal interpretation is a linguistic fallacy is not to deny this indissoluble connection between truth and language, but to state that it does not stand the test of interpretation without highlighting its many contradictions, diffractions and impossibilities. It may also open new perspectives in the analysis of judicial discourse by focusing on the social shaping of legal concepts; the latter can be envisaged as elements of a language game whose rules originate, not in words themselves, and not in a unique connection with its external reference, but as the result of a narrative, metaphorical and over-inclusive construction. From that perspective, the language of law may be considered as a world in its own terms, yet firmly anchored in its social environment. Such a view would highlight the normative importance of legal interpretation while showing the influences to which it is subjected, which could validly generate competing claims that are worthy of future consideration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bix, Brian. “The Application (and Rules-Application) of Wittgenstein’s Rule-Following Considerations to Legal Theory.” In Wittgenstein and Legal Theory. Ed. Dennis Patterson. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. 209-223.

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Fiss, Owen. “Objectivity and Interpretation.” Stanford Law Review 34 (1982): 742-3. https:// digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1217/

Frege, Gottlob. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100 (1892): 25-50. http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/show/frege_sinn_1892

Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistics and Poetics.” In Language and Literature. Eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1987. 62-94.

Johnson, Lyndon B. “Commencement Address at Howard University: To Fulfill These Rights”, LBJ Presidential Library, 1965. [archive : https://web.archive.org/web/20160322112750/http:// www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650604.asp]

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Markell, Bruce A. “Bewitched by Language: Wittgenstein and the Practice of Law.” Pepperdine Law Review 32.4 (2005): 801-845. http://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol32/iss4/4

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Nagel, Thomas. “John Rawls and Affirmative Action.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 39 (Spring 2003): 82-4. DOI: 10.2307/3134387

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Ricœur, Paul. Temps et récit 1. L'Intrigue et le récit historique. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

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Shawver, Lois. Commentary on Philosophical Investigations. [s.d.] http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/ lw81-88c.htm

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Cases cited

Bolling v. Sharpe 347 US 497 (1954).

Brown v. Board. of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 (1954).

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Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary v. Regents of University of Michigan, 652 F.3d 607 (6th Cir. 2012) (currently on appeal to the US Supreme Court sub nom. Schuette v. Coalition to Def. Affirm. Action No. 12-682).

Darthmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 US 518 (1819).

Hall v. De Cuir, 95 US 485 (1877).

Louisville N.O. & T. Ry. Co. v. State, 133 US 587, 10 Sup. Ct. 348 (1890).

Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad v. Beckwith 129 US 26 (1889).

Munn v. Illinois 94 US 113 (1877).

Pacific Gas & Electricity v. Public. Utilities of the Comm’n of California, 475 US 1 (1986).

Paul v. Virginia 75 US (8 Wall) 168 (1869).

The Slaughterhouse Cases 83 US 36 (1873).

Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896).

Railroad Co. v. Brown, 17 Wall. 445 (1873).

Railroad Tax Cases (1882).

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 438 US 265 (1978).

Roberts v. City of Boston, 5 Cush. 198 (1850).

San Mateo County v. S. Pacific R.R., 116 US 138 (1885).

Santa Clara County v. So. Pacific Railroad 118 US 394 (1886).

State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389 (1871).

Strauder v. West Virginia 100 US 303 (1880).

The Slaughterhouse Cases 83 US 36 (1873).

United States v. Carolene Prod. Co., 304 US 144 (1938).

NOTES

1. Reference is made up of all the contextual, extra-linguistic elements against which the contents of a proposition will be tested. Its role is to attribute a truth-value to those propositions by reference to an existing state-of-affairs. For instance, the statement “John McCain is the 44th President of the United States” is false by reference to the historical context we live in. 2. Verbal statements are not necessarily propositions. Commands or questions, for instance, are not propositions. The latter are considered as the bearers of truth and falsity in connection with reference, irrespective of the natural language used to express them. 3. “Here the term ‘language game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life […] It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language” (Wittgenstein 1958: 24). 4. The main point of his argument is that real objects (the reference) may be designated by several signs (words, groups of words, verbal expressions) and their sense will thus differ from one another (the planet Venus, which is visible from the Earth, is designated be the expressions “Morning Star” or “Evening Star”; different designations provide different meaning and

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information about the reference, and it would be wrong to assume that Morning Star = Evening Star in the same way as we may posit a=b). 5. Similar statements can be found at 26, 32, 39. 6. This word translates the German “meinen,” which clearly refers to what the speaker has in mind when making a statement. 7. Fit, according to Dworkin, describes a harmonious relation between legal interpretation and the law’s guiding principles. 8. 5 US 137 (1803) : “[I]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is […] So, if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution, disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty. If then, the courts are to regard the constitution, and the constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature, the constitution, and not such an ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply. Those, then, who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes to the constitution, and see only the law. This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions” (my emphasis). 9. “[T]he Constitution is no different from a poem or any legal document. Generality and comprehensiveness are features of any text. Though the Constitution may be more general and comprehend more than a sonnet or a contract, it is comparable in this regard to an epic poem or some national statures. […] It should also be understood that generality and comprehensiveness do not discourage interpretation but are the very qualities that usually provoke it.” 10. See also Shawver (online). This paragraph suggests, according to her, that precision is not always better than imprecision. Indeed, fixing meaning often results in its disappearance. 11. References are to the original French edition. 12. In San Mateo County v. S. Pacific R.R., 116 US 138 (1885), the argument that corporations were “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was heard for the first time, even if the Court did not rule on that particular issue. 13. Pacific Gas & Elec. v. Pub. Util. Comm’n of Cali., 475 US 1 (1986), Rehnquist J., dissenting, stated that “(e)xtension of the individual freedom of conscience decisions to business corporations strains the rationale of those cases beyond the breaking point. To ascribe to such artificial entities an ‘intellect’ or ‘mind’ for freedom of conscience purposes is to confuse metaphor with reality” (emphasis added). In a way, the very existence of rules is vindicated by this attitude, because what this view expresses is the perception that rules have been violated. 14. The following part relies mainly on Paul Ricœur’s analysis of the connection between time and history in the elaboration of meaning and narrative as developed in Temps et récit 3: Le Temps raconté. 15. “The Equal Protection Clause, however, was […] relegated to decades of relative desuetude while the Due Process Clause flourished as a cornerstone in the Court’s defense of property and liberty of contract […]. In that cause, the Fourteenth Amendment’s ‘one pervading purpose’ was displaced. See e. g., Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896). It was only as the era of substantive due process came to a close […] that the Equal Protection Clause began to attain a genuine measure of vitality.” 16. “[T]he United States had become a Nation of minorities;” “As the Nation filled with a stock of many lands, the reach of the Clause was gradually extended to all ethnic groups seeking protection from official discrimination.” 17. “Each [minority] had to struggle […] to overcome the prejudices not of a monolithic majority, but of a 'majority' composed of various minority groups of whom it was said—perhaps unfairly in many cases—that a shared characteristic was a willingness to disadvantage other groups.”

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18. “The guarantees of equal protection,” said the Court in Yick Wo, “are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality; and the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws.” 19. “There is no principled basis for deciding which groups would merit ‘heightened judicial solicitude’ and which would not.” 20. “Those whose societal injury is thought to exceed some arbitrary level of tolerability then would be entitled to preferential classifications at the expense of individuals belonging to other groups. Those classifications would be free from exacting judicial scrutiny. As these preferences began to have their desired effect, and the consequences of past discrimination were undone, new judicial rankings would be necessary. The kind of variable sociological and political analysis necessary to produce such rankings simply does not lie within the judicial competence—even if they otherwise were politically feasible and socially desirable.” 21. “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of ‘philosophical propositions,’ but to make propositions clear” (Wittgenstein 1922: 77). 22. This case was about the “injurious” labeling and prohibition by the Illinois legislature of the commerce of “filled milk” to other states for health reasons. The appellant claimed that such a decision violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Commerce Clause. The Court found that the legislative decision was “presumptively constitutional,” so there was no basis for the courts to review it. 23. “There may be narrower scope for operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appears on its face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution, such as those of the first ten amendments, which are deemed equally specific when held to be embraced within the Fourteenth […]. It is unnecessary to consider now whether legislation which restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation, is to be subjected to more exacting judicial scrutiny under the general prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment than are most other types of legislation. Nor need we inquire whether similar considerations enter into the review of statutes directed at particular religious […] or national […] or racial minorities […]: whether prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry” (emphasis added). 24. “Ethnic diversity, however, is only one element in a range of factors a university properly may consider in attaining the goal of a heterogeneous student body” (316). Referring to the Harvard College program: “In such an admissions program, race or ethnic background may be deemed a ‘plus’ in a particular applicant’s file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats. The file of a particular black applicant may be examined for his potential contribution to diversity without the factor of race being decisive when compared, for example, with that of an applicant identified as an Italian- American if the latter is thought to exhibit qualities more likely to promote beneficial educational pluralism. Such qualities could include exceptional personal talents, unique work or service experience, leadership potential, maturity, demonstrated compassion, a history of overcoming disadvantage, ability to communicate with the poor, or other qualifications deemed important. In short, an admissions program operated in this way is flexible enough to consider all pertinent elements of diversity in light of the particular qualifications of each applicant, and to place them on the same footing for consideration, although not necessarily according them the same weight” (Powell J.).

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25. Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics. His PhD was supervised by John Rawls, whose theory of justice he discusses in some of his most influential books, notably The Possibility of Altruism (1970, reprinted 1978), Equality and Partiality (1991), and in his article “John Rawls and Affirmative Action” (Nagel 2003). 26. By which we mean the utilitarian concept, based on the calculus of average that defines the common good. Here, Nagel uses this notion in a paradoxical manner: social utility may exist, irrespective of the sum of the interests of the majority. In fact, the purposive feature of utilitarianism is gauged against different time scales: the short term vision of justice, which states that racial preferences are overridden by merit, and long term views stating that Equal Protection is an ongoing process that includes social equality, another facet of justice. 27. Because, contrary to what Wittgenstein had attempted to find in his Tractatus, there is no such a thing as the essence of language. 28. This word refers to any type of human interaction and social organisation. 29. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 701 F.3d 474 (Cole C.J.). See also Cf. United States v. Carolene Prods. Co., 304 US 144, 152 n. 4, 58 S.Ct. 778, 82 L.Ed. 1234 (1938). 30. Compare id., (“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair”), with Coalition 652 F.3d at 614. 31. “Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.” 32. Coalition Plaintiffs Supplemental Brief On En Banc Review at 28, Coalition 652 F.3d 607 (2011) (No. 08-1387), 2011 WL 5122713.

ABSTRACTS

The purpose of this contribution is to provide an insight into the semantics of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution as interpreted by the US Supreme Court, how it has been submitted to the vagaries of context and opinions, as the Justices are speakers of the language of law. Legal interpretation will be approached in Part 1 via the exploration of “grammar” and “rules” that have produced contrasted and sometimes ambiguous results as expressed in the Court’s decisions, following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of the “language game.” Such a notion can be seen as the substance that shapes the identity and the memory of groups that have been differently affected by legal decisions. Part 2 will show how the constitutional clause is structured in relation to its meaning and its complex relation with time, as defined by French philosopher Paul Ricœur. Conversely, claiming that society exerts some influence on the law is equally valid. Part 3 will address the question raised by Thomas Nagel, whether a law that gives “equal opportunities” to a group by means of “preferential treatment” is compatible with justice.

L’objectif de cet article est d’analyser le sémantisme de la Clause d’Égale Protection du 14ème Amendement de la Constitution des États-Unis selon l’interprétation qu’en donne la Cour

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Suprême en montrant combien cette interprétation a varié selon le contexte historique et les jugements (opinions) des juges, dépositaires du langage du droit. La première partie sera consacrée à la manière dont l’interprétation en droit a fourni des résultats contrastés et divers grâce à l’étude de sa « grammaire » et de ses « règles » en s’appuyant sur l'analyse du concept wittgensteinien de « jeu de langage ». On peut voir dans cette notion l’ingrédient central qui a forgé l’identité et la mémoire collective de groupes d’individus affectés de différentes façons par les décisions de justice en matière d’égale protection. La deuxième partie s’attachera à montrer que le sens de la clause constitutionnelle est intimement lié aux différentes perceptions subjectives du temps et de la mémoire historiques, tels que ces notions sont définies par Paul Ricœur. A l’inverse, il est tout aussi vrai que la société exerce une très forte influence sur le droit et la loi. C’est ainsi que la troisième partie tentera de répondre à la question, soulevée par Thomas Nagel, de savoir si des mesures de « discrimination positive » sont compatibles avec la notion de justice.

INDEX

Keywords: rule-following, adjudication, language games, metaphoricity, semanticism, justice, Wittgenstein Ludwig, Ricœur Paul, Constitution of the United States, Supreme Court of the United States, Equal Protection, law Mots-clés: application de règle, jugement, jeu de langage, métaphorisation, sémantisme, justice, Wittgenstein Ludwig, Ricœur Paul, Constitution américaine, Cour Suprême des États-Unis, égale protection, droit

AUTHOR

ANNE-MARIE O’CONNELL Anne-Marie O'Connell is a Senior Lecturer (Maître de conférences HDR) in legal English and the jurisprudence of Common Law countries at the Département des Langues et Civilisations (Department of Languages and Civilisations) of the University of Toulouse 1 Capitole. After completing a PhD on the semiotic analysis of Irish mythology as well as a PhD on the language of being in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, she is currently working on jurisprudence and the didactics of English for legal purposes. She is also a member of the Inter-University Research Laboratory in Foreign Language Teaching & Learning (LAIRDIL) at the University of Toulouse 3. Contact: Anne-marie.o-connell [at] ut-capitole.fr

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