Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Vol. 28, núm. 2 Diciembre 2006
28.2 (December 2006) 28.2 (Diciembre 2006)
General Editor Directora: Angela Downing Managing Editor Directora adjunta: Marta Carretero Assistant Ayudante de redacción: Juan Rafael Zamorano Mansilla Style supervisor Corrector de estilo: Jorge Arús Hita
Editorial Board
Board of Advisors
Andrew Blake University of Winchester Martin Bygate Lancaster University Teresa Fanego Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Fernando Galván Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Heinz Ickstadt Freie Universität Berlin J. Hillis Miller University of California at Irvine Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Universidad de La Rioja Susheila M. Nasta Open University
Board of Referees
Joan C. Beal (University of Sheffield) Jesús Benito Sánchez (Universidad de Valladolid) Marcella Bertuccelli Papi (Università di Pisa) Nilufer E. Bharucha (University of Mumby) Clare Birchall (Middlesex University) Anita Biressi (Roehampton University) Maggie Ann Bowers (University of Portsmouth) Rachel Bowlby (University College London) Kris Van den Branden (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) Mario Brdar (Josip Juraj Strossmayer University) Laurel J. Brinton (University of British Columbia) Manuel Broncano (Universidad de León) Christopher S. Butler (University of Wales) Graham D. Caie (University of Glasgow) Carmen-Rosa Caldas Coulthard (University of Birmingham) Clara Calvo (Universidad de Murcia) Gordon Campbell (University of Leicester) Isabel Carrera (Universidad de Oviedo) Shirley Chew (University of Leeds) Robert Clark (University of East Anglia) Thomas Claviez (Freie Universität Berlin) Tom Cohen (University of Albany) Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (Universidad de Murcia) Francisco J. Cortés Rodríguez (Universidad de La Laguna) Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) Pilar Cuder (Universidad de Huelva) Rocío G. Davis (University of Navarra) Denise deCaires Narain (University of Sussex) Daniela Daniele (Università di Udine) Balz Engler (University of Basel) Susan M. Fitzmaurice (Northern Arizona University) Florencia Franceschina (Lancaster University) Javier Franco Aixelá (Universidad de Alicante) Cristina Garrigós (Universidad de León) Lincoln Geraghty (University of Portsmouth) Vincent Gillespie (University of Oxford) Cristina Giorcelli (Università di Roma Tre) José Luis González Escribano (Universidad de Oviedo) Francisco Gonzálvez García (Universidad de Almería) Agnieszka Graff (Warsaw University) Sylviane Granger (Université de Louvain) Leighton Grist (University of Winchester) Adolphe Haberer (Université Lumière-Lyon 2) Pilar Hidalgo (Universidad de Málaga) Juan Carlos Hidalgo (Universidad de Sevilla) Ton Hoenselaars (Utrecht University) Jacqueline Hurtley (Universitat de Barcelona) David Johnson (The Open University) Stephan Kohl (Julius- Maximilians-Universität Würzburg) Zoltán Kövecses (Eötvös Loránd University) Manfred Krug (Universität Mannheim) Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) Alberto Lázaro (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) Ursula Lenker (Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität München) María José López Couso (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela) Dámaso López García (Universidad Complutense) Ricardo Mairal Usón (UNED) Ana María Manzanas Calvo (Universidad de Salamanca) Javier Martín Arista (Universidad de La Rioja) John McLeod (University of Leeds) Lavinia Merlini (Università di Pisa) Rafael Monroy (Universidad de Murcia) Carmen Muñoz (Universitat de Barcelona) Jo Anne Neff Van Aertselaer (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Heather Nunn (Roehampton University) James Ogude (University of the Witwatersrand) Mohamed-Salah Omri (University of Exeter) Klaus-Uwe Panther (Universität Hamburg) Pedro Javier Pardo (Universidad de Salamanca) Ruth Parkin- Gounelas (Aristotle University) Javier Pérez Guerra (Universidad de Vigo) James Procter (University of Stirling) Victor J. Ramraj (University of Calgary) David Richards (The Open University) Caroline Rooney (University of Kent) Dianne F. Sadoff (Miami University, Ohio) Jürgen Schlaeger (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) Elena Seoane (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela) Alasdair Spark (University of Winchester) M. S. Suárez Lafuente (Universidad de Oviedo) Juan Antonio Suárez (Universidad de Murcia) Henry Sussman (University of Buffalo) Justine Tally (Universidad de La Laguna) Paloma Tejada Caller (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Geoff Thompson (University of Liverpool) I. M. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (University of Leiden) Harish Trivedi (University of Delhi) Carmen Valero Garcés (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University) Pilar Zozaya (University of Barcelona)
Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
28.2 (December 2006) 28.2 (Diciembre 2006)
Table of Contents • Índice
Articles • Artículos
Old English Semantic Primes: Substantives, Determiners and Quantifiers Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa...... 9
Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles: Struggling with Huckleberry Finn Today Tuire Valkeakari ...... 29
Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father: British Identity in Pink Floyd’s The Wall Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo...... 45
Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s “Wet Ungenial Summer” Bill Phillips ...... 59
Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness in Three EFL Educated Readers of English Literary Texts Mireia Trenchs Parera...... 69
Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje María Jesús Sánchez and Luisa María González...... 89
Arte y seudoarte: patrones de ironía en las novelas y guiones de Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Marta Frago ...... 109
Interview • Entrevista
‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird Gerardo Rodríguez Salas ...... 125
Reviews • Reseñas
J. Hillis Miller 2005: Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James reviewed by J Henry Sussman ...... 135
T. S. Eliot. 2005 (1922): La tierra baldía reviewed by Paul Scott Derrick...... 141
Ángeles de la Concha, ed. 2004: Shakespeare en la imaginación contemporánea. Revisiones y reescrituras de su obra reviewed by Celestino Deleyto ...... 147
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, ed. 2005: The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon: Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations reviewed by Celia Wallhead...... 153
Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, eds. 2004: Perspectives on Travel Writing reviewed by Pere Gifra Adroher...... 159
Paul Lyons 2006: American Pacificism. Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures reviewed by Paloma Fresno Calleja ...... 165
Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi, eds. 2005: Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature reviewed by María Isabel Seguro Gómez ...... 171
Ana Martín Úriz y Rachel Whittaker, eds. 2005: La composición como comunicación: una experiencia en las aulas de lengua inglesa en bachillerato reviewed by Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez ...... 177
Margery Palmer McCulloch, ed. 2004: Modernism and Nationalism. Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939 reviewed by Carla Rodríguez González...... 185
ARTICLES
ART¸CULOS
28.2 (December 2006): 9–28 ISSN 0210-6124
Old English Semantic Primes: Substantives, Determiners and Quantifiers
Javier Martín Arista Universidad de La Rioja [email protected]
María Victoria Martín de la Rosa Universidad Complutense de Madrid [email protected]
The aim of this journal article is to apply the methodology of semantic primes to Old English. In this preliminary analysis the semantic primes grouped as Substantives, Determiners and Quantifiers are discussed: I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY, THIS, THE SAME, OTHER, ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL and MUCH/MANY. After an analysis of several instances of portmanteaus, allolexy and non-compositional polysemy, the conclusion is reached that even though the nature of the linguistic evidence that is available does not allow for native speaker judgements, semantic primes represent a powerful theoretical and methodological tool for the lexical and syntactic study of Old English.
Key words: Semantic universals, Natural Semantic Metalanguage, substantives, determiners, quantifiers, Old English
1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the model of universal grammar rendered in Goddard and Wierzbicka (2002) and Wierzbicka (2002a) by carrying out the first application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Research Program (hereafter, NSMRP) to an old diachronic stage of a natural language, namely Old English.1 The Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework is based on the idea that there is a set of undefinable meanings that have exponents in all languages (Goddard and Wierzbicka 1994, 2002a). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework asumes that the meanings of natural languages can be described without resorting to abstract semantic predicates, that is, every natural language can be used as a metalanguage that accounts for its meanings. Such a metalanguage consists of a lexicon of undefinable expressions obtained by means of stepwise semantic decomposition (semantic primes).
1 The research reported here has been funded through the project HUM2005-07651-C02- 02/FILO. 10 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
In its latest version, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard 2002: 14), includes: Substantives (I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY), Determiners (THIS, THE SAME, OTHER), Quantifiers (ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH/MANY), Evaluators (GOOD, BAD), Descriptors (BIG, SMALL), Mental predicates (THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR), Speech (SAY, WORDS, TRUE), Actions, events and movement (DO, HAPPEN, MOVE), Existence and possession (THERE IS, HAVE), Life and death (LIVE, DIE), Time (WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME), Space (WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE), Logical concepts (NOT, MAY BE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF), Intensifier, augmentor (VERY, MORE), Taxonomy, partonomy (KIND OF, PART OF) and Similarity (LIKE). Methodologically, the NSMRP has proceeded in three steps (Goddard 1994, 2002): first, to identify semantic primes; second, to find their exponents in natural languages; and third, to lay the foundations of a semantically-based universal grammar. The isolation of semantic primes is governed by principles of exhaustive decomposition into discrete meanings and of terminal elements of decomposition that cannot be further decomposed. Semantic primes are natural semantic predicates of natural languages. The testing of the lexical expression of semantic primes in a range of languages is governed by principles of isomorphism and lexicalisation, in such a way that the propositions that can be expressed by the NSM based on different languages will be isomorphic; and, moreover, the linguistic exponents of semantic primes will be specific lexical material. Along with semantic primes, the NSMRP contains a grammar that governs the combination of such semantic primes. Since this mini-language (Goddard 2002: 5) has the same expressive power as natural languages, the next methodological step logically taken by the NSMRP is the development of a universal grammar based on the NSM. As Goddard and Wierzbicka remark: “The thirty-year program of semantic research inaugurated in Wierzbicka (1972) has reached the point where it has become possible to articulate a detailed and concrete account of exactly what the unity of all grammars consists in; that is, to delineate where the line runs between what is constant and what is variable, what is essential and what is ‘accidental’, what is universal and what is language-specific” (2002: 41). The USMRP, in line with the previous quotation, began by proposing canonical contexts for lexical primitives that represented the combinations in which the proposed semantic primes could be expected to be found in any language (Goddard and Wierzbicka 1994: 52). Building on the concept of semantic primes, the NSMRP has recently started to establish a basic metalinguistic terminology and to describe the inherent syntactic properties of universal semantic primes (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002). In Wierzbicka’s words “to establish what the universal grammar really looks like we have to learn to distinguish the ‘accidental’, language-specific features of our own native language, and any other languages we happen to be familiar with, from the features which can be found in all languages. But to be able to compare diverse languages we need a powerful and universally applicable metalanguage in terms of which the comparisons can be carried out and such a metalanguage, in turn, can only be constructed, and verified, on the basis of wide- ranging cross-linguistic investigations” (2002a: 293). Old English Semantic Primes 11
Given the latest theoretical move of the NSMRP towards a more grammatically- based semantic prime set, in our application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to Old English we focus on the classes of substantives, determiners and quantifiers. The three classes share the property of distribution, which is a defining characteristic of grammatical categories, whose combinations are far more restricted than those of lexical classes.
2. An overview of Old English
Old English is the West Germanic language spoken by the inheritors of the Germanic (traditionally, Angle, Saxon and Jute) populations that settled in Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire. Most Old English records were written between the 9th and the 11th centuries. Although in the Middle Ages the English language underwent a process of simplification of inflections, while lexical borrowing from Latin through French suffused the lexicon, the Germanic origin of Contemporary English cannot be denied. Nowadays, English is spoken all over the world, either as a first or second language or as a lingua franca of science, technology, culture, and business.2 Old English is an inflective language that shows pronominal, nominal, adjectival and verbal morphological paradigms. This is shown by (1), which contains a nominative subject and a dative adposition. The order of constituents in the clause is SVO in main clauses, with a pronounced tendency for subordinate clauses to abandon the SOV order typical of Germanic dependent clauses and adopt the SVO order. SVO constituent order in main clauses is illustrated by (2), and in dependent clauses by (3).3
(1)
(2)
2 For more information on the morpho-syntactic parameters of Old English we refer the reader to Visser (1963-73), Mitchell (1985), Traugott (1992) and Martín Arista (2001a, b). 3 Unless otherwise specified, the examples (including textual codes) have been extracted from The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. Diachronic and Dialectal (Rissanen and Ihalainen 1984). The main sources of information on Old English meanings are An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Bosworth and Toller 1973), English-Old English, Old English-English Dictionary (Jember et al. 1975), The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray et al. 1987), Wordcraft. Wordhoard and Wordlists. Concise New English to Old English Dictionary and Thesaurus (Pollington 1993), A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 1995) and A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Clark Hall 1996). 12 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
(3)
As far as its lexicon is concerned, the origin of Old English words is Germanic practically without exception. Lexical creation relies on compounding and derivation rather than on borrowing. Thus, we find compositive families like lif-brycgung ‘life, intercourse’, lif-cearu ‘care or anxiety for life’, lif-dæg ‘a day of life’, lif-fruma ‘Christ, the author of life’; and derivative families like ed-wendan ‘return’, and-wendan ‘change’, be- wendan ‘turn round’, mis-wendan ‘turn to the wrong direction’.4
3. Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY
After this blueprint of Old English morphosyntax and lexicon, we discuss the Old English exponents of semantic primes, with emphasis on allolexy, portmanteaus and polysemy. Special attention is paid to primes of recent coinage like BODY, as well as to those that have been questioned on the grounds of the analysis of other languages, such as SOMEONE.5
3.1. ic I, ðu YOU
The basic exponents of I and YOU in Old English are, respectively, the pronouns ic and ðu. Both figure as good candidates for a list of semantic primitives but there are two sets of allomorphs: ic (NOM), min (GEN) me (DAT) and me (ACC) for the first person; and tu (NOM), ðin (GEN), ðe (DAT) and ðe (ACC) for the second person. Their use is syntactically conditioned, ic and ðu are subjects, as in (4), whereas the other forms are non-subjects, as the genitive of the first person pronoun min in (5):
4 The following abbreviations are used throughout this paper: SVO (subject-verb-non-subject order), NOM (nominative case), GEN (genitive case), DAT (dative case), ACC (accusative case), SING (singular number), PLUR (plural number). 5 Wierzbicka (1994) offers a critical review of the progress made by the NSMRP and concludes that the most controversial case of semantic prime is PART OF. The primes that have no exponents in certain languages include SOMEONE, THE SAME, ALL, WANT, THINK, FEEL, BECAUSE, IF, CAN, AFTER and KIND OF. Goddard (2002: 13) distinguishes three groups: the semantic primes that date back to Wierzbicka (1972), the primes that followed the publication of Wierzbicka (1989), and the primes that have been proposed over the last decade (after Wierzbicka 1996) and have not been fully discussed. These include: BODY, SEE, HEAR, WORDS, TRUE, LIVE, DIE, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, NEAR, FAR, INSIDE, SIDE and MORE. Old English Semantic Primes 13
(4)
(5)
The inflectional paradigms of ic and ðu are among the most allolexical of the language. The genitive form of personal pronouns is declined as a strong adjective and agrees in number, case and gender with the modified noun. Moreover, the Old English personal pronouns distinguish the dual number. The forms wit ‘we two’ and git ‘you two’ represent portmanteaus of, respectively, I and TWO and YOU and TWO. This point is illustrated by (6) and (7):
(6)
(7)
The accusative, genitive and dative forms of the personal pronouns ic and ðu do not vary if they are co-referential with a nominative subject, that is, if they are used reflexively. This is the case with the genitive min in example (5). This point is further illustrated in (8) and (9). In (8) the accusative me is co-referential with the first person nominative ic in subject function, whereas the accusative (morphologically ambiguous with the dative) ðe is co-referential with the second person nominative ðu and the second person genitive ðin in (9):
(8)
guðgeweorca, ðonne Grendel hine in battledeeds, than Grendel him ‘I do not consider myself weaker in battledeeds than Grendel’
(9)
As the examples show, there is polysemy in ic and ðu, which have the secondary meaning of reflexivity. On the other hand, ic and ðu are portmanteaus of I and YOU and THE SAME, no matter that the expression of identity through reflexivization is syntactic rather than semantic.
3.2. man SOMEONE
The main exponent of SOMEONE in Old English is the indefinite pronoun man ‘someone’, illustrated by (10), where the alternative form mon appears:
(10)
Also of indefinite meaning, the third person plural personal pronoun hie ‘they’ and the noun leod ‘person’ may be used as substitutes for man. Other exponents of SOMEONE are hwa and, less frequently, hwæt. Hwa and hwæt correspond, not very systematically, though, to who and what respectively. Sum ‘some’, singular and plural pronoun, constitutes another exponent of this semantic prime, as (11) shows:
(11)
Although sum is used as a substantive in the previous example, it is polysemic given that it can also function as a determiner. This is atypical. The other exponents of SOMEONE are purely pronominal and do not combine with determiners or quantifiers. An extremely interesting case within the substantive subgroup is natwha. This indefinite pronoun means I do not know who (literally, I know not who), according to Mitchell (1985: 149). This is a portmanteau, that is, a single word that expresses a Old English Semantic Primes 15 combination of four semantic primes: I, KNOW, NOT and SOMETHING. Even though Goddard (2002: 23) remarks that “many languages have portmanteaus involving negation”, clusters of four primes in one word may not be very frequent interlinguistically.
3.3. folc, leode PEOPLE
The possible candidates for the exponent of PEOPLE in Old English are folc, leode and ðeod. The latter, the singular noun ðeod, enters the compound Angelðeod ‘the English nation’, which is synonymous with Angelcynn, and, consequently, is a collective rather than a multiple noun with the meaning of kin. For this reason, it does not seem tenable to consider ðeod an exponent of PEOPLE. The case with leod is quite different. The singular form leod means ‘person’, frequently ‘man’. In poetry, as in example (12), leod means ‘prince’:
(12)
Leod in the plural means ‘people’, as in example (13):
(13)
Leod is much more frequent in the plural, meaning ‘people’ (as in the previous example), than in the singular, meaning ‘person’. It may well be the case that leod is an allolex of SOMEONE in the singular and of PEOPLE in the plural. Wierzbicka (1996:39) considers leode an allolex of SOMEONE, but what the Old English data suggest is that leod constitutes an instance of non-compositional polysemy.6 Folc ‘folk’, the other candidate for PEOPLE, is not used in the plural. Were it not for synonymic pairs like folcbealu/leodbealu, ‘calamity of the people’, folcscipe/ leodscipe ‘nation’, folcscearu/ leodscearu ‘province’, etc.; and for the complementary distribution in number with leod, it would be possible to discard folc as an exponent of SOMEONE for the same reason as ðeod. Given that folc is not used in the plural, whereas leod appears far more frequently in plural than in singular, this is probably an instance of combinatorial allolexy, that is, two words that express a single meaning in complementary semantic contexts.
6 See also Wierzbicka (2002b: 72). 16 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
3.4. hwæt SOMETHING, ðing THING
For SOMETHING in Old English there is no inanimate exponent equivalent to the animate man ‘someone’. We find, to begin with, the portmanteau nathwæt ‘something’, literally ‘I know not what’. Hwæthwugu is a determiner and pronoun that means something small, in this way representing a portmanteau form of SOMETHING and SMALL. The same combination of primes can be expressed analytically, as in the following example:
(14)
As we have already pointed out, the distribution of hwa and hwæt with inanimate and animate nouns is not as systematic as that of who and what respectively in Contemporary English. This is illustrated by the following pair, in which an animate noun selects the genitive form of hwa in (15) and the nominative form of hwæt in (16):
(15)
(16)
The evidence points out that the main exponent of Old English SOMETHING is hwæt. However, it must be borne in mind that both hwæ and hwæt are polysemic and express two semantic primes, SOMEONE and SOMETHING. The Old English exponent of the prime THING is ðing, which means ‘object, property’ but also ‘creature’ and ‘cause, reason, circumstance’.
(17)
Old English Semantic Primes 17
3.5. bodig BODY
The Old English exponent of the semantic prime BODY is bodig. Lic might also be a good candidate, but, being etymologically related to licgan ‘lie’, it makes reference to the dead rather than to the living body, meaning basically corpse. The following example illustrates the use of bodig as consisting of head, trunk and limbs, and lic, making reference to a dead body.
(18) <32R 133> Syððan hi afarene wæron, com ðæt landfolc to ðe ðær when they gone were, came the landfolk to who there to lafe wæs ða, ðær heora hlafordes lic læg remaining were there, where their lord’s body lay butan heafde, and wurdon swiðe sarige for his slege on mode except the head, and were very sorry for his death in heart, and huru ðæt hi næfdon ðæt heafod to ðam bodige and especially because they had not the head for the body ‘Then after some time, once they had gone away, the country people who remained there came to where their lord’s body lay without the head, and they were very sorrowful in their hearts for his death, and especially because they did not have the head for the body’
Feorhbold, feohhord and feorhhus also mean body, with the sense of the container of life. The three of them are compounds of feorh ‘life’, ‘spirit’. Since these compounds usually collocate with fage ‘fated, dead’, it does not seem out of place to consider them hyponyms of lic. In sum, we are dealing with two words that express a single meaning in complementary semantic contexts, that is, with an instance of combinatorial allolexy.
4. Determiners: THIS, THE SAME, OTHER
4.1. ðes THIS
The exponent of the semantic prime THIS in Old English is the demonstrative ðes (masculine)- ðeos (feminine)- ðis (neuter). This demonstrative, which shows extensive inflectional allolexy (it is declined for three genders, two numbers and four cases), functions as modifier agreeing with a nominal head in instances like (19):
(19)
In general, ðes contrasts with the demonstrative-article se (masculine)-seo (feminine)- ðæt (neuter). The former points at something near or of recent mention, the latter at something far in space or discourse. As Mitchell (1985: 137) points out, ðes 18 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa and se seem equally possible certain contexts. This represents an interesting case of allolexy: it is only in certain contexts, especially when the determiner is used independently, that the semantic prime THIS has two exponents, ðes and se; otherwise, it has one, ðes. Both se and ðes can be used as determiners and as substantives. When ðes and se are used independently they can refer to a clause or a sentence (in the neuter forms ðis and ðæt) and are interchangeable with the third person personal pronoun he (masculine)- heo (feminine)-hit (neuter). This is illustrated by examples (20) and (21), respectively:
(20)
(21) R 156> Ac Adam gestrinde æfter Abeles slege oðerne sunu, but Adam engendered after Abel’s killing another son, se wæs Seth gehaten this was Seth called ‘But Adam engendered another son after Abel’s murder, who was called Seth’
The demonstrative has been replaced with the personal pronoun in the hypothetical expressions (20’) and (21’), respectively:
(20’) *Hit was ðes feorðes geares his rices this was the fourth of the years of his kingdom ‘It was the fourth year of his kingdom’
(21’) *He wæs Seth gehaten he was Seth called ‘He was called Seth’
Both ðes and se can be followed by the exponents of THING, THE SAME and OTHER. Neither can be followed by the exponents of I, YOU, SOMEONE or SOMETHING. There follows an illustration with ðing ‘thing’ in (22) and (23):
(22)
(23)
4.2. ilca, self THE SAME
The Old English exponents of the semantic prime THE SAME are the determiners ilca (masculine), ilce (feminine and neuter) and self. Both can be used dependently as a determiner proper and independently as a pronoun. In general, the difference between the two exponents of THE SAME is that self is emphatic, whereas ilce is not, as is rendered in (24) and (25):
(24)
(25)
Being emphatic, self can be deleted without modifying the meaning of the expression, whereas the non-emphatic ilce cannot. This is illustrated by means of the following hypothetical expressions, which paraphrase, respectively (24) and (25):
(24’) *ðæt cuæð sanctus Paulus that said Saint Paul ‘Saint Paul said that’
(25’) *ða heht he in ðære nihte... then ordered he in that night... ‘That night he ordered...’
Ilca is compulsorily used with the exponents of THIS, ðes and se:
20 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
(26)
(27)
Both ilca and self appear emphatically with proper names, whereas personal pronouns require self, both in reflexive and emphatic use, as in (28) and (29):
(28)
(29)
It is noteworthy that for the expression of manner the allolex is same ‘in like manner’, whereas for the expression of time, the allolex is samod ‘at the same time’.
4.3. oðer OTHER
The main exponent of OTHER in Old English is oðer. This determiner appears dependently or independently, both preceded by the demonstrative se-seo-ðæt, as in (30), or not, as in (31):
(30)
(31)
ða gehyrdon æt Iohanne & him fyligdon that heart at John and him followed ‘Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was the other of those two who listened to John and followed him’
The determiner oðer is also used in conjunction with quantifiers like sum ‘some’, anne ‘one’, nane ‘none’, monig ‘many’, and ænig ‘any’ and with substantives like ðing ‘thing’. In the context of interrogative pronouns like hwa ‘who’, hwæt ‘what’, hwær ‘where’ and hu ‘how’ the positional allolex elles ‘otherwise, in another manner’ is selected, in expressions like hwa elles ‘who else’, hwæt elles ‘what else’, elles hwær ‘elsewhere’ and elles hu ‘how else’. The only quantifiers exceptional in this respect are awiht ‘anything’ and nowiht ‘nothing’, which combine with elles but not with oðer. Oðer ‘other’ has a second, polysemic meaning different from ‘not this one but that one’. In correlative constructions like the one contained by the following example, oðer means either ‘first’ or ‘second’:
(32)
The exponent of OTHER, therefore, is polysemous in a rather unexpected way, as Goddard puts it: “There is nothing surprising about the fact that a word may have two (or more) related meanings, one indefinable and the other definable. Much less expected was the finding of the SLU project (Goddard and Wierzbicka Eds 1994) that in some languages a single form can express two different indefinable meanings” (2002: 26). The evidence shows that there is motivated homonymy in the Old English exponent of OTHER, oðer ‘other’, given that it expresses, at least, the primes ONE and OTHER. The test of syntax confirms that there is non-compositional polysemy because oðer ‘other’ can only mean ‘the first’ in the context of a correlative construction in which the second term is oðer itself. If the reasoning is correct, there exists homonymy proper between oðer ‘other’ OTHER and oðer ‘second’ TWO. It seems sustainable, moreover, to hold that the homonymic overlap does not take place between two semantic primes, but among three: ONE, TWO and OTHER (TWO and OTHER expressed by the ordinals forma ‘first’ and oðer ‘second’). In line with Goddard’s (2002: 27) remark, this may be a finding of certain relevance for the NSMRP.
22 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
5. Quantifiers: ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH/MANY
5.1. an ONE, twegen TWO
The Old English exponent of ONE is the numeral an ‘one’. TWO has two exponents, the indefinite numeral twegen ‘two’ and the definite numeral begen ‘the two, both’. Twegen and begen hold the same relation to one another as do two and both in contemporary English:
(33)
Along with ðrie ‘three’, an ‘one’, twegen ‘two’ and begen ‘the two’ are declined for case and gender, thus displaying inflectional allolexy.7 The choice of cardinal versus ordinal numerals is available, as in contemporary English. This is illustrated with respect to an/forma ‘one/first’ by the following examples:
(34)
(35)
He wæs se forma casere ðe on Crist gelyfde he was the first emperor who in Christ believed ‘He was the first Christian emperor’
It is interesting to note that, unlike in contemporary English, the cardinal or ordinal expression of a numeral is not simply a contextual matter: cardinal numbers are declined strong whereas ordinal numbers are declined weak. This is, to begin with, inflectional allolexy; and, to continue with, distributional allolexy, given that the strong declension of cardinals suggests the absence of demonstratives or articles, while the weak declension of cardinal points in the direction of the presence of demonstratives or articles. Although exceptions to this general tendency may be put forward, examples (34) and (35) do show a distribution of strong cardinal without article and weak ordinal with article.8
7 See Campbell (1987: 284) on the numerals 4-12. 8 Mitchell (1985: 217) identifies exceptions to this general tendency. Old English Semantic Primes 23
An is polysemous, meaning the numeral ‘one’, the quantifier ‘some’ and the adjectival ‘alone’. As for the quantifier polysemy, it involves two semantic primes, since an ‘one’ expresses ONE and an ‘some’ expresses SOME. Consequently, we are dealing with motivated homonymy. The syntactic properties associated with an ‘one’ can be described as a noun phrase in which a numeral determines a countable noun, the numeral plus the nominal head exhibiting a sense of collectivity (Campbell 1987: 282):
(36)
Nevertheless, with the meaning of ‘one’ an is prepositional and strong, whereas with the meaning of ‘alone’ ana is postpositional and weak. An instance of ana ‘alone’ follows in example (37):
(37)
The exponents of ONE and TWO, be it the cardinal an ‘one’ and twegen ‘two’ or the ordinal forma ‘first’ and oðer ‘second’ distribute, as in contemporary English, with relative freedom over determiners and quantifiers, both in the presence and the absence of a nominal head.
5.2. sum SOME
The Old English exponent or the semantic prime SOME is sum ‘some’, as is shown in (38):
(38)
Sum is polysemic. As we have already pointed out, sum ‘some’, singular and plural pronoun, constitutes an exponent of the semantic prime SOMEONE: 24 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
(39=11)
We have just remarked that an ‘one’ expresses the semantic prime ONE and an ‘some’ expresses SOME. Indeed, in the singular, both sum and an ‘some, a certain, a’ are used as markers of indefinite reference, as in (40) and (41):
(40)
(41)
In the singular and in the plural, sum is used both as adjective and as pronoun.
5.3. eall ALL
The main exponent of ALL in Old English is eall ‘all’. Eall precedes a countable noun in (42) and a mass noun in (43):
(42)
(43)
Other exponents of ALL in Old English are ælc and gehwilc. Eall, ælc and æghwilc are used dependently and independently (Mitchell 1985: 183). Whereas eall expresses totality, ælc and gehwilc convey totality as a sum of parts: both mean ‘each’ in the singular and ‘all’ in the plural. In (44) and (45) there follows an illustration with ælc:
(44)
(45)
The tendency, in other words, is for eall to be used with count and mass nouns and for ælc and æghwilc to be used with count nouns. This is partially motivated allolexy.
5.4. micel/fela, MUCH/MANY
The semantic prime MUCH has two exponents in Old English: fela and micel. Whereas micel ‘much’ is restricted to mass nouns, fela ‘much, many’ can be used with both count and mass nouns. There follows an illustration of micel ‘much’:
(46)
The semantic prime MANY has two exponents in Old English: manig ‘many’ and fela ‘much, many’. This is illustrated by (47) and (48):
(47)
26 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
(48)
It turns out that the situation is rather complex: fela is an exponent of MUCH and MANY, while the semantic primes MUCH and MANY have two allolexes that are only partially motivated.
6. Conclusion
The time has passed in which certain -notably, Indo-European inflective- languages were regarded as more perfect than others since they were able to express human thought in a more analytic manner. The time is also passing in which an Indo- European West-Germanic language -English- was the primary target of linguistic description. The time is likely to pass in which English is the only term of comparison between third linguistic parties. The NSMRP is credited in the linguistics community with having contributed to these advances in the science of language in a very remarkable way. Like any ongoing research programme, the NSMRP has many pending tasks. Among these tasks, there still remains the question of how to deal with the language on which the natural semantic predicates of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage are based. Put in other words, it is significant that while Germanic languages like German and English-based creoles like Hawaii Creole English have been approached in terms of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Research Program, English itself remains virgin territory. This may have more to do with the (Wittgensteinian) desire to avoid inconsistencies in describing the English language by means of an English-based metalanguage than with ideological concerns. This article has, however modestly, contributed in this respect. Another pending question in the NSMRP is how to deal with dead languages. This is in no way a peripheral question given that, unfortunately, many of the languages described in typological work are endangered and several of them might die in the medium run. To this question this article has contributed more directly. We have shown that dead languages deserve a place in the NSMRP since the former benefit from a rigorous method of semantic analysis and the latter may benefit from a vast array of data against which findings and proposals of the NSMRP may be tested. In this line, this journal article has provided evidence in favour of the existence of two semantic primes which do not have counterparts as primes in other languages (this is the case with SOMEONE) or which have been proposed recently (as is the case with BODY).
Old English Semantic Primes 27
Works Cited
Bosworth, Joseph and T. Northcote Toller 1973 (1898): An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP. Campbell, Alistair 1987 (1959): Old English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford UP. Clark Hall, John Richard 1996 (1960): A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Goddard, Cliff 1994: “Semantic Theory and Semantic Universals.” Semantic and Lexical Universals. Theory and Empirical Findings. Ed. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 7-29. ———— 2002: “The Search for the Shared Semantic Core of All Languages.” In: Goddard, C. and A. Wierzbicka eds. Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and Empirical Findings (Volume I). Amsterdam: Benjamins. 7-40. Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka 1994: “Introducing Lexical Primitives.” Semantic and Lexical Universals. Theory and Empirical Findings. Ed. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 31-54. ———— 2002: “Semantic Primes and Universal Grammar.” Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and Empirical Findings (Volume I). Ed. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 41-85. Jember, Gregory K., John C. Carrell, Robert P. Lundquist, Barbara M. Olds, and Raymond P. Tripp Jr. 1975. English-Old English, Old English-English Dictionary. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Martín Arista, Javier 2001a. “Sintaxis medieval I: complementación, caso y sintaxis verbal.” Lingüística histórica inglesa. Ed. Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas and Javier Martín Arista. Barcelona: Ariel. 224-312. ———— 2001b: “Sintaxis medieval II: funciones, construcciones y orden de constituyentes.” Lingüística histórica inglesa. Ed. Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas and Javier Martín Arista. Barcelona: Ariel. 313-377. Mitchell, Bruce 1985: Old English Syntax (2 vols.). Oxford: Oxford UP. Murray, James A.H. et al. (eds.): 1987 (1971). The Oxford English Dictionary (3 vols.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ogura, Michiko 1989: Verbs with the Reflexive Pronoun and Constructions with Self in Old and Early Middle English. Cambridge: Brewer. Pollington, Stephen 1993: Wordcraft. Wordhoard and Wordlists. Concise New English to Old English Dictionary and Thesaurus. Norfolk. Anglo-Saxon Books. Rissanen, Matti and Ossi Ihalainen 1984: The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. Diachronic and Dialectal. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Roberts, Jane and Christian Kay 1995: A Thesaurus of Old English. London: King’s College London Medieval Studies. Traugott, Elizabeth 1992: “Syntax.” In: Hogg, R. ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language I: The Beginnings to 1066. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 168-289. Visser, F. Th. 1963-1973: An Historical Syntax of the English Language (4 vols.). Leiden: Brill. Wierzbicka, Anna: 1972: Semantic Primitives. Translated by A. Wierzbicka and J. Besemeres. Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag. ———— 1989: “Semantic primitives: The expanding set.” Quaderni di Semantica 10(2): 309-332. ———— 1994: “Semantic Primes Across Languages: A Critical Review.” Semantic and Lexical Universals. Theory and Empirical Findings. Ed. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 445-500. ———— 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford UP. 28 Javier Martín Arista and María Victoria Martín de la Rosa
———— 2002a: “Semantic Primes and Linguistic Typology.” Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and Empirical Findings (Volume II). Ed. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 257-300. ———— 2002b: “Semantic Primes and Universal Grammar in Polish.” Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and Empirical Findings (Volume II). Ed. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 65-144.
Web sites
The Dictionary of Old English Corpus (http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/o/oec/).
Received 16 January 2006 Revised version received 9 June 2006
28.2 (December 2006): 29–43 ISSN 0210-6124
Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles: Struggling with Huckleberry Finn Today
Tuire Valkeakari Providence College, Rhode Island, USA [email protected]
This essay revisits the decades-long debate about racial representation in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and suggests, looking beyond the rigid binary of either demanding a ban on the novel or belittling its racially offensive aspects, that in racial terms Twain’s creation of the Huck-Jim relationship reflects what was in the author’s own life and worldview a muddled terrain of good intentions, confusion, wavering, and inconsistency. While Twain may not have inscribed his incomplete struggle with the ‘race question’ in the novel deliberately, such an imprint was a de facto outcome of his writing process. A cusp text, Huckleberry Finn is, on the one hand, shackled and diminished by its view of African Americans as Others; on the other hand, the novel does contain an effort, albeit a flawed and unfinished one, to transcend the limitations of post-Reconstruction racism and racialism. This article examines these tension-ridden dynamics of racial representation in Huckleberry Finn by focusing on Twain’s portrayal of Jim as a father figure for Huck (a relationship that temporarily transgresses the depicted era’s prevalent racial hierarchies) and on the novel’s noteworthy, though lamentably incomplete, deconstruction of meanings conventionally attached to whiteness and blackness in nineteenth-century America. This essay argues that Huckleberry Finn—a complex text of whose different layers and threads Twain was not necessarily in full control—both illustrates and mimics historical processes whereby shackles of racialized perception are at first partly opened and then, disappointingly, partly closed again.
Key words: Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, racial representation, Huck-Jim relationship, black manhood, Toni Morrison
“I’d like to pass it on to you, son. There”, he said, handing it to me. “Funny thing to give somebody, but I think it’s got a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we’re really fighting against”. … I took it in my hand, a thick dark, oily piece of filed steel that had been twisted open and forced partly back into place….
(Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1965 [1952]: 313)
The 1880s saw the collapse of civil rights for blacks as well as the publication of Huckleberry Finn. This collapse was an effort to bury the combustible issues Twain raised in his novel. The nation, as well as Tom Sawyer, was deferring Jim’s freedom in agonizing 30 Tuire Valkeakari
play. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s captivity on into each generation of readers.
(Toni Morrison, “This Amazing, Troubling Book”, 1999 [1996]: 389)
[S]ure enough, Tow Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free!
(Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1999 [1884]: 292)
The above exchange between the narrator and a black political activist named Brother Tarp in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man offers a glimpse of a tragic memento, a reminder of Tarp’s nineteen years in a chain gang: a leg iron. Despite Invisible Man’s primarily post-Great Migration time frame, Tarp’s shackle—a link of steel “that had been twisted open and forced partly back into place” (Ellison 1965 [1952]: 313)—functions, among other things, as a metaphor for Emancipation and for the failure of Reconstruction, as well as for the psychological implications of the two. Mark Twain (whose prose Ellison greatly appreciated, recognizing its indebtedness to black Southern vernacular voices)1 wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when, in Toni Morrison’s words, “[t]he nation, as well as Tom Sawyer, was deferring Jim’s freedom in agonizing play” (1999 [1996]: 389). This essay argues that Huckleberry Finn (1884) can at one level be read as a book about shackles of racial oppression that are, in the novel’s course, “twisted open and forced partly back into place” at various levels of the plot and narration.2 To elaborate, during Huck’s journey to the deep South, his African American fellow traveler is much of the time restrained both by the shackles of slavery and by what Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann have, in the title of their 1992 article, aptly termed Jim’s “minstrel shackles”. Huck, in turn—despite his apparent freedom—is confined by various white conventions of antebellum life, especially by his society’s axiomatic assumptions of white superiority and black inferiority. Most crucially, Twain’s narrative is itself shackled and diminished by its view of African Americans as Others. However, being a transitional text written by a former, ‘desouthernized’ Southerner married to a liberal Northerner,3 the novel also clearly contains an effort, albeit a flawed and unfinished one, to transcend the limitations of post-Reconstruction racism and racialism.
1 See the discussion of Ellison in Fishkin 1996: 110–13. For a more comprehensive study of the influence of the black Southern language use on Twain’s writing, see Fishkin 1993. 2 The following Huckleberry Finn edition will be cited parenthetically throughout this essay: Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: An Authoritative Text; Context and Sources; Criticism. Ed. Thomas Cooley. 3rd [Norton] edition. New York and London: Norton, 1999 (1884). 3 William Dean Howells famously called Twain “a desouthernized Southerner” in My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms, ed. Marilyn A. Baldwin (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 1967): 30. Quoted in Bell 1992 (1985): 124, 138. Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles 31
While recognizing and lamenting Twain’s participation in negative racial stereotyping, this essay examines the tension-ridden dynamics of racial representation in Huckleberry Finn by focusing on the novel’s portrayal of Jim as a father figure for Huck (a relationship that temporarily transgresses the depicted era’s prevalent racial hierarchies) and on the book’s noteworthy, though regrettably incomplete, deconstruction of meanings conventionally attached to whiteness and blackness in nineteenth-century America. Rather than aiming to contribute either to an uncritical whitewashing of Twain or to a further hypercanonization of Huckleberry Finn, this essay offers perspectives intended to make the intellectually and politically responsible teaching of this difficult book (of whose different layers and threads Twain was not, in my view, in full control) a little easier.
1. Introduction
Set in the Mississippi Valley “forty or fifty years ago”, as the novel’s subtitle declares, Huckleberry Finn responds to the failure of Reconstruction by retelling the story of slavery from the point of view of a young white runaway whose fate becomes intertwined with that of an adult black fugitive. A darker-toned sequel to the sunnier The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn seems to have begun as another semi- autobiographical, fictionalized narrative about the joys of Southern boyhood and about the charm and spell of Twain’s beloved Mississippi River. However, after the author allowed Huck and Jim’s raft to pass the mouth of the Ohio River, and the two runaways started to drift where no fugitive slave should go, Twain’s “original conception was beginning”, as Jane Smiley observes, “to conflict with the implications of the actual story” (1995: 356). In the pages of his own writing, Twain’s idealized Mississippi River began to monstrously transform itself into what it had, in reality, signified for participants in the domestic slave trade: a major route to the heartland of racial slavery in North America. At this point Twain, in fact, dropped the project and put the manuscript aside for three years; this writer’s block seems to imply, as Smiley (1995: 356) suggests, that Twain did not know how to proceed after the raft had floated beyond the point of no return and entered what for Jim denoted the ultimate realm of terror. Considering this tension-ridden genealogy, which indicates that Huckleberry Finn emerged out of a curious mixture of unrelated and partly conflicting motives, it is not surprising that Twain’s narrative is at various levels “troubling”, as Toni Morrison writes while commenting on “This Amazing, Troubling Book” in her 1996 introduction to the novel. Those initially ‘troubling’ qualities that are the easiest to deal with (and ultimately make up a crucial aspect of Twain’s satirical style) derive from Huck’s status as a young and somewhat unreliable narrator. A poorly educated adolescent, Huck knows little about the workings of society, and his perspectives on what he recounts are limited by his ignorance. The rather modest degree of his self-knowledge works towards the same effect: for all his bitter complaints about the widow Douglas’s and Miss Watson’s attempts to ‘sivilize’ him, Huck is much more heavily influenced by the norms of ‘sivilized’ society than he himself believes to be the case. Rather than going bravely against the grain, he condemns himself for his friendship with Jim and, in 32 Tuire Valkeakari general, for “his inability to conform fully to the norms of the widow Douglas and Tom Sawyer, the representatives of conventional antebellum life along the Mississippi” (Bell 1992 [1985]: 130). Of course, this combination of Huck’s immaturity and unreliability ultimately constitutes one of Twain’s most brilliant narrative inventions (modifying the example of Voltaire’s classic innocent Candide, another traveler): precisely because the narrator-protagonist is young and inexperienced, everything that he sees while floating down the river with Jim strikes him as new and presents an acute challenge to his worldview. In the final analysis, the voice of the adolescent boy whose views of society gradually change during his tragicomic (much more tragic than comic) Odyssean descent into the underworld functions as the primary medium for Twain’s ironic critique of the slaveholding South. All things taken into account, Huck’s narrative of his adventures serves Twain’s projects of unearthing the moral hypocrisy of ‘decent’, churchgoing, and slaveholding white Southerners and of addressing the perils of slavery. This said, the truly ‘troubling’ aspects of this ‘amazing’ book arise from the fact that although Samuel Clemens as an adult distanced himself from the proslavery indoctrination to which he had been exposed as a young member of a slaveholding community, he could not, as critics have convincingly shown, shake off all aspects of the legacy of his Hannibal youth. It is no wonder, therefore, that especially from the early 1950s onwards many African American readers have felt that Huckleberry Finn, with its embarrassing minstrelization of Jim and its frequent use of the word nigger, was complicit in the post-Reconstruction policies that Morrison describes as “agonizing play” with black freedom (1999 [1996]: 389). The view that the novel is racially so offensive that it should be abolished from American high school and college curricula has been most famously articulated by the public school official John H. Wallace, according to whom Huckleberry Finn is “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written”(1992: 16).4 However, legitimate as such critical comments may be, book burnings or any later variations on this medieval practice have never advanced democracy or innovative critical thinking anywhere—a fact reflected in many African American intellectuals’
4 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who has called Huckleberry Finn “the greatest antiracist novel by an American” (1996: 23), represents the other end of the critical spectrum. While Fishkin’s superlative is, in my view, an overstatement, scholars such as she and Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua (1998) have done important work in unearthing the antiracist side of Twain. Yet, it is impossible to dismiss lightly the reasoning of those who argue, as Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann do, that “[t]hough Jim may reasonably be viewed as a model of goodness, generosity, and humility, he is characterized without an equally essential intelligence to buttress our claims for his humanity” (1992: 141). In presenting a counterargument, Chadwick-Joshua (1998: 43–59) examines Twain’s construction of logomachies (verbal battles) between Huck and Jim, claims that Jim wins each of these battles, and focuses on the rhetorical strategies by which Jim triumphs. However, James S. Leonard’s and Thomas A. Tenney’s summary of the more unfavorable criticism firmly maintains that “Twain’s ironic reversals do not overbalance the damage done by Jim’s minstrel-show speeches and reasoning” (1992: 4). An important addition to these discussions is offered by Eric J. Sundquist’s 1993 analysis of Twain and race, which focuses on the “carnivalesque drama of twinship and masquerade” constituting Twain’s 1894 novel, Puddn’head Wilson (1993: 225–270 [225]). Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles 33 rather reserved responses to campaigns to outlaw Twain’s novel. Toni Morrison, for example, has positioned herself among those who hold that Huckleberry Finn should remain in American high school and college curricula. At the same time, her autobiographical testimony emphasizes that the reading should be accompanied by politically responsible teaching:
In the early eighties I read Huckleberry Finn again, provoked, I believe, by demands to remove the novel from the libraries and required reading lists of public schools. These efforts were based, it seemed to me, on a narrow notion of how to handle the offense Mark Twain’s use of the term nigger would occasion for black students and the corrosive effect it would have on white ones. It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution. A serious comprehensive discussion of the term by an intelligent teacher certainly would have benefited my eighth-grade class and would have spared all of us (a few blacks, many whites—mostly second-generation immigrant children) some grief. (Morrison 1999 [1996]: 386)
One way to avoid the rigid binary of either demanding a ban on Huckleberry Finn or insensitively belittling what is racially offensive in the book is to return, in a revised fashion, to the idea that Huckleberry Finn could be read as a semi-autobiographical novel. Bernard W. Bell’s simultaneously serious and tongue-in-cheek characterization of Twain provides an apt starting point:
Born and bred in the antebellum Southwest, a volunteer in the Confederate militia, and an advocate of the delightful accuracy of minstrelsy, Twain… struggles valiantly, like Huck, to reject the legacy of American racism and to accept his personal share of responsibility for the injustice of slavery, but never in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does he fully and unequivocally accept the equality of blacks. (1992 [1985]: 124–25, italics added)
Endemic to this parallel between Twain and Huck are the origins of both the author and his fictional protagonist in a culture and society that took the Peculiar Institution for granted; their gradual realization that they must revisit their views of slavery and of African Americans (and, in the process, of themselves); their attempt at such reconsideration; their wavering, confusion, and inconsistency in this enterprise; and the eventual incompleteness of their respective projects of breaking away from the insidious influence of racism on their cultural perception and imagination. While Twain may not have inscribed his own journey—his incomplete struggle with the ‘race question’—in the novel deliberately, such an imprint was a de facto outcome of his process. This argument resonates with Toni Morrison’s mention of Huckleberry Finn “deliberately cooperating in the controversy it has excited” (1999 [1996]: 386); for Morrison, “[t]he brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument [i.e., the controversy or debate] it raises” (1999 [1996]: 386, italics in original). Judging from Morrison’s commentary, what is needed is serious and critical thinking as to how to teach, rather than ban, Huckleberry Finn. In this spirit, I will next scrutinize how Twain develops the Jim-Huck relationship in the course of his narrative. Aware that this task attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in the mid-twentieth century (including 34 Tuire Valkeakari
Leslie Fiedler’s in/famous 1948 suggestion of the Jim-Huck bond’s latently homosexual qualities), I look at dimensions of the novel that were largely ignored at that time. Taking my cue, in part, from Morrison (1999 [1996]: 389–91), I focus on Twain’s portrayal of Jim as a father figure for Huck—an aspect of Jim’s characterization that transcends, albeit briefly, the racial hierarchies so forcibly inscribed in the novel’s temporal and geographical setting.
2. The White Boy and the Black Man
Comparing Huckleberry Finn to Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, Ralph Ellison wrote in 1958:
...Twain, standing closer [than Faulkner] to the Reconstruction and to the oral tradition, was not so free of the white dictum that Negro males must be treated either as boys or ‘uncles’—never as men. Jim’s friendship for Huck comes across as that of a boy for another boy rather than as the friendship of an adult for a junior. (Ellison 1995 [1958]: 105)
When Huckleberry Finn is studied as a whole, Ellison is undoubtedly correct. However, the novel also offers some glimpses of a Jim who, though compelled to squeeze himself in a humiliatingly diminishing mold while communicating with whites, is nevertheless powerfully aware of his manhood and adulthood. One such passage is the hairball scene in Chapter 4. David L. Smith, one of the few critics examining racial representation in Huckleberry Finn who address this scene, focuses on the pecuniary aspect of Huck and Jim’s ‘transaction’: “[M]uch of the exchange between Huck and Jim is an exercise in wily and understated economic bartering. In essence, Jim wants to be paid for his services, while Huck wants free advice.… In this transaction, Jim serves his own interest while appearing to serve Huck’s interest” (1992: 110). At one level, this reading is accurate: Jim does test his luck, checking whether he could benefit from the fortune-telling financially. However, the scene cannot be completely reduced either to economic negotiation or to Jim’s performance as a ‘superstitious Negro’; rather, Twain also portrays Jim as an adult who pauses to listen to an adolescent in distress and takes his anxieties seriously. Twain’s Jim clearly recognizes that the deeply troubled Huck’s request for fortune-telling connotes much more than its face value indicates: in addition to pursuing information about his father’s whereabouts and intentions, Huck desperately needs emotional support. Jim chooses to respond to this need and thus demonstrates genuine human kindness and unselfish generosity (while living and operating in a society that, ironically enough, questions his full humanity). A slave, Jim can relate, at a most personal level, both to the agony generated by uncertainty about a family member’s fate and to the fear of becoming a target of physical violence. Huck is, at this point, mainly preoccupied with the latter problem: he is already sure that Pap Finn—an abusive parent—is alive, and for the young boy this state of affairs translates, tragically, as extremely disconcerting news; he is, in fact, horrified. A little earlier, he saw familiar footprints in new snow, was struck by panic, Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles 35 and ran to Judge Thatcher to transfer the ownership of his newly acquired assets (see the ending of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) to the Judge—attempting to rid himself of his money, so that he would not have to suffer at his father’s hands for possessing what Pap Finn would try to seize by any means necessary. Huck comes to Jim after visiting Judge Thatcher: “... I went to him [Jim] that night and told him pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow. What I wanted to know, was, what he was going to do, and was he going to stay?” (29). Despite the fear and anguish saturating Huck’s ostensibly matter-of-fact inquiry, Huck and Jim verbally adhere to ‘business’: they conduct their discussion in the language of fortune-telling and avoid any explicit display of emotions. In effect, however, the adult Jim here gently consoles the confused adolescent, communicating with Huck in a language that they both share and cherish, which happens to be the language of folk belief. Because of the societal circumstances in which Huck and Jim find themselves, Jim has no authoritative voice (except for the clairvoyant’s voice temporarily granted to him by the magic authority of the hairball), nor is he in a position to articulate the obvious: in consoling and advising Huck he actually substitutes for the young boy’s father. This silence is one of Twain’s many telling omissions that Toni Morrison perceptively terms “entrances, crevices, gaps, seductive invitations flashing the possibility of meaning” and “[u]narticulated eddies that encourage diving into the novel’s undertow—the real place where writer captures reader” (1999 [1996]: 388). Despite the absence of an articulation of what in the context ‘must’ remain unsaid, the process that results in Jim becoming a father figure for Huck begins as early as this scene. When Jim later, in Chapter 9, discovers that the dead man inside the house floating down the river is Pap Finn, he decides to temporarily withhold this information from Huck (61–62). This decision further develops what began in the hairball scene: without Huck having to consciously face or admit the process of substitution, Jim starts, after Pap Finn’s death, to protect the fatherless boy as unselfishly as if Huck were his own son. Notably, Huck intuitively submits to Jim’s newly established authority as an adult protector: curious and mischievous as he normally is, in Chapter 9 Huck obeys Jim without as much as a word of protest when Jim tells him not to look at the dead man’s face (62). In this scene, it is clear who is a boy (Huck) and who is an adult (Jim), or who is the ‘son’ and who is his new surrogate ‘father’, although this clarity is not sustained in later chapters. Moreover, after this incident Huck begins to call the places he inhabits with Jim—here, Jackson’s Island—“home” (62); the word is yet another signal of Jim and Huck’s ‘family formation’. The explicit linkage of this formation with Huck’s fear of his abusive biological father in Chapter 4 and with the father’s death in Chapter 9 suggests that Twain here indeed deliberately seeks to transcend the stereotypical image of the black male slave as an ‘uncle’ (although his portrayal of Jim is nevertheless heavily influenced by that stereotype).
3. Twain’s Deconstruction of an Idealized Whiteness
In addition to prefiguring the development of the Jim-Huck relationship as a father-son relation that temporarily transcends the era’s racial hierarchies, the hairball scene in Chapter 4 also launches the novel’s examination of the metaphorical meanings that 36 Tuire Valkeakari
Twain’s contemporaries habitually attributed to blackness and whiteness. At first sight, Jim’s vision of black and white angels at the end of the hairball scene (30) may seem to uncritically enforce the Manichean identification of blackness with evil and whiteness with virtue; however, Twain begins to deconstruct this simplistic—and, in the context, racist—dualism immediately after introducing it. When Huck leaves Jim after the fortune-telling, he then, startlingly, encounters his father at the very opening of Chapter 5. The older man’s deathly white pallor functions as a powerful image of the decaying white South: “There warn’t no color in his [Pap Finn’s] face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white” (31). This image of decomposition, corrosion, and corruption is complemented by there being hardly any white character in the novel whom Twain unambiguously presents as morally good, with the possible exception of Judge Thatcher.5 Notably, in Huckleberry Finn a pivotal aspect of the moral imperfection of the whites of Missouri, a slave state within the Union, is their participation in the ideology and practice of slavery—a complicity that even the kindest of Twain’s white characters share, whether or not they recognize their involvement. The widow Douglas is a case in point: though not a slaveholder herself, she benefits from the Peculiar Institution on a daily basis because she shares a household with her sister, Miss Watson, who owns a slave, Jim. Stacey Margolis has recently argued that “Twain’s interest in exploring the ways in which a wide variety of unknowing people could be held responsible for Jim’s fate and be made to compensate him for his injuries must be read as an attempt to imagine what it would mean to extend the logic of negligence to the national level” (2001: 331).6 Twain’s deconstruction of any unproblematized identification of whiteness with goodness and social grace continues as Huck and Jim travel down south and are faced with white degeneration, immorality, and mob mentality practically every time they go on shore. In Chapter 16, Twain’s portraits of poor whites along the Mississippi contain nothing that could be read as flattering; no role models for Huck can be found there. The novel’s view of the white Southern aristocracy is equally disillusioned and pessimistic: although the feud episode of Chapters 17 and 18 may initially seem a hilarious parody of Romantic notions of honor, it ends on an extremely tragic note— the futile and largely self-imposed deaths of the Grangerfords (white upper-class Southerners isolated from the social realities surrounding them), who momentarily seemed to have the potential of becoming Huck’s family. Furthermore, the episode where Colonel Sherburn executes a (white) drunken man in cold blood and is then faced by a lynch mob seeking revenge further calls attention to the antebellum South’s ambience of white terror. Interestingly, repulsive and arrogant a character as he is, Sherburn’s speech to the mob expresses chilling truths that Huck is also discovering
5 The other, temperance-minded judge is well-intentioned, but he is also dangerously naïve and gullible: epitomizing the failure of the novel’s society to provide a safety net for a mistreated child, he leaves Huck at the mercy of a legal guardian who is an abusive alcoholic. 6 Joining the critics who interpret Huckleberry Finn as being strongly antiracist, Margolis further suggests that “[i]n this commitment to examining unintentional harms, Twain... makes his strongest case against postbellum racism” (2001: 331). Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles 37 about the life along the river: “The pitifulest thing out is a mob…. Now the thing for you to do, is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done, it will be done in the dark, southern fashion; and when they come, they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along.” (162, italics in original) While Sherburn is primarily thinking of himself when he utters the word man, the remark can also be read as Twain’s reverent allusion to black male lynch victims (whose executors, ironically, thought of themselves as ‘manly’ and brave).
4. Jim’s Plight
Among the most notorious white characters of Huckleberry Finn are the two con artists who call themselves the Duke and the Dauphin. By the time these “low-down humbugs and frauds” (142) enter the narrative, life on the shore and Huck and Jim’s life on the water have come to represent binary opposites. Huck and Jim have witnessed terrible tragedies and encountered lethal hazards on the shore, but their interracial existence on the raft—their oasis—has become something of a semi-democratic arrangement (still flawed, though, by Huck’s recognition of his racially based power to control Jim). However, when the Duke and the Dauphin arrive, they completely take over; even their fake names signify power. Huck and Jim, a young white boy and an adult black man, cannot defend their newly established way of life against the two white males’ coup d’état. The shore life, with its racial hierarchy, invades the raft, and Jim’s status as a slave is restored. The Duke and the Dauphin decide that it will be ‘pretended’ that Jim is a runaway slave captured by the three white travelers, because this scheme will enable the group to travel by day. A former itinerant printer, the Duke even designs and prints a poster in support of their story: “[The poster] had a picture of a runaway nigger, with a bundle on a stick, over his shoulder, and ‘$200 reward’ under it. The reading was all about Jim, and just described him to a dot” (149). As the Duke’s triumphant explanation indicates, the plan’s consequences for Jim are gloomy:
Whenever we see anybody coming, we can tie Jim hand and foot with a rope, and lay him in the wigwam and show this handbill and say we captured him up the river, and were too poor to travel on a steamboat, so we got this little raft on credit from our friends and are going down to get the reward. Handcuffs and chains would look still better on Jim, but it wouldn’t go well with the story of us being so poor. (149–50)
This passage explicitly evokes Jim’s factually shackled condition (“[h]andcuffs and chains”). From this point onwards, Jim’s adulthood mainly remains suppressed in the narrative. It does, however, surface occasionally—for example, at the end of Chapter 23, where Jim discusses his children with Huck. Jim’s guilt and sadness about his past misinterpretation of his little daughter’s deafness as disobedience reveals his profound appreciation of thoughtful, attentive, and sensitive parenting—a vision of adult conduct totally foreign to most of the novel’s white male characters. This scene also severely criticizes the family-breaking practices of slavery by disclosing how sorely Jim misses his family. What follows this revelation is, as Toni Morrison points out, one of 38 Tuire Valkeakari the loudest silences of the entire novel: “Huck has nothing to say. The chapter does not close; it simply stops” (1999 [1996]: 389). Despite what has in practice become a father- son relationship between Jim and Huck, the white boy (still shackled by his society’s racist concept of black people) is unable to envision Jim in the role of an adult with family responsibilities; the narrative connects this failure of Huck’s imagination to the ‘education’, however informal, that he has received in the South. At this point, moreover, Jim’s real family signifies a rival for his new, needy ‘son’ Huck. Morrison’s analysis of the complex and suppressed undercurrents of Huck’s need for Jim as a father figure is, in its grimness, insightful and accurate:
As an abused and homeless child running from a feral male parent, Huck cannot dwell on Jim’s confession and regret about parental negligence without precipitating a crisis from which neither he nor the text could recover. Huck’s desire for a father who is adviser and trustworthy companion is universal, but he also needs something more: a father whom, unlike his own, he can control. No white man can serve all three functions.… Only a black male slave can deliver all Huck desires. Because Jim can be controlled, it becomes possible for Huck to feel responsible for and to him—but without the onerous burden of lifelong debt that a real father figure would demand. For Huck, Jim is a father-for-free. This delicate, covert and fractious problematic is thus hidden and exposed by litotes and speechlessness, both of which are dramatic ways of begging attention. (Morrison 1999 [1996]: 389–90)
While psychological suppression, internalized racialism and racism, and mixed loyalties cause Huck’s vision of Jim’s adulthood to remain limited and blurred, the Duke and the Dauphin choose complete blindness to Jim’s human dignity. After victimizing him cruelly, the two con artists sell Jim into slavery for forty dollars— which, according to Shelley Fisher Fishkin (1996: 20), is the same sum for which Twain’s father, John Marshall Clemens, sold his slave Charley down the river upon finding himself in financial difficulty. Jim’s monetary value diminishes progressively during his journey; this devaluation aptly suggests a gradual lessening of his human worth in the eyes of the white beholders whom he encounters while traveling further south. His initial value, the price that was promised to Miss Watson for him, was eight hundred dollars. On Jackson’s Island, Jim’s understanding of his own ‘worth’ prompted the following, seemingly innocent comment from behind his minstrel mask—in effect, an ironic allusion to slavery’s reduction of black human worth to monetary value: “Yes—en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo” (58). When Jim becomes a fugitive, however, the advertised reward for capturing him is no longer eight but three hundred dollars (68). The Duke’s poster sets the price at two hundred, and the eventual selling price, forty dollars, is only five per cent of Jim’s original ‘worth’. It is a realistic feature of Twain’s narrative—one closely tied to Jim’s plight—that although Huck rather quickly recognizes the Duke and the Dauphin for what they are, it is much more difficult for him to perceive flaws in Tom Sawyer’s leadership. Huck, a lonely boy without too many friends, shares a history of ‘adventures’ with Tom. Because of their class difference, he uncritically idealizes Tom for being a ‘decent’ bourgeois boy with a family and a good education. In Chapter 2, Huck even takes an oath of loyalty whereby he, in practice, ‘formally’ acknowledges Tom’s authority, Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles 39 although the oath is, on the surface, about solidarity among all boys of ‘Tom Sawyer’s Gang’ (20–21). True, a dissonance—an indication of Huck’s nascent critique of Tom’s leadership—does make itself heard early in the novel: when Tom in Chapter 2 wants to have ‘fun’ at Jim’s expense by tying him to a tree while he sleeps, Huck persuades Tom to drop the idea. In Chapter 3, moreover, Huck begins to see through Tom’s pompous schemes, which are mainly gleaned from romance and adventure novels instead of resonating with real life (24–26). Drawing from the unreal and unseen, Tom’s leadership, in Huck’s disappointed words, “had all the marks of a Sunday school” (26). However, after some time passes without the boys seeing each other, Huck’s earlier idealization of Tom takes hold again. In Chapter 10, Huck unwittingly imitates Tom’s idea of having ‘fun’: wishing to confuse Jim by a prank, Huck puts a dead rattlesnake at the foot of Jim’s blanket. The consequences are much more drastic than Huck ever intended: the snake’s mate comes and bites Jim—that is, Huck’s childish and foolish behavior results in Jim being endangered and hurt. Despite Huck’s shock and regret, the pattern recurs in the narrative (most dramatically, in the chapters on Jim’s captivity on the Phelps farm towards the novel’s end). In Chapter 12, for example, Huck and Jim come across a wrecked steamship, and Huck—more interested in yet another adventure than in safety—decides to go onto the wreck to loot it. As Huck belittles Jim’s objections (which soon prove far-sighted and wise), he explicitly evokes Tom’s example and authority:
I can’t rest, Jim, till we give her [the wreck] a rummaging. Do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing? Not for a pie, he wouldn’t. He’d call it an adventure—that’s what he’d call it; and he’d land on that wreck if it was his last act. And wouldn’t he throw style into it?—wouldn’t he spread himself, nor nothing? Why, you’d think it was Christopher C’lumbus discovering Kingdom-Come. I wish Tom Sawyer was here. (77, italics in original)
It is worth noting that this scene invokes Columbus’s name, and one wonders whether it is a mere coincidence that the site of Jim’s final captivity after his escape from the Phelps plantation is called “Spanish island” (281). If Twain really inserted into his novel what would now be called postcolonial observations—that is, if he, in fact, intended to parallel the ‘Discovery’ and slavery as historical epochs that resulted in the evolution of racial hierarchies in the Americas—then it is significant that such trains of thought are embedded in the story of Tom Sawyer’s cruel, fantasy-fed, self-serving, and racist leadership. When Tom Sawyer re-enters the novel for the last eleven chapters, Huck, disappointingly, yields to his authority. As Huck accepts Tom’s complicated schemes to ‘free’ Jim (which only serve Tom’s yearning for adventure), he prioritizes his friendship with Tom over his loyalty to Jim, and Jim loses the only white ally he has ever had in the deep South. Although Jim was there for Huck when the white boy needed support and protection, the shared journey does not last. Now that Jim would need Huck, he has to watch the boy start a new phase in his life with restored white loyalties. This loss of an ally at least in part motivates Jim’s excessive humility and servitude in the novel’s final chapters: Jim seems to conclude that putting his life in the hands of the two white boys, fully on their terms, is his only alternative to resigning himself to the life as a slave. 40 Tuire Valkeakari
Because Jim finds himself in an unfamiliar and extremely hostile environment, he cannot escape without help; however, asking the slaves of the Phelps farm to assist him would mean putting them in danger. (Here, unlike in earlier episodes where local slaves helped him, the whites already know about Jim, so the Phelps slaves would be immediately suspected if he fled the farm. Ironically, Tom and Huck’s games eventually result in the same outcome, albeit only briefly). Because Jim is a person of high moral standards, his options are extremely limited. It is, admittedly, difficult to determine how emphatically Twain calls attention to Jim’s recognition of Tom as a brutally selfish player who only seeks his own entertainment; towards the novel’s end, Jim’s mask of servitude becomes so firmly cemented on his face that it is almost impossible to see behind it and peer into the author’s intentions. At the very least, Twain’s Jim is powerfully aware of the ineffectiveness of Tom’s plotting and deeply suffers from the consequences of Tom and Huck’s cruel games as he waits, in his dreary cell, for the boys’ next move that never seems to come. Nevertheless, after his eventual escape from the farm—during which Huck and Tom accompany him, and Tom is shot and wounded—Jim makes an unselfish moral decision: he chooses not to leave the injured adolescent behind. He sacrifices his own freedom to nurse Tom, or so he believes at the time. His generosity of spirit stands in striking contrast to the behavior of Tom, who, it eventually transpires, has known all along that Miss Watson’s will has already set Jim free. This final revelation bestows a new, chilling significance on Tom’s earlier remark: “[T]here’s Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain” (246, italics added). In the novel’s last eleven chapters, Tom’s project of having ‘fun’ with Jim culminates in a cruel deferral of Jim’s freedom in a play whose sole purpose is to make Tom feel adventurous, noble, and heroic—a sentiment as unreal as his imaginary heroism in Chapters 2 and 3. While the invented adventures of ‘Tom Sawyer’s Gang’ hardly hurt any one back in St. Petersburg, Missouri, Tom and Huck’s ‘play’ towards the novel’s end on the Phelps farm in Arkansas has extremely serious—physically cumbersome and psychologically humiliating—consequences for Jim. Tom, however, does not understand this difference, or if he does, he believes that Jim’s suffering, like Jim himself, can easily be assigned a monetary value and handled by the rules of capitalism. In ‘Chapter the Last’, Tom gives Jim “forty dollars for being prisoner for us [Tom and Huck] so patient” (294)—the same sum for which the Duke and the Dauphin sold Jim into slavery. Seemingly happy about the money, Jim triumphantly refers back to the discussion that Huck and he had on Jackson’s Island about his ‘worth’ (294–95). However, in another of the novel’s silences Jim never mentions that he only receives forty dollars instead of, for example, the ‘original’ eight hundred. None of the white characters admits that the monetary compensation for Jim’s postponed freedom is shamefully low; nor does anyone seem to recognize the absurdity of the compensation taking the form of a voluntary and ‘noble’ act on Tom’s part; nor does anyone pursue a moral analysis of what has just taken place. Twain’s irony operates on the unsaid. One of E. W. Kemble’s illustrations aptly enhances this ironic effect: in the picture titled ‘Tom’s Liberality’ (295)—which echoes Huck’s words, “Tom’s most well, now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watchguard for a watch, and is always seeing Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles 41 what time it is” (295)—the healed Tom affectionately holds the bullet that pierced his leg while he was ‘freeing’ Jim. Tom, with his ostensibly modest poise, is here presented both verbally and pictorially as the very emblem of hypocrisy. Twain’s and Kemble’s approach contains a germ of later cultural historians’ critical observation that in the United States, as in England, the memory of the slave trade and slavery was soon largely transformed into a memory of white abolitionist heroism; there was little room for the ex-slave in that celebratory discourse (see e.g. Wood 2000: 1–13).
5. Conclusion
In sum, during the journey that he makes with Jim, Huck’s views change from what they were at the novel’s beginning, but the process remains incomplete, as Huck’s eventual relapse into Tom’s sphere of influence powerfully demonstrates. Joel Roache, in discussing Huck’s retrospective narrative voice, captures this dilemma well:
The first person narrator recounts events that have somehow changed him. Huck therefore plays two roles: the protagonist in the process of change, and the narrator who has already experienced that change. It is this second character, the character who supposedly has overcome his racism, who says that Jim’s love for his family “don’t seem natural”; it is this character who says that no one was hurt in the steamboat accident, that it just “Killed a nigger”; it is this character who avers, “you can’t a learn a nigger to argue”; and it is this character who, having been convinced of Jim’s humanity, can express that conviction only by announcing that he “knowed he was white inside”. (Roache 1998)
At one level, Twain’s choice of Huck’s disappointing discourse and register probably reflects the author’s realism: the change in the young protagonist’s worldview is a slow process because it is not supported by white adults around him. However, this aspect of the novel also seems to reflect Twain’s own ambivalences. As Elizabeth Ammons and Susan Belasco point out in their discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is possible to be antislavery and, in terms of intentions, antiracist, and yet end up reproducing racial stereotypes (2000: 2). Besides Stowe’s novel, Huckleberry Finn is, in many ways, another case in point, not only because of Twain’s text itself but also because of his authorization of Kemble’s illustrations. Although such images as ‘Tom’s Liberality’ support an antislavery/antiracist point of view, Kemble’s visualization of Jim certainly leaves much to be desired. Earl F. Briden has rightly stressed that, by accepting Kemble’s work, “Twain was in effect authorizing a pictorial narrative which runs counter to major implications of his verbal text” because Kemble’s illustrations “rewrite the Huck-Jim relationship by reducing Jim, whom Huck gradually recognizes as an individualized human being, to a simple comic type” (Briden 1999 [1988]: 311). Kemble’s illustrations indeed render Jim’s minstrel shackles very visible throughout the novel. Why, then, after all the reservations summed up above, teach Huckleberry Finn at all? Perhaps one valid reason to maintain this ‘amazing’ and ‘troubling’ book in American high school and college curricula is precisely the fact that, with all its wavering and ambivalence, Huckleberry Finn both mimics and sheds light on historical 42 Tuire Valkeakari processes whereby shackles of racialized perception are at first opened and then, very disappointingly, partly closed again; in teaching, this observation is worth articulating, and it acutely points to the question of how such shackles could be fully abandoned. Another good reason to teach Huckleberry Finn in twenty-first-century college classes on American literature, in particular, is the novel’s status as an important antecedent to such African American novels as Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990). In these narratives, the Hucks (to give a nod to Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s famous 1993 title) are indeed black; Ellison and Johnson play deliberate intertextual games with Twain’s classic, but they also introduce a revised racial politics in the process. Like Huckleberry Finn, both Invisible Man and Middle Passage focus on an unreliable first-person narrator-protagonist who survives an ordeal largely caused by racial hierarchies and racialized perception, who undergoes a moral transformation and growth, and who writes down his story. At the same time, however, these African American novels take both literary techniques and moral/racial reflection in radically new directions.7
Works Cited
Ammons, Elizabeth, and Susan Belasco 2000: ‘Introduction: Stowe’s Challenge to Teachers’. Elizabeth Ammons and Susan Belasco, eds. Approaches to Teaching Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: MLA. 1–4. Bell, Bernard W. 1992 (1985): ‘Twain’s “Nigger” Jim: The Tragic Face behind the Minstrel Mask’. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney and Thadious M. Davis, eds. Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Durham: Duke UP. 124–40. Briden, Earl F. 1999 (1988): ‘Kemble’s “Specialty” and the Pictorial Countertext of Huckleberry Finn’. Thomas Cooley, ed. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: An Authoritative Text; Context and Sources; Criticism. New York and London: Norton. 310–18. Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn 1998: The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Ellison, Ralph 1965 (1952): Invisible Man. London: Penguin. ———— 1995 (1958): ‘Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke’. John F. Callahan, ed. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The Modern Library. 100–112. Fiedler, Leslie 1948: ‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!’ Partisan Review 25: 664–671. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher 1993: Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices. New York: Oxford UP. ———— 1996: Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford UP. Johnson, Charles 1991 (1990): Middle Passage. New York: Plume/Penguin. Leonard, James S., and Thomas A. Tenney 1992: ‘Introduction: The Controversy over Huckleberry Finn’. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney and Thadious M. Davis, eds. Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Durham: Duke UP. 1–15. Margolis, Stacey 2001: ‘Huckleberry Finn; or, Consequences’. PMLA 116.2: 329–343. Morrison, Toni 1999 (1996): ‘This Amazing, Troubling Book’. Thomas Cooley, ed. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: An Authoritative Text; Context and Sources; Criticism. New York and London: Norton. 385–92.
7 My warm thanks are due to Robert B. Stepto for kindling my interest in Mark Twain and for inspiring my writing. Huck, Twain, and the Freedman’s Shackles 43
Roache, Joel 1998: ‘Negative Capability and Teaching the Controversy over Race in Huckleberry Finn’. Delivered at a conference of the Maryland College English Association, in Baltimore, in March 1998.
Received 12 February 2006 Revised version received 2 August 2006
28.2 (December 2006): 45–58 ISSN 0210-6124
Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father: British Identity in Pink Floyd’s The Wall
Jorge Sacido Romero Luis Miguel Varela Cabo Universidad de Santiago de Compostela [email protected] [email protected]
In spite of being one the most remarkable and arresting products of late-twentieth- century British popular culture, Pink Floyd’s The Wall has received little scholarly attention. This paper focuses on how in The Wall and in its companion album, The Final Cut, the individual life history and the present predicament of its protagonist stand for the postwar period in British history as a whole. The latter represent the identitary crossroads at which the nation was placed after the collapse of the welfare state system and the major socio-economic and political transformation it underwent at the dawn of Thatcherism. In order to show this, we draw an outline of the historical context in which The Wall is inscribed and attend closely to the film’s complex temporal structure and rich symbolism. We conclude with a brief discussion on how The Wall leaves in sketch an alternative to the present situation which is based on a retrieval of interhuman affects and on justice as the supreme political virtue. As both love and justice bury their roots in the more humane side of the past tradition of the British nation, the work’s Utopian thrust has inevitable conservative overtones.
Keywords: British identity, post-war, welfare state, Oedipal father, ultra-liberalism, Thatcher, Pink Floyd, Roger Waters
1. Introduction
Pink Floyd’s rock album The Wall (1979) was followed by a film version in 1982 which was written by Roger Waters (the leader of the band and composer of most of the album’s songs) and directed by Alan Parker. The Wall, both album and film, are intimately connected to the work that marked the end of Pink Floyd’s major phase as one the most important rock bands of the twentieth century: The Final Cut: A Requiem for the Postwar Dream (1983). The latter’s elegiac subtitle is an explicit reference to the situation in Great Britain during the late 1970s and early 1980s which will constitute the central focus for our close reading of The Wall, a work whose intimate, individualistic and autobiographical aspect stands for the identitary, trans-individual predicament of postwar British society as a whole. 46 Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo
2. Historical Context.
On the eve of the First World War the condition of British society was ominous: the threat of a nation-wide mass strike in mining and transport, civil war in Ireland and revolt in India and Egypt (Morgan 1993: 582).1 However, the war would deflect attention from all these conflicts and bring the country together in the effort to defeat the enemy. The strong feeling of national cohesion during the war went hand in hand with a “massive industrial and social transformation” led by a strengthened state apparatus which implemented reforms in all fields that helped to set the basis of a potentially more egalitarian society (Morgan 1993: 587). Indeed, the traditional liberal ideals of justice, freedom and solidarity were endorsed by society at large and resulted in an increase in the degree of social and political relevance of sectors such as women and the working classes who had inevitably joined the war effort. National identity and cohesion and socio-economic and political transformation were strongly connected with the imperial idea, which was greatly reinforced during the war period.2 Though it would become more and more impractical to maintain, the British Empire extended its boundaries wider than before. After the First World War the Prime Minister, Lloyd George tried unsuccessfully to consolidate the socio-economic reforms of the wartime period. He failed in his attempt to build “a land fit for heroes”, a project that included the extension in health and educational services, the rise in pensions, the spread of universal unemployment insurance and even subsidised housing (Lloyd George in Morgan 1993: 596). The renewed ideal of national unity and the programme of reform measures were soon abandoned and the status quo previous to the war was restored. Class divisions were reinforced and capital and industry returned to private hands. During the interwar years, Britain went through a period of crisis that brought about high rates of unemployment and episodes of social unrest. However, Britain’s leading role in the international sphere remained apparently unscathed and the country “displayed a surprising degree of stability” in comparison with all the other western nations (Morgan 1993: 613). Besides, of the two countries that would take over world leadership after the Second World War, one was still in the making (the Soviet Union), while the other (the United States) went through a crisis of its own, particularly after the crash of 1929. The Second World War was indeed a major turning-point in the history of Great Britain. It changed things in a way the previous war had not done. Alistair Davies and Alan Sinfield have neatly summarised the new situation: “In 1939, Britain was the world’s greatest imperial power; by 1945, even though the empire remained intact, Britain was an enfeebled state in a world divided between two new superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union” (2000: 1). Although the turn of the nineteenth century had already seen the weakening of Great Britain’s power as world leader, it was not until the postwar period that she really lost her hegemonic position in the international sphere
1 In what follows, we draw heavily from Kenneth O. Morgan’s ‘The Twentieth Century (1914- 1991)’ in Morgan (1993: 582-663). 2 As an expression of Britain’s solidity and greatness, the Empire became extremely important in political, commercial and symbolic terms (Morgan 1993: 593). Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father 47
(Hobsbawm 1999: 112-131, 150-172, 185-316). The British Empire crumbled quite rapidly immediately after the war, so much so that by the early 1960s there were left only the remains of what had been a vast territory occupying more than a quarter of the earth.3 This loss pushed post-war Britain into a subordinate position inside the Western bloc that she was unwilling to take. Europe split into two during the Cold War and Britain aligned herself with the superpower that was geographically and historically closest to her. The new situation forced the British into trying different ways of reinforcing their sense of national identity and continuity with their past that were linked to attempts at retrieving their lost greatness. All these efforts were traversed by contradictions of all kinds that would lead to a socio-economic crisis in the years in which Pink Floyd published The Wall and The Final Cut.4 Thus, the ‘special relationship’ with the USA was placed vis-à-vis a reluctant Atlanticism in which the overtones of a family feud could be heard; integration into the European Community was considered a suitable alternative, while at the same time Britain’s insularity was safeguarded in more than merely geographical terms; the final acceptance of the loss of Empire was belied by such victorious episodes as the Falklands War in which the glories of an imperial past were revived. No longer the economic or military superpower of old, Great Britain stuck to a fantasy of unparalleled moral influence in the world’s affairs.5 Britain’s determination to become the world’s moral authority was materialised at home in the establishment of the welfare state system, that compromise reached by Labour and the Tories to create a happier and more egalitarian society, a truly alternative model to both the savage capitalism represented by the USA and the totalitarian regimes of the Eastern bloc. The welfare state system was a combination of mixed economy and social protection that had been outlined by Sir William Beveridge in his Report of November 1942 as a way to build “a land fit for heroes” after World War II.6 Unlike the case of the previous post-war, a return to the pre-war situation was no longer a possibility. Britain chose then to re-edit the project that had been rapidly discontinued after 1918 as the way to regain economic prosperity and to safeguard and strengthen the sense of national
3 “By the early 1960s, only a scattered handful of miscellaneous territories –British Honduras, the barren wastes of the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Aden, Fiji, and a few other outposts– were still under direct British rule” (Morgan 1993: 641). 4 For an analysis of how the loss of Empire haunts post-war Britain as reflected in cultural products as varied as George Orwell’s ‘The English People’ (1947) and the film Love Actually (2004) see Barbeito and Sacido (forthcoming). 5 Thus, for instance, when it turned out that she could not afford an independent nuclear force in her pretension to be a world power, Britain took on the role of leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, in a gesture of moral superiority, abandoned the arms race unilaterally (Davies and Saunders 1983: 31; Morgan 1993: 646 and 653; Bradbury 1994: 275). 6 The principles underlying the welfare state introduced by Labour PM Clement Attlee in 1945 had been outlined by Sir William Beveridge in the Beveridge Report presented to the British parliament in November 1942. The main goal set by the Report was the ‘Abolition of Want’ through the creation of a state-led system of social security that included childcare, the safeguarding of maternity and the coverage of unemployment, disability and retirement. A National Health Service was established in 1948, which meant free medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was likewise introduced to provide social security, so that the population would be protected “from the cradle to the grave” (WW2 People’s War Team). 48 Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo identity and historical continuity that were under the threat of engulfment by external forces and of destruction by internal weaknesses. In The Wall, the protagonist’s father, a war hero who was killed in the battle of Anzio in 1944, incarnates this ‘national ideal’ passed on as a legacy to the post-war generations (with a traditional element attached to it symbolised in his elegant uniform and gentlemanly demeanour). By interweaving the individual with the collective history, the film records how this legacy soon started to undergo a fatal process of erosion and was brought to an end in the present dimension from which the story is told. Indeed, from 1976 onwards, Britain was finally forced to wake up from what was left of the post-war dream. All ended in an economic crisis (inflation rates rose 20 percent in 1980), a series of strikes (particularly serious in the mining sector) and closedowns (shipyards, for example), a rise in unemployment (2 million people in 1980 and 3 million in 1983), demographic deceleration, social unrest, the loss of prestige and credibility of the institutions, and from May 1979 on, a Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher, who, explicitly and programmatically, took the ultra-liberal road (Fernández Sánchez 1999: 72).7 In The Final Cut, ‘Maggie’ is made partly responsible for the country’s critical situation. ‘England’ is a discontented country, a victim of an increasingly ‘global’ economy, narcotised by alcohol, TV and Hollywood. The nation is heading towards her own destruction along with the rest of humankind ruled by a bunch of tyrants led by Reagan and Brezhnev, who play colonial games and whom the poetic voice in ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ (track no. 8 of the album) would like to get rid of.8
3. Pink, or Whither Britain?
The Wall and The Final Cut are two deeply interconnected works. Leaving aside the fact that three of the songs in the last album were actually discarded from the previous one,9 The Wall unifies and condenses through one single subjective perspective all that is expressed in a more dispersed manner in the lyrics of The Final Cut: namely, on the one hand, an angst-ridden analysis and open indictment of the socio-political situation in Britain and the world at large, while on the other, the torment of a real or imaginary World War II veteran haunted by the memory of the war and whose dream of a better society has been betrayed by his own country. Through a combination of the personal and the trans-individual, the autobiographical and the historical, The Wall sharpens
7 Fernández Sánchez (1999) is a thorough and extremely useful study of the period 1975-1990 in British history that revolves around the figure of Margaret Thatcher. ‘Thatcherism’ meant the endorsement of the spirited and acquisitive individualism rooted in the more monetarist and less humane side of the British liberal tradition and the abandonment of post-war Keynesianism. 8 In ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ the list of ‘colonial wasters of life and limb’ includes the following: Ronald Reagan and his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Menahem Begin, Margaret Thatcher and the Reverend Ian Paisley, Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist Party, the ghosts of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon and a bunch of Latin-American dictators that add an exotic note of colour to the group. 9 They are the following: ‘Your Possible Pasts’ (track no. 2), ‘One of the Few’ (track no. 3) and ‘The Final Cut’ (track no. 10). Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father 49 and expands what in The Final Cut remains diffuse: namely, how the ‘post-war dream’ of the generation that fought and died in the war had become a nightmare in the individual and collective present of the ‘I’ that speaks, sees, thinks and experiences. In the last stanza of ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ (track no. 5 of The Final Cut) the poetic voice is haunted by the soldier’s dream of a happier and freer society which the present (the future of the dream’s past) had finally frustrated. He ends up by preaching in the wilderness of the present, desperately crying out for the retrieval of the ideal expressed in the gunner’s dream: “take heed of the dream/take heed”, he says.10 Phil Rose’s 2002 analysis Which One’s Pink? reads The Wall from the perspective of object-relations theory. In a rather heavy-handed manner and quoting too copiously from the works of psychologists, Rose concentrates his argument on Pink’s individual psyche, on how it goes to the extremes of narcissism, obsession and schizophrenia until it expels the ‘bad objects’ he had previously incorporated and is finally able to establish normal relationships with others.11 The present study transcends this confinement to the private sphere of Pink’s mind to offer a detailed analysis of how the protagonist’s predicament equals the Nation’s predicament. The other critical piece that comes close to being a scholarly study of The Wall is a brief essay by Philip Jenkins on the adaptation of the film into the concert given in Berlin’s Postdamer Platz on July 21, 1990 to celebrate the downfall of the Berlin Wall. Jenkins connects The Wall to both the work of contemporary authors and to the temporally distant visionary universe of the English Romantic poet William Blake. Jenkins does in fact establish the connection between the protagonist of The Wall (Pink) and post-war Britain. He states that “Pink’s tragedy reflects that of the nation at large”, and that he is “Britain in miniature” (Jenkins 1996: 205-206). Undoubtedly because of space restrictions, Jenkins’s approach remains in this connection rather sketchy and limited in scope. He substantiates his thesis by selecting certain details in Pink’s story and relating them to facts of (mostly) present-day British history. Our reading attends in a much more comprehensive way to the structuring, systematic interconnections established in the film between the individual and the collective which are presided over by the haunting figure of the absent father that represents the ‘national ideal’ in its doomed attempt to be realised in post-war Britain. The equivalence between Pink and post-war Britain is therefore coherently maintained in The Wall as the way to show the
10 Here are the elements that make up the ideal post-war society dreamt of by the soldier in the battlefield: “a place to stay/enough to eat/somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street/where you can speak out loud/about your doubts and fears/and what’s more no-one ever disappears/you never hear their standard issue kicking in your door/you can relax both sides of the tracks/and maniacs don’t blow holes in bandsmen by remote control/and everyone has recourse to the law/and no-one kills the children anymore/and no-one kills the children anymore.” (Emphasis added). “Standard issue” refers to the standard boots worn by the police or by soldiers, while “maniacs” blowing “holes in bandsmen by remote control” is an allusion to the I.R.A.’s assassination of six army musicians in Regent’s Park, London, on July 20, 1982 (Rose 2002: 145). 11 Rose concludes in a way that, in our view, neither the album, nor the film sustains: Pink is condemned by the Judge in the penultimate song, ‘The Trial’, for having made others suffer (2002: 133). In this way, figures like the mother, or the teacher (who had pushed Pink into a state of alienation) become victims at one single stroke. 50 Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo nation’s ethico-political situation while moving the audience/public (the English in particular) into a strong identification with the hero and with the reality that is being represented. Both the album and the film place the stress on the personal-national identitary dimension and not so much on the socio-economic base which, on the other hand, is shown as determining the former and constituting its material ground. The British had had to bear heavy existential burdens and to confront a profound and long- lasting identity crisis. Britain had now to ‘learn’ how to live in a world in which the rules (military, political, economic and, even, social and cultural) were set by the unruly child of a capitalist model that was British in origin – a major challenge for national pride. The Wall refers to and is part of this historical scenario, in which we find Pink, clearly Roger Waters’ fictional surrogate, placed at the very beginning of the cinematic story-line and in the present dimension of the cinematic discourse. The film starts with a slow and smooth ‘travelling’ through an aseptic and uniform hotel corridor towards the figure of a cleaning lady preparing her vacuum cleaner ready to enter the suite facing her. Behind the door of the room, the wall that protects him from the outer world, we find Pink in a state of depressive and tormented introspection, revisiting his past. On his bare wrist he wears a Mickey Mouse watch, a time image representing some unsolved childhood conflict that has a bearing on the present situation. Pink recreates the circumstances surrounding his father’s death in Anzio under German fire. Piped music is heard in the soundtrack: a song telling the sad story of how Santa Claus had forgotten the toy soldiers that a small boy had asked for, a metaphor of the father who had not come back from the front. The lady knocking at Pink’s door gives way to counterpoint scenes in which a crucial parallelism is established between the past of the battle (the enemy’s fighter planes dropping their bombs on the soldiers who run for shelter and are wounded, culminating in his father’s death in the trenches), the present of the concert of Pink’s band in the United States (a frenzied mob at the concert venue bringing down gates, shouting and running wild) and an imaginary re-elaboration of Pink’s own encounter with the audience attending the concert (those American youths listening in astonishment to a fascist-like Pink who orders them to look into the alienating and oppressive reality hiding behind the ludic and stultifying vertigo of a rock and roll concert). All these scenes of unbridled savagery stand in radical contrast with images of a rugby field bathed in sunlight in which a person is walking alone. In our view, the sunny field represents metaphorically an open space for an unrealised socio-historical progress, alternative to that followed by postwar Britain, which is one of the meanings of what in The Final Cut is called “the possible pasts”.12 The judgement that The Wall passes on the present is brilliantly synthesised in this long initial scene: the victory over evil in the past and the promise of a better future have come to nothing as the war continues in a present that is totally dominated by an evil capitalist system, brutally dehumanised and viciously destructive.
12 ‘Your Possible Pasts’ is the title of track no. 2 of The Final Cut. The phrase ‘possible pasts’ has been interpreted in a more negative way: as what could have happened if the war had been lost and Britain had came under Nazi rule (Rose 2002: 137). See also Jenkins (1996: 209) Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father 51
The plan for The Wall was first conceived by Roger Waters after a distressing episode in the 1977 Animals tour. At a concert in Montreal, Canada, the wild behaviour of a Pink Floyd fan made Waters spit in his face. This act of open confrontation with a mass completely given over to the maddening frenzy of a rock and roll concert led Waters to conceive the idea of building a wall between himself and the public.13 The artistic result of this was The Wall, both the album and the film. In both works Waters’ (self-)critical detachment from the unbearable reality that surrounded him, to which he contributed and from which he had benefited, constituted the nucleus of the band’s creative universe that found its continuity in The Final Cut.14 Thus, the cinematic narrative dramatises this divorce between, on the one hand, Waters and on the other, his public and the show business of which he was part and parcel. His seclusion in a hotel room in Los Angeles before a concert constitutes the critical turning point for Pink, as he comes face to face with the horrid irrationality of consumerism and materialism. The protagonist, the epitome of the rock star and the arch-priest of vacuous hedonism, becomes aware that he is nothing but a piece in an implacable, dark, voracious, irrational and monstrous machinery. The death of Pink’s father symbolises the betrayal and the eventual destruction of the ‘national ideal’. The post-war generation is thus portrayed as a generation of orphans, both literally and socio-politically speaking. We can distinguish three fundamental dimensions in the temporal structure of The Wall (labelled I, II and III in Table 1): I II III PAST PRESENT NO-TIME/PLACE Totalitarian/paramilitary solution Childhood Tour trailer/Hotel room vs. Reconstructed society Craving for purity (Post)-war Concert/orgy/American TV film. vs. Love and justice Britain/England USA Britain/England
Table 1 Temporal structure of The Wall (1982)
In order to examine the central temporal dimension (II) and clarify its crucial connection with the death of the father, the symbol of the ‘wall’ and the alternative based on love and justice sketched at the end, it is useful to have recourse to psychoanalysis and its views on the constitution of the identity of individuals, communities and social formations. In Figuring Lacan (1986), Juliet Flower MacCannell uses the term ‘post-Oedipal’ in reference to modern capitalist society and its dominant values, beliefs, regulations and identitary traits (i.e., the symbolic father or the Name of
13 “What he [the fan] wanted was a good riot, and what I wanted was to do a good rock and roll show.” (Waters in Rose 2002: 85). See also “Pink Floyd: The Wall”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/. 14 After recording The Final Cut Waters left Pink Floyd because of the irreconcilable disagreements between himself and the other members of the band, David Gilmour in particular. 52 Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo the Father in Lacanian theory). Modern culture, or the modern symbolic father, carries on, MacCannell argues, its civilising work in an extremely effective way “but no longer in the familiar forms of love, family, sociability” (1986: 70). In the post-Oedipal ‘present’ of The Wall the place of the father has been taken over by that unbridled and unstoppable machinery that dissolves all traces of socially binding affection and transforms individuals into simple producers and consumers. ‘Daddy’s flown across the ocean’, the first line of ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part I)’, means both the father’s physical death and the relocation of the symbolic father in the USA, the capitalist superpower on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The protagonist qua present-day Britain is subject to a law that does not give love (that is, recognition, affection, etc.) in return for obedience. The consequence of this is ‘the wall’: that is, discontent, frustration, materialist fetishism, isolation, narcissistic introversion, disorientation, vacuous hedonism and irrational (self-)aggression. An orgy of sound and fury sweeps away all traces of critical conscience and pre-empts the desire to build a better society, more humane, balanced, happy and just, the society dreamt of by the soldier at the front and announced by Vera Lynn, a popular wartime British singer, in her songs about a hopeful future for the British nation after the war.15 In the song titled precisely ‘Vera’, the poetic voice asks what had become of Vera Lynn, what of the future “sunny day” in which “we would meet again” (an echo of Vera Lynn’s song ‘We’ll meet again’). In the opening song of The Final Cut, ‘The Postwar Dream’, Margaret Thatcher is repeatedly interrogated in order to express the profound conviction that the promise of a happy has been completely shattered. The blood of the British soldiers has been shed in vain. The poetic voice as: “Tell me true, tell me why was Jesus crucified/Is it for this that daddy died? […] What have we done Maggie, what have we done/What have we done to England?/Should we shout? Should we scream?/’What happened to the post war dream?’/Oh, Maggie, Maggie, what have we done?” The refrain in ‘Your Possible Pasts’, track no. 2 of The Final Cut, condenses in an interrogative way the nostalgia for a society which had not been, based on affective ties and continuous with the tradition of the past: “Do you remember me?/How we used to be?/Do you think we should be closer?”(Emphases added). In the last stanza of this song, we come across a metaphor for the ‘possible pasts’, the alternatives opened up for Britain after the war that had been thwarted by the course of history. This metaphor is that of the ‘flags’, the symbol of national identity par excellence. The poetic voice concludes his lament by saying: “Now our feelings run deep and cold as the clay/And strung out behind us the banners and flags/of our possible pasts lie in tatters and rags”. It is revealing in this connection that the long initial scene of the film is presided over by the US flag. The hedonist-consumerist paroxysm illustrated by this scene is, therefore, clearly associated with United States of America. In the historical present of The Wall Britain is swallowed up by the inhumane and incessant vortex of capitalist production and consumption which dissolves the defining features of individual and national identity. All the traces of the ideal England of the ‘possible pasts’ are wiped out by this process. Britain/England has taken the road of the crudely amoral capitalist model epitomised by the United States of America and Pink/Waters is painfully aware of having contributed to and benefited from this self-destructive craze.
15 See Urick 1997-2001. Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father 53
All the torment expressed in the film’s opening is expanded in the first animation scene in which the plump and lovely White Dove of Peace mutates into a sharp, metallic and menacing Eagle that flies around post-war London. The ominous Eagle represents, of course, the nuclear threat of the Cold War period, which had another main protagonist: the Soviet Union. But the Eagle is and has always been the symbol of Empire. In this context, the Eagle is also the Bald Eagle of the Seal of the United States of America.16 The damaging effect that the post-war period had on British identity is symbolised in this animation scene in the rapid disintegration of the Union Jack that ends up with St George’s Cross (England’s emblem) shedding its blood, incapable of fertilising the devastated field of the Nation. The blood of the cross, both the sacrificial blood shed on the war front and the essence of a nation passed on from generation to generation, is squeezed by implacable superior forces and drained in the sewers of history.17 The individual and collective pasts (dimension I in Table 1) start out being two neatly differentiated pasts: on the one hand, the real, historical past and, on the other, the alternative, ‘possible’ past that never was. The latter is represented in the film by an open field, a luminous space of possibilities where we can find an unequivocal mark of British/English identity: the rugby goalpost. This is the site of hope, of the postwar promise, in which the son-child (the new generation) waits for his father and for other children to start playing, to get involved in a collective activity regulated by rules inherited from tradition and accepted by all. But the game is over before it starts: the father does not come back and other children do not join him. Instead, the field is invaded by all the spectral figures of the real past that lie at the root of the present discontent: the ghost of his dead father; the battle in which ordinary people died; a repressive and extremely violent educational system that transforms children into automata; a disgusting rat that represents post-war shortages, disease and poverty; the doctor and the castrating, protective mother that lays the seed of distrust and undermines his capacity to love the woman that loves him and who leaves him for someone else,18 and so on. The space for hope, happiness and justice mutates into a
16 To be both fair and historically rigorous, we must concede that America’s intervention in World War II was instrumental in the victory against the Nazis. We must add, however, that the USA knew how to use this victory to achieve and reinforce its hegemony in the Western world by, for instance, telling the story of its role in the war in the way it found most convenient for its purposes. All those war films and documentaries with which America bombarded and goes on bombarding the Western world constitute (d) a major ideological tool in this connection. It is not by chance that the scene of Pink’s seclusion in the hotel room is punctuated by short scenes from an American war film that Pink is watching on television. 17 The theme of discontinuity with, and betrayal of, the past is further reinforced by another recurrent motif in the film: namely, the phone call. Pink’s father tries to call someone on the phone from the trenches but fails. He is killed by enemy fire and the telephone is left hanging. Later on, when Pink calls his wife, who had left him, in a desperate attempt to come out of the wall, he likewise fails. The war of the present, like the war of the past, silences the word that binds human beings to one another. 18 Revealingly, this other man is an antinuclear activist. In Britain during the 1970s there was a revival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament of the 1950s which, along with the protests against the Vietnam war, constituted a movement of resistance against the Establishment that was going the way of ultra-liberalism. 54 Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo scenario of depression, desperation, fear, anguish and profound dissatisfaction. In our view, Pink’s journey through this shiny space of promise, which progressively loses its brilliance, stands for Britain’s course through the waters of history after the war. While the open field of the possible past(s) imagined by Pink is being invaded, we hear the song ‘Comfortably Numb’. At the same time and in the present dimension, Pink’s agent and his team break into the hotel room bringing along with them a doctor, or someone who looks like one. The way in which the latter breaks open the lock of the door is a visual echo of the Nazi bombing in Anzio and of the mob running wild at the concert venue. The agent and his crew embody the excessive and incessant movement of dominant capitalism that wrenches Pink away from his tormented state. The doctor gives Pink some drug that forces him into a state of pleasurable lassitude so that he becomes once again the obedient piece in a money-making machine that he had been up to that point. On the way towards the actual concert in Los Angeles there is a leap into the imaginary plane on which Pink’s transformation into a totalitarian demagogue takes place. At this point the narrative action moves into dimension III of our temporal schema (Table 1). Pink’s feverish concert/speech takes place not before a real audience of American fans, but before an imaginary British audience. Pink’s mind becomes at this point the site for the rehearsal of what we call the ‘totalitarian-paramilitary solution’, a way out of the situation of identitary collapse brought about by the course that his personal life had taken, which, according to our central thesis, is the correlate of Britain’s historical progression after the war. This solution rehearsed in the no- time/place of the songs ‘In the Flesh’, ‘Run Like Hell’ and ‘Waiting for the Worms’ is a potential ideological drift towards an ultranationalist, imperialist and racist stand that calls for the resurrection of a Britannia that is both pure and almighty. In a hall adorned with paramilitary paraphernalia and full of ensigns showing two hammers arranged crosswise,19 the concert becomes an imaginary mass gathering. The British crowd is stirred by the dictates of a providential and vehement leader and is ready to undergo a process of purgation. In a Hitlerite attitude, this imaginary Pink has supplanted the real Pink to address the mass and urge them to wake up from their stultifying hedonism and show their adhesion to him. Political purges start in situ right before an army of ‘worms’ takes to the streets. The worms invade the civic sphere in search of inferior beings that must be eliminated. These rallies and raids are an explicit indictment of totalitarianism in the century of totalitarianisms and a warning against the temptation to fall into tentative totalitarian solutions to the problems of the present. A totalitarian regime was considered by some a viable possibility as the traumatic shadow of loss of the Empire was still hanging over a society undergoing profound and rapid historical changes. We must add that this totalitarian-paramilitary solution rehearsed in the no- time/place of The Wall did find some correspondence in the Britain of the times: on the one hand, in the extreme-right fascist movements that wanted to send immigrants back to where they came from and, on the other, in the mixture of ultraliberal capitalism and
19 The Union Jack is visible only on the T-shirts worn by some people in the audience. The traditional symbol of the British nation seems to have been reduced to the status of a mere commodity. Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father 55
British chauvinism of the Conservative Party.20 The victory in the Falklands War gave Mrs. Thatcher the opportunity to exhort the British to hold on to the dream of the Imperius redivivus while at once warning the nation about the threat of contamination through contact with those people of alien cultures and different races who had come to stay. Therefore, this ‘no-time/space’ dimension is undoubtedly connected with the time/space that constituted the historical present of The Wall.21
4. “Tear down the wall!”: The possible future.
According to classic psychoanalytical theory, ‘guilt’ is that mental mechanism which is activated when we disobey or unconsciously desire to disobey the social norm. Guilt puts us back on the track of socially appropriate ways of desiring and acting.22 The problem in this late-capitalist world recreated in The Wall is that the father, in the symbolic sense of the set of social rules and values, no longer returns love in exchange for repression and obedience. The more obedient one is, the guiltier he or she feels. In the present dimension of The Wall, the Oedipal father is absent, he is historically dead. Literally speaking, post-war Britain was a country of orphans. At the symbolic/identitary level, the welfare state model was the nation’s attempt to keep the caring father alive. But in the historical present as represented in The Wall, this symbolic father had been killed in a war won by savage capitalist forces. Pink confronts two modes oppressive authority, the second being subsidiary to the first, which is the dominant one: the maddening, uncontrollable and relentless movement of capitalism and the possessive and castrating mother figure who contributes to her son’s subjugation to the incessant dance of capitalism.23 Pink is racked with guilt and never receives compensation in the form of love from the social order in which he is inscribed. Guilt is the cause of his seclusion within himself. In order to liberate himself from the wall, he must get rid of this feeling that at once traps him in a network of dehumanised relationships and keeps him isolated and permanently dissatisfied. ‘Stop’, the antepenultimate song in both album and film, is the turning-point towards Pink’s liberation. In his exclamation “stop!” a break with the morbid, maddening and psychotic dynamics of the present-day world is performed. In order to walk out of the wall Pink finds it necessary to look into himself and find out if he has “been guilty all this time”. Such self-scrutiny is staged in the following song, ‘The
20 The scene in the streets in which Pink as the leader of the Worms shouts through a megaphone is compared by Waters himself to a march “towards some kind of National Front rally in Hyde Park” (Waters in Rose 2002: 127). 21 There are, of course, examples of racial disturbances before the 1970s and early 1980s, like the Notting Hill riots of 1958 or Enoch Powell’s speeches in the 1960s in which he stated that if whites were too permissive with blacks, the black man would eventually get the whip and subjugate the whites, bringing about major waves of social unrest and “rivers of blood” (Morgan 1993: 647). 22 See, for instance, Freud (1957: 200) and Freud (1961: 76-77) 23 The world of giddy production and consumption of the song ‘What Shall We Do Now?’ is summarised in the phrase “never relax at all”, whereas in ‘Mother’ the protagonist’s mother is reported to have told her son in an authoritarian third-person voice: “She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing”. 56 Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo
Trial’, in which Pink is found guilty of “showing feelings of an almost human nature”. His liberation is paradoxically achieved through his condemnation in the trial. The Judge sentences him “to be exposed before/[His] peers” and orders him “tear down the wall” that at once protects him and alienates him completely. Categories turn into their opposites at the end: the condemned are in truth liberated, and those who are not condemned seem to be damned to live in the late- capitalist hell. Furthermore, the noun ‘worm’, previously associated with the adherents to the supreme authority of the totalitarian leader, becomes the name of the judge in ‘The Trial’. The public prosecutor salutes the judge by saying: “Good morning Worm, your honour”. The judge certainly is the supreme authority but, instead of decreeing subjection to Evil, he decrees liberation from it. Pink seems to carry out the ethical act of breaking with the status quo impelled by a force superior to that which enforces its mandates in a dehumanised social order. In our reading, the judge embodies the possibility of individual and national emancipation from an oppressive, tyrannical system epitomised by the USA. If, as Fredric Jameson maintains, works of popular culture always contain some “Utopian and transcendental potential” (2000: 142), in The Wall the latter is associated with the courthouse, where the two British institutional figures that best embody the values of tradition are present: the Judge and the Crown. ‘The Trial’ follows the normative procedure in that the prosecutor intervenes in the first place and on behalf of the Crown: “The crown will plainly show”, the second line of the song reads. However, the Counsel for the defence, who should speak next on behalf of the defendant, is never heard, as the Judge interrupts the proceedings to deliver his verdict and his sentence. The defendant’s silence adds weight to the institutions of Justice and the Crown which are rescued from the past to incarnate and serve as the Nation’s rebirth out of the ruins of present-day chaos. In the film’s last scene we see children in contemporary Britain collecting pieces of rubble from a wall that had collapsed because of a truck accident or, perhaps, because of a fascist raid. The setting evokes the ruins of post-war London through which adults walk seemingly unconcerned, ignoring the children and the rubble. It seems as if the past of the (post)-war and the historical present are fused in a space in which the heralds of a future social reconstruction are already at work. Of course, the image of children collecting bricks and rubble could be interpreted in a negative key: signifying walls of isolation to be put up again as if British society were prey to some sort of inescapable fatalism. Yet, if we interpret the final scene by attending to the song that is about to be played on the soundtrack (‘Outside the Wall’), then the whole appears to be pointing in the opposite direction towards the establishment of a happier and more humane society in the hands of those who have the future in their hands. Bricks to build homes, instead of walls of seclusion and desperation. The very limit of the cinematic narrative suggests the possibility of rebirth from within the ruins of the wall: children like brothers, a new generation liberated from alienation and oppression, or some hypothetical post-war generation that had taken a different road in history and journeyed through an alternative ‘possible past’. In sum, a society in which love and justice prevail, thus substituting for that of the present envisioned in an apocalyptic fashion in the last song of The Final Cut, ‘Two Suns in the Sunset’: “Like the moment when your brakes lock/and you slide toward the big Roger Waters’ Poetry of the Absent Father 57 truck/and stretch the frozen moments with your fear/and you’ll never hear the voices/and you’ll never see their faces/you have no recourse to the law anymore”. (Emphasis added) 24 There is a traditional-conservative thread running through The Wall manifested principally in the nostalgia for the lost father as a part-whole figure of the British ‘national ideal’ and in the Crown and the Judge as unifying figures of authority and embodiments of the organic continuity of the essence of the nation. All these elements link The Wall politically with the line initiated by George Orwell during World War II in texts such as ‘England Your England’, where ‘British’ was subsumed under ‘English’, as used throughout this essay. In ‘England Your England’ the respect for the Law and for the authority figure of the incorruptible Judge are underscored as all-important identity traits of the British nation. Likewise the rejection of the totalitarian formula for the Britain of the future is explicitly expressed. However, the idealised post-war England envisioned by Orwell as developing from the germ of the light-industry areas evolved in The Wall into the post-Oedipal hell of the present. 25 The question still remains as to whether or not The Wall offers support to what it openly attacks. Does the final scene contain some seed of social change in any way? Or is it, rather, an escapist withdrawal into a mythic childhood realm of some kind that does not offer a real viable alternative but leaves things as they are? Have Waters and Parker, in the end, merely engaged in a useless exercise of wishful utopianism that distracts political action from its truly effective course? Or, is The Wall a constructive example of emancipatory political imagination that could contribute to stopping the maddening dance of the late-capitalist world and help bring about a better society in the future?
24 Jenkins interprets ‘The Trial’ in a completely negative key. For him the judge’s final sentence leaves the hero face to face with “the desolation of reality” and “appears to signify mental and physical annihilation, perhaps suicide, echoing the unravelling of civil society into a new barbarism” (1996: 209-210) Furthermore, Jenkins reaches a conclusion which, in our view, is only possible if one omits, as he does, any reference to the lyrics of ‘Outside the Wall’. He states: “The film concludes with images of children picking their way through the detritus of a London riot in the 1980s, growing accustomed to the nights of rocks and gasoline bombs. The Wall is being built once more in a new generation of minds” (Jenkins 1996: 210). Later on in the essay, however, he admits the possibility of a more positive interpretation of the film’s conclusion, but does not know how to account for it. He simply states: “The [film’s] climax offers some ambiguity, as it is just possible to see the fall of Pink’s barrier as a breakthrough to a new kind of liberation, free of past divisions; and this was naturally the meaning which was emphasized in the Berlin production” (Jenkins 1996: 211). 25 The suburban dwellers of “labour-saving flats and council houses” gathered together “in the naked democracy of the swimming pools” do nevertheless preserve the national essence that stems from the past and is projected into the future like “a living creature” or “an everlasting animal” (Orwell 1962: 88, 65, 90). Orwell’s use of the swimming pool as a positive symbol (related to democracy and naked humanity) turns into its opposite in The Wall (the swimming pool of a luxurious hotel where Christ-like Pink swims in agony in the blood of sacrificial father, of all those who had died in vain to build a better future). Moreover, we could say that Pink-as- postwar-England is drowning in the blood that English-identity-qua-living-organism has shed. 58 Jorge Sacido Romero and Luis Miguel Varela Cabo
Works Cited
Barbeito, Manuel and Jorge Sacido, forthcoming: ‘The Ghost of Empire and British Postcolonial Identity’. Barbeito, Manuel, Jaime Feijóo, Antón Figueroa and Jorge Sacido, eds. National Identities and European Literatures. Bern: Peter Lang. Bradbury, Malcolm 1994: The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin. Davies, Alistair and Peter Saunders 1983: ‘Literature, Politics and Society’. Alan Sinfield, ed. Society and Literature 1945-1970. London: Methuen. 13-50. Davies, Alistair and Alan Seinfield, eds. 2000: British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945-1999. London: Routledge. Fernández Sánchez José Francisco: 1999: El Thatcherismo: Historia y análisis de una época. Almería: Universidad de Almería, Servicio de Publicaciones. Freud, Sigmund 1957 (1921): ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’. John Rickman, ed. A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. 169-209. ––––– 1961: Civilization and Its Discontents. James Strachey, ed. and trans. New York: Norton. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1999: Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. New York: New Press. Jameson, Fredric 2000: ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, eds. The Jameson Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. 123-148. Jenkins, Philip 1996: ‘Bricks in the Wall: An Interpretation of Pink Floyd’s The Wall’. Ernst Schürer, Manfred Keune and Philip Jenkins, eds. The Berlin Wall. New York: Peter Lang. 205- 213. MacCannell, Juliet Flower 1986: Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska P. Morgan, Kenneth O. 1993: ‘The Twentieth Century (1914-1991)’. Kenneth O. Morgan, ed. The Oxford History of Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP. 582-663. Orwell, George 1962. (1941) ‘England Your England’. Inside the Whale and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 63-90. ––––– 1987. (1947): ‘The English People’ The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol 3. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 15-56. Parker, Alan 1982: Pink Floyd: The Wall. London: Goldcrest Films International. Pink Floyd 1979: The Wall. New York: CBS. ––––– 1983: The Final Cut: A Requiem for the Postwar Dream. London: Harvest/EMI ‘Pink Floyd: The Wall’. On line at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/. Rose, Phil 2002: Which One’s Pink? An Analysis of the Concept Albums of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide Publishing. Urick, Bret 1997-2002: Pink Floyd: The Wall: A Complete Analysis. On line at http://home.mchsi.com/~ttint/ WW2 People’s War Team: ‘Beveridge Report’. On line at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2 /A1143578
Received 26 January 2006 Revised version received 26 September 2006
28.2 (December 2006): 59–68 ISSN 0210-6124
Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s “Wet Ungenial Summer”
Bill Phillips Universidad de Barcelona [email protected]
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has attracted a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from the Feminist, to the Marxist, to the Psychoanalytic. Some of these interpretations have relied on the scantiest of evidence while others are simply mistaken in their analysis of the period. Ecocriticism reminds us of the importance of nature in our understanding of literary and cultural texts, and this is never more appropriate than in an analysis of Frankenstein. It is well known that the idea for the novel emerged at the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, during the stormy month of June 1816. So much is explained by Mary Shelley herself. It is not well known, however, that the stormy weather was the result of an Indonesian volcano, which affected the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere for three years, leading to crop failure, riots and starvation. Mary Shelley’s other writings of the period, as well as Frankenstein, reveal her interest in, and concern for, nature and the countryside. To a large extent, the novel is a reflection of these concerns at a time when the natural world was in crisis.
Key words: ecocriticism, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, English literature, nineteenth century novel, romanticism
“...beginning must be linked to something that went before” (Mary Shelley 1998: 8)
The countryside so lovingly celebrated in the then Mary Godwin’s early work, in particular in Switzerland, and subsequently recreated in Frankenstein, was devastated by a dramatic climate change between 1816 and 1818, when the novel was conceived and written. The aim of this paper is to show that the bad weather which kept Lord Byron, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and John Polidori indoors at the Villa Diodati in June 1816, and which Mary herself points to as the origin of the novel, has greater significance than is generally believed. Rather than representing the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, Victor Frankenstein’s monster symbolises the capacity of nature to instigate environmental crises of biblical proportions. Frankenstein is traditionally held to be a novel about getting “too clever with technology” (Butler 1996: 302), as is the idea that Mary Shelley “was writing at a time of phenomenal transformation in the productive and social structures of English society – in short, the transformation we call the ‘Industrial Revolution’” (Hindle 1994: 167). 60 Bill Phillips
Victor Frankenstein’s workshop and the monstrous product which emerges from it symbolise both the horrors of unrestrained technology and the hellish conditions now associated with the process of nineteenth century industrial production itself. The popular belief, however, that early nineteenth century England was being transformed from a primarily rural and agricultural to an urban and industrial society must be challenged. While it is true that in 1784, thirteen years before Mary Godwin was born, “the world’s most powerful steam engine was installed in London” (McKusick 2000: 97), and “over 100 steam engines were at work in London’s flour mills, breweries, tanneries” (McKusick 2000: 98), by 1815, only a relatively small proportion of all the industrial workers were engaged in large factories, and most Englishmen lived in little towns and villages” (Thomson 1973: 117). As late as 1830, according to E.P. Thompson, “the characteristic industrial worker worked not in a mill or factory but (as an artisan or ‘mechanic’) in a small workshop or in his own home” (Thompson 1991: 259). John Stevenson suggests that more recent work “on economic growth ... would characterize an economy growing only gradually until the 1820s (Stevenson 1993: 231), while social critics prior to the 1830s “were primarily concerned with the agricultural labourer and the rural poor” (Stevenson 1993: 229). Despite this, critics such as Warren Montag argue that Shelley suppresses “the urban, the industrial and the proletarian” (Montag 1992: 310) in order to “turn backward toward a time of mutual (if unequal) obligation, to a time before the creation of monsters by the industrial order, a time when the human was regulated by the natural” (Montag 1992: 311). There is a certain confusion to Montag’s thesis. It is not clear whether it is industrialisation itself which Shelley deliberately suppresses, or the concomitant industrial proletariat; whether Frankenstein’s workshop, and its association with “Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’” (Montag 1992: 309) is the true object of her horror, or the monster/working classes. In either case, neither the kind of steam-powered factory-based industry of Victorian England, nor the urban proletariat conjured up by Montag, existed in 1817 when Mary Shelley finished writing Frankenstein. Nor had Mary Godwin grown up in a place or period of great urban and industrial transformation: “I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland” (Shelley 1998: 5), she explains in the 1831 Introduction to the novel. Britain, and Europe as a whole, was essentially rural and agrarian just as “Frankenstein’s world is a world without industry, a rural world dominated by scenes of sublime natural beauty” (Montag 1992: 309). Indeed, neither industry nor the supposed horrors of urban life are mentioned by Mary Shelley. Not in Frankenstein, nor in her journals of the period, nor in her History of a Six Weeks Tour, published in 1817. True, she writes to Thomas Jefferson Hogg in April 1815 that “I shudder to think of breathing the air of London again” (Shelley 1995: 10), but this is a reference to the fact that the London Bailiffs are after Shelley for debt, rather than to the capital’s smoky atmosphere. There is no evidence to suggest that Mary Shelley was concerned with industrialisation at all, other than by its ominously Derridean absence in her writing. Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s “Wet Ungenial Summer” 61
Ecocriticism, however, may be able to provide an alternative and less problematic explanation for both the genesis and meaning of Frankenstein. In his book The Song of the Earth, published in 2000, the English ecocritic, Jonathan Bate, makes the startling but convincing claim that Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ and Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’ were inspired by an Indonesian volcano. The facts, as outlined by Bate, are both simple and extraordinary:
...the eruption of Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815 killed some 80,000 people on the islands of Sumbawa and Lombok. It was the greatest eruption since 1500. The dust blasted into the stratosphere reduced the transparency of the atmosphere, filtered out the sun and consequently lowered surface temperatures. The effect lasted for three years straining the growth-capacity of life across the planet. Beginning in 1816, crop failure led to food riots in nearly every country in Europe. Only in 1819 were there good harvests again. (2000: 97)
‘Darkness’ was written at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 when it “rained in Switzerland on 130 out of the 183 days from April to September ... The average temperature that July was an astonishing 4.9º Fahrenheit below the mean for that month in the years 1807-24” (Bate 2000: 96). When Byron wrote that “Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day” (Byron 1914: 6), far from being metaphorical, he was referring to the day to day reality of millions of people across the northern hemisphere at that time. Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ on the other hand, which was written in September 1819 (Motion 1997: 457), celebrates the fact that the previous three years of appalling weather and failed harvests had finally come to an end: “the terrible summer and failed harvest of 1816, bad weather and poor harvests continuing in 1817 and 1818”, led at last in 1819 to “a good summer, a full harvest, a beautiful autumn” (Bate 2000:102). Rather more famously than ‘Darkness’, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein also has its origins at the Villa Diodati in the early summer of 1816. In the Preface to the 1818 edition she (anonymously) explains that:
I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. (Shelley 1998:14)
Although Mary Shelley would later claim to have had the most difficulty in deciding what to write, she was undoubtedly the most successful when it came to finishing the work, the first draft of Frankenstein being completed in March 1817 (Dunn 1978: 153). The fact that a volcano caused the weather in the summer of 1816 to be sufficiently bad to keep the Byron-Shelley circle indoors reading ghost stories, which then led to the idea of their writing ghost stories themselves, which led in turn to the composition of Frankenstein may seem, perhaps, to be of merely anecdotal interest. The unusual 62 Bill Phillips weather, however, which persisted throughout 1816 and 1817 when the novel was being written is, I would argue, of great assistance to our understanding of the work. The storms which ravaged Europe in the spring and summer of 1816 are mentioned at length by Mary Shelley. On May 17th 1816 she described her journey from Paris to Geneva in a letter to her half-sister Fanny Imlay:
The dashing of the invisible mountain streams announced to us that we had quitted the plains of France, as we slowly ascended, amidst a violent storm of wind and rain, to Champagnolles ... The spring, as the inhabitants informed us, was unusually late, and indeed the cold was excessive; as we ascended the mountains, the same clouds which rained on us in the vallies [sic] poured forth large flakes of snow thick and fast (Shelley 1995: 12).
Years later, Mary Shelley, while providing information for Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), again makes much of the weather, claiming that it disrupted Byron’s and Shelley’s plans to sail on Lake Geneva:
When the weather did not allow of their excursions after dinner,—an occurrence not unfrequent during this very wet summer,—the inmates of the cottage passed their evenings at Diodati, and, when the rain rendered it inconvenient for them to return home, remained there to sleep. (Shelley 1987: 108)
In the fragments which survive of her Geneva journal of June and July 1816 we learn of a ferry overturning in the lake, drowning “two women, two cows & twelve black pigs” (Shelley 1987: 111) while “violent wind & intervals of rain” (Shelley 1987: 111) set in and prevent them from sightseeing. On July 21st 1816 they finally set out on a much delayed trip to Chamounix [sic], but remain dogged by the weather: “we had passed the torrent here in the morning”, she reports at one point, but “the torrents had torn away the road and it was with difficulty we crossed” (Shelley: 1987: 115). Three days later it is raining again: “Wednesday 24th. Today is rainy therefore we cannot go to Col du Baume ... It began to rain almost as soon as we left our inn ... The rain continued in torrents – we were wetted to the skin ... We arrived wetted to the skin ... Friday 26. We determine to return today as it rained and we could not possibly go to Col de Balme as we intended” (Shelley 1987: 115-119). August was not much better. Plans to send up a balloon are disappointed: “we go out in the boat to set up the baloon [sic] but there is too much wind ... Thursday 15th. Go out in the boat a little way with Shelley but it is stormy and we soon return – a rainy day” (Shelley 1987: 123-125). Some of her descriptions were later incorporated into the novel. In another letter to her sister Fanny, on June 1st 1816, Mary wrote: Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s “Wet Ungenial Summer” 63
The thunder storms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before. We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of Jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging cloud, while perhaps the sun is shining cheerily upon us. One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up – the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness. (Shelley 1995: 15)
This storm reappears twice in Frankenstein, firstly as a boyhood memory:
When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunder-storm. It advanced from behind the mountain of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. (Shelley 1998: 41)
The second thunderstorm occurs after Victor has created the monster:
I quitted my seat, and walked on, although the darkness and storm increased every minute, and the thunder burst with a terrific crash over my head. It was echoed from Salêve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy; vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant everything seemed of a pitchy darkness, until the storm recovered itself from the preceding flash. The storm, as is often the case in Switzerland, appeared at once in various parts of the heavens. The most violent storm hung exactly north of the town, over that part of the lake which lies between the promontory of Belrive and the village of Copêt. Another storm enlightened Jura with faint flashes; and another darkened and sometimes disclosed the Môle, a peaked mountain to the east of the lake (Shelley 1998: 76).
What is interesting about this second storm is the sudden appearance of the monster: “A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy dæmon, to whom I had given life” (Shelley 1998: 76). It is as if the storm were responsible for the creature’s existence: it is ‘illuminated’ and ‘discovered’ by the lightning in a rather similar way to later cinematic depictions of the monster’s birth. In a way, the film versions of Frankenstein are right: the weather, with its frequent electrical storms, which kept all indoors at the Villa Diodati in June 1816, led directly to the monster’s genesis. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein rather despondently explains that “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the life-less thing that lay at my feet” (Shelley 1998: 57). Yet this too, the idea of a mere spark engendering life, emerged from the Villa Diodati confinement. Conversation in the 64 Bill Phillips house turned, not surprisingly, perhaps, considering the prevalence of natural electricity in the form of lightning all around them, to the ideas of Abernethy and Lawrence, the former having proposed “that the superadded life-element is analogous to electricity” (Butler 1996: 307). We know that Mary Shelley took an interest in the scientific and technological developments of her day, reporting that she was reading Introduction to Davy’s Chemistry during October and November 1816 (Shelley 1987: 142-4). According to Marilyn Butler, William Lawrence, a professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a leading theorist on anatomy and physiology, and a friend of the couple, “probably ensured that both Shelleys wrote more accurately and less speculatively on scientific matters than they otherwise might” (Butler 1996: 305). In a similar vein Anne K. Mellor claims that:
The works of three of the most famous scientists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century – Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin, and Luigi Galvani – together with the teachings of two of their most ardent disciples, Adam Walker and Percy Shelley, were crucial to Mary Shelley’s understanding of science and the scientific enterprise (Mellor 1995: 108).
The combination, then, of the bad weather, beginning in 1816, and interest in the latest scientific discoveries, shared, it seems, by the whole party, only needed the challenge of a supernatural story to be written by all, to provide the catalyst. There is, however, a further ingredient required. Mary Shelley’s supernatural story, as Walter Montag quite rightly explains, takes place in “a world without industry, a rural world dominated by scenes of sublime natural beauty”. It is not surprising, then, to find in Mary Shelley’s earlier works evidence for her great interest in nature and the countryside. It is also clear, in History of a Six Weeks Tour, for example, that her interest is not merely aesthetic. Shortly after arriving in France, she remarks that the “first appearance that struck our English eyes was the want of enclosures; but the fields were flourishing with a plentiful harvest” (Shelley 1991: 10). This comment is interesting in that, first, it implies a familiarity with the question of enclosure and, secondly, suggests that despite ‘the want of enclosures’ the harvest looked plentiful. In other words, Mary Shelley apparently believed that enclosure, a central plank of the so-called agricultural revolution, was beneficial. For someone of her class, this was undoubtedly true: enclosure created hardship for an unlucky percentage of the population that lived and worked on the land; Mary did neither, but she did have, through Percy, heir to the Shelley family’s Sussex estate, an interest in land ownership and management. Most of France, however, lay in ruins: “Nothing could be more entire”, she cries at the depredations of the Cossacs [sic], “than the ruin which these barbarians had spread as they advanced; perhaps they remembered Moscow and the destruction of the Russian villages; but we were now in France, and the distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed, and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war” (Shelley 1991: 19). These scenes are largely repeated as they journey through France and there is little relief until the frontier with Switzerland is crossed. Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s “Wet Ungenial Summer” 65
The rural world described in Frankenstein largely reflects Mary Shelley’s travels through Germany, Switzerland and Italy. On his journey to London, Victor Frankenstein travels down the Rhine valley and is delighted by the scene: “flourishing vineyards, with green sloping banks, and a meandering river, and populous towns occupy the scene. // We travelled at the time of the vintage, and heard the song of the labourers, as we glided down the stream” (Shelley 1998: 155). This coincides with the description given in History of a Six Weeks Tour, in which “memory, taking all the dark shades from the picture, presents this part of the Rhine to my remembrance as the loveliest paradise on Earth” (Shelley 1991: 69). At other times, in the novel, the prosperity of one region is compared to the poverty of another. In Orkney, Victor Frankenstein thinks of Switzerland: “it was far different from this desolate and appalling landscape. Its hills are covered with vines, and its cottages are scattered thickly in the plains. Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean” (Shelley 1998: 164). In History of a six weeks tour it is France which is compared unfavourably with Switzerland where the “cottages are much cleaner and neater, and the inhabitants exhibit the same contrast” (Shelley 1991: 40). In Italy, nothing but hardship is observed as, early in Frankenstein, we are introduced to Elizabeth Lavenza’s family, “a peasant and his wife, hard working, bent down by care and labour, distributing a scanty meal to five hungry babes” (Shelley 1998: 34). Elizabeth, it emerges, is not actually of peasant stock, but the child of a Milanese nobleman who is either dead or in prison, and the paternalistic Frankenstein family, having learned of her lineage, do not hesitate to adopt her as their own. In England, observations of the countryside are largely reserved for sites of interest to a Romantic tourist which, indeed, is what Victor Frankenstein is. Windsor forest is visited (influenced by Pope’s poem ‘Windsor Forest’ perhaps?), and declared “beautiful” (Shelley 1998: 159), the colleges of Oxford are “ancient and picturesque” (Shelley 1998: 160), the cave at Matlock is “wondrous” (Shelley 1998: 161), while the Lake District, home of the Wordsworths and the Lake Poets, recalls the mountains of Switzerland. Mary, then, was both keenly interested in, and keenly observant of, rural life. Her concerns are those typical of her class: she exhibits the fashionable though paternalistic liberal humanism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in her fictional depiction of Elizabeth Lavenza’s adoption, and in her approval of Swiss cottagers. Her delight in the mountains of Switzerland, as expressed both in Frankenstein and in History of a Six Weeks Tour are those of a tourist of the picturesque, again, typical of her class, but are also a reflection of her political sympathies. Victor Frankenstein, in a passage added to the novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley (Hindle 1985: 269), claims that the “republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it” (Shelley 1998: 65). This was a view that Mary presumably shared, since she had already made similar comments to Fanny Imlay in her letter from Geneva of June 1816: “There is more equality of classes here than in England. This occasions a greater freedom and refinement of manners among the lower orders than we meet with in our own country” (Shelley 1995: 16). In France, meanwhile, the war had left the land desolate, while in England, although Frankenstein refers only to popular Romantic beauty spots, rural poverty, crime and homelessness were increasing alarmingly during the period that the 66 Bill Phillips novel was being written. “The autumn of 1816 was a period of extreme misery and post- war unemployment” (1991: 693), explains E.P. Thompson, in which the artisans of town and country joined with unemployed agricultural labourers, discharged soldiers and shipless seamen to demand reform. Mary Godwin (shortly to become Mary Shelley on December 30th, 1816) was in the habit of reading the newspapers, and reports in a letter to Shelley on December 5th that the “morning Chronicle as you will see does not make much of the [Spa-field] riots which they say are entirely quieted” (Shelley 1995: 18), confirming that she was perfectly aware of the increasing unrest in the country, as is also implied by the couple’s growing friendship with Leigh Hunt, who had been imprisoned in 1813 for libelling the Prince Regent, and by Shelley’s own well-known political views. Only the republic of Switzerland, it seemed, remained prosperous and beautiful. Yet even there, in 1816 (and unlike the Switzerland previously visited in 1814) it was now dark and stormy, its beauties hidden behind sheets of rain and dark clouds, and its harvests failing. According to Jonathan Bate, “annual harvests for that country [Switzerland] have been graded by economic historians on a scale of one to six, according to yield. 1816 achieved a minimal one. As a result of the poor harvests, there was a hemispheric subsistence crisis, marked by violent price fluctuation, basic food shortages and concordant public disorder” (Bate 2000: 97). Mary Godwin left Switzerland with Shelley for London on August 29th (Shelley 1995: 370). The certain failure of the Swiss harvest must have long been known to them and everyone else around Lake Geneva. A spring and summer of extraordinarily low temperatures and non-stop rain could have left no-one in doubt. Even Switzerland, the republic happily free of the worst ravages of war and economic crisis was not to be spared. Does the monster, then, represent the weather? Certainly, the gothic gloom of the novel may well be a reflection of the meteorological conditions under which the novel was conceived and written. And the monster undoubtedly destroys everything that his creator loves, just as the weather seemed to be destroying those parts of the world – the rural world, including German vineyards, Swiss cottages and English beauty spots – that Mary Godwin had held dear. The beauties of the landscape depicted in Frankenstein were culled largely from Mary Shelley’s memories of her travels across Europe, at a period when the sun still shone and the rain and cold did not obliterate everything from sight. Perhaps Frankenstein is nothing more than this. A novel inspired by a coincidence of circumstances: the challenge to write a supernatural story, books and conversation about the properties of electricity, storms, lightning and darkness, war- torn landscapes, rural poverty, hunger and starvation. But it also demonstrates the importance of nature and the environment. It is surely no coincidence that the monster’s movements are perpetually mountainwards and northwards, towards the cold, barren places where human survival, indeed life itself, is threatened, and ultimately extinguished, just as much life in the northern hemisphere between 1816 and 1818 was similarly threatened and extinguished by darkness and cold. After being seen in the lightning flash of the storm (Shelley 1998: 76), the monster next confronts Frankenstein on a mountaintop near Mont Blanc. The association with ice and mountains is made clear: “The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s “Wet Ungenial Summer” 67 does not grudge” (Shelley 1998: 146). Despite being constructed of flesh and bone (albeit second hand), the monster is able to withstand the cold and hunger of his domain; it is as if he has shed his material origins and become the spirit of the ‘desert mountains and dreary glaciers’. This is followed by a meeting in the “desolate and appalling landscape” (Shelley 1998: 208) of the Orkneys and the murder of Frankenstein’s closest friend, Henry Cerval. On returning to Switzerland, Frankenstein marries his fiancée Elizabeth, only for her to be murdered in her bridal chamber. Frankenstein’s response is to seek vengeance and the novel concludes with his pursuit of the monster ever northwards, to the Arctic Sea. In a message left by the creature Frankenstein reads: “Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive” (Shelley 1998: 248). The monster’s world of ice and cold has become Frankenstein’s too, where he dies, his body snatched up by the creature and “borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance” (Shelley 1998: 265). Everyone close to Frankenstein is touched by the hand of death, just as the natural world between 1816 and 1818 lay moribund beneath a cold, black sky. The monster’s behaviour, together with his ability to withstand unbelievable hardship and deprivation, clearly sets him apart from humanity. His indifference towards his victims, at least until the final chapter, is the indifference of a force of nature, capable neither of remorse, nor of rational justification; a monstrous volcano of destruction, spreading darkness and despair wherever he passes, like an angel of death. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, then, attempts to give meaning to a natural disaster, just as Tambora provided the inspiration for a novel. Jonathan Bate argues that the “weather is the primary sign of the inextricability of culture and nature” (Bate 2000: 102). We cannot afford to leave environmental questions out of our analysis of cultural and literary texts, just as we cannot afford to neglect the environment in our day to day life, in the management of the economy, in politics, or in anything regarding our society and our lives. If we do, nature has a habit of reminding us it is there, just as the monster, a force of nature perverted by human ingenuity, is constantly reminding Victor Frankenstein of his existence, just as the tsunami of December 26th 2004, and the Pakistan earthquake of October 10th 2005, remind us that we inhabit a world we do not control.
Works Cited
Bate, Jonathan 2000: The Song of the Earth. London: Picador. Butler, Marilyn 1996: Frankenstein and Radical Science’. J. Paul Hunter, ed. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Byron, Lord, George Gordon 1914: The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. London, New York, Toronto & Melbourne: Oxford UP. Dunn, Jane 1978: Moon in Eclipse A Life of Mary Shelley. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hindle, Maurice 1994: Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. London: Penguin. ———— 1985: Notes on the Text. Frankenstein. By Mary Shelley. London: Penguin. McKusick, James C. 2000: Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mellor, Anne K. 1995: ‘A Feminist Critique of Science’. Fred Botting, ed. New Casebooks: Frankenstein: Mary Shelley. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. Montag, Warren 1992: ‘“The Workshop of Filthy Creation” A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein.’ Johanna M. Smith, ed. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. Boston: Bedford Books. 68 Bill Phillips
Motion, Andrew 1997: Keats. London: Faber & Faber. Shelley, Mary 1818 (1998): Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Oxford, New York: OUP. ———— 1995: Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Betty T. Bennet, ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. ———— 1987: The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844. Vol. I 1814-1822. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP. Shelley, Mary and P.B. Shelley 1817 (1991): History of a Six Weeks Tour. Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books. Stevenson, John 1993: ‘Social Aspects of the Industrial Revolution’. Patrick O’Brien and Roland Quinault, eds. The Industrial Revolution and British Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Thompson, E.P. 1963 (1991): The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin. Thomson, David 1957 (1973): Europe Since Napoleon. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Received 16 January 2006 Revised version received 7 July 2006
28.2 (December 2006): 69–87 ISSN 0210-6124
Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness in Three EFL Educated Readers of English Literary Texts
Sed cum legebat, oculi ducebantur per paginas et cor intellectum rimabantur, vox autem et lingua quiescebant1
Mireia Trenchs Parera Universitat Pompeu Fabra [email protected]
This small-scale study of three educated readers aims to contribute to the exploration of the process of reading literary texts in a foreign language. By means of a think-aloud procedure and post-task interviews, the study explores the repertoire of strategies used by educated, non-native readers of literature and their progress in the use and awareness of those strategies after receiving academic instruction. Results evidenced the use of a great variety of cognitive, support and metacognitive strategies although, over time, some of them became less frequent or even disappeared. The study shows that repertoires of strategies change in time but also that each reader changes differently. The article draws pedagogical implications and provides recommendations for further research into the process of reading literature in a foreign language.
Key words: adult, language awareness, university, EFL, ESL, language learning, literary texts, metacognitive strategies, reading, reading strategies
1. Introduction
It is a common belief that literary texts in a foreign language are more difficult to understand than non-literary ones because of their levels of meaning and their apparent linguistic complexity. Some language researchers cast doubt on such a belief (Van Dijk 1977), but others point out (Zwaan 1993) that literary texts differ in the associations of ideas, the suspense and the emotions they awake in readers. Other applied linguists — and most literary theoreticians— have argued that such complexity is caused by the cultural load and the apparently higher degree of intertextuality inherent to literary texts (Pritchard 1990; Steffensen, Joag-Dev and Anderson 1979). Probably because literature is perceived as such a special type of discourse with few connections with other academic and professional discourses, the activity of reading authentic literature in a foreign language has been scarcely researched. In fact, there is
1 St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 B.C.) was showing surprise at the then ‘odd’ reading behaviour of an educated man reading silently. 70 Mireia Trenchs Parera no research that documents thoroughly what happens when educated adult EFL learners read an authentic literary text. One may find studies on the relationship between comprehension, strategies and metacognitive awareness of strategies, but always with regard to non-literary text (Block 1992; Carrell 1983, 1991, et al. 1988), or to the theoretical potential of literature for language acquisition (Hauptman 2000). As Maley (2001) points out, most scientific research on reading includes data collected from low-level ESP courses, and investigations into the reading of literature are usually parts of doctoral ethnographic studies that tend to remain unpublished. The scarce studies on the actual process of reading literature neither explore the repertoire of strategies triggered by literature, nor describe the complexity of such a process; they rather document the use of individual strategies (Pritchard 1990; Riley 1993). Other studies exploring students’ attitudes towards literature have only taken as participants native literature majors (Davis et al. 1992) or low-level ESL educated learners (Lao and Krashen 2000). None, with the exception of the case study reported by Trenchs (1997, 1998a, 1998b), has been devoted to L2 intermediate or advanced educated readers who may be approaching the comprehension of a literary text. A basis for the present investigation, the afore-mentioned case study, attempted to survey the reading strategies of such readers and to detect possible sources of comprehension difficulties. Its subjects relied on academic knowledge as a comprehension strategy and unconsciously reported on their use of metacognitive strategies, two behaviours worth the further exploration reported in the present article.
2. Scope of the study: Hypothesis and research questions
This small-scale research aims to study the process of reading a literary text in a foreign language as experienced by university students of Humanities —thus, by educated readers— both at the onset of and after their academic instruction. The hypothesis underlying the research was that, after four years of instruction in the Humanities, advanced, educated L2 readers should change the way they approach the reading of a literary text in a foreign language as regards strategy use and strategy awareness. The questions guiding the study were: (1) What repertoire of strategies do learners put to use when reading a literary text in a foreign language? (2) Do the use of and awareness of such strategies change after receiving academic instruction? (3) May different readers develop differently in their use and awareness of strategies after receiving such instruction?
3. Methodological design
The existing studies exploring the strategies that learners put to use when reading in a foreign language recommend a qualitative methodological design including concurrent or retrospective verbal reports provided by the readers themselves (Block 1992; Davis and Bistodeau 1993; Ericsson and Simon 1996; Matsumoto 1993). Thus, two reading sessions were conducted with each participant: one at the onset of their university studies and another session once their degree in Humanities had been completed. Four methods of data collection were designed for each of the sessions: (1) the reading of a Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 71 literary text while doing a concurrent verbal report, (2) an oral summary of the text during a semi-structured post-task interview, (3) a retrospective oral report during the same interview and (4) the observation of the readers’ external behaviour while reading. Each participant was told to read the text aloud; they could stop at any point they wished and had to verbalize what they were understanding, what was going through their minds and what they thought they were doing while reading. The instruments in each session were two literary texts of similar length (1142 and 1385 words, respectively), of similar linguistic difficulty and of academic significance for the participants. The texts chosen were ‘Cat in the Rain’ (part of the students’ course syllabus) for the first session and ‘Mr and Mrs Elliot’, for the second one; both short stories were written by Ernest Hemingway (1963 [1939]). In order to introduce the think-aloud procedure, the researcher exemplified it while performing a writing task so as not to bias the readers’ reports (Victori 1995). They practiced the think-aloud procedure by reading parts of ‘The Star’ by Alasdair Gray (1984). The participants were audio-taped and, when possible, also video-taped to ensure data collection. An original extract from one of the think-aloud sessions may be found in Appendix A. When readers had finished the think-aloud procedure, they retold the story in Catalan, their mother tongue, in order to document comprehension (Block 1992). A semi-structured post-task interview then ensued in which they were asked to say what they had understood and to comment on the task they had just performed. For illustrative purposes, an original extract from one of the interviews is included in Appendix B. All think-aloud reports as well as the interviews were transcribed to facilitate the analysis of the data. The first step in the analysis was “to identify the verbalization units that correspond[ed] to units of heeded information” (Ericsson and Simon 1996: 258). The second step was to encode verbalizations and interview responses with categories describing reading strategies yielded by the data. The categories were based on the preliminary set of categories developed by Trenchs (1997, 1998a, 1998b). The strategies finally found in the data are listed in Appendix C followed by data samples that exemplify what the participants were doing in the sessions. In some extracts the illustrated strategy is accompanied by other strategies. For the sake of readability, the original words in Catalan —the language in which the think-aloud sessions and the interviews were conducted— have been translated into English. Words originally read aloud from the literary text or uttered by the readers in English have been italicized to record the role of both languages in the reading process. All examples come from the think-aloud sessions except for interview excerpts in which the researcher’s voice is present. Occurrences of each category were counted; even though the focus of the present study is qualitative, a table with those counts is provided in Appendix D in order to illustrate the issues discussed in Section 5 below. Finally, the various data were contrasted and analyzed recursively to allow for reinterpretations and recoding. Although this study focuses on only three L2 readers, the data which it yielded sufficed to uncover interesting phenomena, to explore the possibilities of the methodology employed and to prove the interest of a future larger-scale study. The participants' potential repertoire of L1 reading strategies was not taken into 72 Mireia Trenchs Parera consideration since, however interesting it may be, the contrast between L1 and L2 reading processes was not an objective in the present study.
4. The participants
Maria, Montse and Sandra, three students of a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities at a university in Barcelona, participated in this investigation. During the first data collection session, these three participants were starting a first-year core course on English Language and Literature. They had not taken any foreign literature courses before and the three of them had received the grade equivalent to a ‘B’ in either Spain’s standardized university-entry English exam or an entry test administered by their School of Humanities. In the first classes within that course, these three volunteers had already demonstrated a good command of the language, successful interpretation skills and interest in the reading of literature. In their university studies none of them became Literature majors within the Humanities degree, but the three of them reported being regular readers of Catalan and Spanish literature.
5. Results
5.1. Repertoire of reading strategies
As expected, the repertoire of strategies put to use by the participants when reading the literary texts (see Appendix C) consisted of strategies which, individually, had already been reported in previous reading research on the reading of non-literary texts (Hosenfeld 1977; Block 1985; Carrell et al. 1988; Oxford 1990; Anderson 1991; Davis and Bistodeau 1993; O’Malley and Chamot, 1993). As Trenchs (1997, 1998a) had already reported, the cognitive strategies of evaluating and interpreting, which will be commented on in Sections 5.2 and 5.3, emerged again in the reading of both literary texts. No new strategies were put to use in either reading session. In the second session there appeared the same kind of strategies as in the first one although, as will be seen below, the frequency of each of them varied with each reader. It must be remarked that there arose a great variety of cognitive, support and metacognitive strategies which included the use of external resources, the reliance on linguistic knowledge of various kinds, the recalling of personal experiences and the creative interpretation of the text and of its implicit information. Such a variety suggests the complexity of the process of reading itself, even in inexperienced foreign literature readers, as illustrated by the excerpt of a think-aloud session included in Appendix A. Students’ behaviours did not come as a surprise but, as will be seen in Sections 5.2 and 5.3, what was really interesting were the different ways in which in both sessions the participants put to use and combined those strategies differently to make meaning out of the texts.
Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 73
5.2. Differences in the readers’ use and awareness of strategies after receiving academic instruction
The analysis of the oral summaries of the texts and the concurrent verbal reports shows that the three readers were successful in understanding plots, characters and implicit information in both literary texts; they were also able to provide personal interpretations of the author’s intentions. Their success, however, depended on different repertoires of strategies (in Appendix D, see the numbers of references to each strategy in the think-aloud protocols). Sandra, who in the interviews was highly aware of her own strategies, was also the reader who used the widest repertoire in both reading sessions, although like her classmates, she was not conscious of the full range of the strategies she had used during the task. The strategy of ‘rereading portions of the text aloud’ decreased significantly in the second set of sessions, but still remained one of the most frequent. In the first session this strategy, together with the strategy of ‘relating text to previous or subsequent excerpts’ (i.e. ‘going back and forth’), made recursive reading and the analysis of contextual clues possible. In her first reading session, Maria verbalizes such a recursive approach to the reading of the text:
Now s/he talks about the garden and s/he talks about people again, but not about the Americans, but about the Italians, before it has also been said that there were Italians in the hotel, [pause] I think, let’s see. [pause, rereads silently] Ah, no, it is the first time that Italians are mentioned.
Rereading the text aloud was also used as a strategy to pause and think, to extract phonetic information from the words and to keep focused upon the task. ‘Pausing in silence’ was probably another strategy used to gain time to think and to reread; as Sandra said, “I think it is better for me to read longer excerpts and assess the information because otherwise I feel like I am contradicting myself from one sentence to another one”. Re-reading aloud and relating parts of the text appeared together with a significant ‘reliance on the readers’ morpho-syntactic knowledge’, specially in Maria and Sandra, as the latter’s think-aloud protocol illustrates:
Outside right under their window a cat was crouched crouched under one of the dripping green tables. Outside, outside right under their window, outside to the right under her window there was a cat that was, was crouched, crouched I don’t know exactly what it is, under one of the dripping green tables. OK. Was crouched must be that it was lying or that was somehow, but it is a state because, otherwise, if it were an action, it would be was crouching, or something like this, since it is was crouched it must mean, must define the state the cat is in. Under one of the dripping green tables. OK. Green tables, under one of the dripping green tables tables. Dripping I don’t know what it is but, well, it is an adjective of tables.
Another most frequent cognitive strategy in both sessions was the participants’ ‘adding of implicit information’. Regarding the use of this strategy, each participant 74 Mireia Trenchs Parera developed differently over time: one kept her use of it stable, another one increased its use and the third one decreased it drastically. With regard to metacognitive strategies, data from all participants showed a decrease in their verbalization of ‘assessment of text comprehension’ but in the three cases there was an increase in verbalizations of ‘monitoring the task of reading the text’. This may probably indicate that the three readers had become more self-confident and more conscious of the task itself. Their becoming strategically more aware correlates with research showing that strategic awareness and monitoring of comprehension are strategies shown by skilled readers. One of the most significant changes was that, while in the first reading session all participants resorted to ‘using background knowledge’ in order to understand portions of text, this strategy almost disappeared in Montse’s and Maria’s second session. Sandra distinguished herself by increasing, in contrast, the quantity of references to background knowledge, which seemed to help her to understand the text:
Probably she [the female character] had it because it has also surprised me that, that, well, in Hemingway’s time, in a text from that period of time, mmmm, so, in a time in which probably conventionalisms were kept strongly and formalisms and in which to be a virgin at the wedding was something that was taken more, more into consideration, that was more important. . . well, so, all this thinking about the social context and the believes then have, have surprised me in front of this explanation. That is why I had her in mind.
What was surprising was the fact that, after years of academic instruction in the Humanities, there was not any significant increase in ‘references to academic knowledge’ related to literature classes. In contrast, Montse only made two references in her second sessions and Maria’s references decreased. A possible explanation is that readers disregard this kind of knowledge when they read outside the academic context, or that the use has been internalized and it is no longer retrievable in think-aloud sessions. Sandra, again, distinguished herself from her classmates by showing a development over time in the opposite direction. With regard to ‘support strategies’, there was no significant reliance on them in either session although an increased awareness of underlining and of its functions were observed in the three readers. Their comments in the interviews on why they used such support strategies provide us informative hints about when readers resort to them: (1) to mark "something that looks important", (2) to summarize information about characters, (3) "to recall reading", (4) to keep track of textual organization, (5) to mark comprehension difficulties, (6) to mark something that “was surprising", and (7) to mark "a part of the text I like".
5.3. Development as readers of foreign literary texts
The analysis of the data showed that the initial hypothesis of the study was correct, namely that, after years of instruction in the Humanities, advanced L2, educated readers would change the way they approached the reading of a literary text in a foreign language with regard to strategy use and strategy awareness. However, it was observed that, whenever changes in the use and awareness of strategies occurred, different Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 75 readers changed in different directions, as if academic instruction facilitated the development of their successful ‘personalities’ as ‘foreign literature readers’. In the second reading session, Montse remained the reader with the smallest range of strategies. The decrease in assessment of comprehension and the increase in task monitoring suggest that she also seemed to become less worried about lack of comprehension but more conscious of her strategies while reading. Her higher linguistic proficiency and stronger self-confidence as an L2 reader was evidenced in her decrease in the conscious use of linguistic knowledge as a strategy. This lesser attention to linguistic details was accompanied by a more global approach to the text during the second session: she relied more often on the cognitive strategy of relating parts of the text and on summarising as a strategy of support. Her higher linguistic and textual self- confidence could also be evidenced by a lesser reliance on background knowledge. Maria seemed to become less worried about her comprehension problems and more conscious of her strategies. Like Montse, her increased proficiency made her less dependent on the use of linguistic knowledge, as may be seen in a drop in her references to morpho-syntactic issues. She also decreased her reliance on background knowledge, on academic knowledge and on the adding of information, which had previously distinguished her personality as a reader. What was surprising was that, in contrast to Montse, Maria’s proficiency did not lead to a more global approach to the text. In contrast, there was a significant decrease in the cognitive strategy of relating parts of the text and no increase in summarizing as a support strategy. Similar to her fellow students, Sandra became less worried about her lack of comprehension but remained aware of the reading strategies she could rely on. Surprisingly, her gain in reading ability—in fact, her decrease in the use of linguistic knowledge was by far the most marked—did not make her abandon her global approach to the text, as suggested by her increased awareness of textual organization. Departing from her fellow students’ tendencies, she showed a comparatively higher reliance on background knowledge. Her individual development as a reader was also seen in her increased—although still scarce—verbalization of academic knowledge as a useful strategy for evaluating the text.
6. Discussion
Both Maria and Sandra, who showed fewer comprehension problems than Montse, frequently resorted to ‘analysis of textual organization’ as a strategy. Sandra even increased her frequency of use, a behaviour that Riley (1993) considers a strategy of good L2 learners and which became a necessary strategy when reading a story with flashbacks like ‘Mr. and Mrs. Elliot’. In fact, the three readers showed initial comprehension problems with this story, and Sandra and Maria perceived anaphoric and cataphoric analyses as a way to solve them. The three of them also elaborated ‘summaries’, a combination of strategies which, in Maria and Sandra, could be interpreted as a sign of a global approach to the text and of recursive reading. As reflected in their recurrent anaphoric analyses, their summarizing strategies and their retrospective comments, the three participants were observed to pay special attention to the beginnings of texts. Such a preoccupation correlates with Riley's (1993) findings that 76 Mireia Trenchs Parera beginnings are better recalled than other parts of texts. Therefore, it seems likely that L2 readers will be able to perceive the special meanings that fiction writers attach to openings. No participant made frequent use of support strategies in either reading session, and only Sandra’s observed increase was of some significance. This scant reliance actually contradicts research into metacognition, which shows that L1 high reading ability students consider support strategies more valuable than low ability readers (Sheorey and Mokhtari 2001). According to those previous findings, if instructors wish their L2 students to approach the behaviours involved in L1 reading, it would follow that they should include the teaching of such strategies in the L2 classroom and make students more aware of the usefulness of such support. However, none of the participants in the present study seemed to rely on them significantly: this was the first contradiction between previous research and the data coming from participants who seemed to be successful in understanding literary texts. Another similarity between Montse’s and Maria’s development points to a second contradiction, this time with regard to learners’ use of their background knowledge. Research has shown that successful L2 readers use such knowledge to compensate for linguistic deficiencies (Steffensen et al. 1979; Carrell 1983). Davis et al. (1988, 1992) even propose that reliance on such knowledge is essential when reading literature. However, both Montse's and Maria's decrease in its use shows that some L2 readers may not need it as they become linguistically proficient. We could also see this change in behaviour as a sign that the instruction which they received may have somehow changed their approach to the text, since in their foreign language and literature classes students are instructed to support their interpretations on the basis of textual evidence. A similar effect of instruction could be hinted at by the fact that both Montse and Maria seemed to restrain themselves when evaluating the implicit information in the second text. Finally, a third surprise emerged from Montse’s and Maria’s data, in this case as regards the explicit teaching of literary competence: while literature instructors believe that instruction does help in understanding and interpreting literature, the participants did not make frequent, explicit use of literature-related academic knowledge in the second session, and Maria even decreased such references. The fact that Sandra’s changes in behaviour were different from those of the other two participants actually shows us that academic instruction may have different effects on different students. While in their second session Maria and Montse seemed to rely more globally on textual evidence, as emphasised by their instructors in the English language and literature classes, Sandra made more comments on the literary characteristics of the text and brought in her background knowledge and her previous knowledge about the author; she also dared to evaluate the text with more references to implicit information. Despite these differences, other common changes over time were detected which allow us to glimpse some effect of the received instruction. First, although these readers did not rely frequently on support strategies in general, they all did slightly increase their use of underlining, a behaviour which could have been developed as a study habit at the university. Second, it does seem that these readers became more strategically aware, namely, more conscious of the reading task itself, since there was a clear increase —and a highly significant one in the case of Montse—in their task monitoring. Third, in the three participants there was a significant decrease in their re-reading the text Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 77 aloud. This change in behaviour may be attributed to their accumulated reading practice, but other more significant explanations can be provided: (a) the stgudents may have become more self-confident as readers and feel less need to rely on recursive reading and on reanalysis of previous excerpts in order to go on with the task, (b) they may have become faster in processing the text and may need less time to think, (c) they may feel less need to rely on phonetic information provided by the reading aloud and (d) they could concentrate on the task and stay focused on it more easily. All in all, strategic awareness, self-confidence as readers of a text in a foreign language, concentration on the task and the development of distinct personalities point to an increasing maturity of the three learners as readers, which is what we may expect from instruction at the university.
7. Conclusions and research implications
The previously mentioned unexpected findings should make us rethink the instructor’s role in L2 classes whose curriculum includes the reading of literary texts; in fact, the development of these three readers makes us reconsider some of the recommendations made in Trenchs reports of the case studies which served as the basis for the present investigation (1997, 1998a, 1998b). Thus, we may wonder whether instructors should really foster the use of support strategies, as well as the connections between literary texts and real-life experience, and whether literature instructors in L2 contexts should include metacognitive objectives in their curricula in order to make learners more conscious of the value of such knowledge. Further research into these issues is needed in order to discover whether literary texts may call for some reading strategies more often than others, or whether, considering the success of the three distinct ‘reading personalities’ with regard to text comprehension, there may exist more than one type of ‘good L2 literature reader’. The study opens several venues for further research since it could be enriched with a comparison of strategy use and strategy awareness when reading both literary and non- literary texts. If a large-scale study is to be undertaken following the methodology used here, reliability could be increased with other raters coding the data. A more detailed language test at the onset of the study could be added to ensure a more homogenous command of the L2 among all the participants. I would also recommend comprehension tests at the end of each session to gather more data on the degree of reading comprehension and to allow for a closer analysis of the improvement in L2 reading ability. It has been mentioned that all participants resorted to analyzing textual organization. This raises the question of whether different story structures or plot configurations trigger different strategies, as Riley (1993) observed in relation to non- literary texts. Also, if some readers pay attention to author style (as the participants’ comments on Hemingway evidenced), do different authors trigger different strategies? Hemingway’s stories have been used as research instruments here, but one may wonder what happens when students read L2 poetry or drama. Finally, although it has been seen how academic instruction may have similarly affected the participants’ development as more mature readers, we have also observed 78 Mireia Trenchs Parera differences in their personalities as readers after the academic studies. Thus, a future, larger-scale qualitative case study including observation of the university classes attended by participants, documentation on their teachers’ pedagogical approach towards L2 reading and collection of data from reading sessions at several points in time during their academic studies could throw more light on the specific role of instruction in the development of educated adults as L2 readers.
Works Cited
Anderson, N. J. 1991: ‘Individual Differences in Strategy Use in Second Language Reading and Testing’. Modern Language Journal 75.4: 460-472. Block, E. L. 1985: ‘The Comprehension Strategies of Non-Proficient Native and Non-Native Readers of English: A Descriptive Study of Process in Progress’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. New York U. Block, E.L. 1992: ‘See How They Read: Comprehension Monitoring of L1 and L2 Readers’. TESOL Quarterly 26.2: 319-43. Carrell, P.L. 1983: ‘Three Components of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension’. Language Learning 33: 87-112. ———— 1991: ‘Awareness of Text Structure: Effects on Recall’. Language Learning 42.1: 1-20. Carrell, P. L., J. Devine and D. Eskey 1988: Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Davis, J.D. and L. Bistodeau 1993: ‘How do L1 and L2 Reading Differ?: Evidence from Think- Aloud Protocols’. The Modern Language Journal 77: 459-71. Davis, J., L.C. Gorell, R.R. Kline and G. Hsieh 1992: ‘Readers and Foreign Languages: A Survey of Undergraduate Attitudes Toward the Study of Literature’. The Modern Language Journal 76: 320-32. Davis, J., D.L. Lange and S.J. Samuels 1988: ‘Effects of Text Structure Instruction on Foreign Language Readers’ Recall of a Scientific Journal Article’. Journal of Reading Behavior 20: 203- 14. Ericsson, K.A. and H.A. Simon 1996: Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data. 2nd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gray, A. 1984: ‘The Star’. In Unlikely Stories Mostly. London: Penguin: 1-3. Hauptman, P.C. 2000: ‘Some Hypotheses on the Nature of Difficulty and Ease in Second Language Reading: An Application of Schema Theory’. Foreign Language Annals, 33.6: 622- 30. Hemingway, E. 1963 (1939): ‘Cat in the Rain’. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 100-3. (First published in 1925 in In our time). Hemingway, E. 1963 (1939): ‘Mr and Mrs Elliot’. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 95-9. Hosenfeld, C. 1977: ‘A Preliminary Investigation of the Reading Strategies of Successful and Nonsuccessful Second Language Learners’. System 5: 110-23. Lao, C.Y. and S. Krashen 2000: ‘The Impact of Popular Literature Study on Literacy Development in EFL: More Evidence for the Power of Reading’. System 28: 261-70. Maley, A. 2001: ‘Literature in the Language Classroom’. R. Carter and D. Nunan, eds. The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: CUP: 180- 185. Matsumoto, K. 1993: ‘Verbal-Report Data and Introspective Methods in Second Language Research: State of the Art’. RELC Journal 24: 32-60. O’Malley, J. M. and A.U. Chamot 1993: Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 79
Oxford, R. 1990: Language Learning Strategies. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. Pritchard, R. 1990: ‘The Effects of Cultural Schemata on Reading Processing Strategies’. Reading Research Quarterly 25: 273-95. Riley, G. 1993: ‘A Story Approach to Narrative Text Comprehension’. Modern Language Journal 77.4: 417-30. Sheorey, R. and K. Mokhtari 2001: ‘Differences in the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Among Native and Non-Native Readers’. System 29: 431-49. Steffensen, M.S., C. Joag-Dev and R.C. Anderson 1979: ‘A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Reading Comprehension’. Reading Research Quarterly 15: 10-29. Trenchs, M. 1997: ‘A Preliminary Study of the Reading Process of Non-Proficient, Non-Native Readers of Literature’. Lourdes Díaz y Carmen Pérez, ed(s). Proceedings of the 7th EUROSLA Conference. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra: 341-351. . ———— 1998a: ‘How Do EFL Learners Interpret Literary Texts?: Spontaneous Stylistic Analysis in Language Learning’. Perspectives (A Journal of TESOL-Italy) 24.1: 57-66. ———— 1998b: ‘The Process of Meaning Construction in a Foreign Language: Hemingway's “A Very Short Story” and Three EFL Readers’. Pere Gallardo and Enrique Llurda (ed(s). Actas del XXII Congreso Internacional de AEDEAN. Lleida: Universitat de Lleida. 97-101. Van Dijk, T. 1977: Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman. Victori, M. 1995: EFL Writing Knowledge and Strategies: An Integrative Study. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona. Zwaan, R.A. 1993: Aspects of Literary Comprehension: A Cognitive Approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 80 Mireia Trenchs Parera
Appendix A: Sandra’s second think-aloud procedure
[Reading aloud] Hubert Elliot was taking postgraduate work in law at Harvard when he was married. He was a poet with an income of nearly ten thousand dollars a year. He wrote very long poems, poems rapidly. He was twenty-five years old and had never gone to bed with a woman until he married Mrs Elliot… [thinking aloud] Ara aquí m’he quedat parada perquè, perquè no ho he entès del tot, perquè, bueno, ell ara ens està parlant, està anant una mica més enrere, i ens està parlant de Hubert Elliot, que suposo que és el, el Mr Elliot del qual ens està parlant des del principi. Ens diu que estava, estava estudiant, emm, un postgrau en, en, en lleis, bueno, en dret a Harvard when he was married. En aquest cas no sé exactament. . . Sí, when he was married, val, sí, estava dubtant si era que ho estava fent, que mentre ell estava casat, mentre el seu matrimoni, ell estava fent això, estava estudiant aquest postgrau, o si mentre estava fent aquest postgrau, es va casar, i aleshores, emm, que em quedo amb aquesta opció perquè diu when he was married i no while he was married. No sé si m’explico bé, emm, en certa manera el while seria un duratiu i, i en canvi, al posar el when el que m’està dient és que, és que lo duratiu és lo altre, el fer el postgrau: i en aquell temps, mentre feia el postgrau, when, es va casar. Emm, diu que era, diu que era un poeta emm, bueno, amb uns ingressos de prop de ten thousand dollars a year, deu mil dòlars l’any, que crec que, bueno, que deurien ser molts diners per l’època i pel que diu a continuació suposo que sí, perquè en certa manera és una justificació de lo anterior, diu He wrote very long poems rapidly. Emm, suposem efectivament que com que escrivia poemes molt llargs, molt ràpid, potser això li, lògicament això li permetia tenir una producció, doncs, emm, més elevada, i potser per això guanyava més diners. Em fa fixar que, que Hemingway, en el que és l’estructura, utilitza frases molt curtes i de sintaxi força simple i pocs, emm, enllaços, poques subordinades. Aquí, no utilitza per exemple un because o un since he wrote sinó que, bueno, posa frases l’una al costat de l’altra i és el lector qui, qui deriva d’aquesta connexió de les frases l’una amb l’altra, emm, doncs, els nexes subordinats. Abans en el paràgraf, quan parlava de l’edat i si semblava jove, si semblava més gran, també ha utilitzat aquest recurs o aquest, aquest mecanisme. He was twenty-five years old and had never gone to bed with a woman until he married Mrs Elliot. Val, aquí, ara explico perquè m’he quedat parada en aquest punt perquè diu que no havia, no s’havia anat, no havia estat al llit amb cap, amb cap dona als seus vint-i-cinc anys fins que es va casar amb la Mrs Elliot però jo recordava que, que quan ha fet l’explicació des del present fins endarrere ha dit que, que es va casar amb la Mrs Elliot després de fer l’amor amb ella durant, durant uns quants, unes quantes setmanes; llavors vull tornar per comprovar que és així o que ho he entès malament when Elliot had married her after several weeks of making love to her.
Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 81
Appendix B: First interview with Maria
Researcher: Aquest és el dibuix que feies? Maria: No acabava de situar l'acció. Vull dir el paisatge de l'hotel. R: Quina part no situaves bé? M: El bar, cita un bar però no hi passa res al bar, i el que tampoc no acabava de quedar clar és el gat, si està sota les taules al jardí, o si està sota les taules del bar. R: Quin jardí? M: El public garden. . . . R: I les taules on són? On surt, on estan les taules? M: Això és el que no acabo de veure. Relacionat amb les taules no entenia una paraula. Si aquí diu it was crouched . . . dripping no sé que vol dir green tables, suposo que les taules són del jardí. [rereads text] Primer ens descriu l'hotel la situació de l'hotel, el jardí. R: I abans has dit aquesta frase no l'entenc però és descriptiva, quina frase era? Aquesta que has posat entre parèntesi? M: Si, . . . .in a long line in the rain. R: Què descriu aquí? M: M'imaginava que el mar trenqués contra la sorra de la platja, però line in the rain, però s'ho deu imaginar com [inaudible] R: Aquí el que et costa és imaginar-t'ho, no és que no entenguis les paraules, M: Això. Aleshores diu aquí és on ens torna a citar el cafè, ..doorway, doorway suposo que es la porta d'entrada, a waiter stood. . . .square, sembla com si el cambrer, com si el bar hagués de tenir un paper important a la història però no surt. M'ha despistat una mica. R: Per això has tornat endarrera? . . . R: Has dit això no vol dir mort. M: Quan parlava de l'actitud o de l'aspecte del propietari. R: Per què has dit deadly no vol dir mort? M: She liked the deadly serious way, és com una mica despectiu, suposo que és la posse seriosa o tibada, bastant perquè els Italians no són gaire tibats. R: O sigui el significat mort no t'hi lliga, i perquè no t'hi lliga? M: Perquè ho trobo com a despectiu . . . M: Quan al principi ha dit bowed, primer m'ha vingut al cap agenollar-se però-- R: No la sabies aquesta paraula? M: Si, l'havia sentit dir. R: Però en el primer moment no t'has recordat del que volia dir. M: No, quan he vist bowed ho he relacionat amb agenollar-se però no és normal agenollar-se, per tant, he interpretat fer una reverència, per això m'ha semblat que devia ser una persona rica. . . . M: Hi ha hagut com una evolució en la idea que tenia de la noia, primer me l'imaginava gran, . . . i d'això del bowed, me l'imaginava, important, i tibada, rica, i després em diu que és jove, i després bastant capriciosa, ella està bastant agobiada, farta de què l'ignorin. . . . M'ho imagino, quan llegeixo m'ho imagino, m'ho monto, relaciono amb llocs on he estat jo, quan llegeixo se’m forma com una imatge. 82 Mireia Trenchs Parera
R: Això ho relaciones també amb un lloc on has estat tu? A Itàlia? M: Un racó del nord d'Itàlia, no hi vaig ser però hi vam passejar. . . . Més o menys amb l'estructura aquesta, un hotel gran, maco, amb un jardí, després, en aquest cas hi ha havia una carretera, un passeig, el passeig marítim.
Appendix C: Repertoire of reading strategies
I. METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES
I.a Assessing comprehension
MONTSE: Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. Mmmm, water, mmm, was, mmm, pools, pools, I don’t know what it means, it’s like, pool, as if it were in, in, doing pools, on those paths, gravel, I don’t know what it means.
I.b Monitoring the task
MONTSE: Across the square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out at the empty square. This, I read it again, this sentence, [pause] that is, across the square, on the way out of the café, a waiter was looking out.
II. COGNITIVE STRATEGIES: INTERRUPTING AND MODIFYING THE TASK FLOW
II.a Pausing in silence
MARIA: There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Now s/he talks about the garden and s/he talks about people again, but not about the Americans, but about the Italians, before it has also been said that there were Italians in the hotel, [pause] I think, let’s see. [pause, rereads silently] Ah, no, it is the first time that Italians are mentioned.
II.b Rereading portions of text aloud without adding any comments
MONTSE: She had seemed much younger, in fact she had seemed, she had seemed not to have any age at all, when Elliot had married her after several, several weeks of making love to . . . . I read these last lines again, mmm, when Elliot, let’s see, She had seemed much younger, in fact she had seemed not to have any age at all, when Elliot had married her after several weeks of making love to . . . . Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 83
II.c Relating text to previous or subsequent excerpts (going back and forth within the text)
MONTSE: But, well, the thing is that she has not been able to get pregnant, the Mrs Elliot, and now I go back and see if I can understand that sentence that I have not been able to understand in the middle of the text, let’s see if I find it. Mmmm, I’m looking for the sentence which before I said that I would try to go back to it later in case I understand it later.
III. COGNITIVE STRATEGIES: USING BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE
RESEARCHER: And this, do you relate it to a place where you have been to? MARIA: Yes. R: In Italy? M: Yes. R: A hotel like this? M: A place at the north of Italy, we didn’t stay there but we had a walk there. . . . More or less, a structure like this one, a big beautiful hotel, with a garden, then, in this case, there was a road, an avenue . . .
IV. COGNITIVE STRATEGIES: USING LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE
IV.a Using morpho-syntactic knowledge
MARIA: Bueno, Mr and Mrs Elliot. Mr and Mrs Elliot tried very hard to have a baby. OK, by now, we have two subjects, don’t we?
IV.b Distinguishing between different languages (in this case English and Italian, since the literary text included Italian words and some of the characters were supposed to be native Italian speakers)
MONTSE: When she talked in English, the maid's face tightened. Of course, she spoke English, because she was American and then the maid’s face tightened, I don’t know what it means, but I suppose it is, I don’t know, maybe the maid spoke Italian, maybe she did not understand much when she spoke English. 84 Mireia Trenchs Parera
IV.c Making analogies with other L2 words
MONTSE: This set, this set his heart to pounding. Well, this image, either I don’t know exactly, her heart, to pounding, that I don’t know what it means, pound, pound are pounds [currency] but not here.
IV.d Using knowledge about word formation
SANDRA: Well, that George goes on reading she went over and sat in front of the mirror that she sat down in front of the mirror of the dressing-table at the table of, the dressing table, looking at herself in the handglass with the [masculine article], with the [feminine article] in the handglass, glass it is glass, it is cup, with the handglass, that is, with the cup in her hand I think.
IV.e Using knowledge about typographical conventions
MARIA: The maid stayed outside to close the umbrella. as the American girl passed the office, the padrone, padrone, it must be Italian, besides it is in italics, padrone must be the hotel keeper.
IV.f Looking for similarities with L1
SANDRA: She studied her profile. First on one side and then the other. Profile I didn’t know what it was, but now I see it is profile, first because it is similar phonetically and then because first one side and then the other first one side and then the other one, it is the profile.
IV.g Using knowledge about punctuation
MARIA: “I'm going down and get that kitty", the American wife said. That is, now appears a thought, it is in quotation marks, it means, let’s see, I go down and I’ll take the kitty, kitty I suppose it is the cat.
IV.h Analyzing textual organization and text type
MARIA: It was possible to try to have a baby but Cornelia could not attempt it very often although they wanted a baby more than anything else in the world. Well, and now it looks like we go back to the point of, the beginning of the text, don’t we? That is, he has started the text at a point, has introduced the characters, has gone back to introduce the personality and the, let’s say, what the marriage was like.
Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 85
V. COGNITIVE STRATEGIES: EVALUATING AND INTERPRETING
V.a Evaluating and adding implicit information (whether correct or wrong)
MONTSE: I wanted that poor kitty. She would like to have this poor cat, I suppose that maybe it inspired pity in her.
V.b Evaluating with reference to academic literary knowledge (i.e. referring to author’s style, figurative language, characterization, setting, point of view, irony or author’s intention)
SANDRA: Again Hemingway uses his mechanism of concatenating short sentences, one with the other and indirectly, almost without wanting, mmmm, we drift [or ‘derive’; the meaning is not clear], so what we were saying, subordinate links and causal relationships. Or MARIA: The dialogue ends again and there is again an omniscient narrator.
VI. SUPPORT STRATEGIES (using verbal, visual or physical resources)
VI.a Resourcing (i.e. using external reference materials)
SANDRA: In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. In the good weather, when the weather was good, there was always an artist with his easel easel I don’t know what it means, I underline it because maybe it could be one [word] that I would look up in the dictionary. But not yet, I will go on and see if something can tell me, can tell me what it means and otherwise I would look it up. Maybe it is a typical thing of the artist, or some tool.
VI.b Underlining
RESEARCHER: What were you underlining, were you marking things? . . . SANDRA: . . . In the beginning I was marking only things like these ones, I was doing this, and small, [pause] ah the important thing, because, because of the tight, because I had said that small, small, tight important, I have tried to make a parallelism, and I have done like this, you know? But then I have seen that that one was not important.
VI.c Notetaking
MARIA: Let’s see, I think that Hemingway’s writing style és quite like this, isn’t it? Very short sentences and he repeats pronouns and sentences very often. And now he talks already about the husband. I’ll make a note of it here: this is about the woman and here he starts talking about the husband. 86 Mireia Trenchs Parera
VI.d Visualizing (i.e. making drawings)
MARIA: Sometimes I have a kind of code. RESEARCHER: Can you tell me about this code? M: When it is very important I draw like two lines like this, sometimes, since I have to underline so many things, I would underline everything, it is a little hard for me to extract the information, when I have to study something, I underline it all, and when I don’t make such a mess of the book, I do it in the margin. . . . Later, what I look for very often is the structure, for example, the introduction. . . . I try it to be as schematic as possible, introduction, the typical structure, introduction, knot and dénouement, and like this I feel very good. I know when I am done with something, when the action begins, then, the ending. . . . They are simply marks, rather then meaning, it helps me focus my attention, like with colours, fluorescents, everything very visual, very graphic, it, very often I get the hang of it through my sight.
VI.e Summarizing explicit information from text
MARIA: They were all very long poems. He was very severe about mistakes and would make her re-do an entire page if there was one mistake. She cried a good deal and they tried several times to have a baby before they left Dijon. That is, they keep on trying to have a baby. In Paris they couldn’t, neither in Dijon, and she becomes a sort of a shorthand writer of, of the poems he writes. Reading Strategies and Strategy Awareness 87
Appendix D: Number of references to specific strategies made by the participants in the think-aloud protocols
Montse Maria Sandra Session Session Session Session Session Session 1 2 1 2 1 2 Assessing METACOGNITIVE 31 18 31 11 38 16 comprehension STRATEGIES Monitoring the task 6 19 5 10 13 16 COGNITIVE Pausing in silence 4 1 8 2 4 6 STRATEGIES: Rereading aloud 34 28 48 13 46 18 Interrupting the reading Relating excerpts process and modifying 19 28 49 7 34 18 task flow (back and forth) COGNITIVE STRATEGY: Using background knowledge to understand 3 --- 6 1 7 10 (portions of) text. Morpho-syntactic 11 (*) 31 2 35 9 knowledge COGNITIVE Analogies (L2-L2) 2 2 4 --- 9 1 STRATEGIES: Different languages 5 (**) 6 (**) 5 (**) Making use of linguistic Word formation 3 1 ------1 1 knowledge to understand Typography ------1 ------(portions of) text Similarity L1-L2 --- 5 ------3 1 Punctuation ------1 ------Textual organization 1 --- 10 10 4 14 COGNITIVE Evaluating and adding 22 19 29 15 13 22 STRATEGIES: implicit information Evaluating and interpreting (portions of) Evaluating with text reference to academic --- 2 8 3 5 10 knowledge Resourcing ------1 --- Underlining --- (*) 1 3 2 8 SUPPORT STRATEGIES Notetaking ------5 --- (*) Visualizing ------3 3 (*) 2 Summarizing --- 5 3 3 1 2
(*) The strategy was not verbalized in the think-aloud session but in the interview the participant reported a sporadic use. (**) This strategy was not relevant to the second session since the literary text to be read, unlike the previous one, only included words in English and all main characters were supposed to be English speakers.
Received 20 May 2006 Revised version received 10 October 2006
28.2 (December 2006): 89–107 ISSN 0210-6124
Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje1 Learning and lexical instruction
María Jesús Sánchez Universidad de Salamanca [email protected]
Luisa María González Universidad de Salamanca [email protected]
The aim of this paper is to find which type of instruction is appropriate for learning vocabulary in a foreign language. In this research three lexical fields (Look, Temperature and Weather) were taught in a different way. One group of students of English as a foreign language got conceptual instruction of this vocabulary. Another group got the same instruction and was also exposed to native organization. This was inferred from their semantic networks by using the Pathfinder procedure which provides empirical networks with information about how subjects organize lexical material. Results show that when the vocabulary was not difficult both types of instruction had a similar effect on students. However, if the lexical field was very hard to learn, teaching with native organization was a critical factor for learning.
Key words: learning, lexical instruction, English language, expert, native speaker, foreign language, Pathfinder procedure
1. Introducción
La organización de la información es crítica en el dominio de los campos semánticos y ésta varía dependiendo del nivel de conocimiento que de ellos se tiene. Asimismo, se ha demostrado que se producen cambios al pasar de una fase a otra del aprendizaje, y que la adquisición de nuevos conocimientos modifica la organización de los conocimientos previos. De hecho, como el aprendizaje implica la reestructuración de la representación mental dentro de un campo de conocimiento, la representación estructural de los menos expertos debe hacerse más similar a la de los expertos a medida que se produzca aprendizaje (Gonzalvo, Cañas y Bajo 1994). Por todo ello, el propósito de esta investigación es comprobar la diferencia que supone la incorporación de la información estructural de los nativos de la lengua inglesa (expertos) en la instrucción conceptual de los campos semánticos Look,
1 Este artículo se ha realizado gracias a la ayuda prestada por la Junta de Castilla y León para los proyectos US50/02 y SA062/02. 90 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
Temperature y Weather impartida a estudiantes de lengua inglesa. Teniendo en cuenta el efecto del grado de concreción (Marschark 1992), consistente con las teorías estructurales (Bajo et al. 1994), y la categoría gramatical (Ellis y Beaton 1993; Singleton 1997) es muy probable que el aprendizaje se produzca de forma distinta desde el punto de vista cualitativo y cuantitativo en cada uno de ellos. En un principio el grupo léxico Look, más desconocido y de mayor dificultad, por estar compuesto de verbos, ofrece un espacio más amplio para el aprendizaje que Weather (de naturaleza nominal) y Temperature (formado por adjetivos) ya que los términos por los que están compuestos éstos últimos son de uso frecuente. Se espera poder medir la progresión cuantitativa y cualitativa de los estudiantes utilizando el índice de similitud (grado en que cada nodo está rodeado por un mismo conjunto de nodos) en la organización estructural de los sujetos. Es esperable que este estudio demuestre que la organización cognitiva de los sujetos expuestos a las redes expertas sea más completa y parecida a la de los nativos que las de aquellos que no recibieron esta instrucción (Sánchez 2002, 2004).
2. Metodología
2.1. Participantes
Se emplearon 3 grupos de 25 sujetos matriculados en primer curso de Filología Inglesa en la Universidad de Salamanca. Eran grupos homogéneos en cuanto a su conocimiento de la lengua inglesa, como se comprobó en el ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance) que se realizó con los datos obtenidos en la prueba de nivel al comienzo del curso académico (N=35, N=33 y N=35): F = 2,045 (gl = 2/100), p = 0,1348. Además, el promedio de años de estudio de esta lengua es muy similar: 9,84 (Grupo Experimental I, denominado GE.I), 9,76 (Grupo Experimental II o GE.II) y 9,8 (Grupo Control o GC). Los alumnos fueron asignados aleatoriamente al GE.I, GE.II y GC. Así, con el GE.II se practicó una instrucción conceptual y con el GE.I además de ésta se realizó una instrucción estructural facilitada por las redes expertas. Se trataba de comprobar la eficacia de la instrucción. Además, contamos con 30 hablantes nativos de la lengua inglesa matriculados en la Universidad de Salamanca con los que comparamos las estructuras de los sujetos no nativos.
2.2. Materiales
En un trabajo previo seleccionamos los términos a incluir en los tres campos semánticos según criterios de familiaridad y frecuencia (Sánchez, González & Escobar, 2003). Para los tres campos semánticos diseñamos ejercicios de emparejamiento de los términos con su definición y de gap filling con la ayuda del English Learners’ Dictionary (1990) y del The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1993). Además, en el campo semántico Look se utilizaron fotos de revistas y periódicos que reflejaran los verbos a aprender y facilitaran la visualización de los conceptos. En el campo semántico Temperature se utilizaron fotos del libro de texto (Haines & Stewart 1996: 22) para elicitar vocabulario de dicho campo. Y, para los términos Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 91 atmosféricos se dio un texto del periódico The Times (12 de enero, 1991) para que localizaran y dedujeran el significado del vocabulario. Los grupos experimentales (GE.I y GE.II) realizaron los ejercicios y el GE.I recibió además una copia de la red semántica experta obtenida sometiendo los datos de los sujetos nativos al algoritmo Pathfinder (Schvaneveldt, Durso & Dearholt 1989; Schvaneveldt, Durso, Goldsmith, Breen, Cooke, Tucker & De Maio 1985; Schvaneveldt 1990; Thompson, Gomez & Schvaneveldt 2000). Algunos ejercicios se realizaron en casa y se corrigieron al día siguiente.
2.3. Instrucción
La finalidad de la docencia en ambos grupos era que además de conocer la forma, el significado y el uso en contextos adecuados de los términos, fueran capaces de relacionarlos. El grupo GE.I, junto con la instrucción conceptual, tuvo acceso a las redes semánticas de los nativos halladas gracias al algoritmo Pathfinder. Se esperaba que la ayuda gráfica de la red experta media en cada grupo léxico supusiera un aprendizaje más rico desde el punto de vista cualitativo, que se manifestaría en un mayor parecido entre la organización estructural de los estudiantes y la de los nativos. En la docencia del GE.I y del GE.II se empleó un material diverso y auténtico con el fin de ampliar los contextos en los que se podía encontrar cada término y facilitar, de este modo, que se produjera una comprensión adecuada de cada uno de ellos. No sólo se potenció su comprensión sino que también se trabajó el recuerdo y el uso significativo. Además, en el GE.I se trabajó con la organización cognitiva de los nativos para añadir una mayor riqueza cualitativa a la comprensión, organización y retención del vocabulario. Con el GE.I se utilizó un periodo de aproximadamente 90 minutos, dedicando unos 30 minutos a cada campo semántico. Con el GE.II se empleó el mismo tiempo, pero al no exponerlos a la red experta las actividades se realizaron de forma más pausada. En la siguiente clase se dedicaron 15 minutos a la corrección de ejercicios, lo que permitió aclarar algunas dudas. En el campo semántico Look, en el GE.I, se comenzó con un ejercicio de emparejamiento léxico y se explicaron los términos. Posteriormente, los estudiantes discutieron en parejas sobre la connotación de los términos y los contextos más adecuados. Después, en grupos de 4 y utilizando una fotografía dada previamente, seleccionaron el verbo que mejor describía el tipo de mirada de los personajes y se discutió lo acertado o no de la elección para favorecer el recuerdo y la discriminación de los términos. Finalmente, se analizó la organización de la red experta. Para una adecuada interpretación de la red semántica el profesor hizo hincapié en el núcleo de la red (término del cual parte un mayor número de enlaces) y en si los enlaces eran directos (parten del nodo donde se aloja el término) o indirectos (no hay una conexión directa desde el nodo). En el GE.II, se llevaron a cabo las mismas actividades docentes excepto la del análisis de la red semántica experta. En el campo semántico Temperature, el GE.I realizó un ejercicio de emparejamiento léxico con 20 oraciones y 20 términos de este campo semántico (5 minutos). Aunque este grupo léxico era más conocido que el anterior se explicaron algunos términos 92 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
(blistering, scorching, etc). Después, durante 15 minutos, los alumnos buscaron sinónimos y antónimos, seleccionaron los 4 términos más frecuentes y los 4 menos frecuentes y ordenaron los términos de mayor a menor temperatura. Se pretendía que se concentraran en las relaciones entre conceptos para mejorar su organización cognitiva. Al analizar la red semántica de los nativos se explicaron los contextos adecuados para conceptos similares (lukewarm, baking etc.). Finalmente, los dos grupos experimentales examinaron las fotos de su libro de texto con el fin de utilizar activamente los términos de dicho campo semántico en un contexto adecuado. Esta actividad sirvió para activar los conocimientos previos del campo semántico Weather. La activación de los conocimientos sobre términos atmosféricos facilitó su posterior explicación. Se aprovechó el contexto para que surgieran conceptos que no se habían mencionado (sleet, drizzle, etc.). Posteriormente los alumnos subrayaron en el texto procedente de The Times los términos de este campo semántico y dedujeron el significado de los términos desconocidos. Después se realizó un ejercicio de emparejamiento léxico para que los alumnos plantearan sus dudas. Para favorecer las relaciones conceptuales los ordenaron según su uso en situaciones más o menos agradables. Esta actividad duró 15 minutos. En el GE.I se analizó también la red semántica de los nativos de la lengua inglesa y durante 5 minutos se hicieron comentarios sobre la organización estructural experta.
2.4. Procedimiento
Se utilizó un diseño Pretest-Posttest (Preprueba-Posprueba) con juicios de relación. En ambas fases se utilizó el mismo material, ya que como se ha comprobado no se produce un efecto de aprendizaje por la repetición de estas pruebas (Sánchez 2002). Para ello, se les dio a los sujetos una hoja de instrucciones. Dado que se pretendía obtener la relación entre los diferentes conceptos, los sujetos juzgaron la relación existente entre todas las parejas posibles formadas con cada uno de los 20 términos del campo semántico Look, Temperature y Weather. Es decir, valoraron para cada grupo léxico la relación entre 190 pares de palabras presentadas de modo aleatorio (20 palabras tomadas de dos en dos). Los sujetos debían indicar la relación existente entre los términos seleccionados utilizando un número del 1 al 9. El 1 indicaba poca relación y el 9 una relación estrecha entre los términos. La tarea tuvo una duración media de 10 minutos por grupo léxico y el orden de presentación se contrabalanceó. Se aplicó el algoritmo Pathfinder, para producir redes a partir de los datos de proximidad de los sujetos, con el parámetro q=n-1 (n=número de conceptos) y el parámetro r=infinito. De este modo, se generaban las redes menos densas, es decir, aquéllas con el menor número de enlaces. Para obtener la red ideal con la que comparar los datos de los estudiantes se hizo la matriz media del grupo experto. Después se comparó esta red ideal con cada una de las redes promediadas de los tres grupos de sujetos no nativos halladas por el Pathfinder con los juicios de relación de los sujetos, esto dio lugar a una comparación cualitativa entre grupos y fases. También se obtuvo el índice de similitud, es decir, el grado en que cada nodo en la red semántica está rodeado por un mismo conjunto de nodos, del grupo experto en relación con el de cada grupo de sujetos en sus distintas fases. Esto permitía comprobar cuantitativamente si Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 93 existían diferencias cuantitativas que explicaran la mayor o menor eficacia de los distintos tipos de instrucción.
3. Resultados
3.1. Análisis cualitativo
El análisis de las redes semánticas promediadas proporcionadas por el Pathfinder es esclarecedor pues permite ver los cambios producidos en la organización del material léxico utilizado antes y después de los diferentes tipos de docencia.
3.1.1. Campo semántico Look
En las redes semánticas de los estudiantes en la fase de Pretest con el grupo léxico Look se percibe una organización alejada de la del grupo experto. Ésta se manifiesta en el escaso número de enlaces que comparten, así la red experta, compuesta por 20 enlaces, comparte 6 enlaces con la del GE.I, 5 con la del GE.II y 4 con la del GC. to skim to scan to browse to peek to spy to peep to glance
to glimpse
to spot
to see
to watch to look to peer to squint
to gaze
to stare
to glare
to scowl
to lower to frown
Figura 1. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los nativos de la lengua inglesa hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. 94 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
to skim
to glimpse to scan
to spy to gaze
to squint to glance to look to stare
to watch to glare to see
to peer
to peek
to peep
to frown
to lower to browse
to scowl to spot
Figura 2. Red Pathfinder con los datos del GE.I (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
to browse
to scowl to glimpse
to frown to skim to gaze
to glance to squint
to stare to peep to scan
to spy to glare to watch to peek to look
to see to peer to lower
to spot
Figura 3. Red Pathfinder con los datos del GE.II (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 95
to peer
to glimpse
to gaze
to peek to glare to frown
to skim to peep to spy to scan to browse
to stare to squint to glance to see to spot to look to scowl to watch
to lower
Figura 4. Red Pathfinder con los datos del GC (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
to squint
to peer to peek
to peep to spy
to spot to glimpse
to glance
to skim
to browse to scan
to stare to frown to scowl
to glare
to lower
to gaze to look
to watch to see
Figura 5. Red Pathfinder con los datos del GE.I (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. 96 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
to peek
to peep
to frown
to squint to peer
to glance to skim
to spy to glimpse to gaze to glare
to scan to stare to spot
to scowl to watch
to see
to look to lower
to browse
Figura 6. Red Pathfinder con los datos del GE.II (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
to squint to skim to lower
to peek to glance to watch
to see to peer to spy to frown to scowl to look
to glimpse to spot to glare to gaze to scan
to browse
to stare
to peep
Figura 7. Red Pathfinder con los datos del GC (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 97
Al analizar estas redes se nota, en los enlaces directos compartidos con los de la red experta, que los únicos conceptos que inicialmente (fase Pretest) dominan los estudiantes son: to see, to look y to watch (en el GE.II sólo se dio la secuencia: to look – to watch). Además, en el GE.I y en el GE.II parece que conocen la conexión entre to frown - to scowl, to stare - to glare, to peek - to peep. Sin embargo, al no mantenerse todos los enlaces en la fase Posttest, se percibe una reestructuración debido a la instrucción. En la fase Posttest, las redes promediadas de los estudiantes de los grupos GE.I y GE.II tienen más enlaces en común con la de los nativos que en la fase anterior. La del GE.I comparte en la fase Posttest más enlaces que antes (pasa de 6 a 12), en la del GE.II hay 2 enlaces más que en la fase Pretest (7) y en la del GC han disminuido a 2 (2 menos). Se debe a que el GC no conoce bien ese campo semántico. Al no haber recibido instrucción y no conocer los términos, han realizado las valoraciones de forma aleatoria. Sin embargo, los dos grupos experimentales han mejorado con la docencia asemejándose más a los nativos. El GE.I, más próximo a los expertos, mantiene los enlaces de la fase Pretest añadiendo las nuevas conexiones fruto de la docencia. El GE.II también ha incrementado los enlaces comunes con los expertos. De los 7 enlaces comunes a la red experta 6 de ellos también están presentes en la red del GE.I en la fase Posttest. Esto puede deberse a que, aunque el GE. II no ha sido expuesto a la red experta, el tipo de ejercicios realizados también mejora la estructuración de los conceptos. Hay que mencionar el hecho de que entre la red de la fase Pretest y Posttest el GE.II sólo mantiene 1 enlace común. Esta variación se debe a la reestructuración del conocimiento ya que, al valorar términos que ahora sí tienen un significado, las relaciones se modifican. Además, el incremento en el número de enlaces apoya la existencia de un mayor conocimiento en esta segunda fase.
3.1.2. Campo semántico Temperature
Los distintos grupos en la fase Pretest se encuentran un poco más próximos a la estructura experta de lo que se mostraban en el campo léxico To look, ya que en este caso el GE.I comparte 7 enlaces, el GE.II 5 y el GC 7 de los 20 que consta la red experta.
scalding baking crisp lukewarm scorching burning warm hot sizzling cool mild blistering boiling chilly frosty
nippy cold freezing icy
frigid
Figura 8. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los nativos de la lengua inglesa hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. 98 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
mild
warm
lukewarm scorching
scalding
sizzling
hot burning
boiling
crisp baking
icy blistering cool freezing frigid cold
frosty nippy chilly
Figura 9. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.I (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
chilly lukewarm mild
warm crisp
frosty hot
frigid scorching baking burning cool freezing boiling icy sizzling nippy cold scalding
blistering
Figura 10. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.II (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 99
crisp sizzling
nippy
frosty
icy frigid cold freezing
cool
baking
mild warm lukewarm hot chilly scalding
burning
boiling blistering
scorching
Figura 11. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GC (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
Aunque están alejadas de la estructura experta, las redes de los estudiantes muestran relaciones idénticas a ésta, lo que hace suponer que son conceptos conocidos: warm- lukewarm, hot-burning y freezing-icy. En la fase Posttest se nota una pequeña mejoría en el GE.II, con 7 enlaces en común con la red experta (2 más que en la fase Pretest), produciéndose una reestructuración del conocimiento. El grupo GE.I mantiene el mismo número de enlaces pero, excepto para los términos warm – lukewarm, se ha producido una modificación en la organización del conocimiento. Lo mismo sucede en el grupo GE.II, que mantiene los enlaces de la Pretest: warm – lukewarm, scorching – sizzling. Por otro lado, el GC ha disminuido en 3 enlaces en la fase Posttest (ahora tiene 4 enlaces en común con la red experta). Esta variación se puede achacar a la variabilidad de los juicios ante elementos desconocidos, así aparece chilly (también en la fase Pretest) emparejado con los términos que denotan calor y sizzling con los que denotan frío. Sin embargo, se mantienen los enlaces de los términos que hemos concluido que sí conocen: warm – lukewarm, hot – burning y freezing – icy. 100 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
warm lukewarm mild
sizzling frosty
scalding baking freezing boiling burning scorching frigid crisp blistering icy hot chilly
cold nippy cool
Figura 12. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.I (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
blistering scorching
sizzling baking
mild boiling
burning hot lukewarm scalding warm freezing cool crisp
frigid icy cold frosty
chilly nippy
Figura 13. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.II (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 101
baking chilly scalding
hot lukewarm
burning cool warm
scorching boiling mild frosty cold
freezing crisp icy blistering
frigid
sizzling nippy
Figura 14. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GC (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
3.1.3. Campo semántico Weather
El mayor número de enlaces en común en la fase Pretest con el grupo experto (GE.I 8, GE.II 8 y GC 10) manifiesta un mayor dominio previo de este campo semántico.
breeze
wind
thunder hurricane lightning
sunshine storm hailstorm downpour sleet snowfall heat wave rainfall snowflake cloud shower
fog precipitation
drizzle mist
Figura 15. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos nativos de la lengua inglesa hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. 102 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
breeze
wind
sunshine hurricane
hailstorm
heat wave storm
thunder shower rainfall
lightning cloud precipitation sleet
snowfall downpour snowflake
mist drizzle
fog
Figura 16. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.I (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
sunshine
heat wave
breeze
wind hailstorm
hurricane sleet storm thunder shower lightning rainfall precipitation
cloud snowfall downpour snowflake fog drizzle mist
Figura 17. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.II (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 103
breeze sunshine
heat wave wind
hurricane sleet
storm hailstorm lightning thunder rainfall
precipitation shower
cloud
downpour
snowfall drizzle fog snowflake
mist
Figura 18. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GC (fase Pretest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
heat wave
sunshine
breeze
wind
hurricane
lightning thunder storm downpour sleet hailstorm precipitation
rainfall snowfall cloud shower snowflake
fog
drizzle mist
Figura 19. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.I (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. 104 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González
sunshine heat wave
breeze
wind
hurricane snowflake lightning snowfall
thunder storm hailstorm
precipitation shower
downpour sleet rainfall
cloud drizzle
fog mist
Figura 20. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GE.II (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito.
breeze
wind
hurricane
hailstorm lightning snowfall thunder storm snowflake rainfall shower
precipitation heat wave
cloud downpour sleet
drizzle fog
sunshine
mist
Figura 21. Red Pathfinder con los datos de los sujetos del GC (fase Posttest) hallada con los parámetros q=n-1, r=infinito. Instrucción léxica y aprendizaje 105
En las redes de los estudiantes aparecen enlaces comunes tanto en la fase Pretest como Posttest lo que hace suponer que conocen bien los conceptos involucrados. Así, se dan los enlaces: breeze – wind –hurricane, storm – hailstorm y sunshine – heatwave. Se produce una mejoría en la fase Posttest al incrementarse el número de enlaces (GE.I 10, GE.II 11). En el grupo GC, como se esperaba, se comprueba que no existe cambio numérico pero sí cambios estructurales. En los grupos experimentales hay cambios cuantitativos y, en contra de lo esperado, el GE.II ha avanzado más que el GE.I, pues ha conseguido un enlace más en común con los expertos. Dado que es una diferencia tan pequeña hay que pensar en una mejoría similar con los dos tipos de instrucción. Los datos obtenidos hacen pensar que la instrucción con la organización experta es más eficaz cuando el campo que se presenta es desconocido y de gran dificultad (ej. Look).
3.2. Análisis cuantitativo
Los índices de similitud (similitud entre dos redes en cuanto a los nodos que rodean a uno determinado), hallados sometiendo los juicios de relación al algoritmo Pathfinder, proporcionan información interesante que permite ir más allá del mero análisis cualitativo. Con ellos se detectó un parecido inicial (Pretest) entre los grupos de estudiantes en cada campo semántico y también una diferencia en la organización en los dos grupos experimentales en la fase Posttest. Ésta era más parecida a la del grupo experto, lo que lleva a pensar que los alumnos han estructurado sus conocimientos de una manera sólida. El análisis del número de enlaces que comparten y del número de enlaces totales que se observan en estas redes semánticas permite conocer en qué circunstancias se produce ventaja de un tipo de instrucción sobre el otro. Las cifras obtenidas (Tabla 1) son reveladoras al respecto. En la fase Pretest se observa el parecido numérico inicial entre las redes de los grupos de cada campo semántico y el aumento en la fase Posttest en los grupos experimentales, el cual varía dependiendo del tipo de instrucción practicada. Se puede afirmar que antes de la instrucción los grupos tienen un conocimiento similar en cada campo semántico ya que la diferencia numérica que se da entre ellos es pequeña (centésimas).
LOOK TEMPERATURE WEATHER Pretest 0,1818 0,2121 0,2667 G. Exp. I 0,1417 0,1429 0,2667 G. Exp. II. 0,1143 0,2188 0,3571 G. Control Posttest 0,4286 0,2188 0,3571 G. Exp. I 0,2188 0,2121 0,3929 G. Exp. II. 0,0476 0,1143 0,3448 G. Control
Tabla 1. Índice de similitud entre el grupo nativo y los distintos grupos en las distintas fases
Sin embargo, en la fase Posttest las cifras aumentan para todos los campos léxicos en los grupos experimentales. No sucede así con el GC. De hecho, en éste se observa, en 106 María Jesús Sánchez y Luisa María González consonancia con el análisis cualitativo, una ligera disminución con respecto a la fase inicial, para la cual no hay una explicación lógica. Las cifras de los grupos experimentales incrementan mínimamente, a excepción del GE.I en el campo léxico Look donde se obseva un aumento considerable (0,2468). Estos datos llevan a pensar que cuando los campos semánticos que se enseñan son sencillos y conocidos, caso de Weather y Temperature, no es tan necesario trabajar con la organización cognitiva. Sin embargo, ésta es extremadamente importante cuando el grupo léxico es desconocido y difícil de aprender debido al parecido que hay entre sus componentes (ej. Look).
4. Conclusiones
Se concluye que gracias a este tipo de instrucción los estudiantes consiguen una organización cognitiva más similar a la de los sujetos expertos. Se manifiesta una eficacia equivalente con los dos tipos de instrucción léxica impartida en esta investigación, la cual se percibe cualitativa y cuantitativamente con campos semánticos conocidos por los estudiantes (Temperature y Weather). Cuando el campo semántico es de gran dificultad (Look) la instrucción que se acompaña de la información gráfica experta es decisiva para el aprendizaje del mismo.
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Received 16 January 2006 Revised version received 3 May 2006
28.2 (December 2006): 109–122 ISSN 0210-6124
Arte y seudoarte: patrones de ironía en las novelas y guiones de Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Art and Pseudo-Art: Patterns of Irony in the Novels and Screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Marta Frago Universidad de Navarra [email protected]
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala uses irony in a good number of her novels and screenplays to evaluate, as a theme, the adulteration of art. Specifically, she turns to three different patterns of irony to articulate it. Each of these patterns is distinguished by the matter that it censures: the merchandizing of art, the idolatry which art may raise, and the corruption of art by the culture of entertainment. But all of these have elements in common. Jhabvala composes the patterns by establishing paradigmatic models of relationships between characters, which are also caricatured in various degrees. In order to understand how these structures are shaped and how they articulate the issue of art, I will develop and illustrate each of them in this article.
Key words: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, irony, film and literature, screenwriting, screen adaptations, literature and arts
Son varios los críticos que han encontrado en el arte y sus posibles manipulaciones uno de los temas más recurrentes de las novelas y filmografía de Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Shahane 1976; Gooneratne 1983; Long 1997, 2005). Esta preocupación de Jhabvala por la adulteración de lo artístico se hace especialmente clara en novelas como A Backward Place (1980) y The Nature of Passion (1986), y en las películas Shakespeare Wallah (1965), The Guru (1969), Bombay Talkie (Jhabvala and Ivory 1970), Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978), Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980), Madame Sousatzka (1989) y The Golden Bowl (2000).1 En la mayor parte de estas narraciones, Jhabvala incluye a personajes convencidos de un talento artístico o gusto estético del que carecen. Se trata de seudoartistas y falsos estetas que no sólo se engañan a sí mismos sino que habitualmente confunden a otros
1 A excepción de Madame Sousatzka (1989), todas estas películas han sido producidas por Merchant-Ivory Productions. James Ivory las ha dirigido y ha intervenido en la escritura del guión (coguionista) en los casos concretos de Shakespeare Wallah (1965), The Guru (1969), y Bombay Talkie (1970). Sobre Madame Sousatzka hay que decir que es el único guión que Jhabvala escribe fuera de la productora Merchant Ivory. Sin embargo, en esta película se repiten los rasgos estilístico-temáticos más característicos de Jhabvala. La dirigió John Schlesinger en 1989. 110 Marta Frago personajes tan ignorantes sobre el arte como ansiosos de tener alguna experiencia estética. En otras ocasiones los protagonistas están muy bien dotados, pero llegan a falsear el arte porque lo idolatran hasta el extremo. Jhabvala recurre a la ironía para provocar sobre estos personajes un efecto ambivalente: se ríe de ellos y nos hace participar de la mofa, pero al mismo tiempo los comprende y los trata con benevolencia (Sucher 1989: 7; Agarwal 1990: 21-24; Bailur 1992: 26). Precisamente alrededor de esta doble perspectiva suscita cierta reflexión sobre la belleza y el arte. De ahí el interés de profundizar en los mecanismos de ironía que Jhabvala aplica a este particular. Los críticos que han estudiado la obra de Jhabvala reconocen unánimemente que la ironía es una nota inherente a su estilo narrativo. Entre ellos, Raghavan (1984) y Gooneratne (1978) han analizado específicamente esta cuestión. Han descrito los recursos irónicos más utilizados por Jhabvala y han atendido a los efectos que provocan en sus novelas. Ninguno hace referencia, sin embargo, a las estructuras o patrones de ironía que la autora llega a formalizar. En relación con el arte, sostengo que Jhabvala establece hasta tres patrones de ironía, que se repiten casi idénticamente en diferentes narraciones. Por patrón de ironía entiendo aquí un esquema o estructura que implica a dos o más personajes (uno de los cuales es siempre el seudoartista, el falso esteta o el artista manipulador), y en el que hay que considerar tanto el tipo de relación que establecen entre ellos como los diversos rasgos de su conducta. Se trata, por tanto, de un modelo que al desplegarse en cada caso concreto puede incluir un conjunto de ironías situacionales, verbales o de conducta, pero que en sí mismo es ya un esquema irónico porque establece correspondencias espejo entre el personaje y su aproximación al arte, de un lado, y el personaje y su relación con otros personajes, de otro. En general, y como se verá, los tres patrones contienen elementos comunes y ciertos paralelismos. Todos ellos son cauce para un modo de ironía estable, en el sentido de que la autora deja en ellos huellas suficientes para que el lector pueda interpretar adecuadamente la intención que subyace (Booth 1986: 25-40). Por otro lado, los tres patrones contienen algún aspecto de denuncia.2 Recriminan, respectivamente, la comercialización del arte, la sublimación irracional de lo artístico y la devaluación del arte a través de la cultura del entretenimiento. A continuación desarrollaré cada uno de ellos con el propósito de identificar sus particularidades, describir su dinámica e ilustrarla con distintos ejemplos. Tras la exposición de los tres patrones de ironía destacaré algunas de las características que comparten. Me referiré concretamente a aquellas notas que contienen información más allá de su construcción y funcionamiento discursivos, convirtiéndose en cauce para expresar el lugar que ocupa la belleza y el arte en la obra de Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
2 Tal y como contempla la retórica clásica, toda ironía estable encierra en sí misma algún juicio, punto de vista o evaluación del ironista que la ha creado (Jankelevitch 1982: 59; Booth 1986: 73-78; Hutcheon 1995: 37-43). Arte y seudoarte 111
1. Primer patrón: sobre el arte y la mercadotecnia
Uno de los esquemas de ironía más recurrentes en la narrativa de Jhabvala se plantea a partir de la antítesis arte/dinero y se apoya en dos tipos de personajes: a) aquellos que trafican con obras de arte, compran, venden y coleccionan piezas para ellos o para museos, y b) aquellos que utilizan su talento artístico para obtener un claro beneficio económico. En ambos casos, el esquema de la ironía se fragua a base de correspondencias entre el comportamiento de estos personajes frente al arte y el tipo de relaciones afectivas que establecen con otros personajes. Jhabvala crea en estas correspondencias un efecto metonímico o efecto espejo. Así por ejemplo, es fácil que el personaje que comercia con objetos artísticos termine aplicando los mismos criterios utilitaristas a sus relaciones afectivas, corrompiendo en esencia el vínculo de amistad o de eros. Algo similar ocurre en los personajes que atesoran objetos artísticos sin otro propósito que el poseerlos. Estos personajes tienden a elegir cuidadosamente sus relaciones, guiándose por criterios formales y de mera atracción. Admiran a esos terceros personajes como a sus colecciones, pero no saben amarlos con desinterés ni asumir sus defectos. Podría decirse que estos coleccionistas también coleccionan personas. Por último, en el caso de los artistas que corrompen su talento por obtener ganancias, se los presenta incapaces de establecer cualquier relación humana que no tenga como propósito directo el acaudalar más dinero. Estos circuitos de ironía funcionan en distintas novelas y guiones cinematográficos, si bien en cada caso de forma particular. Los ejemplos más significativos son la novela The Nature of Passion (1956), el guión original Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978) y las adaptaciones de Quartet (1981), y The Golden Bowl (La copa dorada, 2000). En el guión de Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978) encontramos por primera vez el esquema de ironía sobre coleccionistas de arte. Esta película, realizada para la BBC, si bien recuerda el esquema del cuento de hadas, con moraleja y final feliz, es una historia para adultos con una temática seria y reminiscencias de la novela de Henry James The Aspern Papers (Long 1997: 92-93). La trama gira en torno al palacio de Jodpur, donde el Maharajá esconde unas miniaturas pictóricas muy codiciadas, que atraen la visita de dos coleccionistas extranjeros. Ambos se convierten en competidores en busca del mismo tesoro, y utilizan parecidas estratagemas para hacerse con las miniaturas. Por un lado, Lady Gee (una británica amante del arte que busca llevar esa colección a un museo de su país) planea una intriga en la que Lynn, su joven acompañante, deberá cortejar al Maharajá para obtener su favor. Por otro lado y con un propósito similar, el norteamericano Clark Haven, coleccionista privado, coqueteará con la hermana del Maharajá. Estas notas falsas en relaciones amorosas son el reflejo de otra perversión: la que radica en el afán de posesión y dinero con respecto al arte. No obstante, el tono cordial de la película suaviza este esquema irónico, que se mueve dentro de la comedia amable. En la adaptación de The Golden Bowl (2000), por el contrario, el patrón funciona en una historia más sutil y de mayor carga dramática. Como han apreciado diferentes críticos, este mismo patrón ya estaba implícito en la novela de Henry James. En ésta, el 112 Marta Frago personaje de Adam Verver (coleccionista de arte) se relaciona con la joven Charlotte Stant y el Príncipe Amerigo con el mismo pragmatismo con el que negocia la compra y venta de obras de arte (Bellringer 1988: 70-72; Holland 1987: 78). Concretamente, el matrimonio entre Adam Verver y Charlotte Stant se formaliza después de que Adam compre una hermosa pieza de arte acompañado de Charlotte. Se sugiere así que su matrimonio es una extensión vital de la transacción económico-artística que han llevado a cabo. De un lado, Charlotte es bella como una diosa; de otro, la unión con ella soluciona lo que inquieta de verdad a Adam: que su hija Maggie esté excesivamente preocupada de su viudedad (James 1963: 135-147). En la adaptación, Jhabvala no sólo recoge esta ironía de James sino que juega a partir de ella y la subraya en un ejercicio muy significativo. Mientras que en la novela el personaje de Adam Verver es una figura siempre refractada en la conciencia de otros personajes, en la película pasa a tener una presencia objetiva y de mayor peso. Se ha dicho incluso que la película puede resumirse narrativamente en la ejecución de un castigo por adulterio a manos de Adam Verver, tal y como sugieren simbólicamente las primeras imágenes en el prólogo, pertenecientes a un flashback, y las imágenes finales de American City, a modo de epílogo (Person 2002: 25-37). Independientemente de esta interpretación, sin duda Jhabvala aplica a este personaje las características del patrón irónico que estamos considerando. Por ejemplo, subraya en el guión la afición coleccionista de Adam y su afán por comprar todo lo bello que Europa pueda ofrecerle, conectando su modo de proceder en los negocios artísticos con su conducta como padre y como esposo. Como indica Stewart, Adam Verver se convierte en “el hombre que puede comprar personas” (2002: 4); él es quien obtiene para su hija un buen partido: Amerigo, un aristócrata arruinado que necesita de su dinero para sobrevivir sin trabajar. Así, antes de que acontezca la boda, Jhabvala introduce una escena en la que, mientras Adam examina un medallón renacentista, Maggie confiesa a Amerigo: “Well, thank heavens that in this generation it was you… Because –Shall I tell him? It’s what made Father and me first fall in love with you –yes, yes, yes, your name!” (2000: 5). Parecida conexión se repite en el caso del compromiso y matrimonio de Adam con Charlotte Stant. La primera atracción hacia ella surge cuando un tercer personaje (Fanny Assingham) le hace ver que Charlotte “is a very grown-up woman… And a beauty –but one hardly needs to point out beauty to a great collector” (2000: 20). El compromiso llega, por otro lado, cuando comprueba que Charlotte entiende de arte, se interesa por sus colecciones y participa en una operación de compra de antigüedades persas (2000: 23-24 y 26). Con esta secuencia de acontecimientos se está sugiriendo que Charlotte interesa a Adam porque puede serle útil. Una vez casados, dos escenas confirman la obsesión de Adam Verver por la belleza de Charlotte. En la primera de ellas, Charlotte le anuncia que, según el dictamen médico, nunca podrá darle hijos. Adam la tranquiliza: “Perhaps it’s for the best… Childbirth does change a woman’s body… her beautiful body…” (2000: 38). Y en la escena que precede al regreso del matrimonio a American City, Adam comenta a su esposa que los habitantes de aquella ciudad se admirarán: “When they see my treasure, all my plunder, unpacked and displayed, they’ll learn to like it, all right… and when they see you, my dear, won’t they just sit up and take notice!” (2000: 117). Si de la caracterización de Adam Verver depende buena parte de las ironías que contiene la película y es el personaje en el que mejor puede identificarse el esquema Arte y seudoarte 113 irónico acerca del arte y el comercio, los efectos no son tan sobresalientes en la adaptación de Quartet (1981). En este caso, Jhabvala introduce pequeñas alteraciones sobre la novela de Jean Rhys que permiten que el patrón funcione. Concretamente, cambia la profesión de Mr. Heidler de escritor a intermediario en la compra-venta de obras artísticas en el Montparnasse parisino de entreguerras (Long: 2005: 256). Con esta modificación sobre la novela, Jhabvala vincula el oficio de este personaje con su comportamiento moral, pues al tiempo que Heidler ofrece mecenazgo artístico a la joven y desorientada Marya, también aprovecha su situación de superioridad para hacerla víctima de sus vicios personales. En esta ocasión, la clave trágica del relato crea una de las ironías más negras de la narrativa jhabvaliana. Hay que señalar que de este patrón surgen otros usos irónicos puntuales, a través de los que Jhabvala denuncia indirectamente ciertos comportamientos. Un ejemplo lo encontramos en The Remains of the Day (Lo que queda del día, 1993). En esta película la conexión entre tráfico de arte y comportamiento corrupto aparece amalgamada en una breve escena, de fuerte carga simbólica, dentro de una trama secundaria: aquella que relaciona a Lord Darlington (a quien sirve el mayordomo Stevens) con la presión nazi sobre Inglaterra en los preludios de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Se trata de una escena de nueva creación y, por tanto, sin apoyo alguno en la novela de Kazuo Ishiguro. Stevens recibe en el vestíbulo de la mansión a los habituales amigos y contertulios de Lord Darlington, un grupo de políticos y diplomáticos que discuten sobre el futuro de Inglaterra. De entre ellos, varios alemanes anotan cada uno de los cuadros de valor que penden de las paredes de la mansión. Se adivina en esta imagen una ironía sobre el expolio futuro de la casa y, más allá de ella, un posible expolio de toda Inglaterra a manos del III Reich. La escena, además, actúa como imagen de la clara manipulación a la que se ven sometidos Lord Darlington e indirectamente su mayordomo. Queda todavía por señalar algún ejemplo de esquema irónico que contenga a personajes capaces de pervertir su talento artístico a causa del dinero. El más evidente lo encontramos en The Nature of Passion (1986). Como indica Gooneratne, en esta novela el afán de prosperidad económica que se genera en los sectores más favorecidos de la India recién independizada se extiende a muchas esferas, entre ellas la del arte y la cultura (1983: 72). El uso irónico funciona en los personajes secundarios de Bawha y Zahir-ud-din. Son dramaturgo y músico respectivamente, cuyo afán por llevar una vida acomodada les ha acercado al espectáculo popular y fácil. Son personajes satirizados, a los que la autora presenta no como artistas sino como seudoartistas, tal y como puede verse en la descripción de Zahir-ud-din:
He wanted money very badly. It was true that he wanted to be a famous artist, but above all he wanted to be a rich one. This was understandable; for though he was young and gay and spent a lot of money in expensive restaurants, he had sitting at home, never seen and never heard of, a wife and three small children. (1986: 33)
Estos personajes sólo funcionan dentro de la trama como contrapeso de una figura más central: el adolescente Viddi. Tanto Bahwa como Zahir-ud-din, aunque se comportan como amigos de Viddi, en realidad se aprovechan de su ingenuidad e idealismo para tratar de hacer negocios con su padre. Éste, como empresario, podrá comprar cuadros, subvencionar espectáculos o incluso convertirse en su mecenas 114 Marta Frago
(Jhabvala 1986: 32, 57-63). Este modo de pervertir su amistad con Viddi aparece como un reflejo o extensión de la conducta de estos personajes hacia el arte mismo. El efecto cómico que produce esta concordancia se vuelve, en este caso, muy explícito, puesto que ambos personajes, en su función de secundarios, están también visiblemente caricaturizados:
Viddi was flattered that they regarded themselves as his friends; but he said: ‘If I went into business, you would not want to be my friends any more.’ When the other two made no comment, he added: ‘And your friendship is worth more to me than any money my father could give me.’
At this they gave him up. Zahir-ud-din said sadly: ‘At least, ask your father if he would not like his portrait painted. Tell him I will give him a beautiful picture of which he will be proud.’ (34)
2. Segundo patrón: sobre la idolatría hacia el arte
Otro modelo de ironía que alberga la narrativa de Jhabvala atañe a personajes que, lejos de pervertir el arte con dinero, lo subliman hasta convertirse en excesivamente celosos. Se trata de artistas a menudo célibes, pues se han entregado a la actividad artística con tal sumisión que han renunciado a desarrollar una esfera personal. Para establecer la ironía, Jhabvala conecta estos personajes con jóvenes discípulos a quienes tratan de enseñar su ascética, sin grandes resultados a la larga. El camino que imponen a estos jóvenes se convierte en el espejo en el que ver los aspectos más contradictorios de su propia renuncia. Por otro lado, Jhabvala hace consciente al lector de las hipocresías que rodean a estos personajes, dejando entrever las notas falsas en su aparente sumisión al arte. Este patrón se encuentra, de forma parcial o completa, en varios guiones distanciados en el tiempo: The Guru (El gurú, 1969), Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980), y la adaptación de Madame Sousatzka (1989). En The Guru (1969) encontramos el primer dúo artista/discípulo. Ustad Zafar Khan, un reconocido músico de la India, toma como discípulo al británico Tom Pickle, una estrella del pop que se desplaza hasta Bombay para aprender a tocar el sitar. Khan ejerce realmente de maestro y gurú, y no está dispuesto a enseñar una técnica sino un programa de espiritualidad que es la base de la interpretación de este instrumento. A primera vista, la superficialidad y afán de protagonismo de Pickle contrasta con la mesura y discreción de Khan. Sin embargo, y como señala Long (1997: 59), Jhabvala se encarga de mostrar que este segundo personaje no está realmente ajeno a la vanidad mundana. Así, mientras amonesta a Tom por vivir de cara a la galería y estropear las cualidades que ha de poseer un verdadero músico, le reprocha: “When I first heard you were coming, I was proud. The famous idol of the West! It was a triumph for me (…) but when you came, then I wasn’t proud. I was humble” (Jhabvala 1969: 42). Y de forma similar, Khan envidia un tour de conciertos de Tom que le ha preparado su manager o los autógrafos que le piden sus seguidores, pero no deja de reprochárselo a su discípulo. Este tipo de ironías se multiplican a lo largo del filme y hacen de Khan el Arte y seudoarte 115 personaje más contradictorio, aquél sobre el que gira realmente la película (Long 1997: 59). Los artistas célibes que aparecen en Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980) y Madame Sousatzka (1989) también son personajes paradójicos y, en último término, tristes y solitarios. Son Pierre e Irina Sousatzka, respectivamente, y están caracterizados de forma muy similar. Ambos defienden el postulado de una vida para el arte y se han impuesto a sí mismos duras cargas para llevarlo a la práctica. En ambos casos, y casi en una actitud de despecho, tratan de obligar a otros a asumir las mismas exigencias. El carismático y autoritario Pierre, en Jane Austen in Manhattan, dirige una compañía de teatro avant-garde. En su afán de conseguir los derechos de representación de una obra teatral atribuida a la novelista Jane Austen, reclama todo el esfuerzo de su compañía. Concretamente, a la joven Ariadne le aconseja que deshaga su reciente matrimonio con Víctor como requisito para seguir en la compañía y prosperar profesionalmente. Este afán de dominar y poseer el talento artístico de otras personas se vislumbra en la película como el resultado de una obsesión desmedida por el arte. Esta impresión se repite en Madame Sousatzka, donde Irina, una concertista y profesora de piano a la antigua usanza, reclama de sus pupilos una dedicación exclusiva que implica un modo de entender la vida y vivirla. Manek, un joven de gran talento, es presionado por Sousatzka para que lleve una vida casi monacal en favor de la música. Muchas de las ironías que aparecen en ambas películas surgen del contraste entre lo que predican estos maestros a sus pupilos y el resultado que, como espectadores, vemos reflejado en su conducta. Ni Pierre ni Irina son personajes atractivos, pues no han llegado a una plenitud de vida. El rigor de Pierre y la soledad de Irina son el irónico espejo de un programa vital fallido. Así se sugiere, por ejemplo, en una de las descripciones sobre Sousatzka que Jhabvala introduce en el guión:
Sousatzka goes to the piano and looks at the keyboard. In a series of short, sharp cuts taken at different and extreme angles, it looks like teeth that might bite her. Sousatzka stares at the keyboard motionless, and then at piles of music on the top of the piano … In the distance, she looks a forlorn and lonely figure. (1989: 49-50)
Por otro lado, las paradójicas situaciones a las que se enfrentan los jóvenes alumnos son otra fuente de ironías. El ensimismamiento de Ariadne hacia Pierre, en Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980), obliga a su marido, en una situación ridícula, a pedir ayuda para que ésta regrese a casa. Y en Madame Sousatzka (1989), Manek se ve enfrentado casi de continuo al programa al que le alienta su profesora. Cuando ella le habla sobre las cualidades de la música clásica, él se siente atraído por una cantante de pop sin futuro. Y cuando ella le enseña que su porte y sus maneras han de ser clásicas porque “everything is one. The way we dress, the way we speak, the way we play” (1989: 21), Manek no es capaz de renunciar a utilizar sus patines y su walkman. A través de estos detalles, más cotidianos que excepcionales, Jhabvala subvierte el ideal de una vida para el arte, y sugiere que en esas renuncias descansa la incorrección del planteamiento. La abnegación de los discípulos conecta irónicamente con la postura que adoptaron sus profesores en el pasado, que se revela tan baldía como sus vidas entregadas al arte. 116 Marta Frago
3. Tercer patrón: sobre el arte y la cultura del entretenimiento
Si los patrones de ironía considerados hasta ahora giran en torno a alguna perversión del arte, este tercero indaga en la confusión de lo artístico con otros sucedáneos. Los personajes a los que implica este esquema no son ya inteligentes manipuladores (como Adam Verver, Pierre o Mr. Heidler) sino que son, por un lado, seudoartistas arrogantes, y por otro, jóvenes ingenuos. Precisamente porque estos personajes se nos presentan como inferiores, el patrón adquiere un tono cómico y satirizado en torno a ellos y al mundo del cine comercial y del espectáculo popular que representan. Son varias las novelas y películas de Jhabvala que se atienen a un esquema similar para establecer la ironía en este sentido. Las novelas To Whom She Will (1955), The Nature of Passion, y A Backward Place (1965), y las películas Shakespeare Wallah (1965) y Madame Sousatzka (1989) relacionan a un personaje joven, idealista en extremo, con algún actor, actriz, o profesional del mundo del entretenimiento. La relación se sustenta sobre la admiración de los primeros hacia los segundos. Los jóvenes creen encontrarse ante artistas, se dejan deslumbrar por su palabrería y quieren emular su estilo de vida. Pero el modo caricaturesco con el que Jhabvala dibuja a estos seudoartistas provoca un buen número de situaciones cómicas que, a la postre, hacen evidente la irrealidad en la que se mueve el personaje joven. Además, en la ridiculización de estos caracteres se percibe la aguda crítica de la autora hacia la sublimación de la cultura popular. Hay que señalar que esta relación entre el seudoartista y el joven tiende a establecerse como trama secundaria dentro de la historia. Ahora bien, el personaje joven implicado en este esquema siempre se relaciona con un tercero, que sí es protagonista dentro del relato. Este personaje es también joven, habitualmente una mujer (novia o esposa) en proceso de maduración. Le caracterizan un mayor sentido común y una visión menos idealizada. En dos primeras novelas que Jhabvala ambienta en Nueva Delhi, encontramos esta relación de personajes jóvenes y seudoartistas. En To Whom She Will (1985), el joven Hari disfruta con la compañía de Vaidya, un compañero de la emisora de radio en que trabaja. Vaidya, si bien no trabaja directamente en el mundo del cine o del espectáculo, hace alarde de un bagaje cultural que sólo ha extraído de las películas y los medios de comunicación. La ironía se establece a través del respeto que su verborrea despierta en Hari, y mediante la reacción de Amrita, novia de éste. A diferencia de Hari, ella percibe la escasa educación de Vaidya y siente un rechazo instintivo hacia sus modales. Así, por ejemplo, estando los tres personajes en el restaurante The Cavalier, y ante una actuación musical de escaso nivel, se establece la primera de estas correspondencias:
The band stopped playing again and Vaidya, tipping his chair backwards, applauded loudly and cried, ‘Encore!’ Everybody now looked at their table. Amrita whispered, ‘Let us go home, please, Hari.’ But he did not hear her; he was intent on admiring Vaidya.
‘What are you shouting?’he asked him, and Vaidya replied: ‘Encore. It is French. It means once more. Encore!’ he shouted. ‘Encore!’ (Jhabvala 1985: 44-45) Arte y seudoarte 117
En The Nature of Passion (1986) encontramos un esquema parecido. El joven Viddi se siente atraído por un grupo de amigos de la nueva ola cultural india: el dramaturgo Bahwa y el pintor Zahir-ud-din. Aunque son personajes astutos y están viciados por una excesiva atracción hacia el dinero (de ahí que se hayan insertado en un patrón anterior), tienen mucho en común con Vaidya y otros seudoartistas de la narrativa jhabvaliana. Están caricaturizados en exceso, son arrogantes y pretenciosos, y alardean de un gusto que resulta extremadamente sentimental, como puede advertirse en el siguiente fragmento:
‘I have wonderful ideas for film decor,’ Zahir-ud-din said. ‘Listen, how do you like this? The heroine sings; she is sitting on a little golden chair by the side of a lake. It is night and there is a moon and everything is silver. In the middle of the lake is a lotus; as the heroine sings the lotus spreads and grows and grows and as it spreads and grows, slowly there come out of the petals beautiful girls wearing only gauze scarves, and all these beautiful girls will dance. The lotus will grow so high that it is level with the moon and the girls will dance against the moon. Then as the heroine ends her song, the lotus will get smaller again and fold up and all the girls will disappear within it, and then there is a silence again and the lake is very still, with the lotus floating on it and the reflection of the moon. Is not beautiful?’ ‘First class,’ said Bahwa. ‘I have a lyric all ready, which will suit this theme very well.’ (1986: 61)
La confusión estética que estos personajes provocan en Viddi es similar a la que Vaidya suscita en Hari en To Whom She Will (1985). También Viddi se deja impresionar por sus conversaciones y anhela integrarse en su círculo ‘artístico’:
Viddi was left thinking about what were the things he wanted . . . Perhaps also he would go to a University and study some more. He would learn about modern art and literature, and then when he came back he would be able to speak about these things with authority, while he treated his companions to whisky and cigars. (31)
Precisamente esta conexión entre ingenuidad juvenil y tratamiento de la cultura popular como arte está en la base de diversas ironías que vuelven a repetirse en la novela A Backward Place (1980). Esta vez el personaje inmaduro está encarnado en Bal, un joven indio casado con una mujer europea, sin un trabajo estable que asegure el porvenir a su esposa y dos hijos de corta edad. El espejo en el que el lector ve dibujados los extremos a los que puede llegar con su idealismo se encuentra, otra vez, en una figura parodiada, Kisham Kumar, un popular actor de cine de la industria de Bombay, a quien la voz narrativa introduce en los siguientes términos:
He was taller than any of them, handsomer, more charming, more expensively, more beautifully dressed. As a matter of fact, he was more so than anyone in the airport, and indeed more than anyone to be met with in this everyday world: and so he walked as king, knowing he was splendid yet carrying it off with ease and grace. He chatted and laughed with his friends, a trifle too loudly and to all appearances so much engrossed that he was totally unaware of all the looks he drew. When he was asked -as he soon was, by porters, drivers and college boys- for his autograph, he gave it with a kind of professional humility 118 Marta Frago
which was rather at odds with the huge portentous squiggle in which he wrote his name on the proffered scraps of paper. (1980: 76)
Como ha indicado Gooneratne, este personaje, además de traer implícita la actitud crítica de Jhabvala hacia el mundo cinematográfico de Bombay y el lugar que ocupa en la era poscolonial india, resulta ser una imagen amplificada de la vulnerabilidad de Bal (1983: 172-173). Si Bal es idealista, Kisham Kumar vive ya en un mundo irreal, que no le permite reconocerse a sí mismo con defectos. Por ello, la admiración que Kisham Kumar suscita en el joven protagonista provoca una mezcla de hilaridad y compasión en el lector. El deseo de Bal de seguirle hasta Bombay y encontrar de su mano un trabajo como actor que lo ubique personal, profesional y económicamente, da la pauta del grado de ingenuidad que padece y la ruina a la que esta decisión final le puede conducir. El contrapunto a la relación entre Bal y Kisham Kumar está en el personaje de Judi, esposa de Bal, que trata de persuadirle desde el sentido común, sin demasiado éxito. La escasa atención que Bal presta a su esposa, en contraste con su actitud hacia Kisham Kumar, hace crecer la ironía sobre este personaje. Pero también esta ironía termina proyectándose en Judi. Ella es un personaje central en la novela y describe un viaje interior hacia la renuncia de sus raíces europeas y la aceptación abnegada de la cultura india. En su decisión última de seguir a su marido e instalarse en Bombay para que Bal encuentre su oportunidad en el mundo del espectáculo, planea un fatal presagio. Y esa posible tragedia puede leerse como irónica, en cuanto que castiga en lugar de premiar la actitud abnegada de Judi. En estos ejemplos puede verse que el patrón de ironía aquí descrito se fragua en las primeras novelas indias de Jhabvala. También pueden encontrarse secuelas del mismo en algunos guiones cinematográficos cercanos en el tiempo, como Shakespeare Wallah (1965) y Bombay Talkie (1970), y en otros posteriores, como es el caso de Madame Sousatzka (1989). En Shakespeare Wallah este patrón de ironía funciona en los personajes de Sanju y Manjula. Esta última, actriz de cine, vuelve a constituir una parodia del seudoartista y una crítica a la industria cinematográfica de Bombay. Sanju, en cambio, es la imagen del joven idealista que todavía no ha madurado e idolatra a Manjula. Como ya ocurriera en las novelas de A Backward Place (1980) y To Whom She Will (1985), un tercer personaje vinculado afectivamente con el joven ingenuo hace de contrapunto realista, y potencia por contraste el idealismo de éste. Aquí es Lizzie Buckingham, novia de Sanju, que experimenta durante la trama un proceso de maduración que le lleva a alejarse de Sanju, al igual que ocurriera con Amrita, novia de Hari, en To Whom She Will. Bombay Talkie (1970) recoge también los dos personajes tipificados que se vienen refiriendo: el del arrogante y superficial seudoartista, en este caso encarnado en Lucia Lane, una escritora norteamericana de novelas baratas y de gran tirada, que visita Bombay; y el del joven idealista, que en esta ocasión se llama Vickram, un actor joven que se ha convertido demasiado rápido en estrella del cine. No obstante, el esquema irónico en esta película se desarrolla de modo particular, pues Vickram, inmerso en la superficialidad de Bollywood, ha perdido la ingenuidad de otros jóvenes jhabvalianos. Está más caricaturizado y contiene algunos rasgos típicos del seudoartista, si bien no llega al grado de corrupción que alcanza el personaje de Lucia Lane. Es menos Arte y seudoarte 119 experimentado y todavía mantiene el idealismo de la juventud. No es extraño que Jhabvala genere a través de la relación entre estos dos personajes una historia trágica que, según sus propias palabras, “conecta el mundo superficial y hueco del cine indio con la imaginación basura occidental” (Pym: 1983: 46). Vickram se deja envolver por la atracción que experimenta hacia Lucia y se sumerge en una relación superficial, muy satirizada por Jhabvala a través de ironías verbales y de situación. Paralelamente, otros personajes, como la mujer de Vickram y otro admirador de Lucia, ven heridos sus sentimientos y provocan el estallido de la tragedia final: un enfrentamiento pasional que se salda con la muerte de Vickram. Esta catástrofe choca brutalmente con la frivolidad precedente y provoca una ironía de conjunto, que contiene una fuerte denuncia. Por último, y retornando a la película de Madame Sousatzka (1989), pueden verse reminiscencias de este patrón irónico en la atracción y admiración de Manek, el jovencísimo alumno de piano, hacia Jennie, una simple aspirante a cantante pop, que paga los servicios de un agente artístico. Esta relación, en contraste con la que mantiene Manek con su exigente profesora de piano, produce un buen número de situaciones cómicas en torno a la cultura del entretenimiento. Estas culminan en una escena final en la que Manek, tras abandonar las clases con Sousatzka, asiste a su primera cita con un nuevo profesor de piano que le ha proporcionado Ronnie, el agente artístico de Jennie. Durante la clase, el pianista aconseja a su pupilo: “The audience, whoever they are, is still the King and the performer is there to please. That’s all. To please the King” (1989: 112). Y estas palabras, en contraste con las habituales que le dirigía Irina Sousatzka, abren al espectador la puerta a una ironía que apunta hacia la totalidad de la historia.
4. Hacia una reflexión sobre el arte
Hasta aquí he expuesto los tres patrones de ironía que Jhabvala configura repetidamente y a través de los cuales expresa su preocupación por el arte y la belleza. En todos ellos la intención que subyace a la ironía es tanto correctiva (denuncia ciertos vicios), como apelativa (la ironía apunta más allá de la historia y llama la atención sobre notas de la sociedad y de la misma naturaleza humana). No es mi intención desarrollar ampliamente este particular, lo cual excedería los límites de esta investigación. No obstante, anotaré algunas observaciones que pueden inferirse de los mismos patrones, especialmente de sus notas comunes, y que apuntan en esta dirección. La principal coincidencia entre los patrones es que, en todos los casos, la adulteración de lo artístico se subraya a través de conductas universalmente reprobables en cuanto que desvirtúan en esencia el amor o la amistad. Esta corrupción de las relaciones humanas se convierte en el espejo indirecto en el que mirar y juzgar la conducta que, con respecto al arte, mantienen los personajes. En este sentido, son una marca clara a través de la que interpretar estos patrones irónicos en términos de denuncia. Jhabvala, sin duda, censura en estas obras la subversión de lo artístico por criterios pragmáticos, utilitarios y egoístas, así como por una idolatría obsesiva que desfigura el papel del arte en la vida humana. Hay que decir que subrayar lo incorrecto a través de construcciones irónicas implica, al menos, un deseo de lo correcto, esto es, de un arte y belleza puros, no 120 Marta Frago contaminados ni contaminantes. El significado positivo del arte no aparece de forma explícita en la narrativa jhabvaliana: sólo se puede inferir a partir del negativo de la ironía, invirtiendo los patrones señalados. Jhabvala es consciente de las limitaciones e imperfecciones humanas. Como apunta Bawer (1987: 7), en sus obras no hay personajes centrales buenos o malos, ni del todo espirituales ni del todo materialistas. El arte, al igual que el amor y la religión, se hace expresión de la búsqueda de trascendencia por parte de estos personajes, pero una búsqueda que habitualmente resulta infructuosa y contradictoria. En este sentido, es revelador el tipo de personajes que participan en todos los patrones de ironía que he desarrollado y que constituye otra nota común a ellos. Se trata de dos modelos de personaje que funcionan además en otros contextos de la narrativa de Jhabvala. Por un lado, y como hemos visto, adquieren importancia los personajes manipuladores, aquellos seudoartistas que tergiversan tanto el arte como las relaciones humanas (Bahwa, Zahir-ud-din, Kisham Kumar, Adam Verver, Mr. Heidler, Pierre, Irina Sousatzka). Éstos pueden ser manipuladores conscientes o inconscientes, estar más o menos caricaturizados, pero todos ellos actúan de obstáculo y confunden al segundo arquetipo: el personaje desorientado o buscador. Este es, en realidad, víctima de la ironía y generalmente el personaje que Jhabvala dibuja con un mayor esmero. Es el joven idealista con una personalidad por terminar de definir (Viddi, Hari, Bal, Vickram, Lizzie, Manek, Ariadne), o el adulto desarraigado que busca alguna salida a su crisis de identidad (Charlotte Stant, Marya). El hecho de que este personaje buscador sea manipulado y confundido con respecto al arte es la expresión de una ironía existencial o metafísica que algunos autores han reconocido como una marca característica del universo jhabvaliano. Radica ésta en la contradicción que experimenta el ser humano, siempre aspirando a lo infinito y siempre encontrándose abocado a la imperfección (Bawer 1987: 7). Tal contradicción levanta a menudo un fuerte sentimiento de nostalgia y anhelo en los relatos de Jhabvala, de la mano de estos personajes desorientados (Crane 1992: 67; Gooneratne 1978: 45; Sucher 1989: 10).3 Buscan, a través del arte, un escenario para su felicidad, pero la tergiversación artística con la que se topan, y que no saben advertir, augura casi siempre su desdicha. En definitiva, los patrones de ironía aquí estudiados también son un vehículo retórico que permite expresar ese contrasentido existencial que preocupa a la autora. En todos ellos, los personajes manipuladores provocan ironías, a menudo satíricas, y en relación a ellos se puede escuchar la voz de la censura. Pero, al mismo tiempo, la suerte que corren los personajes desorientados es el contrapeso a la denuncia. Se convierten éstos en el cauce de una ironía metafísica, que apunta al drama existencial que percibe la autora y sobre el que se pregunta y nos pregunta, sin incluir una respuesta.
3 Un recurso irónico puntual muy utilizado por Jhabvala, incluso fuera de los patrones estudiados, consiste en relacionar el gusto estético de un personaje con el grado de desorientación en el que está inmerso. El mal gusto se convierte con frecuencia en el espejo de su fractura interior o crisis de identidad. Así ocurre en el personaje de Jenny (en The Guru, 1969); en el mayordomo Stevens (The Remains of the Day, 1993); en India Bridge (Mr. And Mrs. Bridge, 1990), en Louise y Marieta (In Search of Love and Beauty, 1983); en Harriet Wishwell (Three Continents, 1987); o en Henry (Shards of Memory, 1995). Arte y seudoarte 121
Obras citadas
Agarwal, Ramlal G. 1990: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A Study of Her Fiction. Nueva Delhi: Sterling. Bailur, Jayanti 1992: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Fiction and Film. Nueva Delhi: Arnold. Bawer, Bruce 1987: ‘Passage to India: the Career of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’. The New Criterion 6: 5-19. Bellringer, Alan W. 1988: Henry James. Londres: McMillan. Booth, Wayne 1986 (1974): Retórica de la ironía. Trad. Jesús Fernández Zulaica y Aurelio Martínez Benito. Madrid: Taurus. Crane, Ralph J. 1992: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Nueva York: Twayne. Gooneratne, Yasmine 1978: ‘Irony as an Instrument of Social and Self-analysis in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust’. New Literature Review 4: 41-50. ———— 1983: Silence, Exile and Cunning. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Londres: Sangam. Holland, Laurence Bedwell 1987: ‘The Crisis of Transformation: The Golden Bowl’. Henry James. Ed. Harold Bloom. Nueva York: Chelsea. Hutcheon, Linda 1995: Irony’s Edge, the Theory and Politics of Irony. Londres: Routledge. James, Henry 1963 (1904): The Golden Bowl. Londres: Methuen. Jankelevitch, Wladimir 1982 (1964): La ironía. Trad. Ricardo Pochtar. Madrid: Taurus. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 1969: The Guru. Guión original no publicado. Londres: British Film Institute. Special Collections. ———— 1978: Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures. Guión original no publicado. Londres: British Film Institute. Special Collections. ———— 1980 (1965): A Backward Place. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 1980 (guionista): Jane Austen in Manhattan. U.S.: Merchant-Ivory Productions y Polytel. ———— 1981: Quartet. Guión adaptado no publicado. Londres: British Film Institute. Special Collections. ———— 1983: In Search of Love and Beauty. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———— 1985 (1955): To Whom She Will. Hardmondsworth: Penguin. ———— 1986 (1956): The Nature of Passion. Londres: Penguin. ———— 1987: Three Continents. Londres: John Murray. ———— 1990: Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Guión adaptado no publicado. Londres: British Film Institute. Special Collections. ———— 1993: The Remains of the Day. Guión adaptado no publicado. Londres: British Film Institute. Special Collections. ———— 1995: Shards of Memory. Londres: John Murray. ———— 2000: The Golden Bowl. Guión adaptado no publicado. Londres: British Film Institute. Special Collections. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer y James Ivory 1970: Bombay Talkie. Guión original no publicado. Londres: British Film Institute. Special Collections. ———— 1965 (filme), 1973 (publicación del guión): Shakespeare Wallah. A Film. Londres: Plexus. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer y John Schlesinger 1989: Madame Sousatzka. Guión adaptado no publicado. Londres: London: British Film Institute. Special Collections. Long, Robert Emmet 1997: The Films of Merchant Ivory. Nueva York: Citadel. ———— 2005: James Ivory in Conversation. Los Angeles: U of California P. Person, Leland S. 2002: ‘The Golden Film: Charlotte Stant and the Palace Guards’. The Henry James Review 23.1: 25-37. Pym, John 1983: The Wandering Company. Twenty-One Years of Merchant-Ivory Films. Londres: BFI. 122 Marta Frago
Raghavan, Ellen Weaver 1984: Irony in the Works of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Tesis doctoral no publicada. Houston: University of Houston, Department of English. Shahane, Vasant 1976: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Nueva Delhi: Arnold Heinemann. Stewart, Garret 2002: ‘Citizen Adam: The Latest James Ivory and the Last Henry James’. The Henry James Review 2: 1-24. Sucher, Laurie 1989: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Nueva York: St. Martin’s Press.
Received 18 February 2006 Revised version received 22 April 2006
INTERVIEW
ENTREVISTA
28.2 (December 2006): 125–132 ISSN 0210-6124
‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird
Gerardo Rodríguez Salas Universidad de Granada [email protected]
The contemporary Australian author Carmel Bird writes a fiction that blends real and surreal, mundane and macabre with inventive irony. In doing so, she reflects a perception of her birthplace (Tasmania) as a meaningfully multi-faceted island, whose picturesque surface masks deep secrets and is haunted by the ghosts of the indigenous peoples as well as those of the convicted criminals who were the first colonial inhabitants. With the themes of colonialism and genocide frequently infusing her fiction, Bird has edited a ground-breaking collection of the oral histories of Australian indigenous people who were forcibly removed from their land in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: The Stolen Children—Their Stories. It is perhaps this work that has brought Bird’s own stories, her fiction and essays alike, to a wide international attention. The motif of the dis-empowered is one of the key elements of all her work, colouring her response to the broader questions of life, love and justice. Her most recent novel Cape Grimm is currently listed for the Dublin IMPAC Award. Bird is one of Australia’s most active and visible writers. Her fiction, while being highly individual and varied, sits within the Australian traditions of both Peter Carey’s fabulism and Thea Astley’s humane wit. The work has been compared with that of Angela Carter and Jeannette Winterson, and yet there is a rogue quality about it that brings it into the realm of Kurt Vonnegut and even García Márquez. This is a rare and heady mix that leaps categories and bears very close attention. It is work that attracts the imagination of film-makers, several of the short stories being currently in production. The story ‘A Telephone Call for Genevieve Snow’ was adapted for film in 2001 and won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival. She has published five collections of short stories: Births, Deaths and Marriages (1983), The Woodpecker Toy Fact (1987), Woodpecker Point (1988), The Common Rat (1993), and Automatic Teller (1996), followed by a recent collection of her best stories in 2005 under the title The Essential Bird. Among her novels, the most distinguished work is her Mandala Trilogy, which Bird is planning to convert into a quartet with the novel she is currently working on and whose title will be Green Language. The trilogy so far is made up of The White Garden (1995), Red Shoes (1998), and Cape Grimm (2004). Although freely bound up together, the pieces of this trilogy are connected by the concept of a charisma that, when combined with evil, can cause extreme damage such as mass murder. Bird speaks of ‘The Halo Effect’ that charismatic people exert on average human beings by radiating a mysterious aura and power that are finally translated into blind obedience. Bird fictionalises an unfortunately frequent reality, since, like Ambrose Goddard, Petra Penfold-Knight and Caleb Mean—the protagonists 126 Gerardo Rodríguez of the three novels—charismatic leaders keep proving to be quite a powerful weapon of mass destruction. As Wilde et al. (1994: 94) state, Bird is “a witty writer with a wide but always highly original tonal range”, who “raises what is often potentially sinister or horrific to something approaching comedy. Disease, deaths and violence are staples in her fictional world, which has similarities with Barbara Hanrahan’s Gothic sensuality and feminist irony, although Bird’s deadpan humour is a distinctive, determining element”. The interview that follows is the result of two meetings (Granada, December 2001 and Sydney, July 2002) and further contact through e-mail, phone and letter. I have concentrated principally on discussions of the genesis and inspiration of Bird’s work and on her reflections regarding these central issues.
You have specified elsewhere (Walker 2004b:281) that the concept of charisma is the leitmotif of your Mandala Trilogy (The White Garden, Red Shoes and Cape Grimm). Actually, you describe the protagonist in Red Shoes, Petra Penfold-Knight as having a ‘Halo Effect’. In which way are the three main characters in this trilogy (i.e. Ambrose Goddard, Petra Penfold-Knight and Caleb Mean) charismatic? And then, would you say that Ambrose, for example, is as charismatic as Petra? Is there any difference in the halo effect of these powerfully attractive people?
I was only looking for a trinity (man, woman and child) where each character would be charismatic and evil, but different according to age and gender. Petra was, in fact, the only one I imagined entering a roomful of children and having the other infants drawn to her as moths to a candle flame. In that image there is the notion of the danger that the halo person is to others. I toy with the idea of having a character somewhere (perhaps in The Green Language), who is charismatic and good, probably someone like Mother Teresa or St Teresa. Goodness is harder to deal with than evil, because part of goodness tends to be humility. It would be interesting to put Petra, Ambrose and Caleb on a stage together and see who shines the brightest. Actors and singers have charisma to begin with, and this is bolstered by PR and lights and costumes, as indeed it is for Petra and the other charismatic leaders in the trilogy, and perhaps because actors and other famous people offer their art, they have a goodness and purity that was not available to Petra and the rest of the team.
As Shirley Walker has already acknowledged, “Caleb is the most unearthly and inhuman of Bird’s charismatic figures” (2004a: 273) and, indeed, after reading the Mandala Trilogy, one gets the impression that he is the creepiest of the three protagonists: Goddard becomes aware that he is a fake and commits suicide when this is acknowledged by society; Petra is also aware of her falsity after murdering Celeste, but she kills herself choosing to remain an immortal myth to her community’s eyes; Caleb seems to believe in his supernatural power until the very end and his death is not even clear. And yet it is as if, behind the fakeness of these figures, there is some truth to their supernatural power, like Petra’s ability to see her guardian angel or Caleb’s fatalistic signs—the plane that kills a mother and her daughter in his presence, Marina Galaxy’s accident while listening to his preaching, and his grandmother’s vision the day of his birth.
‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird 127
I sometimes think that the three of them lack a kind of skin that most humans have, a membrane that shuts the world of the supernatural off from more regular people. You could call it a gift—the skin-lessness—or a curse. The three have access to some power or at least to some ability or way of knowing.
The three charismatic figures in The Mandala Trilogy are terribly cold and wicked. Is there any of them that, despite this perverse nature, gains the reader’s sympathy?
Maybe it is worth considering the tragic events in the early lives of Petra and Caleb, as they both suffered from the circumstances and events at that time. Petra was the child of her sister and the priest (Somerset Jones), although she believed she had the same mother and father as her sister. She was then sexually abused by Somerset, who was Petra’s best friend’s father. That she possessed the halo effect is something unaccounted for. It is seen to be a gift, like amazing musical ability or mathematical intelligence. It is just a feature of the person, a legacy they are born with. It could be argued that since Petra was born with so many strikes against her, a benign creator gifted her with the beginnings of her charisma. She used that charisma to rise to power over others, to enslave them, to force them to fit into the image of reality that she had developed gradually with the input of such people as Meena and then all the men who fell for her. I do not suggest that readers should feel ‘sympathy’ for her actions; I only suggest that her character and personality developed from the confluence of her heritage and her nature and experience. I imagine that at some point she could have used her powers for good. So I am proposing understanding, not sympathy. Caleb was spoilt from birth: again his heritage told against him, being born into the community at Skye, and having the grandmother who saw the visions at his birth. He was doomed to be a little tyrant, although he could have chosen to be good. However, the easy path to power (or even, I suppose, the difficult one) can be like a drug: it went to his head as it did to Petra’s. He seems to have been insane. Ambrose is a bit different. He was a bright boy in a patriarchal society where he could fairly easily rise to power in his field, having images of himself as a great elephant. The point in his character that is sometimes sympathetic is his humour. He is sometimes funny—of course it is dark humour—and, although he is a vile criminal who dominates, rapes and murders, his take on things is sometimes quite funny. The humour in Red Shoes comes from Beau, the guardian angel, and his control of the narrative is in itself intended to be ironic and amusing. The mild humour in Cape Grimm comes from Paul’s lack of self-knowledge. He does not seem to be able to see that he is the other side of Caleb. He is un-ironic and thinks he is so smart and good.
The philosophy underlying your fiction, which you have explained on countless occasions with different words and similes, is the one that Celeste Penfold-Knight summarises in Red Shoes: “Mama tells us that beauty is like a water lily, like the lotus, for without the mud and slime and darkness beneath the surface of the water, it would not be possible for the lilies to rise up and break into all the luminous grace and pure colour above the pool” (Bird 1998:189). Like alchemy, fiction is the gold that appears when facts and imagined events are intertwined by means of a third element that escapes any wording. Could you elaborate on this? 128 Gerardo Rodríguez
I see fiction like alchemical gold, appearing when facts and the imagination come together to make a new element. That is ‘magic’. Something magical happens—the facts and the imaginings lock together and a new creature slips out: fiction.
Every writer has certain key topics and preoccupations. Could you summarise yours?
I am always looking for meaning, hence the playing around with the Mean family. Language, of course, is a preoccupation, and I know that Mean is only a word, but I like having the family just called that, without any comment—it amuses me that nobody has ever examined any of this. Nobody ever seems to comment on the fact that all of my books have at least an epigraph from some mad book by Carrillo Mean, and then he turns up in the text, more or less unexplained. Basically, I am seeking beauty and I always run up against its opposite too. To return to the metaphor of alchemy, I grope around in the slime under the surface of the pool, and sometimes I am rewarded by the appearance of the lotus. There are recurrent images in my work, such as flowers and nature; animals and birds; gardens; sewing, knitting and houses; death and murder; power and powerlessness; children; religious iconography; loss; and psychology. I am crazy about the beauty of the opium poppy and fascinated by the fabulous poison it carries. It was nice in Cape Grimm when readers challenged me on the poisonous character of the hydrangea which Dorothea ate; people did not know that this plant was poisonous. Beautiful things are sometimes poisonous—snakes are very beautiful—and I am fascinated by the base stories, such as Garden of Eden, and also by the German folk tales which express in Western thought many of the deep problems in human life in such a magical and frankly matter-of-fact way. I love that tone, and I feel nourished by it. Having said this, I must admit that my fiction is steeped in the Australian literary tradition, to which I belong owing to obvious geographical bonds. The settings of my fiction are often recognisably Australian, like Melbourne in The White Garden or Tasmania in Red Shoes and Cape Grimm. In this last novel, the keys to understand supernatural events lie in Tasmania—or to give it its previous name, Van Diemen’s Land—and its history. Virginia has the visionary power to see the ghost of an aboriginal girl that takes the narrative back to the silenced chronicle of abused indigenous Tasmanians. Through this ghost, named Mannaginna, Virginia witnesses the 1820s massacres of native Tasmanians at the hands of white European whalers, sealers, soldiers and farmers, who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This central issue in Cape Grimm connects with the nineteenth- century Australian tradition of the novels of Henry Kingsley, brother of Charles Kingsley, and the many others who wrote about pioneer life. And yet, my scope is universal, since, also in the line of writers like Patrick White, my interest lies in the discovery of universal values.
The guardian angel narrator in Red Shoes (Beau) is a brilliant idea, very much in line with the classical child narrator or the figure of the stranger in such novels as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Did you pursue a similar effect?
‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird 129
I had imagined the story of Petra, and then I wondered how to tell it, who on earth would have the voice to tell this. It had to be bright and special, and suddenly—this is the moment of magic I spoke of earlier—the idea of a guardian angel came to me. I realised he could have just the job of preventing Petra from being in danger but that he would have no business with her morality, and this really appealed to me because I realised that guardian angels do not seem to have a moral dimension: they save people from physical danger or disease, but that seems to be it. Humans are left with the free will to choose good or evil. He developed into a captivating character; indeed, I think he goes a lot further than any such character in anything I have ever read.
Somewhere else you said that in your writing you need the organising force of a male narrator (Walker 2004b: 287) and yet, one gets the impression that in your novels the real force comes from female characters. That is the case of the women patients at the Mandala Clinic, Petra in Red Shoes and Virginia Mean in Cape Grimm.
You are right about the sometime female narrators, but often I do also like to have a male storyteller delivering the stories. My most sustained one is in Crisis, a comic novel, and when it was first published it had a male author as well as a male narrator—Jack Power, my surname before I was married, quite hilarious indeed—and then it was re- published under my name. Maybe the male is the organising force, but then the women often write diaries or deliver monologues within the framework of the male narrative, subverting the male sometimes, not always, but certainly in The White Garden. There is, in my reception, perception and experience of life—particularly in my observation of the lives of women in my mother’s generation—a vast un-tapped creative power in women, a power beyond the creative act of child-bearing, which is amazing in itself. And this creative force was often—and still sometimes is—dammed up and unable to find its expression. I think of my mother who channelled her creativity into the home and children, who loved to sew and embroider, to play the piano and sing, and yet there was a sense I had—this is not only in retrospect—that there was so much more she could have done, and I knew she could do, but there was no way of even discovering what that was. She gave me the wonderful gift of the opportunity to practise creative arts of various kinds, but the society of Australia in the years immediately after World War Two gave women of her generation very little chance to shine. So there was frequently a sadness in them. This sadness began to be acknowledged in the writing of Betty Friedan, but it was a bit late then. So I suppose that in the voices and the sometimes subversive behaviour of the women in my work, there is an acknowledgement of what I observed in the women of my mother’s generation.
How did you come up with the idea of adding a footnote section to such novels as Red Shoes and Cape Grimm? What is for you the process of writing a novel as regards the orchestration of all the documentation and its filtering into the fictional product?
In the late eighties I decided to add a section to the end of my novel The Bluebird Café, called ‘A Reader’s Guide to The Bluebird Café’. My intention was to separate and yet integrate certain little bits of information, for example the titles of some of Carrillo’s 130 Gerardo Rodríguez books. The question is why I did not have a similar section in The White Garden. I honestly work fairly unconsciously, so I find it hard sometimes to answer sensible questions. With Red Shoes there was the joke of the ‘Foot Note’ and then with Cape Grimm there was so much history that I had to have the end bits. I puzzled for a long time over what to call them and then one morning I woke up with the words time and tide and could not see why I had not realised this before. Another trait of my fiction is that I like to include fictitious information along with the truth; for example, the timeline in Cape Grimm has dates of fictitious events, which are fairly obvious, but in the Tide section there are fake stories as well as true stories. I am very interested in the borderlines that run between the true and the false, and I know that fiction is the place to explore these slippages and boundaries.
Your real experience as a Tasmanian has definitely informed your writing.
Yes, I was born at the beginning of the Second World War in Tasmania, which was about as far from the action and realities of war as you could get, but I have always been fascinated by the war, by the year (1940), by the idea of being born just then. I seek out anything that happened in 1940 and feel a strange link and comfort to be derived from the fact: I think of writers who died that year and imagine myself moving forward as they move back, wishing I could have met them. The Tasmanian aspect of this is also significant: I have always been fascinated by the history of and geography and geology of Tasmania—settled by the British as a prison colony, so that there is a horrible prison history as well as virtual extermination of indigenous people who were a unique race, not the same as the indigenous people of Australia. As a Tasmanian, I have always felt cut off not only from the world but also from Australia—the island is often left off maps because it is insignificant. It is a very beautiful place, physically, but I believe it is haunted (literally) by the ghosts of its sorrowful past, and I am made melancholy by this. Thus, definitely, it does inform what I write.
Your fascination with the fairy tale seems significant to me in relation with the interest that it has aroused in other contemporary women writers such as Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt, Jeannette Winterson, to name just a few. To what extent is it important in your fiction and why do you think so many women writers have re-encountered a new value in this genre?
Carter and Byatt are the same age as I am, and I imagine they, like me, were nourished as child readers by the fairy tales. There was very little fiction for children then and the fairy stories dealt so elegantly with deep issues. A child or girl with the need to put into narrative the unspoken—except in fairy tales—themes of love and hate was instantly gripped by the way the stories could do this with ease and dead-pan language and brilliant images. In my opinion, the fairy stories are probably speaking a feminine language which appeals to women writers in particular. The stories are in one sense transgressive, and yet they were sanctioned by adults because they were ‘literature’ and because they were deemed to be harmless. I was given a beautiful volume bound in dark blue leather of Grimm when I was about seven and I wonder if my parents looked at the hideous—fascinating—little black and white etchings by Cruikshank—they were very frightening and engaging. There is also an urge in women writers to re-write these ‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird 131 stories, to explore their possibilities and meanings. As regards fairy tales, the beginning of Cape Grimm where Lady Jane Franklin brings the Grimm tales to Van Diemen’s Land is metaphoric: the idea of European stories transmitted by a woman to nourish the minds and hearts of the children of Tasmania, so far away from the centres of ‘civilisation’.
Quoting N. E. Solomon at the beginning of the Footnote section in Red Shoes (1998: 223), you say that “All stories rest in other stories which have gone before”. Is there any writer/text, classic or contemporary, that has exerted a significant influence in your writing?
Yes, N. E. Solomon is invented and just means any wise person. What I meant is that stories keep building on past stories, piling up and up to build the big story—the whole story—which will be as big as a grain of sand in the end. I am very influenced by the things I love to read—too many to mention, I suppose. My favourite recent one is Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. In The Bluebird Café the female narrator talks about how she feels she is writing a volume that is part of some great book along with all other books. There is a section of this novel that is called ‘The Interviews’. The character, Virginia— you will see that I frequently use that name, since it has for me at least three meanings: Woolf, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Virgin Mary—is a writer, and she in fact goes on to be the narrator of my book Dear Writer. What I think of as ‘The Virginia Effect’ covers a wide range of issues in my work—issues of creativity and inspiration, feminism, image and language. I sometimes think of language itself as a whole universe of chaos from which is born thought, from which thought is shaped. It is like music, but that is a rather banal observation—yet a true one.
We have mainly discussed your approach to novels. But now that a collection of your short fiction (The Essential Bird) has been recently published, is your approach to short fiction the same as that to the novels?
With short fiction I think of a lovely idea and can just sit down, explore it, complete the writing and see the result quickly. In a short piece of writing, I do not inhabit the narrative for so long, but I do keep coming back to the stories in my mind and thinking about them. However, it is more or less the same technique as in a novel—dream it up and write it down. I like to say over in my head things I have written—but this applies to both short and long—they both have moments that I love to think about over and over again. I love the discipline of the short story, the way that, in a few thousand words, a piece of short fiction can make a powerful point, can deliver such imagery and such music. I love the freedom to be found within the discipline, and the opportunity for revelation and discovery, and I adore the way the whole cavalcade of humanity can parade swiftly by in a handful of sentences. There is something so joyful, so satisfying about reading and writing short fiction. For a range of reasons, Australian fiction has a deep tradition of the short story, and I feel that my work in this area sits firmly within this tradition. It is a nice place to be, although I must point out that Australia, particularly in its literature, still operates within what we here call ‘The cultural cringe’, whereby Australian readers still look to 132 Gerardo Rodríguez the works of English, North American and European writers as the benchmark. Fiction from other countries is generally still more celebrated here than the home-grown variety. This is just a fact of life. My impression is that this is changing. I hope it is. When I studied at university in Australia in the fifties, there was no Australian text on the syllabus. Literature, students were led to believe, originated in the British Isles, North America and France, and to a certain extent Spain (I refer to Cervantes and Lorca, for example). Australian texts are today studied in Australian universities, and have even migrated to other countries. Nevertheless, as I say, the cultural cringe is still present in Australian literary culture. I am sorry to end on this note. I am, in fact, very positive and cheerful, but, I hope, honest and realistic enough.
Works Cited
Bird, Carmel 1995: The White Garden. Queensland: U of Queensland P. ———— 1998: Red Shoes. Sydney: Vintage. ———— 2004: Cape Grimm. Sydney: Flamingo. Walker, Shirley 2004a: ‘All the Way to Cape Grimm: Reflections on Carmel Bird’s Fiction’. Australian Literary Studies 21.3: 264-76. ———— 2004b: ‘Conversations at Rochester Road: Carmel Bird Discusses Her Writing with Shirley Walker’. Australian Literary Studies 21.3: 277-88. Wilde, H. William, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, eds. 1994: Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 2nd ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. On line at http://www.carmelbird.com/about_toc.html. Accessed December 2005
Received 4 April 2006 Revised version received 10 September 2006
REVIEWS
RESEÑAS
J. Hillis Miller 2005: Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. New York: Fordham UP. xii + 343 pp.
Henry Sussman SUNY University at Buffalo [email protected]
J. Hillis Miller’s nuanced, precise, and detailed elaboration of speech acts in literature has encompassed, in addition to a volume of the same title (2001), at least The Ethics of Literature (1987), Versions of Pygmalion (1990), and Topographies (1995). The long- awaited appearance of Literature as Conduct is notable as a current update and consummation of certain theoretical issues into which he has delved over a significant stretch of his remarkably generative career, questions relating to the conceptual, rhetorical, representational, and ethical conditions under which literature is at once possible, felicitous, and impossible. The volume at the same time orchestrates a meticulous and multi-tiered encounter with Henry James’s mature fiction in all the exasperations, rewards, ethical quandaries, communications blackouts, confirmations of existential predicaments, and literary and theoretical educations encrypted in its astute reading. Each reading with which Miller emerges is authoritative. Major novelists, of which James is a particularly daunting and compelling, but by no means exclusive, example, will never again be readable in obliviousness to the play of speech-acts and performatives on which the credibility of their simulated worlds depends. In the wake of Literature as Conduct, the literature on Henry James gains a framework and focus of which it was largely unaware. Miller explains the persistence of his interest in speech acts and performatives in some of the following introductory phrases:
The author’s act of writing is a doing that takes the form of putting things in this way or that. . . . The narrators and characters in a work of fiction may utter speech acts that are a way of doing things with words—promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like. Such speech acts make up crucial moments in the narrator’s or in the characters’ conduct of life. . . . The reader, in his or her turn, in acts of reading, criticism, or informal comment, may do things by putting a reading into words. Doing that may have an effect on students, readers, or acquaintances. . . . My title, “Literature as Conduct,” can refer to the way writing literature is a form of conduct, or to the representation of conduct within literary fictions, or, using conduct as a verb, to the way literature may conduct readers to believe or behave in new ways (2).
Acts of readership, criticism, commentary, and rhetoric, in and around literary works, are not without their repercussions. These preoccupations are anything but hopelessly derivative teapot tempests at an outrageous remove from the scenes of deliberation and action. They are the very paradigms of the tangible, often cataclysmic aftershocks, in the full socio-political sense, ensuing from the collaborative speech acts in which actual people as well as literary characters regularly engage. As Miller puts it, with respect to one of the major Jamesian novels in his sights: 136 Henry Sussman
Society in The Wings of the Dove is a reciprocal system of working and being worked. . . . The whole system of relative valuations is based on nothing of substantial worth as foundation, at least not on any insight into that, nor on an objectively valid method of measuring value. Another more hyperbolic way to put this is to say that this social system is based on a set of lies that everyone knows are lies and yet agrees to pretend to believe. The whole airy fabric of giving and taking, of exchange, substitution, and appropriation, has no substance and is suspended over nothing (216-17).
In comparison to earlier studies, Miller demonstrates even greater confidence and fluidity in linking interrelated phenomena of narration, characterology, rhetoric, and ethics while at the same time bringing certain persistent theoretical inquiries—into the nature of speech acts and their decisiveness to social relations in and out of literary works—to some resolution, however provisional. His commentary achieves new authenticity not by dint of any relaxation of discipline or by giving in to broad generalizations. With regard to the nature of speech acts, their role in and out of literary texts, their theoretical implications, and their compelling interest as a site where literary (and by implication, all cultural) invention impacts tangibly on the domain of action in its multiple theaters, Miller’s phrasings and attestations attain even more than their usual high level of lucidity and directness, as should be evident in the initial citation above (from the Introduction). Yet each chapter in Literature as Conduct is a complex performance in its own right. Each encounter with a major James novel or novella somehow manages to choreograph patient elucidation of related theoretical inquiries by the likes of John Austin, John Searle, Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida; precise definitions and examples, in and outside of James’s writing, of specific speech acts such as lies, paths, promises, and the rhetorical tropes (for instance, catachresis, diegesis, prosopopoeia) that they mobilize; and, a remarkably germane and coherent elucidation of a James work certain to have aroused more than its share of ‘the commentator’s despair’. In the fluidity with which each extended encounter with a major Jamesian fictive work segues toward the broader theoretical considerations specific to it, Miller attains a new level of playfulness in his criticism. In keeping with his unabashed respect and appreciation for Jacques Derrida, the man and his project, and, in his dedication, his celebration of “almost forty years of unclouded friendship” between the two, each detailed exegesis arises from and embellishes the local difference, endowing that text with its irreducible singularity, its private idiom, and its distinct virtual reality. It is within the framework of such a multifaceted performance, whose core bearings and insights have matured over steady retrospection as well as time, that Miller can offer us his bravura readings of kisses in The Portrait of A Lady (32-44) and of the ejaculations “There you are” and “Oh!” as they transition from character to character in The Wings of the Dove (195-202). The kiss, for Miller, figures as a modality of expression operating on oral, tactile, non-verbal, demonstrative, and performative levels. Miller’s reading of the kiss that Caspar Goodwood gives Isabel Archer near the end of The Portrait of a Lady focuses on how the avatar and literal vehicle of the more untrammeled sexuality emerging during the timeframe of the novel (the kiss) is precisely the cue triggering her return to an awful marriage—but in a state of knowledge, autonomy, and liberation emerging from her performative experience in Reviews 137 the novel. The motif of the kiss in James’s fiction attains its local singularity over and against its role in works by Proust, Freud, Joyce, Novalis and Derrida, in a surprising, spontaneous literary history of the kiss that Miller deftly grafts into his own narrative. Speech acts are an abiding concern for Miller, among other reasons, because they serve as the interface at which the formal features and dynamics of language receive their ‘translation’ into social relationships and societal phenomena. Deconstruction’s eventual turning, after its initial inquiry into the philosophical pretexts to and conflicts surrounding the figural constitution of texts and discourse—its taking up such issues as hospitality, pardon, mercy, and political sovereignty—no less than ‘decided’ the social relevance and indispensability of its critique. Literature as Conduct, in the extreme effectiveness of its summation of deconstruction’s turn to the theories of performance and speech-acts, is a major work of critical theory at the same time that it is a decisive contribution to the criticism of Henry James and of fiction in general. Not only does it take James’s novels as the pretext for a clearer, more patient exposition of the possibilities and varieties of speech acts than is available, say, in the works of Derrida or Jean-Luc Nancy. It discloses the novelistic dimension surrounding all our conventional interpersonal interactions, opening up a crucial new panorama for ethical oversight and introspection. Severe moral quandaries, both exacerbated and resolved by the speech acts in which they engage, are an everyday fact for the characters housed in the virtual space of James’s novels, according to Miller. The reader of his novels encounters “a torn fabric full of gaps, hiatuses, voids, places where what should have been represented is not represented, or represented inadequately, though it remains there, waiting to be justly said” (163). Miller in no way evades the historico-sociological constraints upon the particular moral quicksand upon which the Jamesian characters tread. Nanda Brookenham’s marriage prospects, in The Awkward Age, are severely restricted by the sexual knowledge to which she has been prematurely exposed according the Victorian mores of sexuality operative within the novel’s fictive cadre. “On the continent young girls are scrupulously protected, sequestered, until the moment of marriage. . . . That decade was an awkward age of transition from Victorian approximate silence about sexual misdoings in literature to a new century” (131). “Only a girl who is not only physically a virgin but whose mind is a virgin sheet of paper is qualified to say ‘I do’” (135). Morally attenuated situations in literature more often than not have their roots in speech acts, such as the lies and lying promises proliferating in The Wings of the Dove, but the quandaries to which they give rise empower the artifacts, in this case novels, to issue overall moral declarations of their own:
The lesson of The Wings of the Dove might be expressed as the command: don’t tell lies. They have a way of coming true, of their own accord, through the power of words, that is, in their secret relation to death, against all your wishes and intentions (225).
Two striking Millerian beliefs (themselves inevitably, in his parlance, bearings toward words) in the background of the above formulation concern the virtuality of a memorable writer’s fictive spaces, their objective and autonomous existence with regard to their characters, readers, and even their authors; and, speech acts’ proleptic and self- 138 Henry Sussman confirming effectivity (what they pronounce eventually comes true). In respect to The Wings of the Dove’s virtual existence, Miller writes:
The novel, it follows, refers to an entire world to which James alone has access, but which he has not invented, except in the sense of discovering it. The evidence for this is the way he says he fails to bring all of it to light (162).
With unerring accuracy and concision, Miller demonstrates throughout James’s fiction the actualization of realities first arising as circumlocutions in speech acts, a construct we might rephrase, for purposes of our discussion, ‘the customized fictions of everyday life’. The uncanny fluctuation, in and outside of literature, that Miller stages between the play of its figures and fanciful conceits and its virtual repercussions, is a vertiginous object-lesson in the earnest responsibility inhering in the critic’s (and reader’s) task. Speech acts, for Miller, are the disturbing interface where the contractual conventions of literature spill over into the human conspiracies both definitively establishing the banality of evil and rendering the exchanges of communal life possible. It is a tribute to Miller’s personal and interpretative ethics, his approach to linguistic and human predicaments always on the highest intellectual plane, and his avoidance of personal and intellectual triviality that the “almost forty years of unclouded friendship” he claims to have shared with Jacques Derrida is indeed a true attestation. Very few of Derrida’s colleagues and associates, past and ongoing, can press this claim with anything near Miller’s authority and authenticity. Yet Miller’s ongoing investigation into the performative moves the construct of the community away from the impasse it reached in Derrida’s own writings and closer to the notion of the inoperative community defined by intangibles: death, narrative, contingent encounters and affiliations—explored by Jean-Luc Nancy. Speech acts, for Miller, at once imbue literature with a good measure of its drama and excitement, facilitate the enactment of ploys and plans whose initial expression is understandings between people in and about words, and underwrite all mechanisms of the social contract— for example, laws, civil and administrative procedures—‘making something happen’. Yet the only possible arena for Miller in which such deliberations and postulations can take place is a meticulous reading of cultural artifacts, one informed by the most dynamic and thought-initiating conceptual paradigms available. At a moment when the corporatization of information and the commodification of intellectual work pull critics away from exegesis and into postures of self-presentation and self-representation (for instance a memoir); increasingly, as well, into wide-bore global pronouncement, Miller restricts himself to scoring all his points in a head to head encounter with Henry James, in the above-cited phrasings a most exasperating intellectual ‘property’. Miller simply will not let his fellow critics off the hook of the complexity of the artifacts they address and the imponderables attending their own rhetorical positions, the fated obscurity of astute and responsible commentary in an age of sound-bytes, and the moral imperative, within ethical limits, to make complexity plain. Nothing could be timelier than Miller’s exhortation, in his ‘performance’ of James, for the colleagues, students, and readers all over the world he has served with dedication, integrity, and intellectual and personal generosity: to keep on task, to brave the resistance and Reviews 139 obscurity prompted by criticism, and to sustain that close commentary, on our age and the forces and phenomena it brings into play. If we were to permit ourselves a moral pronouncement, yet another form of speech act, one arising from the invariably inventive critical ploys of Literature as Conduct, one of its (several possible) virtual articulations might be as follows: “Readers will make things happen only if they persist in the task of the critic, only if they assume the devotion, discipline, and rigors entailed in close reading and minute attention to the transitions between words and deeds”.
Works Cited
Miller, Hillis 1987: The Ethics of Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. ———— 1990: Versions of Pygmalion.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———— 1995: Topographies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———— 2001: Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts of Henry James. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Received 5 April 2006 Revised version received 13 September 2006
T. S. Eliot. 2005 (1922): La tierra baldía. Edición bilingüe. Introducción y notas de Viorica Patea. Traducción José Luis Palomares. Madrid: Cátedra, Letras Universales, 2005. 328 pp.
Paul Scott Derrick Universitat de València [email protected]
It is practically impossible to overestimate the importance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), not only in the course of twentieth-century poetry in English, but for Western poetry in general. This single poem has been the object of many hundreds of critical articles and book-length studies. And that interest, that cultural fascination, still shows little sign of diminishing. Along with Pound’s Cantos (begun in 1915), Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Williams’ Spring and All (1923) and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), The Waste Land can be classed as one of a handful of ‘centrepiece texts’ of the first-generation Modernist enterprise. It is a masterwork of constructive destruction, a brilliant application of Cubist collage techniques to language. It is both an expression and a demonstration of the cultural malaise and the crisis of belief that resulted from the First World War. It is a profound experiment in the compression, or codification, of an encyclopaedic body of knowledge—as if we had sensed the need at that point in time to condense our heritage into complex, hermetic forms in order to preserve our cultural memory in the face of some impending disaster. But, in addition, it offers a possible therapy for our illness, an opportunity to put a broken world together again—or at least to practice putting it together again. And in this sense, The Waste Land is a powerful record of a yearning for health, wholeness and holiness (words which are all, as Eliot must have been aware, etymologically connected). The poet himself, however, claimed that he had no such exalted aims in mind in 1921 when, trying to recuperate in Margate from the stress contingent on his gradually disintegrating marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, he sat down to write what would eventually become part III, “The Fire Sermon”. (He had begun the poem at the end of 1919 as a long series of stylistic parodies with the title “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. He composed the final section, “What the Thunder Said”, in late 1921 in Lausanne, under the care of a pre-Freudian analyst named Roger Vittoz.) In his own, undoubtedly dissembling words, The Waste Land was intended to relieve “a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” (Eliot 1971: 1). All false modesty aside, the question that immediately arises is: how does an insignificant personal complaint get converted into such an astounding religious, philosophical and literary accomplishment? Providing a credible account of such a complicated process might be compared to producing a high-resolution, three-dimensional, multi-sectional holographic map of the occult intestines of the Gordian Knot. But that’s what this edition does. The personal aspects of The Waste Land’s genesis, the stages of its development, its roots in Eliot’s previous experience, the warp and woof of its incredible texture and much much more are masterfully illuminated in Viorica Patea’s lengthy and well-written 142 Paul Scott Derrick
Introduction to this new translation of The Waste Land into Spanish. There seem to be very few of those hundreds of studies the poem has inspired that she is not aware of. It first appeared in the London journal Criterion, in October 1922. It was published one month later in New York in The Dial. For reasons that Eliot never made clear, he decided to append those famous notes to each of the poem’s five sections for its first edition in book form (New York: Boni and Liveright, [December] 1922). Did he do so simply for commercial reasons, to make the book longer? Did he feel the need to protect himself against possible claims of plagiarism? Was it part of the overall strategy of Modernism to present its practitioners as connoisseurs, a subterfuge by which the Modernist poet distinguished himself from the sentimentality of many fin-de-siècle versifiers and emphasized his ‘professionalism’? Or was it a sincere attempt at explanation, to make the poem accessible to more than an elite coterie of privileged readers? Whatever the motives may have been, those notes have raised more questions for serious students of Eliot’s work than they answer and have notoriously become an integral factor in the poem’s lasting fascination. But of course it was not Eliot’s duty, or intention, really to explain his own poem to the public. That is a task for those of us who follow. In this edition, Dr. Patea, Senior Lecturer in American literature at the University of Salamanca and a specialist in Modernist poetry, elucidates the meaning and significance of The Waste Land just about as thoroughly and effectively as it seems possible to do. The book consists of three general sections. The first, the Introduction, provides us with a wealth of background material which is an indispensable aid for an appreciative reading of the text. The second one is a meticulously annotated bi-lingual edition of the poem itself, and its notes, with a translation by José Luis Palomares. And the third, an extremely helpful addition, is an Appendix of ten short texts (1-2 pages), also in bi- lingual format, which are among the most important of The Waste Land’s cornucopia of intertextual references. The Introduction, also structured in three sections, is a well-balanced mix of biographical information and critical assessment of Eliot’s thought and work. This kind of approach is always enlightening, but especially so in the case of an author who went to such extremes to obfuscate the many traces of his personal life that inform his work. We learn about Eliot’s New England family background, and the atmosphere surrounding his childhood; the influence of Irving Babbit and George Santayana during his undergraduate years at Harvard and the early but lasting literary influence of Baudelaire, French Symbolism and the work of Dante. Few readers beyond specialized academic circles are aware that Eliot carried out his graduate studies at Harvard in philosophy. Dr. Patea provides a very informative discussion of this fundamental period in his intellectual development, pointing out the importance for him of teachers such as Josiah Royce, William James, Bertrand Russell and, above all, the subject of his doctoral dissertation (which he completed but, because of the First World War, never defended), the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley. Patea is especially effective in signalling the impact of Bradley’s philosophy on Eliot’s poetry and tracing Bradley’s imprint in The Waste Land. This very complex aspect of the poem was first seriously considered by Anne C. Bolgan (1973), who rediscovered Eliot’s dissertation in the Pusey Library at Harvard. Since then, few commentators have Reviews 143 failed at least to mention Bradley, although the most satisfying studies in this respect are probably still those of Schusterman (1988) and Jain (1992). We are also given a good overview of Eliot’s earliest critical essays and how they are intimately linked with the content of the papers he wrote for many of his graduate courses in philosophy, as well as a survey of the development of his poetry and criticism over the course of his life. The second part of the Introduction offers a panorama of detailed information concerning The Waste Land itself and discusses the most important influences contributing to its innovative form and breathtaking scope. We are given a fine description of Ezra Pound’s incisive editorial work. In convincing Eliot to cut out more than 40% of the original text, Pound ensured not only a tighter and stronger organization and a more allusive and esoteric quality, but also a higher degree of Cubist fragmentation. Patea explains how Eliot discovered what he described as ‘the mythical method’—which defines his use of history in the poem—in his own reading of Joyce’s recently-published Ulysses. She also gives a clear account of the use Eliot made of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Because Eliot directly cited these two works in the introductory paragraph of his notes to the poem, their importance is undeniable (regardless of what his motives for appending that material may have been). Patea’s Introduction, however, places them in a much more balanced perspective than usual, within the framework of the mythical method, among a larger number of literary, religious, anthropological and psychological influences. Finally, the third part of the Introduction devotes just over 75 pages to a detailed, insightful and coherent close reading of the poem. Many ingenious metaphors have been invented to illustrate what happens in The Waste Land. My own personal choice is the archaeological site. The ultimate grace of the Eliot/Pound collage technique is that it confronts us with a field of confusing fragments that we need to reconstruct, fragments that happen to be the remains of earlier cultural continuities: the various traditions of the West, primitivism and the wisdom of the East. This act of reconstruction corresponds with the final phase of the Cubist aesthetics. After the painter has analyzed a scene, taken it apart and placed the pieces into a new design, the viewer must complete the process by recreating the original scene (or stimulus) from the confusing cues the painting provides. In the case of The Waste Land though, the original scene, or stimulus, is the whole expanse of Western culture. The reader, like an archaeologist at a dig, is forced to use every bit of intelligence, imagination and knowledge at his or her command to flesh out those fragments, reconstitute them and to recover, or maybe better, recreate the historical continuity those fragments are remnants of. There can be a virtually unlimited number of coherent and valid explications of the poem. But every one of them is, in effect, an individual step toward recovering the health—or the wholeness—of the waste land of Western society. In her particular unfolding of this enigmatic complex of language and cultural memory (and forgetfulness), Dr. Patea applies a fine imagination and a generous intelligence to the large body of knowledge that the first two sections of her essay display. The Waste Land ends with an appeal to Buddhist and Hindu scriptures as offering a possible model for a cure to the spiritual aridity that is destroying the West: 144 Paul Scott Derrick
con estos fragmentos a salvo apuntalé mis ruinas Sea, pues, que habré de obligaros. Hierónimo esta furioso otra vez. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shanti shanti shanti (285)
The poem itself, in spite of its apparently chaotic fragmentation and pervasive air of pessimism, constitutes a journey from despair to hope. “La tierra baldía acaba”, writes Patea,
con un atisbo de lo trascendente y la aceptación de lo sagrado. [. . .] La verdad revelada conduce a la conciencia lírica a la realidad de lo inexpresable “donde el significado aún persiste aunque las palabras fallan” [. . .] El poema de Eliot traza el viaje del alma a través del desierto de la ignorancia, del sufrimiento y de la sed de las aspiraciones terrenales. Concluye con la revelación de una realidad que libera su condición fragmentada. En el misterio de la contemplación el ser intuye la plenitud de este estado de conciencia no dual y no objetivable. (170-71)
It is probably true that it began as an attempt to relieve “a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” (Eliot 1971: 1). But Eliot is an artist whose individual mind came to accommodate the collective mind of his culture. This is an artist who taught himself to write, as he describes it in his early essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, “not only with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot 1964: 4). His ‘insignificant grouse’ therefore inevitably transcends to a universal plane. The Waste Land is a prototype of the verbal collage, a case study of Eliot’s concept of the historical consciousness and the mythical method. It can be thought of as a puzzle to be solved, in which we solve—or resolve—ourselves. Or it might be thought of as a verbal field containing relics of all that we are losing—fragments, mixing memory and desire, forgetfulness and need, pointing us the way toward a new sense of wholeness. Several worthwhile contributions to the general field of Eliot studies have been published in Spain (Gibert 1983; Abad 1992; Zambrano Carballo 1996; Vericat 2004), each one commendable in its own way. But this edition of The Waste Land seems to me to offer Spanish readers the best opportunity to appreciate and to comprehend all of the manifold dimensions of this towering signpost to the Modern (and post-modern) condition.
Works Cited
Abad, Pilar 1992: Cómo leer a T. S. Eliot. Madrid: Júcar. Bolgan, Anne C. 1973: What the Thunder Really Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Making of “The Waste Land”. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP. Eliot, T. S. 1964: Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. ———— 1971: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Reviews 145
Fraser, James George 1922: The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Abridged ed. New York: The MacMillan Co. Gibert Maceda, María Teresa 1983: Fuentes literarias en la poesía de T. S. Eliot. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Complutense. Jain, Manju 1992: T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Schusterman, Richard 1988: T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia UP. Vericat, Fabio 2004: From Physics to Metaphysics: Philosophy and Allegory in the Critical Writings of T. S. Eliot. Valencia: Universitat de València, Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord- americans. Weston, Jesse 1983 (1919): From Ritual to Romance. Gloucester MA: Peter Smith. Zambrano Carballo, Pablo 1996: La mística de la noche oscura: San Juan de la Cruz y T. S. Eliot. Huelva: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Huelva.
Received 20 May 2006 Revised version received 5 October 2006
Ángeles de la Concha, ed. 2004: Shakespeare en la imaginación contemporánea. Revisiones y reescrituras de su obra. Madrid: UNED Ediciones 2004. 261 pp.
Celestino Deleyto Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected]
Shakespeare ain’t what he used to be. Or, perhaps, we should say that Shakespeare is again, at last, what he once was. Romantic originality, genius and universality have ceased to be catchwords of Shakespearean criticism, even if popular culture, while largely responsible for bringing the bard down from his high pedestal, has managed to retain such terminology in its contemporary repackaging of his figure. As the title of a recent book on (more or less) the English playwright cleverly suggests, “Shakespeare remains”, or, in graffiti-speech, “Shakespeare rules O.K.” (Lehman 2002). But what remains is little more than ‘remains’, vestiges, or, as the manipulated still from the film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996) selected for the front cover of the volume illustrates, ruins of his former glory. At the same time, however, his glory has not been seriously threatened. It has simply been transformed. In recent and not so recent critical studies of his figure, his erstwhile untouchable works have become the subject of endless intertextuality, cultural negotiations and ideological struggle. As Mireia Aragay argues in her introduction to a recent study of adaptation, the name of the game is now “the transformation and transmission of texts and meanings in and across cultures” (2005: 30). Shakespeare’s poetic language, the complex dramatic structures of his plays and the endless resonance of his poetry, its rhythms and musicality, may have lost some ground but, instead, his name has become an inexhaustible buzzword for cultural production, exchange and consumption. Shakespeare has been turned into the quintessential postmodern author. We never stopped talking and writing about Shakespeare. We have just learned to talk and write about him in a different way. Rewriting the bard may be, in the words of the editor of this volume, “a daring enterprise” (207) but ever since David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee (1769), the playwright has been a tourist attraction and a privileged channel for the propagation of Englishness; films have been made of his plays for more than a century now; and all sorts of literary works have taken their inspiration from the lines and the plots of his stories, but it is only recently that these dimensions of his figure have taken centre stage in academic criticism. To the dismay of the increasingly unhappy few, ‘Shakespeare’ has been replaced by many, sometimes hardly recognisable, Shakespeares. The collection of essays gathered by Ángeles de la Concha in this volume attests to these changes and, therefore, inscribes itself within this critical trend, once again demonstrating the receptiveness of Spanish scholarship to recent developments in literary theory and critical practice. Its publication is, in fact, timely because it addresses mainly, although not exclusively, an area of the ever-expanding corpus of Shakespearean scholarship which has not yet received a lot of attention: rewritings of Shakespeare within the field of more or less canonical literature as opposed to popular culture’s appropriations of his works and figure. Although the first two chapters deal with the presence of Shakespeare in popular culture and filmic adaptations of his plays, 148 Celestino Deleyto and the closing article suddenly shifts attention from rewritings of Shakespeare to the playwright as rewriter of earlier texts, the main focus of the book is on literary genres and, very particularly, on written narratives that have used his dramatic works as starting points or sources of inspiration. Unlike what is suggested in the title of Lynda Boose and Richard Burt’s article, in this book Shakespeare most definitely does not go Hollywood (1997: 8). Not for the authors of this study to speculate about the cultural importance of the fact that Cher knows Hamlet through Mel Gibson in Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995), but, given the recent proliferation of scholarship of Shakespeare in popular culture, de la Concha and her collaborators are wise to identify a dimension of the impact of the English dramatist in contemporary culture that has definitely gone largely unnoticed. Within these parameters, the book abandons from the beginning any claim to exhaustiveness and yet the various chapters cover a very wide and rich spectrum and reveal the wealth and variety of critical and cultural perspectives from which literary works in general and Shakespeare in particular are approached nowadays. Nevertheless, certain patterns emerge, with King Lear and The Tempest as unrivalled protagonists, and colonialism and, especially, parent-children relationships as topics that are returned to once and again. In this respect, two of the most representative essays of the collection analyse two novelistic rewritings of those two plays and tease out relevant meanings within the book’s two favourite topics. Angela Carter, in her last novel, Wise Children, managed to strike a perfect balance between high and low culture by seamlessly bringing together Shakespeare and the tradition of the music hall, rescuing both from centuries-long cultural prejudices and linking them via the irresistible power of, again, high and low forms of comedy. Clara Calvo, in her brilliant study of the novel, takes her inspiration from the British novelist in a chapter which is as entertaining as it is intellectually stimulating. Calvo has a firm grasp of current critical debates, which she brings to fruition by moving effortlessly between the two authors and throwing in bits of Jane Austen for good measure. The novel is much more than a rewriting of King Lear and can be seen as a novelistic ‘abridged complete works of William Shakespeare’ but, beyond that, it is a contemporary reconstruction of the bard as a bridge between the two banks of the river Thames, between high and low culture, between the popular and the legitimate stage, or, to put it in other words, as a return of popular culture which, like the return of the repressed, comes back to reappropriate what was once expropriated (165). In addition to all this, Carter explicitly brings Jane Austen into the picture at the beginning of chapter four of her novel as if to seduce the attentive reader to consider the novelist as the missing link between Shakespeare and contemporary culture. Calvo takes up the challenge and notices the importance of this strategic move: Austen becomes one more bullet in Carter’s rich and miscellaneous bag of ammunition to turn Lear into a comedy. Yet, in spite of all the parodies, in-jokes and references to other plays, Wise Children remains a Lear story, and as such it is read by the author of this chapter: a novel, like many of Austen’s novels, about mean fathers and absent mothers, about wise children who know who their father is and foolish fathers who do not know their children. Thus is Lear brought down to earth in the novel. Calvo is aware of the resonances that this gesture has for our deep understanding of what Shakespeare has become in recent years. She is amused by it but, at the same time, convinced that this Reviews 149 amusement represents as valid an avenue for the evolution of Shakespearean (and Austenian) scholarship as any other. Marina Warner’s Indigo is a more earnest rewriting of a Shakespeare play, in this case The Tempest, and one which, as Ángeles de la Concha asserts in her complex and nuanced analysis of the novel, openly inscribes itself within feminist and post-colonial debates. De la Concha takes full advantage of the candidly acknowledged feeling that the novel is less interesting in itself than in its relationship with The Tempest (210) and this makes it into the ideal object of analysis for a project of this kind. Indigo is a story about history and about other stories, an intertextual exercise which rewrites the Shakespearean past by, specifically, rewriting each of the main characters of The Tempest. De la Concha pays special attention to the reconceptualisations of Sycorax and Miranda and cogently uses the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the subject, history and desire in order to tease out multiple dimensions of the novel as a restructuring of the spaces and discourses of the play. In this chapter, the author insists on the impossibility of textual autonomy and on the inevitability of intertextuality, thus bringing home the importance of Warner’s take on Shakespeare. Beyond narrow traditional concepts of authorship, Indigo, like all the other texts visited in this volume, is also Shakespeare, and our understanding of his cultural and historical importance can no longer be limited to more or less canonical readings of his plays and poetry. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope provides the theoretical perspective for the editor’s other chapter in the volume, an analysis of Robert Nye’s novel Falstaff within the context of the new historical novel. As Indigo does with The Tempest, this novel engages in a productive dialogue with Shakespeare’s Plantagenet tetralogy in order to produce yet another rewriting of history. The fact that the dramatist himself already initiates the process of rewriting his own ‘official’ history through the tavern scenes of the two Henry IV’s provides the starting point for a chain of revisions to which Nye’s novel is one more addition, an addition which exists at the same level as contemporary critical perspectives on the history plays. Therefore, for de la Concha, who in this article establishes an excellent historical context from which to approach the plays and the novel, critical discourses and artistic revisitations of the plays exist within the same cultural universe and partake of the same ‘contemporary imagination’. A central concern of the book is the exploration of the postcolonial subject through contemporary rewritings of Shakespeare, a concern already evident in the editor’s study of Indigo. The Tempest is the obvious starting point here although this line of enquiry is inaugurated in the book by Graham Huggan’s account of the contemporary Holocaust novel and his analysis of Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood and its intertext, Othello. This trend is continued later on in the book in two ambitious chapters, Pilar Hidalgo’s original juxtaposition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with contemporary novelistic rewritings of The Tempest in which postcolonial and feminist perspectives often enter into conflict, and Isabel Carrera’s overview of West Indian postcolonial appropriations of the same play. Hidalgo argues that historical changes in the West, particularly the consequences of World War II, separate Huxley’s novel from recent feminist takes on Shakespeare’s play, but what Brave New World has in common with, for example, Rachel Ingalls’s short story ‘Mrs Caliban’ is their use of Shakespeare as a measure of the depth and sincerity of human affects pitted against the various deficiencies of contemporary society. For Carrera, the postcolonial context has turned 150 Celestino Deleyto
The Tempest into a mythical text, which is as routinely appropriated by the postcolonial subject as the English language. West Indian writers turn the play around and present its stories from the point of view of the ‘other’. More specifically, while Miranda has been described as the most solitary character of Renaissance drama, postcolonial versions of the play have gradually populated the stage with female figures, with sisters, mothers and daughters who have joined Caliban as new subjects of desire and are filling the islands with their words. Like de la Concha, Carrera pays equal attention to critical discourses and artistic texts based on the play. Her account not only encompasses narrative but also poetry, although drama is only marginally mentioned. It is down to another two authors to look at dramatic texts. Pilar Zozaya focuses on Edward Bond’s two nineteen seventies plays on the subject of Shakespeare, Lear and Bingo which she sees, in the light of contemporary poststructuralist and cultural materialist conceptions, as excessively manipulative. The plays are very much artistic endeavours of their own time and appear to have dated badly in view of the crucial cultural developments of the following decades. The author rhetorically asks Bond to allow us to read Shakespeare in our own way instead of dictating what we should think. Ana Zamorano continues with the book’s general interest in King Lear and looks at recent attempts on the part of contemporary theatre to understand the roles played by the female characters in the original play. Taking her cue from the fictional figure of Will’s sister, Judith Shakespeare, created by Virginia Woolf, the author questions, like the female dramatists she studies, the universality of the author from a feminist perspective. It is crucial both for female dramatists and female critics to approach the bard’s plays with a new look that may reconcile the mixture of love and resistance that women feel towards him. Zamorano concludes on a more optimistic note that it is not so much Shakespeare but the tendency to universalise his figure that should be critically explored and scrutinised, as contemporary female dramatists have done with King Lear. Given the general thrust of Shakespeare en la imaginación contemporánea, it is not so easy to place the two opening chapters within its overall structure, yet they manage to suggest the vastness of the critical territory tapped by the volume. Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso provides a useful, very general account of the ever-increasing presence of Shakespeare in popular culture, swiftly moving from television to police novels, from pop psychology to rock, from Broadway musicals to computer games. An idea of the Olympian view taken in this chapter may be given by the fact that the author disposes of the whole of Shakespeare on film in three pages. Still, the chapter works well as an introduction, even though the topics she introduces are not often followed up in the rest of the book. In the second chapter José Ramón Díaz provides a thorough, entertaining and well-documented analysis of three more or less filmic versions of Henry V (Bogdanov’s Wars of the Roses is, at the most, glorified filmed theatre), although there is little in this essay that the reader can connect with the thematic concerns of the rest of the book, not even with those expressed in de la Concha’s study of Falstaff. If the book may be said to start at the end, with Muñoz Valdivieso’s overview of Shakespeare in popular culture, then we can equally surmise that it ends at the beginning, with Marta Cerezo’s interesting and rigorous analysis of a Shakespeare play, As you Like It, as a game of revisions and rewritings of earlier texts. Cerezo’s take on the Reviews 151 play does not share the rest of the book’s approach to intertextuality and history from an unashamed postmodern and poststructuralist perspective while contradicting Calvo’s (and Carter’s) sophisticated defence of comedy as equal to tragedy. Yet, her useful thematic comparison between the play and its sources does tie in with concerns expressed earlier by other contributors, and, more importantly, its position in the volume reveals the editor’s shrewdness in linking Shakespeare as a rewriter, revisionist and performer of brazen intertextuality with his successors. Which brings us back to the beginning: Cerezo shows some of the reasons why the English dramatist needed, a few decades ago, to be rescued from originality and brought back to the intertextual world which he had inhabited during his lifetime and in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. That this operation of rescue has been largely successful, both in popular culture and in academic writing, is once again demonstrated by a book which, thankfully, not once regrets the gradual but relentless loss of a pure Shakespeare, an ideologically specific construct which, as the final chapter of Shakespeare en la imaginación contemporánea once again proves, never existed outside literary criticism.
Works Cited
Aragay, Mireia, ed. 2005. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Boose, Lynda E. and Richard Burt 1997. ‘Totally Clueless?: Shakespeare Goes Hollywood’. Lynda Boose and Richard Burt, eds. Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. London and New York: Routledge. 8-22. Lehman, Courtney 2002. Shakespeare Remains: Theatre to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP.
Received 15 March 2006 Revised version received 15 September 2006
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, ed. 2005: The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon: Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations. New York: Camden House. 222 pp.
Celia Wallhead Universidad de Granada [email protected]
Thomas Pynchon is a notoriously slow writer. Not for nothing was one of his early works entitled ‘Slow Learner’. In all his writing career of at least fifty years (he will be seventy in 2007), he has written a mere five novels. On average, that is one novel every ten years. But what novels! Where Pynchon writes one brilliant novel of over five hundred pages (Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon – and his forthcoming Against the Day has over 1000 pages), other writers produce three mediocre to good ones. The ‘slow learner’ business is ironic, or pretend false modesty, at the very least. What Pynchon researches and practises in ten years, it would take us ordinary mortals twenty years, or never, to research. But even in the Pynchon offshoot industry, or the ‘Pyndustry’,1 the cogs grind slowly. The book under review here, The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, seems to have taken seven years to come to fruition. In all cases involving Pynchon, however, the wait is usually worthwhile. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds tells us at the beginning of her Preface that the Modern Language Association devoted its first session of the December 1998 meeting in San Francisco entirely to Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which had come out the year before. She and her four fellow presenters went out to breakfast together afterwards and agreed that they all wanted to know what other experts like themselves, experts in eighteeth-century America and postmodernism, thought about the novel. Only the editor and Frank Palmeri survived the three-year “collecting” (vii) and subsequent publishing, but seven further experts joined them along the way. The blurb on the inside cover of the book states: “This volume of new essays studies the interface between eighteenth- and twentieth-century culture both in Pynchon’s novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon’s work not only because it deals with his most recent novel…”. The first part of this suggests that the scholars are doing their homework on Pynchon’s homework, the second part suggests that Mason & Dixon is not being scrutinised in isolation. This is significant for us to think about because Deborah Madsen, the reviewer of the previous collection, “the first book-length collection of essays on Mason & Dixon” (Madsen 2001–2: 229), Pynchon and Mason & Dixon (Horvath and Malin 2000), thought that the contributors were judging the novel from what they knew of Pynchon’s previous works. While this new volume appears to fall into the same ‘error’, it is very difficult, perhaps even erroneous in itself, not to envisage the novel as part of a trajectory. Madsen also gave the editors, Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (2000), some stick for producing a collection of essays on Pynchon that was, in her view, too homogeneous: “These essays together
1. So named, following Joseph Tabbi (2002), by Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland, editors of Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon, p. 7. I am grateful to Zofia Kolbuszewska for this note, see Kolbuszewska 2002: 137. 154 Celia Wallhead represent a consensus view of Mason & Dixon – what it is and where it is to be situated within the body of Pynchon’s work.… But together they make Mason & Dixon seem too much like Pynchon’s earlier works, and they represent rather too consistent a viewpoint. These are weaknesses of editorial judgement…” (229). She particularly laments that the collection is all about history and narrative, and has no mention of gender or race (237). She had begun her review by blasting the editors for not including any essays by women scholars. Thank goodness for Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds! (Although she is the only female contributor to her volume). And at least slavery is mentioned over fifty times, race being an important topic in chapters two, three and four. Such a savage review quite naturally prompted a reply from the editors, printed in the following volume of Pynchon Notes. Brooke Horvath explained that he had tried to include women Pynchon scholars, having contacted at least twenty, and got a negative from all of them (Horvath 2002: 183). He also argued that a woman scholar is not necessarily going to write about women, gender or sexuality, that would be gender stereotyping, and indeed, Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds’s Introduction to her volume, about time and history, does seem to vindicate his thesis. All of this has been a rather roundabout way to show the difficulties in putting together a collection of this nature. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds’s book is divided into four sections, and goes from the general to the specific. The first section, ‘The Rounds of History’ is about historio- graphy and narrative temporality. It comprises her authoritative ‘Introduction: The Times of Mason & Dixon’ and Mitchum Huehl’s ‘“The Space that may not be seen”: The Form of Historicity in Mason & Dixon’. The second section, ‘Consumption Then and Now’ deals not only with food and consumption but with the hidden powers behind them, such as trade relationships and production based on slavery. The two essays are Brian Thill’s ‘The Sweetness of Immorality: Mason & Dixon and the American Sins of Consumption’ and Colin A. Clarke’s ‘Consumption on the Frontier: Food and Sacrament in Mason & Dixon’. ‘Space and Power’ is the title of the third section, and again, it has two essays: Pedro García-Caro’s ‘“America was the only place …”: American Exceptionalism and the Geographic Politics of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon’ and Dennis M. Lensing’s ‘Postmodernism at Sea: The Quest for Longitude in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before’. In the final section, the three specific eighteenth-century cultural incidents or phenomena studied are as follows: ‘Haunting and Hunting: Bodily Resurrection and the Occupation of History in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon’ by Justin M. Scott Coe; ‘“Our Madmen, our Paranoid”: Enlightened Communities and the Mental State in Mason & Dixon’ by Ian D. Copestake, and Frank Palmeri’s ‘General Wolfe and the Weavers: Re- envisioning History in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon’, a topic he ably discoursed on at the Malta ‘Transit of Venus’ Pynchon Conference in June 2004. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds is quite right, but still valiant, to set out in her Introduction with the large-scale deixis of time and place and to try to give us an insight into the complexity of these seemingly-simple concepts when they fall into Pynchon’s hands (4–5). As she explains, the essays in the volume seek to explore these boundary conditions. They trace the connections between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, two eras she describes as “discreet” (11): maybe they were, although we are not talking about the Victorian age, but they are also discrete. Reviews 155
She makes a further claim for the book: “These essays represent a second wave of Mason & Dixon scholarship, one that keeps in view the complex linkages – linear and non-linear, nostalgic and ironic, ‘other than postmodern,’ paramodern, postmodern, and early modern – that its historiography offers” (20). This statement suggests that considerable development went on in the years between the MLA conference of 1998, which must have been ‘first wave’, and the publication of the collection, also that this so-called ‘first wave’ of Mason & Dixon scholarship did not address such complexities. I have my doubts about this. Indeed, she herself writes “More complex readings of Pynchon’s historical method surfaced early on in the criticism as well” (17). But at least, she and the other contributors to the volume are up-to-date with the early criticism as far as it could be obtained, for example, references to Horvath and Malin and Clerc (18). Her essays “round out earlier interpretations” (18). Robert L. McLaughlin berates two authors of Pynchon monographs for not taking this into account in order to be sure of being original: “I have always thought of criticism as an ongoing conversation among scholars and of the new book or article as obliged to demonstrate its understanding of the conversation to that point so as to show how it is contributing something new” (McLaughlin 2000–1: 218).2 Professor Hinds’s Introduction, with its discussion of ‘Anachronism Now and Then’ a topic she had already visited (see Hinds 2000), and ‘Postmodern Observations’, where she recognises Mason & Dixon as a good example of Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (18) (see Hutcheon 1988) in all its formal complexity, sets the tone for some sound research and enlightening reading. I only have one quibble: she refers to Mason and Dixon as “a couple of ordinary guys” (7). We know what she means – that Pynchon makes historical figures human – but they were far from being ordinary men, especially Mason, who was always on his high horse, with his expectation to be made Astronomer Royal on Bradley’s death. Nor did they have “an innocence of power unimaginable” (7), despite displaying a feeling of being manipulated. That she is on the right track, however, is backed up by similar priorities picked out by Francisco Collado for the Mason & Dixon chapter (chapter 6: “El legado es Norteamérica: Mason & Dixon o la resolución de los opuestos. El futuro escrito en el pasado”) of his recent monograph on Pynchon, the first in Spanish (Collado Rodríguez 2004). Mitchum Huehls’s article, arguing, as Professor Hinds puts it, “that the narrativity of Mason & Dixon is constituted by a complicated commingling of moments and durations, a commingling responsible for the specific form of the interface between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries” (20), talks of “a structure of mutual invagination” (32), which sounds rather naughty, and is explained in terms of narrative complexity. The two chapters on ‘Consumption Then and Now’ delve into the immorality and complacency involved in consumption and excess, comparing globalisation in the two time periods: “Food in Mason & Dixon becomes emblematic of colonial control as well as post-colonial difference and revolution; it becomes the embodiment of the vast network of cultural signifiers and appropriations that frame the colonial and post-
2. “Editor of the valuable Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow (1983), Clerc offers us here something midway between Cliff’s Notes and a Twayne study as an introduction to Pynchon’s latest novel. The result might better be titled Mason & Dixon for Dummies” (McLaughlin 2000-1: 222). One trembles. 156 Celia Wallhead colonial discourse which permeates the novel, and it serves to undermine myths of cultural permanence and superiority” (78). Pedro García-Caro takes further the discussion of Pynchon’s revelations concerning the connections between consumption, domination and extermination (103). America turned out not to be the exception, the Utopia, as Mason and Dixon realised, and thus they gave up tracing the Line thirty-six miles short, since the totalitarian aspects of Enlightenment scientific progress were encroaching upon the rights of the Native Americans. García-Caro brings Adorno and Horkheimer into the theoretical side of this discussion, and, on the practical side, he has recourse to Mason’s (non-fictional, authentic) Journal and the pro-slavery historian John H.B. Latrobe’s 1854 speech to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The History of the Mason and Dixon Line, the “first recorded instance … in which the two surveyors [sic] were fictionalized” (117). The whole makes for fascinating reading. Dennis M. Lensing’s essay about longitude in Mason & Dixon is the only one in the collection that introduces another work and another author for major study, which might have brought some misgivings. But it is justified, as the comparison demonstrates how the Quest for Longitude, vital though it was at the time, is not central to Pynchon’s novel, as it is in Eco’s. And yet, it is latently present throughout, and has a relevance, through its ramifications, to postmodernism. As Lensing says, the theme “feed[s] into … a variety of issues” (133), from cartography, the pettiness and corruption of the Royal Society, Maskelyne and other astronomers’ obsession with the stars as a solution rather than time-pieces, to the general issues of time, place, globalisation and control and their narration. The talking clocks, the ‘land-as-sea’ trope and its reversal (135), the de-privileging of scientific discourse, are only a few aspects or manifestations of the subject and its treatment in relation to these issues. Lensing’s article becomes more ambitious towards the end, as he argues that both Pynchon and Eco use the topic of longitude “due to its strong resonance with the postmodern sense of being adrift, without bearings” to treat the quest “in such a way as to point beyond the failings and confusions of postmodernism” (142). Which leaves us in uncharted territory. In the final section, Justin M. Scott Coe takes up Pynchon’s discussion of that thorny problem, the afterlife and bodily resurrection. In spite of the physical aspects of this subject, with Mason haunted by his dead wife Rebekah and seeing her as if bodily restored, and the connections between the Eucharist and the physical presence of Christ, the ‘hunt’ for Christ, Calvin’s ‘Ascent to Christ’, St Paul’s doctrine set out in I Corinthians 15, to which Rev. Cherrycoke refers, the argument is very abstract, and the reader could have done with some headings or subheadings as a guide (as there are in certain of the chapters, but not others). The argument goes on to cover the distinction between nostalgia and history, and especially Pynchon’s serious concern in Mason & Dixon “with the influence of religion on history and history’s preoccupation with futurity”, as Professor Hinds puts it (22). Coe’s tracing of Pynchon’s treatment of this matter shows the high seriousness and yet the comic possibilities, as he reminds us that Pynchon has Fang, the Learnèd English Dog, give his opinion; Pynchon also has the overly melancholy, gallows-obsessed Mason consult Jenkin’s Ear and then consult Dixon upon his return from the Inner Earth. “The occupation of history by the dispossessed”, as Coe puts it, comes to threaten “Mason and Dixon’s Enlightenment Reviews 157 sensibilities” (165) and this aspect feeds into one of the fascinating, yet unsolvable, discussions that Pynchon takes on. Ian Copestake’s piece is similar to one he wrote for the volume of Pynchon essays which he more recently edited (Copestake 2003). As he shows, madness, or abnormal mental states, “has been a recurrent presence in Pynchon’s work throughout his career” (171). In his latest novel, madness is linked, through an American tradition, with divine election and national selfhood. In the early part of the essay, Copestake shows that the dichotomy land/sea has a distinct relation to stable and unstable mental states in The Crying of Lot 49’s Oedipa Maas. Although Mason and Dixon supposedly inhabit an enlightened age, they are surrounded by madness wherever they go, be it England, South Africa or America. Even Cherrycoke was banished from England because his moral iconoclasm was deemed insanity. Though this saved his life, it simultaneously banished his selfhood (180) and threatened his credibility as a narrator of ‘An American Tale’, which is what the LeSpark children asked for. Pynchon’s interplay of historical truth and a celebration of the absurd through flights of fancy form part of the discussion of what happened, what did not happen and what may have happened. This subject leads neatly into Frank Palmeri’s discussion of a very specific choice of historical topic. He demonstrates how Pynchon scrupulously observed what we have on historical record for the episode of General Wolfe and the Stroud weavers of 1756–7, and yet manipulated the character and role of Wolfe himself, making him harsher towards the striking weavers than the historical record suggests. As Pynchon re- envisions this episode, Palmeri puts forward his theory: “Perhaps Pynchon identifies General Wolfe and the country Justices of the Peace with a Britain that is hierarchical, imperialistic and oppressive, while, because of their contact with the early American landscape, he allows Mason and Dixon an access to other perspectives, an openness to other possibilities that he associates with the early days of America” (196). It is this type of minute study by eighteenth-century experts like Professor Palmeri which reveals Pynchon’s working methods, and ultimately, his intentions and priorities. This volume is a must for all Pynchon scholars, and equally obligatory reading for anyone interested in recent American fiction, postmodernist fiction, or generally the direction of culture and fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For, as Pynchon shows us, things do not happen overnight. The America we have today, indeed the world, was forged centuries ago, and to explain it, we need to look at historical documents, but also search for traces of what was but was not given importance, was lost or might have been. All of these are Pynchon’s hunting grounds.
Works Cited
Collado Rodríguez, Francisco 2004: El orden del caos: literatura, política y posthumanidad en la narrativa de Thomas Pynchon. Valencia: U of Valencia P (Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans). Copestake, Ian D., ed. 2003: American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Oxford: Peter Lang. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall, ed. 2000: ‘Sari, Sorry, and the Vortex of History, Calendar Reform, Anachronism, and Language Change in Mason & Dixon’. American Literary History 12.1–2: 187–215. 158 Celia Wallhead
Horvath, Brooke 2002: ‘Letter to the Editors in Response to Deborah L. Madsen’s “Narratives of the Visto”’. Pynchon Notes 50–51: 183–5. Horvath, Brooke and Irving Malin, eds. 2000: Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Newark: U of Delaware P. Hutcheon, Linda 1988: A Poetics of Postmodern Fiction: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Kolbuszewska, Zofia 2002: ‘An Elated Eye: Scandinavian Perspectives’ (review of Mangen and Gaasland 2002), Pynchon Notes, Into the Zone 2000, 50-51: 136–153. Madsen, Deborah L. 2000–1: ‘Narratives of the Visto’ (review of Horvath and Malin 2000). Pynchon Notes 46–49: 229–238. Mangen, Anne and Rolf Gaasland, eds. 2002: Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Oslo: Novus. McLaughlin, Robert L. 2000–1: ‘Talking to Themselves’ (a review of Alan W. Brownlie 2000: Thomas Pynchon’s Narratives: Subjectivity and Problems of Knowing. New York: Peter Lang, and Charles Clerc 2000: Mason & Dixon and Pynchon. Lanham, MD: U P of America). Pynchon Notes 46–49: 217–224. Pynchon, Thomas 1966: The Crying of Lot 49. London: Picador. ———— 1973: Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Bantam/ London: Picador. ———— 1984: Slow Learner. London: Jonathan Cape. ———— 1997: Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt/ London: Jonathan Cape. Tabbi, Joseph 2002: Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Received 28 August 2006 Revised version received 3 November 2006
Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, eds. 2004: Perspectives on Travel Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate. VIII + 200 pp.
Pere Gifra Adroher Universitat Pompeu Fabra [email protected]
Focusing on a broad range of geographical areas as well as on a wide array of travellers from the early modern period to the postcolonial age, the essays collected in this book, published as volume 19 in the Studies in European Cultural Transition series, cogently exemplify the diverse paths that scholarship on the literature of travel has trodden in recent years. The wealth of publications as well as the scheduled academic events regularly devoted to this field evidence that the critical study of travel writing is not only holding its ground within the vast domain of literary studies but also expanding it with more sophisticated forays into other disciplines. Specialized journals like Studies in Travel Writing and Journeys, book series such as Travel Writing Across the Disciplines, published by Peter Lang, and well-established conferences like the biannual meeting of the International Society for Travel Writing (ISTW) are but a few examples that attest to the strength and diversity of a field where much of the best criticism continues to be concerned with texts written in English. This is particularly true of the present collection of essays, which far from being merely descriptive, provides finely crafted theoretical treatments of British, Scottish, Caribbean, and Indian travel texts by some of the most active experts in this field. The editors acknowledge early on in the Introduction that, in accordance with the series in which the book has been issued, one of the goals of this volume is to scrutinize the rhetorical strategies whereby European travel writing has ‘othered’ foreign cultures and in turn has been transformed by its own ‘othering’ processes. However, their scope clearly goes beyond that, as the diverse approaches employed by the contributors raise other issues and questions that may challenge long-held assumptions about this genre. What constitutes travel writing? Which are the most suitable tools to dissect it? What kind of interaction between disciplines does its criticism foster? Indeed, these questions have no easy answer, but the heterogeneity that travel literature and its critical practice so conspicuously display certainly indicates, as the editors suggest, that this is a complex field of study in a constant state of transition. It is no coincidence, then, that the book commences with an essay where Jan Borm faces the always problematic task of redrawing the boundaries of the subject matter. In ‘Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing, and Terminology’, he relies on a group of mainly French critical theorists—Philippe Lejeune, Gérard Genette, Jean-Didier Urbain—to tackle the terminological quandaries that the genre has faced over the past twenty years, and concludes that in spite of its generic looseness it still serves as “a useful heading under which to consider and to compare the multiple crossings from one form of writing into another and, given the case, from one genre into another” (26). For Borm, travel writing, whether it is an autobiography, a novel passing for a non-fictional travel account, or vice versa, should be conceived of by its author (and viewed by its readers) as a literary artifact, but he seems to forget that the genre also encompasses para-texts like leaflets, guidebooks, and blogs that, though not strictly literary, should be included 160 Pere Gifra Adroher in any discussion of the genre if only on account of their liability to be parodied or appropriated by more elaborated travel texts. The essays that follow prove the validity of most of Borm’s claims by deftly exploring how travel narratives, thanks to their chameleonic nature, use the possibilities of combining genre, aesthetics, and ideology to inscribe difference. To begin with, Helga Quadflieg’s essay (‘As Mannerly and Civill as any of Europe: Early Modern Travel Writing and the Exploration of the English Self’) focuses on some of the Renaissance narratives anthologized in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations and Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus to demonstrate that the early discoverers inscribed images of the Other in their texts to strengthen their national identity and to reaffirm their own Protestant values. In contrast to these prejudiced early modern texts, Betty Hagglund in ‘Not Absolutely a Native, nor Entirely a Stranger: The Journeys of Anne Grant’ concentrates on the less biased travel books that this Glasgow-born woman wrote during the Romantic period, when the appeal of the Home Tour was beginning to supersede that of the Grand Tour. Hagglund compares Memoirs of an American Lady (1808), based on Grant’s reminiscences of the colonial upstate New York where she spent her childhood, with her Letters from the Mountains (1806), an account of the parish of Laggan, in the Scottish Highlands, where she later resided with her husband, and argues that the celebration of otherness and multiculturalism in this writer’s travel books arose from her early experiences of the American wilderness and her even longer daily contact with the Gaelic-speaking population of northern Scotland. Equally focused on perceptions of Celtic difference are the essays by Glenn Hooper and Jean-Yves Le Disez, which are partial re-elaborations of previous work already known to the public (Hooper 2001, 2005; Le Disez 2002). In ‘The Saxon in Ireland: John Hervey Ashworth on the Emigrant Trail’, Hooper explores nineteenth-century British travel writing on Ireland by focusing on a book—The Saxon in Ireland (1851)— which extolled the wonders and promises of an island still under the consequences of the potato famine. While many British travelers deplored the state of their neighboring island, Hooper explains, Ashworth deployed several tropes typical of colonialist literature that publicized it as a potentially advantageous destination much closer to home for the English settler than those in Africa, Australia or New Zealand. Similarly, in ‘Animals as Figures of Otherness in Victorian Narratives of Travel in Brittany, 1840– 95’, Le Disez studies the attraction that travellers like Thomas A. Trollope and Matilda Betham-Edwards, among many others, felt towards another marginal yet very close destination. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Le Disez contends, Victorian travelers generally misrepresented French Brittany by way of animal imagery, and a close study of these narratives evidences the gradual domestication of a puzzling, somewhat exotic region across the Channel that for many remained halfway between the security of home and the wildness of abroad. Grounded in the connections between travel writing, otherness, and identity, the next two essays take the reader further afield across the Atlantic. Peter Hulme’s ‘The Silent Language of the Face: The Perception of Indigenous Difference in Travel Writing about the Caribbean’ sagaciously examines how the representation of the Caribs has evolved over the past century, starting with some of the official reports published immediately after the U.S. invasion of 1898 (for instance, the widely circulated Our Islands and their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil), continuing with such Reviews 161 narratives of the 1940s as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree, and ending with recent texts by Caribbean authors from Cuba and Dominica. Hulme, who has been studying the British representation of the native Caribbean peoples for more than two decades (Hulme 1986, 2000; Hulme and Whitehead 1992), claims that even though the earlier travel accounts represent the native peoples as a silent race nearly condemned to extinction, there has been lately a process of recovery on their part to speak up with their own voice. A similar process is analyzed in Erdmute Wenzel White’s essay ‘Night Train to Belo Horizonte: South American Travels’, which argues that revisionist readings of the early European travel accounts on Brazil compelled some Brazilian intellectuals and artists of the 1920s and 1930s like José Oswald de Sousa Andrade or Heitor Villalobos to travel across their country in search of its rich multicultural heritage. Their chief goal was to redefine their national identity, and in order to do so they collected native songs, reinterpreted Indian myths, and launched avant-garde movements such as Antropofagia that helped them to stand up against the old Eurocentric burden. Less focused on collective discourses than White’s essay, the emphasis on how travel texts construct and blend personal identities also becomes central to Loredana Polezzi’s article ‘Between Gender and Genre: The Travels of Estella Canziani’, an interesting case study of how a traveler can shift between selves and cultures, between autobiography and travel writing. The British-born daughter of a forward-looking American mother and a culturally committed Italian father, Canziani excelled both as a writer and painter and continuously sought the overlapping of multiple identities in her travel books. Ironically, as Polezzi observes, both facets stand apart today, for she is remembered in Italy as a British writer, whereas in Britain she is exhibited in museums as a painter of picturesque Italian scenes. The last three essays in this volume strike a more contemporary key by focusing on postcolonial travel literature and theory. In ‘Varieties of Nostalgia in Contemporary Travel Writing’, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan continue exploring one of the issues they had already touched upon in their path-breaking study Travelers with Typewriters (1998). Drawing on Susan Stewart’s theorization of different modes of ‘longing’ as well as on Renato Rosaldo’s conceptualization of ‘imperialist nostalgia’, though inexplicably ignoring John Frow’s relevant theses on the ‘semiotics of nostalgia’ (Frow 1991), these scholars trace the presence of colonialist, spiritual and environmental yearnings in postwar texts that transmute a bygone “desire for domination and conquest into ‘benign’ mythologies of loss or remembered pleasure” (141). While the first part of their essay is concerned with the writings of such well- known travelers as Eric Newby, Redmond O’Hanlon, Bruce Chatwin and Wilfred Thesiger, who are dubbed as “the 100-years-too-late” school of travel writing (142) on account of their belated—albeit sometimes ironic—imperial reminiscences, in the second part readers will find Huggan and Holland engaging into a profitable discussion of texts by Laurens Van der Post and Marlo Morgan where the invocation of the loss of primitive communities taps a sort of modern-day mysticism that ultimately disguises the damaging role played by western civilization in colonial contexts. The conflicts arising from cultural encounters are also significant in the essay entitled ‘Mediaeval Travel in Postcolonial Times: Amitav Ghosh’s ‘In an Antique Land’, where Padmini Mongia brings her own perspectives on travel writing from the standpoint of a scholar in postcolonial theory (see Mongia 1996). This critic employs 162 Pere Gifra Adroher
Ghosh’s singular book—a novel published in 1993 that in fact reads like a narrative of Ghosh’s sojourn in contemporary Egypt blended with the history of a medieval Jewish traveler to India he himself was researching—not only to discuss an Indian writer’s view of Islam but also to probe the limits of travel writing in the postcolonial era. Mongia methodologically defends a porous type of text, call it a novel, call it a travel book, which openly and self-consciously blends genres, anecdotes, historical layers and cultural traditions in order to provide a non-western representation of otherness. However, in placing so much emphasis on the postcolonial side of this book she fails to underline its most postmodern traits, particularly Ghosh’s collage of fictional and non- fictional materials resulting in a narrative where the traveler-cum-narrator must share protagonism with an apparently minor historical character called Bomma. Finally, calling for further perspectives on travel writing, Tim Youngs closes the book with a state-of-the-art discussion of some relevant issues that this genre and its critics systematically fail to address. Youngs, an expert in African travel writing (Youngs 1994, 1997) now better known for having recently co-edited the valuable Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Hulme and Youngs 2002), captivates the reader with a suggestive title—’Where Are We Going? Cross-border Approaches to Travel Writing’— that evokes concepts like transition and cross-disciplinarity which this volume had sought to (re)define from its inception. However, instead of exploring the permeability and cross-fertilization of travel writing alongside other genres, which is the task that Jan Borm carries out earlier, Youngs here examines the limits as well as the intersection of the discipline with other fields of research in the humanities and social sciences. He particularly focuses on the fecund ties that over the past two decades have been established between travel writing, on the one hand, and discourse analysis, anthropology and postcolonial studies, on the other. This mutual exchange of ideas and methods, he contends, is nowhere more visible than in the widespread presence of travel metaphors and terminology that we all take for granted in academic circles. Migration, border-crossing, nomadic literatures or travelling cultures, Youngs observes, are just a few of the many images of fluidity that have crossed over from one discipline into another and that we use today in many different contexts; however, he alerts that, paradoxically, behind their polysemic value we may encounter bleak political and economic realities that travel writing and its critics either ignore or approach in a rather muted manner. According to Young, “[t]ravel writing should not be blamed for this” (180), but its criticism should perhaps aim for a less metaphorical and more pragmatic consideration of those issues—linguistic, political, economic, technological—that really matter, or else it may run the risk, as the title of his essay seems to imply, of losing its bearings. In conclusion, the essays featured in this volume provide perspectives for reading travel literature that, in spite of their diverse subject matters, cohere into a critical methodology which pays attention to otherness and representation through issues of gender, race, nation, and genre. The volume’s contribution to the field, in consequence, lies in its stimulating display of the many ways of reading travel texts. For all the strengths of the editors’ careful selection, however, the reader is left with the sensation that matters of class are hardly tackled in a book that emphasizes so much the representation of the Other, and also that the choice of mostly English texts does not totally correspond to the presumed European scope of a volume where French or Reviews 163
German travel writers, for example, are almost absent. This is partly one of the reasons why the book, lacking the specificity it would have gained under a narrower chronological, geographical, or authorial framework, bears such an umbrella title as Perspectives on Travel Writing capable of containing it all. Thus, even though its contents and conclusions may be relevant for anyone in the area of humanities, this book is aimed primarily at scholars working in the field of travel studies. Those hoping for practical overviews of canonical travel writing and theory will not find them here, and should do well to complement their reading with other fairly recent publications in the field like Susan Roberson’s careful compilation of theoretical texts, Defining Travel (2001), or the comprehensive Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Hulme and Youngs 2002). These reservations expressed, this collection of essays marks another commendable instance of the solid work being carried out lately in the field of travel writing. Apart from the editors and contributors, the publishers deserve equal praise for the careful editing of this hardback which, with its nine illustrations and very useful index, serves as a fine instance of their ongoing commitment to producing excellent books in the field of travel writing.
Works Cited
Frow, John 1991: ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’. October 57: 123-151. Hooper, Glenn, ed. 2001: The Tourist Gaze: Travellers to Ireland, 1800-2000. Cork: Cork UP. ———— 2005: Travel Writing on Ireland, 1760-1860: Culture, History, Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Huggan, Graham and Patrick Holland 1998: Travelers with Typewriters: Critical Reflections of Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Hulme, Peter 1986: Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London: Methuen. ———— 2000: Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and their Visitors, 1877-1998. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Hulme, Peter and Neil L. Whitehead, eds. 1992: Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day. An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hulme, Peter and Tim Youngs, eds. 2002: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Le Disez, Jean Ives 2002: Etrange Bretagne: récits de voyageurs britanniques en Bretagne, 1830-1900. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Mongia, Padmini 1996: Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. London: Arnold. Roberson, Susan ed., 2001: Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Youngs, Tim 1994: Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900. Manchester: Manchester UP. ———— ed. 1997: Writing and Race. London: Longman.
Received 6 June 2006 Revised version received 14 September 2006
Paul Lyons 2006: American Pacificism. Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. 271pp + xii.
Paloma Fresno Calleja Universitat de les Illes Balears [email protected]
In the last decade numerous critics (see, for example, Ahmad 1995; McClintock 1992; Shohat 1993) have become aware of the shortcomings of postcolonial studies as a discipline affected by several contradictions. One of the aspects which has often been criticised is the celebratory use of the term postcolonialism whose temporal focus seems to disregard the prevalent effects of colonialism, or the impact of processes like global capitalism, neoimperialism or diaspora. Likewise, critics have questioned the generalist approach of most postcolonial theories, which depart from a common rejection of colonialism, but cannot always respond to historical or cultural specificities. In a recent study, Graham Huggan revises some of these issues, calling attention to the implications of a discipline which, despite its aims, is sustained by an industry centralised in western countries, unified by the use of English as a vehicle of literary and critical expression, and often reduced to the study of a privileged elite of writers and critics (2001: 4). This privileging has also affected some geographical areas, with the subsequent tendency to ignore or exclude others from the global postcolonial map. Oceania, and more specifically the literature produced in the Pacific Islands, is a case in point. In her recent study, Postcolonial Pacific Writing. Representations of the Body (2005), Michelle Keown calls attention to this omission in several recent books on postcolonial literature, where the Pacific Islands are either subsumed by labels such as ‘the Asia- Pacific region’ or ignored in preference or more commercial literatures (8-9). Likewise, Paul Sharrad opens his book Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature. Circling the Void (2003) stressing that although the works of Pacific writers respond to “the demand of postcolonial theory (and of its critics) for cultural and historical specificity”, this has paradoxically placed them outside “the largely afrocentric and indocentric concerns of postcolonial diaspora in the transatlantic metropolises that still dominate anglophone publishing” (32). Sharrad’s and Keown’s studies are just two of the most recent works to have plunged into the depths of a literary ocean virtually unexplored since Subramani published his pioneer South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation in 1985. Their aim has been to offer new critical perspectives on the fiction of Oceania’s most prominent authors, who are revising colonial views and producing ‘alter/native’ representations of their Pacific cultures both from their countries of origin or from their new countries of residence. Another aspect of this revision has involved reassessing historical, literary and anthropological discourses on these islands as presented in western texts. This has been the concern of a series of works (Calder et al. 1999; Edmond 1997; Edmond and Smith 2003; Fausett 1994; Howe 2000; Nicholas 1997; Smith 1992, to name just a few), among which Paul Lyons’ American Pacificism. Oceania in the U.S. Imagination occupies an outstanding position, first because it continues with the revision of colonial discourses about the Pacific, and secondly because it does so from a perspective which had been 166 Paloma Fresno Calleja traditionally ignored by more generalist approaches. Despite the fact that crosscultural exchanges between Euroamericans and Oceanians have been analysed in several works and that some of them include chapters or sections devoted to American authors, like Jack London or Herman Melville, Lyons’ work constitutes the first consistent and systematic effort to analyse the literature about Oceania produced in the United States. In Representing the South Pacific (1997) Edmond acknowledges a “terminological imprecision” when it comes to using the terms European and western in the context of intercultural encounters in the Pacific, an inaccuracy which in his view reflects “not only the changing map of an unravelling post-colonial and post-Cold War world, but also the fluid and contested nature of our cultural and intellectual categories” (1997: 16). These terminological inaccuracies are in fact solved in Lyons’ work, precisely because he concentrates on what is specifically American in the works he analyses. This allows him to avoid the generalist tendencies so often attributed to (post)colonial studies, while illuminating these texts from a perspective which has also escaped the paradigm of American studies. His aim is to show that, despite the fact that the images of Oceania have been deconstructed from different angles, the American approach still needs to be reassessed, especially when considering U.S. influence on the region. The portrayal of these islands in American texts reveals not only a historical ignorance about an area where “the U.S. has formed states and territories, tested weapons, recruited soldiers, exploited resources, induced dependencies, displaced populations, and ruptured cultures” (8), but also a deeper lack of consideration for indigenous epistemologies, beliefs, and traditions, which was pervasive not only in colonialist literature but which prevails in contemporary critical responses to those texts. The introduction already displays what I consider to be one of the strengths of the book: the author coins several terms to solve critical deficiencies and to systematise the most common tropes employed in the works of American authors, which are studied through the lens of what he calls “American Pacificism”. This term refers to the Orientalist discourse employed to reinforce U.S. national narratives in different historical periods, demonstrating that “it is clearly not the ‘essential nature’ of the Islander that changes, but the material relation and the discursive needs of the receiver” (16). Lyons employs the term Pacificism to avoid the flaws of the term Orientalism with its tendency to “marginalise Oceania under the rubric of the Orient” (36). This has been a critical step taken by other scholars; Elizabeth Deloughrey (2001), for example, has redefined the Orientalist discourses in the oceanic context with the term islandism, considering that western views were articulated basically through the representation of these islands as isolated and contained spaces which demanded control and favour continuous visitation. Lyons’ focus is even more specific since he establishes the connections between representations of Oceania in the context of diverse debates on U.S. national identity, economic expansion, or military history, pointing for example at their similarities with discourses about Native Americans or African Americans. A deeper analysis of the terms American and Pacificism is offered in the first chapter where Lyons reviews the main images of Oceania looking at the pervasive tropes of cannibalism and tourism. The description of the islands and their indigenous populations as simultaneously hostile and friendly proves the ambiguous premises on which these discourses were formulated, presenting the islands as useful stepping stones for U.S. economic, political or development and as places in urgent need of progress Reviews 167
(24), simultaneously constructed “to be civilized and as escapes from civilization” (27). Lyons detaches thus the term Pacificism from its literal meaning calling attention to the violent legacy which still today remains hidden under apparently harmless contacts like tourism. The rest of the chapters are organised chronologically to cover the literature about Oceania produced from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter two deals with the literary accounts of the Pacific in the context of U.S. commercial expansion, arguing that the line between non-fiction and literature was erased when authors began to rely on travellers’ accounts and nautical literature to produce literary texts which in turn contributed to the narrative of national advance through the narration of maritime adventures in the area. The texts discussed in this section are Edgar Allan Poe’s Native of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and James Fennimore Cooper’s Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater, a Tale of the Pacific (1847), which are read as complementary ways of channelling economic nationalism through ambivalent perceptions of Islanders. Lyons claims that the way in which Poe’s work has been studied, in the light of black and white issues in America, has made critics ignore the relevance of its location, which he interprets as Poe’s way of displacing “antebellum debates about race into a vast, resource-rich, fantasmic Oceanian space” (55). Poe’s text is studied in connection with other commercial pro-slavery texts (such as James Kirke Paulding’s Slavery in the United States or Benjamin Morrell’s Four Voyages) which fed the myths of the natives’ need to be rescued by U.S. commercial expansion. Lyons concludes this section suggesting that Poe’s text is a failed parody which appropriates previous texts, not with the aim of questioning the myths they project, but with the clear intention of perpetuating them in the light of the prevailing economic discourse. Using an allegorical approach, Cooper’s work reveals a similar purpose, displaying a clear-cut ideology according to which natural hierarchies and moral unity are defended as key ingredients in the formation of the colony. The next two chapters form a unity in themselves, since they are organised around the notions of fear and friendship, which in turn derive from the images of the hostile and accessible natives mentioned above. Chapter three starts with an excellent analysis of fear as a pervasive element in the literature of encounter, determinant to understanding the production of historical knowledge about the Pacific. The chapter comments on Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of The United States Exploring Expedition (1845), in contrast with one of the best known literary works about the Pacific, Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), considering the ways in which these authors put this archival fear to use in their portrayals of cannibalism. For Lyons, Wilkes’s text is an obvious response to the nationalistic mission, intended to corroborate pre-existing assumptions about natives and proving that he “was not a discoverer but a surveyor, not an original describer but a certifier of existent knowledges” (79). Melville’s text, on the contrary, does not permit such a straightforward analysis: his work displays a citational form of cannibalism (89) which took him to appropriate existing knowledge in order to fulfil the audience’s expectations while attempting to parody these views, conscious as he was of their constructed nature. And yet, Lyons stresses the inherent difficulties in a text whose subversive potential is undermined because it continues to be informed by a prevailing 168 Paloma Fresno Calleja notion of fear difficult to escape when “structures of belief were deeper than parody could cleanse” (90). The next chapter analyses the portrayal of friendship between Oceanians and U.S. citizens in the literature of encounter, describing its recurrent features in texts by Henry Dana, Herman Melville, Henry Adams, Willowdeen Handy and Jack London. The narrations of these encounters were based on the proverbial hospitality of Oceanic cultures and combined remarks about their chaotic and exaggerated reactions with veiled erotic references, often narrated in scenes of arrivals and departures which took place on the liminal space of the beach. These relationships served to establish alternative interpersonal networks among Oceanians and Euroamericans not traditionally registered in official narratives and where fear was not altogether absent, thus stressing the links between fear and friendship as part of a ‘discursive continuum’ (98). The following chapters open what, in my view, is the most interesting part of the book. Chapter five highlights the transition from colonial encounter to literary tourism, focusing on the mechanisms by means of which twentieth century literature has continued to reveal an image of these countries as paradises to be discovered and controlled, despite the fact that by this time they had already been corrupted and transformed in various ways. The propagandistic role carried out by adventure narratives or nationalist texts in the past is now the responsibility of works apparently different in motivation and contents, but informed by similar ideas. To encapsulate their views Lyons uses the terms cannibal tour and lotus-eater tour, the modern versions of the literature of encounter, both of which are determined by the need to overcome “colonial shame by embracing Oceanians, who are now considered as unthreatening” (136), but remain intent on presenting the islands in similar terms, as spaces accessible to westerners, as the settings of colonial fantasies whose refreshed versions continue to be realised. Lyons devotes part of this chapter to the discussion of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which he reads as an extension of the lotus-eater school of writing with which she shares similar assumptions about the sexual availability of the natives and a common need to fulfil her expectations after the encounter. The chapter concludes with a brief analysis of a more recent but equally controversial book, Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992), which he defines as a “postmodern cannibal tour” (145), considering that it moves between a postmodern incredulity about Oceanic myths and a stubborn resistance to reject those images, as if Theroux was entitled to continue with the task performed by previous authors. The last chapter is devoted to several works related to U.S. perceptions of Oceania in the context of the Second World War and concentrates on the evolution from literary tourism to what the author calls ‘histotouricism’. This is a term he coins to account for the code which dominated Cold War writing about Hawai’i, which combines the authority of historical accounts with the typical features of touristic texts, “presents history as a ‘tour’, essentializes group characteristics, and takes on the structure of guidebooks” (151). In the introduction of the book, Lyons had already referred to the contradictory position of Hawai’i, as an area which is excluded both from Pacific and from American studies, having been incorporated as part of the States, and yet not having become properly American either. At this point in history, Hawai’i was presented as “a paradise redeemed in Cold War terms” (152), which displayed the full Reviews 169 effects of a successful colonial mission now perpetuated in its touristic promotion. The chapter contains an analysis of James Michener’s Hawaii (1959), the work which Lyons considers as the paragon of histotouricism. The conclusion, ‘Changing pre-scriptions: varieties of antitourism in the contemporary literatures of Oceania’, is not a mere summary of the book but rather a substantial chapter meant to be read contrapuntally with the rest of the volume. Whereas the whole book is devoted to the reassessing of American visions, in the conclusion Lyons stresses the need to renew the images of the Pacific from the inside, connecting the views of these authors to their social and material contexts. This section surveys the contemporary literatures coming from Oceania and the ways in which indigenous authors have fought Pacificist imaginings and its prevalent effects through the articulation of ‘antitourism’, a type of writing which “puts the pains and pleasures and social situations of Islanders center stage [and] positions Islanders in front row seats, whoever actually attends” (179). The chapter analyses this antitouristic frame in several works by Albert Wendt, Sia Figial or Alani Apio, who have added the diversity, richness and quality of their literatures to the postcolonial spectrum. My only concern has to do with Lyon’s style. The book is, at some points, heavy reading because of a tendency towards obscurity, and the abuse of quotations. This is, due without any doubt to Lyons’ vast knowledge on the topic, but some of these paragraphs (on pages 63, 93, 131, 180, to enumerate just a few) should be edited for the sake of clarity and fluidity. There are also a couple of typographical errors (the name of the author Keri Hulme is misspelt on page 182, and the Spanish word he refers to on page 214 should be tocayo not tacayo); a certain confusion is found when Lyons refers to the film Once Were Warriors as Where We Once Belonged, which is in fact the title of one of the novels he comments on in the conclusion and which, as far as I am aware, has not been adapted for the screen. Despite these formal issues, this is a work of great value which displays many strengths. Its interdisciplinary focus, its undeniable scholarship and its illuminating literary, theoretical and historical views make it a notable and original addition to the studies on Oceania and will be of interest to anyone working in Pacific, American or postcolonial studies.
Works Cited
Ahmad, Aijaz 1995: ‘Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?’ Román de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker, eds. Late Imperial Culture. London: Verso. 11-32. Calder, Alex, Lamb, Jonathan and Orrs, Bridget, eds. 1999: Voyages and Beaches. Pacific Encounters 1769-1840. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P. Deloughrey, Elizabeth 2001: ‘The Litany of Islands, the Rosary of Archipielagoes: Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy’. Ariel 32.1: 21-51. Edmond, Rod 1997: Representing the South Pacific. Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Edmond, Rod and Vanessa Smith, eds. 2003: Islands in History and Representation. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. Fausett, David 1994: Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century. A Study in Stereotyping. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 170 Paloma Fresno Calleja
Howe, K. R. 2000: Nature, Culture and History. The “Knowing” of Oceania. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P. Huggan, Graham 2001: The Post-colonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge. Keown, Michelle 2005: Postcolonial Pacific Writing. Representations of the Body. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. McClintock, Anne 1992: ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the “Postcolonialism”’. Social Text 31/32: 84-98. Nicholas, Thomas 1997: In Oceania. Visions, Artifacts and Histories. Durham: Duke UP. Sharrad, Paul 2003: Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature. Circling the Void. Manchester and Auckland: Manchester UP; Auckland UP. Smith, Bernard 1992: Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. New Haven: Yale UP. Shohat, Ella 1993: ‘Notes on the “Postcolonial”’. Social Text 31/32: 99-113. Subramani 1985: South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation. Suva: University of the South Pacific.
Received 3 May 2006 Revised version received 25 September 2006
Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi, eds. 2005: Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Seattle and London: U Washington P. 296 pp.1
María Isabel Seguro Gómez Universidad de Barcelona [email protected]
The articles included in the anthology Form and Transformation are of great interest given the fact that, overall, they provide a different approach from that offered by some of the first studies of Asian American literature. As one of the editors, Zhou Xiaojing, explains in the introduction, the tendency was to over-emphasize the common themes in works by Asian American writers together with the social and historical contexts of their literary productions. Such was the perspective adopted by Elaine H. Kim in her influential work Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982). Notwithstanding its valuable contribution to the field, critical writings following this kind of analysis seem to use literature as a means of producing a socio-historical study of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States rather than a critique of literature itself. Despite Kim’s feminist perspective, which clearly differentiates her from that of the influential Aiiieeeee! anthology (Chin et al. 1974), both works share a trait common to most criticism on Asian American literature up to the late 1980s. As the editors of Form and Transformation point out, this consisted in assessing the worth of a text according to the extent to which it resisted notions of assimilation within a dominant culture. This had the effect of ignoring “the ways in which Asian American authors have resisted, subverted, and reshaped hegemonic European American genres”, an approach which underlines the “complex relationship between Asian American and traditional European American literature” (4). In fact, this anthology follows the trends shown by those critical works, especially since the 1990s, which problematize analyses based on the assimilation/resistance binary, such as David Palumbo Liu’s Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (1999), David L. Eng’s Racial Castration: Managing Masculinities in Asian America (2001) and Viet Than Nguyen’s Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), among others. Recent critical works state that, as part of American literature, Asian American texts should be considered not in opposition to, but as sites of negotiation with/within mainstream culture. Theoretical approaches should, therefore, bear in mind issues concerning diaspora, for example, with its emphasis on transnationality and hybridity, which question clear-cut binaries in relation to the construction of identity. Other aspects are the intersectionality of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and class discourses in such constructions. These proposals, simultaneously, de-essentialize the racial (and gendered) Asian American subject— deconstructing an ethnographic analysis—as well as that of the universal, Western/American subject as white, male, middle-class and heterosexual. This tendency has been further emphasized by gay and lesbian studies and the publication of clearly
1 This article has been published with the financial support of the Departament d’Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the European Social Fund. 172 María Isabel Seguro Gómez queer texts, for instance, Filipino American Zamora Linmark’s short novel Rolling the Rs (1995) and Chinese American Chay Yew’s play Porcelain (1997). These critical approaches have, in turn, led to a revaluation of the question of generic form in Asian American literature. In particular, they have taken into account postmodern poetics, its use of intertextuality and the concept that the transformation and subversion of these forms are a kind of “politicized aesthetics” (25) as a means of addressing, challenging and changing American culture. This is precisely the aim of Form and Transformation: to reveal how Asian American writers have appropriated genres traditionally associated with Western literature, not so much to express their degree of assimilation—and consequently of acceptance by mainstream American society—but their attempts to question and transform them. The anthology covers a wide range of texts from the late nineteenth century by Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, to those by late twentieth century authors such as Timothy Liu, Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Chang-rae Lee. It also analyzes a variety of genres including memoirs and autobiographies, poetry, the short story cycle and the novel, but it excludes plays—a genre which is gaining importance within Asian American letters. It should also be noted that the anthology analyses works by Asian Americans of diverse origins, not merely Chinese Americans, the ethnic group with whom the term Asian American is usually identified. Texts by Americans of Japanese, Korean, Cambodian, Hawaiian and Indian background have also been included. This fact highlights the coalitional nature of the term and, consequently, its heterogeneity as a result in recent times of the changing demographic composition of Asian immigration in the United States. The anthology can be divided into four sections. The first includes contributions dealing with authors considered to be the pioneers of Asian American writing: Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Yung Wing. In fact, Floyd Cheung’s article on Yung’s work My Life in China and America (1909) is also a link to the second section, which concentrates upon those authors known for their use of the autobiography and memoir, such as Jade Snow Wong. The third section consists of articles on contemporary Asian American poets. Xiaojing analyses the poetry of John Yau and Kimiko Hahn, while Richard Serrano looks particularly at the interaction between Timothy Liu and Walt Whitman. Finally, the articles from the fourth section concentrate upon fiction. These evaluate the works of Nora Okja Keller, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Chang-rae Lee and Bharati Mukherjee. The first two, by Samina Najmi, co-editor of the anthology, and Rocío G. Davis, analyze how the authors transform and re-appropriate the bildungsroman in order to incorporate in the American imagery the experiences of Korean Americans and Hawaiian Japanese Americans respectively. On the other hand, Tina Y. Chen looks at Chang-rae Lee’s deconstruction of the spy novel in Native Speaker (1995) as a means of reflecting the author’s perspectives of racial invisibility and its consequences on the formation of the Self. Finally, Pallavi Rastogi’s article on Mukherjee’s novel The Holder of the World (1993) considers how the author, drawing from such a canonical text as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, deconstructs the homogenic image of mainstream America. Form and Transformation opens with two contributions by Dominka Ferens and David Shih, who question traditional views on the Eaton sisters. Winnifred and Edith Reviews 173
Maude Eaton were Eurasians, daughters of an English father and a Chinese mother. Unlike her sister, who in her texts acknowledged her origins, Winnifred projected her public self as half Japanese, changing her name to that of Onoto Watanna. This decision, as Ferens argues, had in mind the more positive image of Japan versus China at the turn of the nineteenth century and, consequently, responded to the West’s interest in the country, then regarded as both a source of exoticism and as a means of gaining insight into the ‘Japanese miracle’. A first reading of Watanna, then, following the criteria of assimilation versus resistance, would consider her an assimilationist writer, satisfying the readership’s expectancy for the exotic and for explanations of Japan’s rapid modernization. Ferens argues that, in Watanna’s attempts to indulge Western fantasies of the Orient, she not only appropriated but transformed texts on Japan authored by Anglo-American men. The subversion of her literary production, then, consists of deconstructing nineteenth century ethnographic theories by which race, being intimately related to culture, was essentialized. Her supposedly Japanese background legitimized her as an authentic, authoritative voice on anything Japanese. The article, thus, manages to reveal a not easily recognizable, subversive aspect of Watanna. Shih, on the other hand, reads Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far’s best-known piece of writing, ‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian’ (1909) in relation to another text that was originally published along with the essay: her own self-portrait. This kind of intertextuality, therefore, subverts more overtly than Watanna’s writings nineteenth century ethnographic theories. Her portrait challenges any clear racial identity and, according to Shih’s reading of both texts, reflects Sui Sin Far’s awareness of the racialized body as a socio-cultural construction. Not only the written, but also the visual text, deconstruct stereotypical images of Chinese, problematizing racial discourses and strict categorizations. One of the most interesting articles in the book is Cheung’s re-interpretation of My Life in China and America by the Chinese diplomat Yung Wing. The analysis of the text undermines the cultural-nationalist reading provided by the Aiiieeeee! editors led by Frank Chin. Cheung convincingly inserts Yung’s autobiography within the American literary tradition by demonstrating his particular use of this characteristically American genre, relating him to Benjamin Franklin. Aware of the correlation between the individual and his/her country, Yung wrote about himself as a hard-working, self-made man, following the precepts of manhood and virtue as exposed by Theodore Roosevelt. From the perspective of masculine studies, the use of the genre and especially of Standard ‘correct’ English represents a strategic “resistant appropriation” (79). Yung was not only reasserting himself, but also his fellow countrymen and ultimately China. On the other hand, Christopher Douglas’s analysis of Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), does not initially seem so convincing about the writer’s use of the genre as a means of intervening in dominant American discourse. This is partly due to the first part of the article which describes how Wong’s autobiography was used by the U.S. State Department to convey an image of the United States as “an international beacon of democracy, liberty, and importantly, racial harmony” (103). The fact that Wong describes life in Chinatown from a culturalist viewpoint, has led some critics to consider her work as an attempt to make Chinese Americans more acceptable by rendering them, yet again, as exotic and, above all, 174 María Isabel Seguro Gómez unchallenging. Douglas considers, however, that Wong’s use of the ethnic rather than the racial discourse, predominant within the social sciences in the 1950s, challenges essentialist attitudes around race and culture for its emphasis on the performative nature of behavior and customs. The article, in fact, exemplifies the limitations imposed on Asian American texts when they are interpreted ethnographically so that Wong’s usage of the autobiography is not particularly emphasized as a means of intervening within the dominant culture. This is not the case of the following two contributions, which close the section on the the memoir/autobiography. Both Rajini Srikanth’s article on Abraham Verghese’s memoir My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS (1994), and Teri Shaffer Yamada’s text on autobiographies by Cambodian Americans, emphasize the interaction between the individual and the community, (in the case of the latter, the global community), a trait common to most literature produced by minorities. This characteristic in itself transforms the traditional concept of the genre, described by Srikanth as one which “charts a journey—typically from youth to old age, from ignorance to knowledge, or from naïveté to maturity” (126), highlighting individual growth. In the case of Verghese’s memoir, as underlined by Srikanth, there are actually two journeys which intertwine with each other. One is the AIDS patients’ return to family and home, and the other is Verghese’s own integration into the community as the doctor who enables the re-establishment of links between his patients, their families and the outer world. His status as an outsider as a result of his race and ethnicity connects him to that of his patients ostracized by illness, and provides the image, like that of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, of the various pieces which sewn together form a unity and a “meaningful and useful relationship” (130). The Cambodian American autobiographies published in the 1980s use the genre not so much to think about American identity but as a means of interrogating how American values about democracy, justice and human rights are un/applied within the United States and in more global contexts. The autobiography is used as a means of transforming the author/protagonist from a victim to a fighter demanding justice both on a national and an international level. From this perspective these autobiographies occupy a space between borders, emphasizing the transnational experiences, and consequently, their interconnections in the globalized world of the late twentieth century. Zhou Xiaojing’s and Richard Serrano’s contributions focus on the ongoing dialogue between Asian American and Euro-American poetry. The result is the re-definition of the genre to include within the literary tradition, once again, the experience of Americans of Asian origin. Xiaojing analyses how the poetry of John Yau and Kimiko Hahn appropriates and redefines a particular lyrical form strongly associated with American letters: confessional poetry. Xiaojing demonstrates how both poets, through their manipulation of this kind of lyric, criticize the links traditionally made between Asian American and Asian literary forms. Yau and Hahn emphasize the fact that their work forms part of American letters by their alliance with American poetic movements such as Language Poetry. At the same time they transform American poetics, in particular confessional poetry, by subverting the privileged position of the ‘I’ which ignores other identities marginalized by gender and racial discourses. This is achieved, for example, by the use of a plurality of voices in their work. Reviews 175
Affirming one’s belonging to American literature, as well as criticizing it, is part of Timothy Liu’s agenda as revealed by Serrano’s article. This is reflected in the fact that Liu addresses himself to the icon of gay American poetry, Walt Whitman, a strategy which he shares with the African American gay poet Essex Hemphill. Serrano argues that Hemphill and Liu, in turn, talk to each other through Whitman, manipulating their common literary legacy so as to highlight their exclusion from the mainstream as well as their different experiences as ethnic, gay men. The latter part of the volume consists of articles that examine the intervention of particular authors in modifying variants of the narrative genre. Samina Najmi and Rocío G. Davis look at the transformation of the bildungsroman in Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller and in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, both from 1997. As Davis asserts, a conventional bildungsroman “functions as a program for identification with the accepted social order and value system as it chronicles the protagonist’s assimilation of his or her society’s values” (233). Moreover, as Najmi states, it is a kind of narrative traditionally concerned with unmarked universal identities, that is, with Eurocentrism and the masculine. Najmi successfully argues that Keller’s novel actually combines two forms, the bildungsroman and the war narrative, and in the process feminizes and asianizes them. On the other hand, Davis demonstrates how Yamanaka too, manipulates not only the bildungsroman but also the short story cycle, following the line of other ethnic writers such as Amy Tan. What both Keller and Yamanaka do with their texts is modify the bildungsroman so as to draw attention to the specific experiences of ethnic women within a particular historical, socio-cultural background. What is important about Davis’s choice of Yamanaka’s text is that it foregrounds the contribution made by Hawaiian writers to Asian American literature, showing more bluntly the complexities of identity formation in a multicultural context. Tina Y. Chen analyses Chang-rae Lee’s appropriation of the spy novel in Native Speaker (1995). The article shows how Lee subverts the genre by portraying a character who does not embody the traits of the typical spy hero. This, in turn, is used to question the roles that we are assigned or even choose to play out in accordance with certain parameters, be it race, ethnicity, gender, class, etc. In her analysis Chen demonstrates how Lee forces the main character, Henry Park, and consequently the reader, to look at the performative nature of identity by having a spy playing varying roles according to the requirements of his job. Being someone who works undercover, the spy is an excellent vehicle for social criticism, in this case enhanced by the protagonist’s Korean origin. An interesting aspect of Chen’s article is her argument of how Lee counterattacks stereotypes of the Asian spy (such as Fu Manchu) in popular texts by Euro-American writers. Finally, the anthology closes with an article by Pallavi Rastogi on Bharati Mukherjee’s 1993 novel The Holder of the World. It is interesting to note that the volume opens with an article on Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, an author traditionally viewed as an advocating assimilationist, and closes with another on Mukherjee, criticized for the same reason, and how both essays challenge that vision. Following the same line as the previous articles, Rastogi proposes to read Mukherjee’s novel as a claim being part of the American canon as well as the right to intervene in it so as to deconstruct the conventional image of a homogenized American culture. This 176 María Isabel Seguro Gómez is achieved by using The Scarlet Letter as a starting point for her novel. Hawthorne’s heroine, Hester Prynne, becomes Hannah Easton, a woman who, in seventeenth century India has a love affair with an Indian monarch and eventually returns to Salem, already pregnant. Mukherjee thus legitimates the presence of Indians in the United States as much as that of Europeans, suggesting that hybridity has always been an intrinsic characteristic of the country. By rewriting the canon she attempts “to make the ‘mainstream’ an amalgam of ‘minorstreams’” (282). Overall, the collected essays in Form and Transformation achieve their aim of demonstrating the necessity of taking into account the political agenda behind the choice of a particular genre and, especially, of its subversion, something which may not be so apparent at first sight. This kind of analysis provides a complex literary critique, rather than simple ethnographic readings and the assimilation/resistance binary, emphasizing how Asian and Anglo America interact and construct each other.
Works Cited
Chin, Frank, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong. 1974: Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. New York: Meridian. Eng, David L. 2001: Racial Castration: Managing Masculinities in Asian America. Durham: Duke UP. Kim, Elaine H. 1982: Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple UP. Linmark, Zamora 1995: Rolling the R’s. New York: Kaya. Nguyen, Viet Thanh 2002: Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford UP. Palumbo-Liu, David 1999: Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford UP. Yew, Chay 1997: Porcelain and a Language of Their Own: Two Plays. New York: Grove P.
Received 29 March 2006 Revised version received 15 September 2006
Ana Martín Úriz y Rachel Whittaker, eds. 2005: La composición como comunicación: una experiencia en las aulas de lengua inglesa en bachillerato. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. 197 pp.
Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez Universidad de Santiago de Compostela [email protected]
Aquellos de nosotros a quienes nos interesa y preocupa todo lo relacionado con el aprendizaje y enseñanza de lenguas, y que por nuestra actividad diaria y profesional nos movemos entre la teoría y la práctica pedagógica, no tenemos por menos que celebrar y alabar la publicación de la obra que a continuación vamos a reseñar. Tal como se deduce del título propuesto, el propósito final de este trabajo es medir la influencia de metodologías pedagógicas innovadoras en la enseñanza de la composición escrita; en otras palabras, se trata de analizar hasta qué punto la introducción de una innovación educativa, que en este caso se concreta en un determinado tratamiento de la didáctica de la expresión escrita, repercute en la enseñanza y al mismo tiempo en el desarrollo profesional de los profesores implicados. El gran mérito e interés de esta obra se deriva de una combinación armónica y efectiva de los tres ejes principales en el avance de una disciplina científica: la investigación, la teoría y la práctica. Es evidente, y así es señalado por múltiples autores (McLaughlin 1987; White 1993; Nunan 1994), que un campo epistemológico no progresa sin una investigación que esté apoyada en una práctica real con una fundamentación teórica sólidamente constituida. La enseñanza de una lengua extranjera no supone una excepción al axioma anterior. Será a través de la investigación como podremos avanzar en la enseñanza del inglés y así, de este modo, estaremos en condiciones de llenar el vacío existente entre los múltiples modelos de aprendizaje de lenguas y la propia enseñanza de éstas, a la vez que se podrán extraer implicaciones directas para nuestro contexto particular. Por otra parte, es necesario destacar que esta monografía nos presenta los resultados de un proyecto de investigación donde han colaborado dos equipos de profesores pertenecientes a niveles educativos diferentes (Universidad y Enseñanza Secundaria) pero que han unido sus conocimientos teóricos y su formación docente e investigadora con el fin de diseñar y valorar los resultados de una experiencia de enseñanza de la escritura de carácter comunicativo en cinco grupos de alumnos de bachillerato de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid. Una cuidadosa planificación del tratamiento propuesto, la selección de una metodología adecuada y debidamente justificada para los objetivos que se persiguen, acompañadas de los principios de un marco teórico coherente y actualizado dan buena muestra de su elevado carácter científico y académico. Este marco teórico se encuadra básicamente dentro de las teorías cognitivas de la enseñanza-aprendizaje de la expresión escrita, con una atención especial al acto de escribir como proceso con todas las implicaciones que esto conlleva en la consideración del rol del escritor y del lector, así como de la propia naturaleza de la tarea escrita. De las cuatros destrezas lingüísticas que tradicionalmente se distinguen en la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras, es posible que en los últimos años la expresión escrita haya sido relegada de modo injustificado a un segundo plano. Con la llegada de los 178 Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez enfoques comunicativos y por tareas con sus diversas ramificaciones e interpretaciones, el término comunicación se ha convertido en el punto de referencia que condiciona la actuación del profesor, tanto fuera del aula en el diseño de cursos y la programación de sus clases como dentro de la misma a la hora de poner en práctica todo un elenco de técnicas didácticas en consonancia con este objetivo final. Erróneamente se ha venido considerando que la comunicación en la lengua extranjera estaba asociada casi de manera exclusiva a la lengua oral, asumiendo que esta supuesta competencia comunicativa se extrapolaría posteriormente de forma natural a la lengua escrita. En la línea de este razonamiento, se daba por sentado que si un alumno era capaz de expresarse oralmente, automáticamente podría hacer lo mismo en el caso de la escritura. Por si fuera poco, a todo lo anterior se ha añadido la especial circunstancia de que en el nivel de bachillerato la prueba de idioma extranjero para acceso a la universidad española está basada en un texto de lenguaje no especializado con el que los alumnos tienen que enfrentarse, contestando a una serie de preguntas de lectura comprensiva y de opinión que requieren, en la mayor parte de los casos, una capacidad muy limitada y constreñida para expresarse por escrito. Este formato de la prueba de selectividad tiene repercusiones directas en muchas ocasiones en la enseñanza de la lengua escrita, favoreciendo una metodología que prima por encima de todo el resultado final, es decir, el producto, sin considerar en absoluto los procesos iniciales, intermedios y finales que lleva implícito todo acto de escritura. Si en el panorama internacional de la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras y sobre todo en el ámbito anglosajón, la investigación en torno a la expresión escrita ha ocupado un lugar preferente a raíz de las propuestas de perspectivas metodológicas de carácter cognitivo con acento especial en el proceso (Zamel 1982, 1983; Raimes, 1983a, 1983b; White y Arndt 1991; Kroll 1996), no podemos decir lo mismo de nuestro contexto educativo. Lamentablemente no son muchos los trabajos de estas características de los que tengamos conocimiento salvo los de Cassany (1993, 1999), Manchón (1999), Manchón, Murphy y Roca (1997, 2000), y Neff et al. (2003, 2004), además de las investigaciones llevadas a cabo por el grupo de investigación de las editoras de este volumen, Ana Martín Úriz y Rachel Whittaker, integrado también por María Barrio, Sandra Blanco Paetsch, Laura Hidalgo Downing y Luis Ordóñez de Celis, que se han concretado en varias tesis doctorales, publicaciones de interés, tales como Chaudron, Martín Úriz y Whittaker (2001); Martín Úriz, Hidalgo Downing y Whittaker (2001), Martín Úriz (2002), y proyectos de investigación financiados por el MEC y por otras autoridades educativas. Por todo lo anterior, estimo que este proyecto supone una contribución importante a la didáctica de la lengua escrita en nuestro país, constituyendo además un modelo de lo que puede ser la aplicación de una innovación educativa sencilla, sin derroche de grandes recursos materiales o económicos pero fiel a unos objetivos concretos y perfectamente asumibles, llevada a cabo de forma concienzuda y rigurosa. Desde un punto de vista de su organización interna, se pueden distinguir tres partes bien diferenciadas: 1) los comienzos del proyecto, 2) textos, análisis y resultados, y por último, 3) los profesores en el proyecto. Cada una de estas tres secciones está conformada por tres, cuatro y dos capítulos respectivamente, sumando un total de nueve. Llama la atención que, a pesar de que son varios y en ocasiones diferentes los colaboradores de cada contribución, se transluce una gran unidad y coherencia interna Reviews 179 con infinidad de citas cruzadas que ayudan a comprender mejor lo que se nos quiere exponer. Sin duda, todo ello es debido a una labor de edición considerable. Por otra parte, destaca el hecho de que muchos de los capítulos, sobre todo los que constituyen la segunda parte en la que se describen y analizan los resultados obtenidos, puedan ser leídos como contribuciones independientes que tienen sentido completo por sí mismos. En el primer capítulo, Ana Martín Úriz hace una revisión panorámica de los modelos de composición que más influencia han tenido en la enseñanza-aprendizaje de la escritura en las últimas décadas, considerando con más detalle la escritura como proceso. Asimismo, se nos dan unas pinceladas sobre las tendencias que se perfilan para el futuro. Se abordan igualmente temas sumamente interesantes como la propia naturaleza de la escritura, el valor pedagógico de la composición escrita, el lugar de esta destreza en el Marco Común Europeo de Referencia para la enseñanza, aprendizaje y evaluación de las lenguas y los modelos teóricos de composición. Dentro de este último apartado se dedica un espacio considerable a las teorías cognitivas basadas fundamentalmente en el modelo propuesto por Flower y Hayes (1981). Las ocho páginas dedicadas a este planteamiento están plenamente justificadas porque los puntos de partida y final del proyecto se encuadran en el marco de este entramado teórico. A pesar de esto, se echa en falta, por un lado, una postura más crítica con los modelos cognitivos de la escritura y, por otro, una explicación más detallada de otros esquemas teóricos de composición alternativos como son los modelos expresivos y los sociales. El capítulo segundo, firmado por las dos editoras generales y por el prestigioso investigador norteamericano en el área de adquisición de segundas lenguas, Craig Chaudron, nos da cuenta de la naturaleza y características de los centros, alumnos y profesores que estuvieron implicados en esta experiencia de innovación. Participaron cinco profesores de bachillerato con características diversas y concepciones diferentes de la enseñanza de la lengua extranjera, y se tomaron muestras de cinco grupos de un total de 93 alumnos. Todos los muestreos se llevaron a cabo en 1998 y se operó con el patrón de una pretarea que los alumnos tenían que realizar antes del tratamiento y una postarea justo al final. En el primer ejercicio el tema elegido fue Friendship, y en el segundo, Parents and Children. El período de desarrollo del experimento tuvo una duración de alrededor de cinco meses, desde enero hasta mayo. Además de la propia recogida de muestras de interlengua, se realizaron observaciones periódicas de aula con el fin de obtener información de carácter cualitativo que completara los datos cuantitativos anteriores. En la p. 52 se nos dice que “no existe un grupo de control, puesto que se estimó, que con un número de participantes limitado, la comparación de los tratamientos innovadores intragrupos estaba justificado”. Sin disentir totalmente de la afirmación anterior puesto que los grupos de sujetos comparten una serie de rasgos comunes pero también difieren en sus contextos particulares, lo que llevó a tratamientos diferentes para cada clase, estimamos que la existencia de un grupo de control podría haber proporcionado resultados de interés para la investigación, pues ayudaría a comprender y a establecer un contraste claro entre aquellos sujetos que no recibieron ningún tipo de tratamiento o que eran instruidos en un tipo de enseñanza de la composición de corte tradicional con los demás grupos de alumnos que eran sometidos en mayor o menos grado, desde una perspectiva u otra, a la innovación en la enseñanza de la escritura. Sin duda, la consideración de un grupo de control hubiera aportado otra perspectiva a la obtenida, ya de por sí bastante completa. 180 Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez
El tercer capítulo, presentado por María Barrio Luis, aborda de forma pormenorizada las distintas fases seguidas en la sistematización de los datos con el fin de diseñar un corpus formal que recoja las composiciones escritas compiladas como base para la realización de análisis lingüísticos a distintos niveles. En un primer apartado de esta sección, la autora se refiere a la importancia y papel de la metodología de corpus en la lingüística, deteniéndose a considerar la investigación lingüística con corpus de estudiantes de lenguas o learner corpora. Sin duda, esta cuestión merecería un estudio más profundo, ya que se hace un recorrido demasiado rápido y superficial sobre los rasgos y tipos de corpus de aprendices, mencionando solamente de pasada algunos de los más interesantes como el International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), iniciado por Granger (1998), el Longman Learner’s Corpus (LLC), el Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Learner Corpus (HKUST), y el Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), sin referirse a otros igualmente relevantes como el componente español del ICLE, compilado en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, el Santiago University Learner of English Corpus (SULEC), el Cambridge Learner Corpus (CLC), el EVA Corpus of Norwegian School English, el Uppsala Student English Project (USE), el Corpus-Based Analysis of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CBACLE) y el Japanese English as a Foreign Language Learner (JEFLL). Una vez explicado el marco general en el que se sitúa el corpus de datos seleccionado, se pasa a comentar las fases de diseño, organización e informatización. Recogidas las composiciones, éstas fueron convertidas en formato electrónico, manteniendo todas las características de la muestra original en cuanto a su ortografía, gramática, saltos de línea, títulos, uso de mayúsculas, sangrado, etc. Asimismo, se explican de forma exhaustiva las variables que se han tenido en cuenta en la propia organización del corpus: tipo de aprendices, edad, curso de secundaria al que pertenecen, centro escolar, sexo, condiciones bajo las cuales se realizó la composición, género del texto y tema. El paso siguiente fue la codificación de todos los aspectos anteriores en la organización de los textos del corpus de tal modo que permitieran una recuperación y análisis informático detallado. Como colofón a este capítulo, la autora nos presenta un ejemplo del análisis de los elementos metadiscursivos existentes en los textos de los estudiantes como demostración de las múltiples posibilidades de este corpus. Aquellos investigadores que estén diseñando o pensando en la confección de una base de datos similar a la aquí propuesta encontrarán en este capítulo un buen número de consejos prácticos y orientaciones metodológicas que les ayudará a dar los pasos necesarios para poder acometer esta difícil y laboriosa empresa con unas mínimas garantías de éxito. Con el capítulo cuarto cuya autoría, al igual que en el capítulo dos, corresponde a las editoras y a Chaudron, se inaugura la parte segunda que está dedicada, tal como anunciábamos más arriba, a la descripción y discusión de los resultados obtenidos. En este capítulo, en particular, se caracterizan las composiciones de los estudiantes atendiendo a criterios lingüísticos basados en datos empíricos, como son la extensión de los textos, la distribución de las palabras, la corrección gramatical, la riqueza léxica y el uso de los conectores. Para el análisis de los diferentes aspectos de los textos escritos de los estudiantes se han utilizado parámetros ya comprobados científicamente por investigadores anteriores en estudios similares a éste, mientras que a la hora de Reviews 181 establecer comparaciones estadísticas entre los resultados obtenidos para cada uno de los grupos se ha manejado la prueba t para variables independientes. El capítulo siguiente firmado por las dos editoras junto con Laura Hidalgo Downing y Sandra Blanco Paetsch estudia el desarrollo y complejidad del sintagma nominal en el corpus seleccionado. Siguiendo a de Haan (1994), se clasificaron las frases nominales en cuatro grupos de acuerdo con su grado de complejidad, encontrándose una disminución estadísticamente significativa del número total de sintagmas nominales de la pretarea a la postarea. Por otra parte, del análisis de datos se deduce que la estructura de posmodificación que más utilizan los alumnos en cada grupo y tarea es la frase preposicional seguida de la cláusula de relativo. Por el contrario, la posmodificación con adjetivos y cláusulas finitas apenas se emplea. Este capítulo concluye con una serie de implicaciones didácticas interesantes entre las que destaca la necesidad de que se incluyan sesiones de generación de ideas en la preparación de una redacción, pues de este modo los estudiantes accederán más fácilmente a su marco conceptual. También se subraya la necesidad de hacer conscientes a los estudiantes de la relación sintáctica y semántica en la frase nominal a través de actividades de expansión de la misma. El capítulo sexto, en el que también participan las editoras junto con Laura Hidalgo Downing, supone un punto de inflexión importante, puesto que se produce un cambio de orientación del nivel sintáctico al funcional y discursivo. En concreto, se examina la forma en la que los sujetos organizan el contenido conceptual de sus escritos y construyen el texto con un énfasis especial en el desarrollo de la coherencia textual. Para la evaluación de estos rasgos discursivos se utilizó muy acertadamente el baremo analítico de Jacobs et al. (1981) y se contó con la colaboración de tres evaluadores externos. Las categorías utilizadas fueron las siguientes: a) oración inicial/texto preliminar, b) idea principal, c) argumento, d) elaboración, e) conclusión y f) información irrelevante. Del estudio pormenorizado de esta información se deduce que alrededor del 84% de las composiciones contienen una idea principal, 97% presentan un argumento que apoya la proposición de la idea principal, el 69% de los alumnos incluyen además un segundo argumento y, por último, únicamente el 6,5% contiene información irrelevante, lo cual nos sorprende favorablemente. Igualmente, los datos anteriores también revelan que los alumnos desconocen el sentido de la conclusión, ya que está sólo aparece en la mitad de las composiciones. Asimismo, queda demostrada la existencia de una correlación directa entre la capacidad argumentativa y la madurez cognitiva de los discentes. Los autores concluyen resaltando la importancia de hacer conscientes a nuestros alumnos de la función de la textualidad en una composición y de la necesidad de estructurar la información de forma adecuada. El metadiscurso es el tema central del capítulo siete, presentado por las mismas autoras del anterior, a las que en esta ocasión se suma la investigadora María Barrio. Siguiendo en la línea funcional y discursiva anterior, se intenta averiguar en qué medida el alumno hace uso de los recursos lingüísticos de los que dispone para interactuar con su posible lector. Éste es un elemento clave en las aproximaciones de la escritura basadas en el proceso. Se examina, entonces, la utilización de marcadores de metadiscurso y sus tipos, así como la posible variación entre la pretarea y postarea. Con este propósito, se distinguen siete clases de conectores de metadiscurso textual y cinco de naturaleza interpersonal. El análisis de los datos indica la existencia de un aumento significativo de marcadores entre la pretarea y la postarea sobre todo en las 182 Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez subcategorías de marcadores ilocutivos, matizadores y marcadores de actitud. Por otra parte, las categorías más empleadas en el corpus son los marcadores lógicos seguidos por los de actitud. Entre los factores que pudieran ser responsables de la variación lingüística identificada entre las dos tareas se barajan las diferencias entre el tema del texto de cada una de ellas, ya que podrían condicionar las elecciones de formas lingüísticas por parte de los escritores. Entre las implicaciones didácticas de lo anterior merece una mención particular la necesidad de tener en cuenta a la audiencia a la hora de escribir las composiciones, mostrando la gran variedad de posibilidades expresivas existentes para los distintos tipos de metadiscurso. En los capítulos ocho y nueve los profesores participantes en el proyecto y que llevaron a cabo la experiencia adquieren protagonismo. Luis Ordóñez nos presenta de un modo muy claro, práctico y sencillo un programa de escritura para secundaria desde el momento de su planificación hasta su desarrollo final, pasando por una exposición detallada de cada una de las sesiones de su puesta en práctica. Se hizo un seguimiento de un grupo de 22 alumnos de segundo curso de bachillerato que durante cinco clases de alrededor de cincuenta minutos practicaron aspectos tales como la identificación del tema y la opinión del autor, la escritura de oraciones tópicas o proposiciones básicas que organizan el mensaje escrito, la conclusión de párrafos y la caracterización de la estructura informativa de las diversas secciones que constituyen un texto. En este tratamiento los alumnos son gradualmente introducidos en toda una serie de técnicas de composición mediante un conjunto de actividades: la división de un pasaje en párrafos, la reorganización de secciones de una redacción que previamente han sido desordenadas intencionadamente, la identificación de determinadas unidades gramaticales y de una estructura retórica típica construida de lo general a lo particular. En el último capítulo las propias editoras hacen una serie de consideraciones sobre la evolución de los profesores implicados en el proyecto en cuanto a sus actitudes y puntos de vista sobre la enseñanza de la escritura. Los datos recogidos claramente denotan que todos ellos se desarrollaron profesionalmente gracias a su implicación en la experiencia y además adquirieron nuevas percepciones sobre su trabajo como profesores de una lengua extranjera. Se volvieron mucho más críticos de sus propios métodos y se percataron de la enorme complejidad de su tarea. Llegado este punto, es posible afirmar que, frente a las opiniones de los docentes, no estaría de más recabar también la perspectiva de los alumnos sobre la innovación. ¿Cuáles eran realmente las actitudes y opiniones de los estudiantes antes y después del tratamiento? ¿Son conscientes de haber experimentado un progreso en su nivel de competencia escrita y en su formación como escritores? Finalmente, nos queda también la duda de saber hasta qué punto esta metodología de la lengua escrita podría extrapolarse del nivel de secundaria a estudiantes con un nivel más avanzado de inglés. A lo largo de esta exposición se han ido señalando todos los méritos indudables de esta monografía al mismo tiempo que se han dejado entrever algunas de las leves carencias detectadas. A estas últimas habría que añadir pequeños detalles que en absoluto empañan su alta calidad científica. Entre ellas, se podría mencionar el hecho de que los datos aquí presentados están fechados en 1998 mientras que la publicación por el Servicio de ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid no ve la luz hasta 2005. Se nos antoja un periodo bastante largo entre la fecha de inicio de la investigación y su presentación formal a la comunidad científica en formato de monografía. Bien es Reviews 183 verdad, y así se señala de forma explícita en sendas notas a pie de página, que los resultados de los distintos estudios fueron expuestos y discutidos previamente en diversas reuniones científicas nacionales e internacionales. Asimismo, se echa en falta un índice conceptual y otro de autores que contribuirían a redondear este trabajo. Por último, nos gustaría señalar que, si bien la presentación formal y la expresión son impecables, se han detectado algunas inexactitudes en algún gráfico como el de la página 28, que en una segunda edición o versión serían fácilmente corregibles. Por todo lo anterior, no nos queda más que animar a los docentes de inglés de los distintos niveles educativos, investigadores en el campo de la adquisición y aprendizaje de lenguas, y a los especialistas en la didáctica de esta lengua a consultar esta obra en la que encontrarán no sólo resultados interesantes sino también reflexiones llenas de significado e innumerables sugerencias para futuros trabajos.
Obras citadas
Cassany, Daniel 1993: La cocina de la escritura. Barcelona: Anagrama. ———— 1999: Construir la escritura. Barcelona: Paidós. Chaudron, Craig, Ana Martín Úriz y Ráchel Whittaker 2001: ‘La composición como comunicación: influencia en el desarrollo general del inglés como segunda lengua en un contexto de instrucción’. Carmen Valero Garcés, ed. La Lingüística Aplicada a finales de siglo. Alcalá de Henares. U. de Alcalá. 53-62. Flower, Linda y John Hayes 1981: ‘A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing’. College Composition and Communication 32: 365-87. Granger, Sylviane 1998: Learner English on Computer. Londres y Nueva York: Longman. Haan, Pieter de 1994: ‘The Noun Phrase in English: Its Structure and Variability’. Anglistik and Englischunterricht 29: 85-106. Jacobs, Holly L., Stephen A. Zingraf, Deanna R. Wormuth, V. Faye Hartfiel y Jane B. Hughey 1981: Testing ESL Composition. A Practical Approach. Rowley: Newbury House. Kroll, Barbara, ed. 1996: Second Language Writing. Research Insights for the Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Manchón Ruiz, Rosa María 1999: ‘La investigación de la escritura como proceso. Algunas implicaciones para la enseñanza de la composición en una lengua extranjera’. Sagrario Salaberri Ramiro, ed. Lingüística Aplicada a la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras. Almería: U. de Almería. 439-81. Manchón Ruiz, Rosa María, Elizabeth Murphy y Julio Roca de Larios 1997: ‘An Approximation to the Study of Backtracking in L2 Writing’. Learning and Instruction 10.1:13-35. ———— 2000: ‘La influencia de la variable “grado de dominio de la L2” en los procesos de comunicación en lengua extranjera. Hallazgos recientes de la investigación’. Carmen Muñoz, ed. Segundas Lenguas: Adquisición en el aula. Barcelona: Ariel. 277-297. Martín Úriz, Ana 2002. ‘La composición en las aulas de bachillerato: proceso, comunicación y desarrollo lingüístico’. Gloria López Téllez, ed.. Lenguas extranjeras: hacia un marco de referencia en su aprendizaje. Madrid: MEC, Instituto Superior de Formación del profesorado. 41-82. Martín Úriz, Ana, Laura Hidalgo Downing y Rachel Whittaker. 2001. ‘Desarrollo y complejidad de la frase nominal en composiciones de estudiantes de secundaria’. Ana I. Moreno y Vera Colwell, eds. Perspectivas recientes sobre el discurso. León: U. de León. CD ROM. McLaughlin, Barry 1987: Theories of Second Language Learning. Londres: Arnold. Neff, JoAnne, Emma Dafouz, Mercedes Diez, Francisco Martínez, Rosa Prieto y Juan P. Rica 2003. ‘Evidentiality and the Construction of Writer Stance in Native and Non-native Texts’. 184 Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez
Josef Hladký, ed. Language and Function. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 223–35. Neff, JoAnne, Emma Dafouz, Mercedes Diez, Rosa Prieto y Craig Chaudron 2004: ‘Contrastive Discourse Analysis: Argumentative Text in English and Spanish’. Carol Lynn Moder y Aida Martinovic-Zic, eds. Discourse Across Languages and Cultures. Studies in language Companion Series 68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 267–83. Nunan, David 1994: Research Methods in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Raimes, Ann 1983a: Techniques in Teaching Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———— 1983b: ‘Anguish as a Second Language? Remedies for Second Language Teachers’. Aviva Freedman, Ian Pringle y Janice Yalden, eds. Learning to Write: First Language/Second Language. Londres: Longman. 258-72. White, Ronald 1993: The ELT Curriculum: Design, Innovation and Management. Oxford: Blackwell. White, Ronald y Valerie Arndt 1991: Process Writing. Harlow: Longman. Zamel, Vivian 1982: ‘Writing: The Process of Discovering Meaning’. TESOL Quarterly 16.2: 195- 209. ———— 1983: ‘The Composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies’. TESOL Quarterly 17.2: 165-81.
Received 12 July 2006 Revised version received 13 October 2006
Margery Palmer McCulloch, ed. 2004: Modernism and Nationalism. Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939. Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow: ASLS. 398 pp.
Carla Rodríguez González Universidad de Oviedo [email protected]
En los últimos años, la identidad nacional escocesa ha sido objeto de análisis muy diversos, desde las propuestas marxistas de Tom Nairn (1981) a la aplicación de la teoría postcolonial de críticos como Berthold Schoene (1995) o Euan Hague (1996). A pesar de las divergencias, todos los enfoques han coincidido en considerar el Scottish Renaissance como punto de trascendencia incuestionable para comprender el presente de Escocia. Con el paso del tiempo, las obras del período han adquirido gran prestigio y han sido incorporadas a los programas académicos, pero resultaba evidente la necesidad de recopilar el pensamiento de estos autores en un volumen colectivo donde se pudiera oír su voz contextualizada por las polémicas en las que se inscribieron sus opiniones. Margery Palmer McCulloch, profesora emérita de la Universidad de Glasgow y experta investigadora del período, recoge en Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939 un material indispensable para el estudio de la generación más discutida del panorama escocés del último siglo. Desde sus orígenes en la década de los veinte, el movimiento ha generando gran controversia debido a la complejidad de ideas ofrecidas por sus intelectuales y a las frecuentes contradicciones mostradas por algunos de ellos a lo largo de su trayectoria. En el contexto de crisis surgido tras la Primera Guerra Mundial, la búsqueda de una identidad colectiva ocupó a toda una generación con afanes renovadores que intentaba encontrar un espacio propio para Escocia dentro del nuevo orden global. Según Charles Haws, antes del conflicto el sentimiento unionista era predominante y tan sólo una elite intelectual que bebía de las fuentes de la literatura del kailyard apoyaba la defensa de una identidad diferenciada. De igual modo, desde el ámbito político, el nacionalismo fue en principio un fenómeno minoritario y el Scottish National Party –resultado de la fusión del National Party of Scotland, fundado en 1928, y del Scottish Party, fundado en 1932– representaba, según Haws a una minoría en la que “what was missing was the rank and file of Scots including businessmen, trade unionists, churchmen, and the working class” (1989: 24). Este vacío de representación se vería llenado desde la esfera de la cultura por los intelectuales del ‘renacimiento escocés’. El término Scottish Renaissance fue acuñado por Christopher Murray Grieve – posteriormente Hugh MacDiarmid– en 1922 y popularizado al año siguiente por Denis Saurat en Europa para aludir a los debates más importantes que tenían lugar en la Escocia del período de entreguerras y que estaban orientados fundamentalmente al análisis y la definición de la identidad nacional. El Scottish Renaissance fue un movimiento heterogéneo, pero hoy en día suele asociarse con unos ejes concretos. Susanne Hagemann destaca: la poesía como género literario, el Scots como lengua para reivindicar una identidad oprimida, el nacionalismo como postura política, las reflexiones sobre los problemas y los mitos de la sociedad escocesa como tema de inspiración, así como el intento de mejorar cualitativamente la literatura nacional (1994: 44). Ya en 1924, Saurat determinaba sus ejes principales: una revista de 186 Carla Rodríguez González propaganda política, The Scottish Nation, una publicación mensual exclusivamente literaria, The Scottish Chapbook, y una antología anual de poesía escocesa, Northern Numbers, todas ellas dirigidas por la mano de Grieve (Palmer McCulloch 2004: 53). En Modernism and Nationalism, Margery Palmer McCulloch recoge de manera exhaustiva la heterogeneidad de un período en el que, entre otros conflictos, se intentaban conciliar las contradicciones del Caledonian Antisyzygy, definidas en 1919 por Gregory Smith como “the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn, in his political and ecclesiastical history, in his polemical restlessness, in his adaptability” (Palmer McCulloch 2004: 6). En esta antología advertimos la peculiaridad del Scottish Renaissance por la combinación de propuestas socialistas y nacionalistas de sus intelectuales, en principio enfrentadas. Tal como señala Palmer McCulloch, la aparente disputa ideológica encubría, no obstante, la coincidencia absoluta de ambas corrientes en su búsqueda del beneficio común para Escocia a través de una regeneración cultural: “there was general agreement that the health of a nation’s culture could not be separated from the health of the nation as a whole” (xiii). Neil M. Gunn lo describía del siguiente modo: “Scotland must be kept alive. For if Scotland dies, then not only the Vernacular but everything that gives her separate meaning and identity dies with her” (Palmer McCulloch 2004: 39). Advertimos, así, el valor político asignado entonces a los textos literarios, muy distante de la desvinculación que demuestran gran parte de las obras modernistas de Europa y América. De hecho, Palmer McCulloch considera que el papel de los poetas del Scottish Renaissance se aproxima más al unacknowledged legislator propuesto por Shelley que a las corrientes estéticas del período de entreguerras (xiii). Gran parte de los textos que se incluyen en este volumen son fruto de la prolífica aparición de periódicos y revistas en Escocia tras la Primera Guerra Mundial, que constituyeron el principal foro de discusión del movimiento, como relevo de los caducos Edinburgh Review y Blackwood’s. The Scottish Chapbook, editado por Grieve – MacDiarmid–, resultó vital para el intercambio y la difusión del pensamiento renovador de los autores. Palmer McCulloch otorga igualmente un lugar privilegiado en la expansión del movimiento a Criterion, editada por Eliot, “which provided the platform for Grieve’s development of his ‘Theory of Scots Letters’, with its advocacy of a revitalised Scots Vernacular as the principal poetic medium for a revival in literature” (xv). Modernism and Nationalism incorpora, además, otros documentos de incuestionable valor para el estudio del período, como son las primeras reseñas literarias de las obras más representativas del momento. Entre otras, aparecen comentadas por sus coetáneos Sunset Song, de Lewis Grassic Gibbon (87-9), Imagined Corners, de Willa Muir (84-6, 87-9), The Three Brothers, de Edwin Muir (82-4), Morning Tide, de Neil M. Gunn (75-77), o algunos poemas de MacDiarmid, como To Circumjack Cencrastus (80-2). De igual modo, cabe destacar la presencia de abundantes fragmentos de la correspondencia mantenida entre distintos autores y autoras durante el período, donde las opiniones literarias y políticas aparecen manifestadas con mayor libertad gracias a la privacidad del medio: Neil M. Gunn escribe a Catherine Carswell (78-9), Catherine Carswell a Grieve (376-7) o Willa Muir a su amiga Helen Cruickshank (340-2). Como contexto global para el movimiento, Palmer McCulloch selecciona segmentos de las obras ‘universales’ que más influyeron sobre el pensamiento de los intelectuales escoceses, como The Interpretation of Dreams de Sigmund Freud (148-9), ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ de W. B. Yeats (150-1), ‘More Dostoevsky’ de Virginia Woolf Reviews 187
(162), ‘A Retrospect’ de Ezra Pound (162-3) o ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (171-2) y ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (172-173) de T. S. Eliot. Los dos grandes bloques en los que se estructura la colección, ‘Towards a Scottish Literary Renaissance’ y ‘Whither Scotland?’ se ocupan por separado de recoger los aspectos relacionados con la literatura y la lengua escocesa, por un lado, y cuestiones de carácter más social o político, por otro. Las conexiones entre ambas partes son inevitablemente múltiples, dado que, como se ha expuesto, la agenda política de estos intelectuales estuvo en todo momento ligada a literatura. Como punto de partida para el debate sobre la existencia de una tradición literaria propia y, por lo tanto, de una cultura diferenciada de los modelos ingleses, Palmer McCulloch selecciona una cita de 1888 de Robert Louis Stevenson: “Don’t put ‘N.B.’ on your paper: put Scotland and be done with it. Alas, that I should be stabbed in the house of my friends! The name of my native country is not North Britain, whatever may be the name of yours” (3). Con ella se inaugura la polémica principal que ocupa las páginas de esta antología. La existencia de un ámbito cultural independiente más allá de la frontera romántica que separa Escocia e Inglaterra es el centro sobre el que giran las dos primeras secciones del libro: ‘What is Scottish Literature’ y ‘Language, Identity and the Vernacular Debate’. Autores como Grieve, Grassic Gibbon, o Edwin Muir contradicen aquí las afirmaciones de, entre otros, T. S. Eliot en su artículo de 1919 ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’ (7- 10), donde rechaza la continuidad de la tradición lingüística y literaria en la nación, a la que se refiere constantemente de manera despectiva: “a provincial capital, even with the Edinburgh and Blackwood’s of a hundred years ago, is the matter of a moment; it depends on the continuous supply of important men; the instant this supply falls off, the metropolis ... gains the ascendant” (9). Quizás una de las razones por las que el Scottish Renaissance ha despertado tanto interés en los últimos años tenga que ver con la claridad con la que quedó expuesta la redefinición de sus signos nacionales, un proceso característico de todo movimiento nacionalista. Como Cairns Craig nos advierte, el ‘renacimiento’ propuesto por estos intelectuales llevaba implícita la necesidad de dar muerte al espíritu nacional, hasta entonces asociado al ‘nacionalismo unionista’ del siglo XIX. De hecho, Craig considera que, en un intento por definir las bases de la nueva identidad escocesa, estos autores generaron un movimiento basado hasta tal punto en el alejamiento de modelos anteriores que las propuestas de cambio se vieron muy limitadas: la oposición no estaba tanto en Inglaterra como en sus propias mentes; debían combatir the monster within, representado por el pensamiento de épocas pasadas. Según Craig: “this produced ... a nationalism whose main focus was not the recovery of the virtues of the Scottish past – an enhancement of those ‘historical memories, shared cultural elements’ which form the basis of a national ethnie– but their negation” (2001: 7). Grieve –MacDiarmid– lo describía en 1929 del siguiente modo: “‘The Scott Country’, ‘the Burns Country’, ‘the Barrie Country’. How I hate these fixations of parts of Scotland so that one cannot got into them without being compelled to entertain a certain set of associations” (Palmer McCulloch 2004: 111). Precisamente la necesidad de reconducir los significados de la tradición y establecer una corriente moderna en Escocia quedan reflejados en las dos secciones que siguen en la antología, ‘A Scottish Renaissance? Responses and Reviews’ y ‘Transforming Traditions’, donde MacDiarmid se erige progresivamente como líder del movimiento. 188 Carla Rodríguez González
Edwin Muir afirmaba con humor en 1925: “The idea of a Scottish literary revival was first publicly advanced by Mr M’Diarmid’s friend and colleague, Mr C.M. Grieve, about three years ago” (66) y a continuación enfatizaba la relevancia del poeta no sólo en cuanto a sus esfuerzos de movilización colectiva, sino también por la calidad de sus propios textos, que compara con los de Graves, Blunden o de la Mare. Otro apartado interesante, incluido tras los textos más ‘internacionales’ de este volumen ‘Europe and the Impact of the Modern’ ya mencionados, es ‘Women on Women: Gendering the Renaissance’. El Scottish Renaissance fue un movimiento masculino en el que la representación de las mujeres o la presencia de sus autoras se vio muy limitada. Como Gillian Carter expone: “Popularly seen as the heyday of Scottish Modernism, this period is remarkable for an aggressive, masculine nationalism which informed the literature, language, and politics of the early twentieth century” (1995: 69). A pesar de la importancia que la crítica ha atribuido a las autoras del ‘renacimiento escocés’ desde la década de los noventa (Elphinstone 1997, Palmer McCulloch 2000), casi todas tuvieron que sortear grandes obstáculos para que sus ideas trascendieran el ámbito de lo privado. Willa Muir afirmaba por ejemplo en 1936: “it is difficult to speak of women’s movements in Scotland, since most Scottish working-class women –and men, too– are dominated by the belief that outside the home men should have all ‘the say’” (Palmer McCulloch 2004: 215). Como prueba del debate sobre el papel de la mujer en la sociedad escocesa, esta descripción contrasta radicalmente con otros textos que recogen el estereotipo de igualdad de una nación en la que, según Nannie K. Wells, “the Scotswoman has always been encouraged, both by Scots law and by custom, to ‘individuate’ herself, to take responsibility, to hold her own views, and make her beliefs felt” (215). Tal como advierte Palmer McCulloch, la segunda parte del libro, ‘Whither Scotland?’ responde al cambio de enfoque sobre las necesidades colectivas. Si en un primer momento la identidad literaria y la redefinición de las tradiciones ocuparon un lugar privilegiado en los debates, desde mediados de los años veinte, los intelectuales del Scottish Renaissance buscaron el afianzamiento de un discurso político para apoyar sus reivindicaciones (221). ‘The Condition of Scotland’ recoge los miedos de una sociedad que debe afrontar el declive económico generado por la Primera Guerra Mundial, así como una reorganización interna en un momento en el que los roles tradicionales han dejado de ser válidos. Las infraviviendas, los altos niveles de paro, el hambre, el declive de la industria y la inmigración irlandesa ocupan gran parte de esta sección, donde se aprecia la urgencia con la que se buscaba el respaldo de un discurso político. Un aspecto significativo es la presencia de comentarios xenófobos hacia los irlandeses, convertidos en el otro que amenaza la frágil economía nacional. Como ejemplo, las palabras de George Malcom Thomson en 1927: “The first fact about the Scot is that he is a man eclipsed. The Scots are a dying people. They are being replaced in their own country by a people alien in race, temperament, and religion, at a speed which is without parallel in history outside the era of the barbarian invasions” (225). Este miedo hacia la ‘invasión irlandesa’ resulta curioso al estudiar los textos que aparecen en ‘Celtic Connections and the Situation of the Highlands’. Como estrategia para legitimar la presencia de una tradición cultural propia a lo largo de la historia se recurrió, en ocasiones no sin un exceso de idealización romántica, a argumentos étnicos y lingüísticos que pretendían rescatar el pasado celta de Escocia –o picto, en el caso de Reviews 189 autores como R. Erskine of Maar. Estas discusiones representaban el pasado de la nación como un estadio de pureza corrompido por la colonización de los ingleses, cuyo máximo exponente habían sido las Clearances. Las Highlands y las islas del norte pasaron a personalizar la resistencia del espíritu de un pueblo oprimido que ahora encontraba la fuerza para reclamar sus derechos históricos. Esta sección recoge las opiniones de autores como Fionn MacColla acerca de la necesaria diferenciación entre el gaélico escocés y el de las demás áreas lingüísticas afines (290-4), o el elogio de la vida rural como única esperanza ante la degradación del mundo moderno, defendida, entre otros, por Neil M. Gunn (305-14). Edwin Muir afirmaba en 1932: “It seems to me that the main problem is still to rouse Scotland to a genuine (not merely conventional o sentimental) consciousness of itself” (343). Éste es el espíritu que impregna la parte final de la colección, ‘Competing Ideologies’. Desde la aproximación inicial de MacDiarmid al fascismo (317-9), hasta los programas para adaptar modelos socialistas de Naomi Mitchison (337-40), se observa la búsqueda incesante de una solución política para Escocia, a la vez que se reclama, desde la conciencia nacionalista, el despertar de una sociedad a menudo pasiva. Modernism and Nationalism es una obra sin precedente para el estudio de la cultura escocesa del último siglo, tanto por la representatividad de los textos recogidos como por su abundancia y organización. MacDiarmid afirmaba en 1927: “the movement began as a purely literary movement ..., but of necessity speedily acquired political and then religious bearings. It is now manifesting itself in every sphere of national arts and affairs, and is at once radical and conservative, revolutionary and reactionary” (321). Palmer McCulloch recoge todos los aspectos de esta evolución en su antología y consigue guiar al lector en un terreno complejo al que ha sabido dar coherencia. La colección representa el primer gran esfuerzo editorial por rescatar del archivo unos documentos fundamentales para comprender el período de la historia escocesa que más ha influenciado el pensamiento nacional en el último siglo.
Works Cited
Carter, Gilian 1995: ‘Women, Postcolonialism, and Nationalism: A Scottish Example’. SPAN 41: 65-79. Craig, Cairns 2001: ‘Constituting Scotland’. The Irish Review. Ireland and Scotland: Colonial Legacies and National Identities 28: 1-27. Elphinstone, Margaret 1997: ‘Willa Muir: Crossing the Genres’. Douglas Gifford y Dorothy McMillan, eds. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh UP. 400-15. Hagemann, Susanne 1994: ‘“Bidin Naitural”: Identity Questions in Scottish Twentieth-Century Renaissance Literature’. Scottish Literary Journal 21.1: 44-55. Hague, Euan 1996: ‘North of the Border? –An Examination of Scotland within the United Kingdom’. Scotlands 3.1: 125-138. Haws, Charles 1989: ‘The Dilemma of Scottish Nationalism in Historical Perspective’. Horst Drescher y Herman Volkel, eds. Nationalism in Literature: Literature, Language and National Identity. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York and Paris: Peter Lang. 21-8. Nairn, Tom 1981 (1977): The Break-Up of Britain. Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: Verso. Palmer McCulloch, Margery 2000: ‘Literature and History: Women and the City in Early Twentieth-Century Scottish Fiction’. Terry Brotherstone, Deborah Simonton y Oonagh Walsh, eds. Gendering Scottish History. An International Approach. Glasgow: Cruithne. 98-111. 190 Carla Rodríguez González
Schoene, Berthold 1995: ‘A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Postcolonial Condition’. Scotlands 2.1: 107-121.
Received 30 January 2006 Revised version received 25 May 2006