ATLANTIS Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Vol. 28, núm. 1 Junio 2006 ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006) 28.1(Junio 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) Gordon Campbell (University of Leicester) 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) 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) 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) 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) Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University) Pilar Zozaya (University of Barcelona)
ATLANTIS
Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
28.1 (June 2006) 28.1 (Junio 2006)
Table of Contents • Índice
Articles • Artículos
On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions: A Functionalist Perspective A. Jesús Moya...... 9
1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut Celestino Deleyto ...... 29
“A Stranger in a Strange Land”: An Existentialist Reading of Fredrick Clegg in The Collector by John Fowles Andrés Romero Jódar...... 45
Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility Clara Escoda Agustí ...... 57
A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: The Term Hierarchy Carolina Rodríguez Juárez ...... 71
Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez ...... 89
Nilda de Nicholasa Mohr. El Bildungsroman y la aparición de un espacio puertorriqueño en la literatura de los EEUU Pilar Bellver Sáez ...... 101
Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo and Manuel Almagro Jiménez...... 115
Reviews • Reseñas
Juan E. Tazón Salces and Isabel Carrera Suárez, eds., 2005: Post-Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations reviewed by Christopher Rollason ...... 133
Helen Cooper 2004: The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare reviewed by Jordi Sánchez-Martí ...... 139
Fernando Galván y José Santiago Fernández, ed. and intr. 2005: Joseph Conrad. El corazón de las tinieblas reviewed by Jesús Varela Zapata ...... 145
Carmelo Medina Casado y José Ruiz Mas, eds. 2004: El bisturí inglés. Literatura de viajes e hispanismo en lengua inglesa reviewed by José Carlos Redondo Olmedilla...... 151
María Pilar Safont Jordà 2005: Third Language Learners. Pragmatic Production and Awareness reviewed by Patricia Salazar Campillo...... 155
Enric Llurda (ed.) 2005: Non-Native Language Teachers. Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession reviewed by María del Pilar García Mayo ...... 161
Andrew Blake 2002: La irresistible ascensión de Harry Potter. (trad. E. Hidalgo Tenorio, 2005) reviewed by Mª del Carmen Espínola Rosillo ...... 167
Christian Isobel Johnstone 1815: Clan-Albin: A National Tale, edited by Andrew Monnickendam (2003) reviewed by Alexis Easley ...... 173
ARTICLES
ART¸CULOS
ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 9–28 ISSN 0210-6124
On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions: A Functionalist Perspective
A. Jesús Moya Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha [email protected]
The aim of this paper is to analyse two different text types within a discourse functional framework, in order to determine whether there is a difference in their formal realizations of new and known topics. This will be done by investigating how introductory and given topics are realized in clause structure in a sample of sixty news items and tourist brochures. In line with Biber, I have assumed that linguistic features vary with communicative purpose and topic. The results of the analysis carried out seem to conflict with Dik’s claim that the new topics tend to be located towards the final slot of the clause. The study also shows that these two text types differ in terms of how the known topics are realized syntactically.
Key words: Functional Grammar, text type, new topic, known topic, subject, initial position
1. Aims and scope of the article
Within the frameworks of the Prague School of Linguistics, Functional Grammar, American Functionalism and Cognitivism, many linguists have made reference to the tendency of the English language to locate clausal topics in initial position coinciding with the subject of the clause.1 In the forties, Mathesius (1939) pointed out the close relationship between given topic, initial position and subject. Later on, within the framework of Functional Grammar, Dik (1989, 1997) stated that topic and subject, though distinct, have a strong tendency to coincide in the same term. From a cognitive perspective, van Oosten (1985) affirmed that the prototypical topic, defined as a perceptually salient entity through an extended stretch of text, tends to overlap with the grammatical function of subject and the semantic function of agent. Within American Functionalism, Givón (1992) also considered that the entities that express topical
1 This paper is based on a previous study on syntactic and pragmatic functions carried out in my doctoral thesis, La Introducción y el Mantenimiento del Tópico en las Noticias de Sucesos y en los Folletos Turísticos, which was directed by Prof. Angela Downing. I am indebted to her for her accessibility and interesting comments on that research. My sincere gratitude also to Cristina Alonso for her help in the elaboration of the current statistical backup. 10 A. Jesús Moya information usually coincide with nominal groups which have a subject and object function. Following this position, Langacker (2000: 28-29) describes a prototypical subject as being both an agent and the primary clausal topic. In order to narrow the scope of this research, in the following pages we will focus our attention on the interdepencence between new and known topics and subject within the framework of Functional Grammar (Dik 1989, 1997; Hengeveld, 2004a,b). With regard to the correspondence between new topics and subject, there has been a wide-ranging debate during the last 20 years among functional linguists. While in Dik’s account new topics tend to occupy a late non-subject rather than an early clausal position (even in those languages in which the subject is prototypically initial), Givón (1989: 224), on the basis of the task urgency principle, estimates that new topics preferably surface in the earlier syntactic positions of the clause.2 As to the relationship between given topics and subject, Dik (1978, 1989, 1997) has defended the intuition in English for the topic to be preferentially assigned to the argument that fulfils this syntactic function. However, the prototypical subject-(given) topic correlation has also aroused controversy. In fact, within the Functional Grammar account the interdependence between subject and topic is not presented as exclusive or obligatory in the sense that a (given) topic may well be a non-subject constituent and a subject may well be a non-given topic. Within the framework of American Functionalism, Givón (1989) adopts a more radical stance since he characterizes the subject as the gramaticalized topic and the primarily pragmatic notion. The unmarked association that is established between (given) topic, subject and P1 in the FG account is due to Dik’s restriction of topic assignment to constituents with special formal treatment, which in English is mainly associated with the initial slot of the clause, where the subject is prototypically placed.3 However, in Cornish’s contribution to A New Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) (2004), the assignment of topic status is regarded as being sensititive to both cognitive and contextual factors that go beyond the simple correlation of topic with clause-initial position, with subjecthood or with any morphological marking. Thus in his model the topic-initial position correlation is no
2 According to this principle, the clause-initial information will be either less predictable or more important than the information located in the final slot of the clause. This conflicts with the idea that given or topical information tends to come before new or focal information. The non- initial positioning of focal constituents may be understandable from a processing viewpoint: the cognitive identification of focal information, which is typically new, and the selection of the appropriate lexicalization for it, both require time. By contrast, topical information that is already activated and therefore highly accessible is immediately available for expression (Butler, 2003). 3 The principle of constituent ordering SP5 says as follows: “Since the subject is the prime GivenTopic candidate, it will often be placed in P1” (Dik, 1997: 409). Following Dik (1997: 255), initial position, nominative case (in pronouns) and agreement with the verb are the three basic characteristics of the subject function. Note also that in FG pragmatic functions are assigned only when a constituent is given some distinctive treatment in the language. FG is concerned exclusively with phenomena which have a clear grammatical, lexical or intonational reflex in the actual structure of utterances. For this reason, Mackenzie and Keizer (1991) argue that English doesn’t have the topic function, since there is no grammatical reflection of topichood in this language. On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 11 longer a requirement for topichood.4 In turn, this implies that the identification of topical entities with the syntactic function of subject or with P1 is not as obvious as has been considered so far in Functional Grammar. In the approach adopted here, Topic is actually required to account for textual phenomena that surpass the simple identification of this discourse category with specific marking or formal realizations. Taking this view as the starting point of our analysis, the aim of this paper is to explore the syntactic realizations of the pragmatic function of topic in two different written text types within a discourse functional framework (Hengeveld 2004a,b).5 This will be done by investigating how the new and known topics of 30 news items and 30 tourist brochures are realized syntactically. We shall examine whether the clausal topics of the sample texts are prototypically realized by clause initial or subject constituents (Givón 1992, Dik 1989, 1997, Langacker 2000) or whether the communicative function and contextual characteristics of the two subgenres under investigation impose some different syntactic patterning. First of all, in full consonance with Cornish (2004), the concept of topic is defined from the aboutness perspective as a discourse, cognitive and contextual notion, independent of language-specific coding devices. Secondly, following van Dijk (1981a and b) and Dik (1997), two basic levels of topicality are proposed: discourse topics and clausal topics. A further hierarchical organization of clausal topics is made and the concepts of introductory topic, given topic, subtopic and resumed topic are defined in an attempt to limit their scope and facilitate their identification in discourse. This is followed by a brief comment on the specific communicative purposes and contextual characteristics of the two subgenres analysed. Finally, after referring to the method of analysis, the syntactic realizations of new and known topics will be studied in the sample of journalist and travel texts. This will de done on the basis of the descriptive and syntactic approaches established by Quirk (1985) and Downing and Locke (2002).
4 There is a universal claim that all languages have a special clause initial position P1 which is used for special purposes. These include both the placement of constituents which must necessarily be put in P1 and the placement of constituents with special pragmatic significance (Hannay 1991, Dik 1997: 420). In this paper, I have assumed that P1 (Dik 1997) contains one and only one intraclausal constituent which fufills a function in transitivity (Halliday 1985, 1994, 2004). 5 As Hengeveld (1997, 2004a and b) affirms there are some grammatical phenomena that can only be properly described with reference to units larger than the utterance. These phenomena create the need for developing Functional Grammar into a discourse grammar. While the new Functional Discourse Grammar is being written, some reflections as to what a grammar of discourse implies have been presented in Mackenzie and Gómez-González’s (2004) A New Architecture for Functional Grammar and Mackenzie and Gómez-González’s (2005) Studies in Functional Grammar. 12 A. Jesús Moya
2. Towards a definition of topic. Discourse topics and clausal topics
Following the view of topic as a discourse, cognitive and contextual notion, topic is defined from the aboutness perspective as the entity, proposition or main idea which a clause, a stretch of discourse or a discourse in its global sense is about. Thus, in the delimitation of the notion of topic as aboutness, the following key aspects are all taken into account: the communicative purpose of the speaker/writer, defined on the basis of relevance or current interest (Reinhart, 1982); the short-term linguistic contextual information derivable from both the previous and the subsequent discourse; the extralinguistic context of communication and, finally, the long-term or general knowledge that the interlocutors share or can infer from a specific situation (Moya, 2005, 2006). Interpreting a text or stretch of discourse from a topical perspective is highly dependent on being able to activate the knowledge structures or schematic conceptions (Lakoff 1990) which have shaped our experience of the world. As a result, I have considered this concept as a pragmatic discourse phenomenon, which can only be established in contextual terms and on the interactants’ communicative purpose and the speaker/writer’s evaluation of the addressee’s current cognitive state. In the approach adopted in this paper, the assignment of topic is no longer, as is the case in orthodox FG, dependent mainly on language-specific regulations. It is, however, the result of non-grammatical contextual and cognitive operations, and the competing demands imposed by the interpersonal, representational and structural components of the language (Hengeveld, 2004a,b, 2005). The notion of topic has been enlarged upon to apply not only to the clause, but also to textual sections and to the text in its global sense. In fact, depending on the unit of application, from the text right down to the clause, many linguists make a distinction between discourse or global topics and clausal or local topics (van Dijk, 1977, 1981a; Reinhart, 1982; Downing 1991; Dik, 1997; Alcaraz 2000). In line with Cornish’s views, in this paper the local topic is defined as a contextual, salient and referential entity about which information is given at the clause level. The local topic is a constituent that is at the forefront of the interlocutor’s consciousness at the time of speech and which, after its first activation, is maintained through the continuous references that are made to it throughout the text (Givón 1983, 1995). However, in many cases the topic expresses a main idea or a general concept that unifies and gives coherence to the text. While the clausal topic represents the entity or the proposition about which information is given at local level, the discourse topic represents what a whole text or discourse is about and is defined as a cognitive schema which sequentially organizes and unifies all the clausal topics of the discourse under the same topical frame (van Dijk, 1977, 1981a and b; van Oosten, 1985). Although in cognitive approaches the general meaning of a text is not always considered to be intrinsically present, but is instead assigned to it by its readers, I have considered the notion of Discourse Topic useful to refer to the global idea which the discourse is about. Therefore, discourse topics were identified a) in terms of the global idea expressed either in news headlines or in the titles and subtitles of tourist brochures and b) on the basis of the aboutness perspective referred to previously. On many occasions these provide a framework for the global meaning of a stretch of text, giving the analyst a basis for focussing on the textual elements that carry out in some way the On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 13 general thrust of a passage. Clausal or local topics were identified by their being embodied or subsumed within the discourse topic and by their referential continuity in the text. In practical terms, the clausal topics of the news items and tourist brochures under analysis are prototypically those referential, identifiable and perceptually salient entities (Chafe, 1994) which, after their activation in the current discourse, (1) convey the pragmatic aboutness of the clause in relation to the wider discourse (Reinhart, 1982), (2) are at the forefront of the interlocutor’s consciousness at the time of utterance, (3) are referred to in the following cataphoric discourse by means of proforms, repetitions, synonyms, etc. and (4) emerge linguistically as the nominal arguments of clauses.
3. A classification of clausal topics: from new to given, sub and resumed topics
With regard to the hierarchization of clausal topics and in line with Dik (1989, 1997), a further typology of four different subtypes of clausal topics is differentiated (new topic, given topic, subtopic and resumed topic), in order to study the cohesive relationships that are established between the local topics of a text and the sequentiality with which they are activated in discourse. Topical referents may stay alive throughout several clauses or even the whole text, or have a low level of persistence. After a new topic is activated for the first time, it can be maintained by means of given topics, subtopics and resumed topics (Dik, 1989, 1997). Independently of their positions in the clause, New topics are those topical entities that are introduced for the first time in the discourse. The function of introductory topics is to activate an entity which will later become a potential topic in the subsequent text (Hannay, 1985a). Therefore, two characteristics should be attributed to this notion: on the one hand, its presentational and new character and, on the other, its high level of persistence in the following context. The new topic is the most problematic of the four subtypes of FG topics, since it is treated as a type of Focus. Even Dik (1989, 1997) admits that there is not a clear-cut boundary between the notions of new topic and focus. The focal nature of Dik’s new topic is also recognized by Hannay (1985a), who proposes a focal presentative function equivalent to Dik’s new topic. Mackenzie and Keizer (1991) also consider newtops as presentative focus elements. These controversial aspects have led me to assume that, although all clauses can, in principle, contain one referential entity which can be assigned a topical status, this does not mean that all referential entities fulfil a topical function. In the topical approach adopted here, only those entities that are preserved at least once after their first introduction in the text have been considered topical. Once a topical element has been introduced or activated it becomes a “given topic”. A topical entity should be analysed as known not only in those cases when it has been previously activated directly or indirectly through an introductory topic or a subtopic component (Dik, 1989), but also when it is available from the general or situational contexts that the interlocutors share (Mackenzie and Keizer, 1991), or when it is presented by other informative elements of the clause. These can be either verbal processes, circumstances or nominal entities which, usually placed in final position, introduce future potential topics (Moya and Albentosa, 2001; Moya, forthcoming). 14 A. Jesús Moya
The term subtopic is used here to define those entities associated with a new topic (Fumero Pérez 2001) or related to a topic previously activated in the text: “If an entity X has been activated in the given setting, then the speaker may present an entity Y as a sub-Topic entity, if Y R X, where R is a relationship of inference” (Hannay, 1985b: 53). In the sample of texts under analysis a subtopic relationship implies a part-whole relationship within the basic topic. In line with Prince (1981) and Hannay (1985a), I have considered that subtopics should be described on the basis of their dual nature both as new entities, due to their innovative character, and as given entities, since they are contextually bound and can be inferred, albeit indirectly, from other previously evoked entities. It is for this reason that, although they are not identical to other constituents that have already been activated in the linguistic context, their capacity for inference and their contextual dependence have led me to consider them as known elements that fulfil a function in topic continuity. Finally, I use the term resumed topic to describe any topical entity that is re- established via anaphoric reference after some absence in the discourse, without necessarily being an explicit indication of resumption. A resumed topic is a referent assumed to exist within the current discourse, but is not the current focus of attention of the addressee (Cornish, 2004). For the purposes of this paper, the resumed topic has been considered as a mechanism of continuity since it keeps a known topical entity that had already been the focus of attention alive. As it is not possible to introduce all the information at once and in a sole constituent, there are continuity and discontinuity chains within a stretch of text. The discourse is in this way organized hierarchically in topical sequences, formed by groups of clauses that are about the same topic and that keep, in turn, a narrow relationship with the discourse topic. A topic will be maintained while it is still relevant to the communicative purpose and until the activation of a new informative entity opens a different topical chain. While the writer has to add more information about a topic, this will be kept alive by means of the continuous references that are made to it. Once the chain is over, the current topic is left behind and a new referent with a topical status is introduced.
4. Analysis of the data and exemplification
Now that the theoretical framework has been outlined, the proposed concept of topic can be applied to the sixty news items and tourist brochures in order to establish whether there are differences in their topical and syntactic organizations. As the main aim of this study is to carry out a comparative analysis of the syntactic realizations of the notion of topic displayed by the two subgenres researched, the communicative purpose and contextual characteristics of the sample of texts which form the data are outlined in section 4.1.
On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 15
4.1. Database and text type selection
As previously stated in the introduction of this paper, our aim is to compare the syntactic realizations of clausal topics in thirty news items and thirty tourist brochures, taken from a selection of English quality newspapers and tourist brochures. While the main aim of the journalist is to inform the greatest number of readers about all issues of a current event in a hypothetically objective and impersonal way, the main goal of the brochure (although it is, to a certain extent, also informative in nature) is to promote tourism in the areas being described. In line with Biber (1995), who considers that linguistic features vary with communicative purpose, situational context and topic, it is anticipated that the difference in rhetorical purpose of the two text types under analysis will determine the position of clausal topics within the structure of the clause and consequently produce differences in their formal realizations. The thirty news items selected for research belong to the informative subgenre and, following van Dijk (1988a), can be classified as ´hard news´, as they are current events that should be published the same day on which they occur. The selected news items are sensationalist in character and make reference to events of human interest, which usually imply rarity, suspense, conflict, antagonism and violence. Their style is impersonal and concise. Thus, they can be considered, together with brief news, as the prototype of pure news par excellence. Although the rhetorical purpose of the journalist can be influenced by political, social or ideological motives (Fowler, 1991), his/her main aim is to transmit hypothetically objective and truthful information6 (van Dijk, 1988b; Grijelmo, 1997). The transmission of this type of information imposes a narrative style characterized, as Downing points out, ‘by temporal sequencing of events, dynamic verbs, usually past tense and characters that perform actions’ (1998: 25). The sample of texts have been chosen at random from three quality newspapers (The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph), all typically directed at the liberal, educated middle class with a medium or high level of culture (Jucker, 1992). Finally, the mode of the news is, evidently, the written language. The written product tends to be independent of the immediate context in which the event that is narrated takes place. Therefore, there is no possibility of feedback between the news writer and his/her reader. The lexis is elaborate, presenting a high level of lexical density, and the syntax is normally characterized by its low grammatical intricacy. These various aspects of the news items determine the utilization of a formal, concise and impersonal language that does not use personal comments and evaluative expressions. In contrast to the informative and narrative character of the news items, the main aim of the tourist brochures is not so much to inform the reader about a particular ‘product’ as to influence directly his behaviour (van Dijk, 1988a and b); Cook, 1992). The promotion of a geographical area, a city, a museum, etc. is the main aim of the tourist brochures. With the help of iconic elements, psychological and social mechanisms and convincing and descriptive techniques, the professional tries to
6 Although many Spanish scholars agree that journalism must be essentially objective (Martín Vivaldi, 1993; López García, 1996), news items are products which are logically mediated by ideological interests. In fact, with the term ‘objectivity’, Martínez Albertos (1993: 43) makes reference to the journalist’s duty to truthfulness and intellectual honesty. 16 A. Jesús Moya persuade the reader to accept fully the information that is shown in the brochure. Regarding the interpersonal relationship that is established between the travel writer and the reader of a tourist brochure, a travel writer aims to persuade a possible visitor, usually someone less familiar with the place that is being described. Although there is no possibility of feedback between them, the writer of the tourist brochure appeals to the potential tourist in a personalized tone in order to influence his/her behaviour. As written texts, the tourist brochures share some properties of the mode of the news items; both subgenres are written to be published. However, in contrast to the discourse of journalism, the language of the travel writer is more interpretative, persuasive and evaluative. As a text type, the tourist brochure is a descriptive text in which there is a predominance of subjective language. In fact, although there is no possibility of direct interaction, the writer of the tourist brochure looks for a certain complicity with the tourist. This complicity is achieved by the utilization of personal expressions, stative verbs and descriptive adjectives.
4.2. Method of analysis
In order to study the relationship between syntactic functions and the pragmatic function of topic in our database, the thirty news items and thirty tourist brochures were submitted to an empirical analysis. It could thus be determined whether the majority of the local topics were prototypically realized by clause initial or subject constituents in both subgenres or whether the topical entities were realized by other syntactic elements depending on the subgenre. As previously mentioned, clausal topics were identified on the basis of the aboutness perspective referred to earlier, by their inclusion within the discourse topic, and by their referential continuity in the text (Givón, 1983, 1992). In fact, only those pragmatically salient entities (Reinhart 1982) that express what the clause is about and that are referred to in the following discourse have been considered topical. The local topics of the sixty texts usually make reference either to the main characters of the news items or to the different tourist areas of interest described in the brochures. In this analysis I have also estimated that there is only one topic per clause, on the principle that the topic is the entity chosen as the most topical in a given setting (Butler, 2003). As stated in section 2 the syntactic elements of the clause structure were identified on the basis of the syntactic frameworks established by Quirk (1985) and Downing and Locke (2002).7
7 The reason why I have chosen Quirk and Downing and Locke’s models for the syntactic analysis of new and known topics is that in FG only two syntactic functions are recognized: subject and object (Garcia Velasco 2003). However, the variety of syntactic elements described in the models previously mentioned is more complete from a formal perspective, as they distinguish between the syntactic functions of subject, direct, indirect and prepositional objects, subject complement, object complement, predicator complement and adjunts. In FG, syntactic functions assignment is sensitive to the Semantic Function Hierarchy: Agent > Goal > Recipient > Beneficiary > Instrument > Location > Time. This implies that a term as agent is the primary candidate for subject and that a term as goal is the prototypical candidate for object. Thus, the assignment of subject and object becomes more difficult as one goes further down the hierarchy On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 17
Regarding the relationship between known topics and subject, the formal realizations of given topics, subtopics and resumed topics have been considered as tokens of Givenness since they all fulfil a function in topic continuity and are co- referential to entities that have already been activated. As for the interdependence between new topics and subject, new topics have been considered only potentially topical as they do not emerge fully-fledged just through being introduced into a given discourse; they have to be established, and then kept alive through the subsequent references that are made to them (Butler, 2003). Therefore, only the formal realizations the new clausal topics that have been maintained at least once after their first activation in discourse have counted for the purposes of this research. The co-occurrence patterns among the syntactic functions that realize the clausal topics of both news items and tourist brochures were analysed through statistical techniques to provide an overall description of the similarities and differences betweeen the two text types under research. Frequency counts were normalized to values in percentages to compare the whole sample of texts. Raw frequency counts could not be used for comparison across the two subgenres, as the number of clausal topics identified in the thirty tourist brochures (494) was smaller than the total amount of local topics counted in the thirty news items (730).8 I have provided both the percentage of each syntactic token and a Chi-Square test using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences), in order to measure the extent of the distribution of the syntactic functions that prototypically carry out the formal realizations of the clausal topics in the sample texts.
(Moutaouakil, 1989: 6). Semantic functions, however, do not seem to play a part in topic assignment. 8 In fact, even though the texts comprising the typology of texts chosen were similar in length (10,145 words in the journalistic texts against 9,873 words in the tourist texts), 1,365 clauses were counted in the news items while only 990 were found in the tourist brochures. The smaller number of topics identified in the travel texts may be due to the fact that in these the clausal topics are not always realized by a specific clause constituent; they sometimes remain implicit, either for purely rhetorical and persuasive reasons, for questions of linguistic economy or for their possible inference from the iconic elements in the brochure. On some occasions the topic is not made explicit either because it is recoverable from the general knowledge that the writer and the reader share, or because it can be deduced from the previous linguistic context. Thus, in travel texts it is not infrequent to find sentences which lack a local topic. In the following extract, for instance, all the information is focal and makes reference to the main topical entity about which information is given, Castleton. The propositional content of the sentence implies that Castleton is unique for its tourist features that can be seen both in the open air and underground: “[...] It would be hard to imagine anywhere with such an array of natural and historical features both above and below ground [...]” (Castleton, 1995). 18 A. Jesús Moya
4.3. Formal realizations of new and given topics in news items
This section analyses the syntactic realizations of the clausal topics found in the selection of thirty journalistic texts in an attempt to determine what motivates the writers of the journalistic texts to place the local topics in either P1 or away from the initial positions of the clause.
Absolute Values Values in percentages Formal realizations New topics Known topics New topics Known topics Subject 67 587 93.1 89.2 Object 5 46 6.9 7.0 Adjunct 0 6 0.0 0.9 Predicator 0 4 0.0 0.6 Complement Subject Complement 0 2 0.0 0.3 Agent 0 5 0.0 0.8 Postmodifier 0 8 0.0 1.2 Total number 72 658 100 100
Table 1. Realizations of New and known topics in journalistic texts
The table above clearly shows that the new topics are typically realized in the news items by clause constituents that fulfil a subject function. In fact, 93.1% of the new topics identified in the data coincide with the clausal subject (in raw figures, 67 out of the 72 tokens analysed). The introductory clause shown in (1) provides an example in which the entity that carries out the aboutness property (a girl) coincides with the element that is located before the predication in declarative clauses. Only 6.9% of the new topics in the journalistic texts are realized by direct or prepositional objects (in raw figures, 5 out of the 72 tokens identified):
(1) A 15 year old girl (Newtop, Subject) was found strangled and battered in a field near a lovers’s lane yesterday. The body of Louise Sellar was discovered at 7am by a retired policeman walking his dog behind Bellinge Hospital … (Girl, 15, strangled near lovers’ lane. The Daily Telegraph. August 15, 1995)
With regards to the formal realizations of known topics in news items, like new topics they are also prototypically associated with the initial subject positions of the clause. 89.2% of the known topics coincide with the clausal element that carries out this syntactic function (in raw figures, 587 out of the 658 tokens counted). As a result, examples such as (2), in which the topic is realized by nominal groups or personal pronouns functioning as subjects, are predominant in this subgenre and display the tendency of using nominal subjects to refer to the participants about which information is given in the discourse (Perfetti and Goldman, 1974):
On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 19
(2) … The pilot (Givtop) was 36-year-old Ian Fraser, a major serving with 47th Regiment Royal Artillery at Thorney Island, West Sussex. He (Givtop) was with his wife, Wg Cdr Sulvia Bibson, 44, a French linguist based at RAF Uxbirdge.
The two other passengers (Givtop) were the couple’s friends Sqn Ldr Paul Lockwood, 36, also based at RAF Uxbridge, and his wife ... (Military Officers killed in air crash; The Daily Telegraph, August 14, 1995).
Although with a much smaller rate of frequency (7%; in raw figures, 46 out of the 658 tokens analysed), clausal topics realized by personal pronouns and nominal groups functioning as direct or prepositional objects have also been identified in the thirty news items. Givón (1983, 1992), for example, makes reference to the topical possibilities of the clausal entities activated both by subject and object elements. As the following extract shows, there are two topics materialized in two personal pronouns (him, it) as direct objects:
(3) … Rescuers found him (Givtop) (Tom Willacy) and he was taken 80 miles to Glasgow Royal Infirmary. His leg was packed in ice provided by a fish factory, but surgeons were unable to save it (Givtop). (Fisherman phones home for help after leg is severed; The Guardian, August 11, 1995).
As can be appreciated in Table 1, known topics are also realized in the news items by other clause elements such as adjuncts (I have nothing but praise for this incredibly brave man),9 predicator complements (Croatia last night blamed rebel Serbs for the attack...),10 agents (...More than a million Jerry Garcia neckties have been sold in the United States; a Beverly Hills hotel suite was reshaped by the guitarist...),11 postmodifiers (Suspicion for the attack has fallen on the small band of Sikh separatists),12 and finally, subject complements (It was still the Dead ... who made most money from concerts).13 However, these syntactic and semantic elements reach the rate of only 3.8% of the total tokens analysed. In raw figures, only eight postmodifiers, six adjuncts, five agents, four predicator complements and two subject complements with a topical function have been identified in the thirty news items. From the outset the journalist seems to activate the new and known topical entities about which information is given in the clauses of the news items. The initial position of the clause, where the subject is prototypically located, is reserved for the presentation of the topics. However, the mid and final slots, where objects, adjuncts and agents are prototypically placed, are used to introduce the most relevant information the writer wishes to transmit about the topical entities. In this way, Firbas’ principle of Communicative Dynamism is safeguarded and the understanding of the message is made easier for the
9 Taken from the news items “Fisherman phones home for help after leg is severed”. The constituent “for this incredible brave man” can be located in the initial position of the sentence. This has led me to consider this element as an adjunct. As Quirk (1985) states adverbials are characterized by their mobility within the structure of the clause. 10 “BBC reported killed in Croatia” (The Guardian, 10.08.1995) 11 “Leader of Grateful Dead, Jerry García, dies in clinic” (The Guardian, 10.08.1995) 12 “Car bomb kills Punjab minister” (The Daily Telegraph, 01.09.1995) 13 “Leader of Grateful Dead, Jerry García, dies in clinic” (The Guardian, 10.08.1995) 20 A. Jesús Moya reader. Thus, the empirical analysis of the sample of news items shows the journalist’s clear intention to make clausal topics (either new or known) match up with subject constituents, usually located at the beginning of the clause in initial position. This clearly conflicts with Dik’s claim (1989, 1997) that new topics tend to be located toward the final slot of the clause.
4.4. Formal realizations of new and given topics in tourist brochures
I now turn to analysing the new and known topics of the tourist brochures and determine whether the same syntactic patterns are followed in the two subgenres or whether there are quantitative and qualitative differences in the formal realization of clausal topics in both text types.
Absolute Values Values in percentages Formal realizations New topics Known topics New topics Known topics Subject 22 317 68.8 68.6 Object 2 62 6.3 13.4 Adjunct 3 55 9.3 11.9 Predicator Complement 2 10 6.3 2.2 Subject Complement 3 0 9.3 0.0 Postmodifier 0 18 0.0 3.9 Total number 32 462 100 100
Table 2. Realizations of New and Known topics in travel texts
As can been seen in table 2, as in the news items, in the tourist brochures most of the new topical entities are also realized by subject constituents (68,8%, 22 out of 32 tokens). However, the rate of frequency of topical entities realized by elements that fulfil this syntactic function decreases considerably in this type of text. Moreover, as can be noted in examples (4) and (5), although the new topics correlate with the function of subject, typically associated with the initial slot of the clause, the new topical referents are preceded either by an -ed clause or a ‘there’ presentative construction that postpone their activation in discourse:
(4) Sheltered by the reef that encircles this beautiful, uncrowded island, Bermuda (New topic) is a relaxing destination with a distinctive atmosphere reflecting the traditions of over 400 years as a British Colony … (Bermuda, British Airways Holidays, 1996).
(5) There is a place in Middle England that is waiting to be discovered. North West Leicestershire (New topic) is literally brimming over with things to do and places to go. Something for everyone … (Welcome to North West Leicestershire).
Though with a lower value in percentages, the new topics in the tourist brochures are also realized by other clausal elements such as adjuncts and subject complements On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 21
(9.3% respectively), and objects and predicator complements (both with a rate of 6.3%). As shown in (6) and (7), these syntactic elements tend to be located towards the mid/final slot of the clause in the unmarked pattern and, by placing the topical entities in these syntactic positions, the travel writer postpones the introduction of the topic:
(6) Half way along Crete’s northern coast between Heraklion and the island’s western most point is the seaside town of Rethymnon (Newtopic, Subject complement) … (Crete, Rethymnon. Olympic Holidays, 1995)
(7) Arriving at the Candlelight (Newtop, Adjunct) you find the warm and sincere type of welcome which only a family-run small Irish Hotel can sypply … (The Candlelight Inn)
Regarding the realization of known topics in the travel texts, after analysing syntactically the elements of the clause that carry out topical information in this subgenre, it has been found that 68.6% of the known topics identified (317 out of the 462 tokens) overlap with the subject of the clause. Note that the rates of distribution are similar to those of new topics. So, the tokens that most frequently predominate are those in which the clausal topic coincides with the element that fulfils this syntactic function:
(8) Beautiful beaches, warm blue sea and sun-drenched days virtually year-round, Barbados (Newtop) certainly offers all the features of a tropical island. Its people (subtop) are especially warm and welcoming, and there’s still an inescapable colonial feel that adds to the island’s unique atmosphere and special style ...
Barbados (Givtop) is not as scenic and lush as some of its more mountainous neighbours, but touristically, it (Givtop)’s the English speaking Caribbean’s most developed and sophisticated island, with a wide range of round-the-clock activities ... (Barbados, Time Off. City Selection, 1995)
There is a notable presence of adjuncts in the brochures with topical properties. In fact, 11.9% of the local topics identified are realized by constituents that fulfil this syntactic function (55 out of the 462 tokens analysed). On some occasions the topic coincides with a prepositional group functioning as adjunct (at the Leeds Castle); in others, as can be appreciated in the second paragraph of extract (9), it is realized by an adverbial group (here):
(9) Strung out as far as the rock of Gibraltar, the aptly named Costa del Sol (coast of the sun) is Spain’s southernmost coast line. Not only does this make it the warmest and sunniest spot in Spain, the resort is ideally placed for interesting excursions locally and further afield into neighbouring Gibraltar or Seville ...
Fuengirola too has grown into a wintersun holiday paradise. The rain-lashed streets of the UK seem light years away from the blue skies and sunshine here (Givtop)! What’s even better is that standards of service are high and the facilities modern (Costa del Sol, The Sunshine Coast. Inspirations. Wintersun Issue 1, 1995/96).
22 A. Jesús Moya
What is also notable is the predominance of direct and prepositional objects in the tourist brochures (13.4% of the total tokens analysed, in raw figures 62 out of 462 cases),14 which is higher than in the news items, where the number of topics realized by those syntactic elements barely reaches the level of 7% of the total. On some occasions, given topics, subtopics and resumed topics, carried out formally by an object, are introduced in the mid slot of the clause by an imperative structure that invites the reader to visit the place that is being promoted. As in the case of adjuncts, the realization of topics by objects allows the writer to move the topical constituents away from the initial positions of the clause. In fact, they occupy a late rather than an early position in the structure of the English clause:
(10) Visit the Ferrers Centre (subtopic), set in the beautiful lakeside setting of Staunton Harold, where you will find some of the finest contemporary crafts … (Welcome to North West Leicestershire).
Postmodifiers (you will be struck by the magnificence of its location...),15 whose frequency displays the rate of 3.9% of the total tokens identified (only 18 out of 462 tokens), also make reference to entities that contain topical information in the tourist brochures. Most of them are part of a complex nominal group located towards the end of the clause. Less frequent are the topics realized by predicator complements (only ten tokens identified; 2.2%), defined by Downing and Locke (2002:50) as those obligatory elements of the clause which are necessary to complete the predication and which do not fulfil the criteria established for objects and other complements. As Downing and Locke (2002:55-56) point out, the constituents following relational verbs (have, lack...), verbs of equal reciprocity (marry, resemble...), verbs of measure (cost, take...) and obligatory directional complements do not become subjects in a corresponding passive clause because there is no passive counterpart. Extract (10) provides an example (Port El Kantaoui):
(11) For those for whom the history class was an excuse for a couple of hours off in the afternoon, spare us a few moments and we’ll convince you that a brief delve into the past may be the answer why you should consider a holiday in Tunisia ...
Head further south and you’ll come to Port El Kantaoui (subtopic). Centred around
14 41 direct objects and 21 prepositional objects have been counted in the text samples. In the sentence ‘you may wish to join in the locals’ favourite pastimes, such as sailing, surfing, swimming, diving or fishing...’ (Western Australia), “join in” has been analysed as a verbal form that requires a prepositional object. It has not been considered as a phrasal verb followed by a direct object. As Downing and Locke (2002) point out it is not possible to separate the verbal form from the preposition in this type of construction or even locate the object constituent between the verb and the preposition. However, other combinations such as: “If after all that you still have energy for more you can take in the walled rose garden, of Forge and Craft Centre...” (Stanford Hall. Lutterworth, Leicestershire), admit the possibility that the object be placed between the verbal form and the adverbial particle. In these cases the clause elements that realize the topic have been syntactically analysed as direct objects: “you can take the walled rose garden in”. 15 Example taken from the tourist brochure “Castleton”. On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 23
a large international marina, Port El Kantaoui is a ‘self contained resort with fashionable boutiques, an array of restaurants selling traditional European dishes, and a variety of bars and clubs ranging from the sophisticated to the small and friendly ... (Tunisia. A Living History Lesson. Inspirations. Wintersun Issue 1, 1995/96).
5. Discussion and conclusions
The results of the analysis carried out confirm that clausal topics tend to be prototypically realized by subjects in both news items and tourist brochures. However, new and known topics have been found to be more frequently located in the mid and final positions of the clause in the tourist brochures than in the news items. While in the journalistic texts the correlation between topic and subject reaches the rates of 93.1% and 89.2% for new and given topics respectively, in the tourist brochures this matching is represented by 68.8% and 68.6% of the total tokens of new and known topics analysed. This increases the variety of clause elements that can also carry out topical information in the tourist brochures and decreases, to a certain extent, the correlation between topic and subject in this type of texts. Regarding new topics, 31.2% of the introductory topics identified in the brochures are realized by other clause constituents which function as prepositional or direct objects (6.3%), adjuncts (9.3%), subject complements (9.3%) and predicator complements (6.3%). On the other hand, in the news items only 6.9% of the new topics are realized by a clause element that occupies a non-subject position. As far as the known topics are concerned, 31.4% of the given, sub- and resumed topics identified in the travel texts are realized by objects (13.4%), adjuncts (11.9%), postmodifers (3.9%) and predicator complements (2.2%). However, in the journalistic texts only 10,8% of these correlate with a clause element that fulfils a syntactic function different from the subject. Quantitatively speaking, 7.0% of the known topics activated in the news items are realized by direct and prepositional objects. Less frequently predominant are the topics realized by postmodifiers, predicator complements, adjuncts, agents and subject complements, as they barely reach the rate of 3.8% of the total. The Chi-Square analysis provided below also reveals significant differences in the syntactic realizations of the clausal topics between the journalistic and travel texts. Comparing the observed values of frequency with those which would be expected if there was no association between frequency of syntactic features and text type, the realization of both new and known topics by subjects is shown to be more relevant in the news items than in the tourist brochures. The expected count for subjects is 592.3 in the journal texts and 400.7 in the travel texts and the observed frequencies account for 654 and 339 respectively. However, the statistical backup reveals a different syntactic patterning in the case of objects, adjuncts, predicator complements, subject complements and postmodifiers as their frequencies of distribution are more significant in the tourist brochures than in the news items. In fact, regarding direct and prepositional objects, the expected count is 46.4 in the tourist brochures and 68.6 in the news items. The observed count is 64 in the former, but only 51 appear in the latter. As for adjuncts, the expected count is 25.82 in the travel texts and 38.18 in the journal 24 A. Jesús Moya texts and the observed frequencies account for 58 and 6 respectively. Finally, with regards to postmodifiers and predicator complements, the expected counts are 10.49 and 6.46 respectively in the tourist brochures and 15.51 and 9.45 in the news items. The observed counts are 18 and 12 in the former, but only 8 and 4 appear in the latter. A similar pattern is found with subject complements. The expected counts are 2.02 in the tourist brochures and 2.98 in the news items and the observed frequencies account for 3 and 2 respectively. Only the frequency of agents follows a distribution similar to the rates of the subject function in both subgenres. In fact, the expected count is 2.98 in the news items and 2.02 in the tourist brochures and the observed frequencies account for 5 and 0 respectively. Thus, the degree of deviation from the null hypothesis of no association between syntactic realizations and text type varies greatly from one syntactic function to another in the sample texts.16
16 Also notice that the category of Predicator Complement has been eliminated from the second revised edition of Downing and Locke (2006), the relational types being subsumed under non-prototypical direct objects, the others under types of complement. However, in order to maintain the maximum variety of syntactic functions within the English clause (see note 7), for the purposes of this study I have adopted the previous version of the editions of 1992 and 2002 in which the authors draw a clear boundary between the functions of direct object and predicator complement. On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions 25
FEATURES TEXT Crosstabulation.
TOURIST NEWS ITEMS TOTAL BROCHURES Count 654 339 993 SUBJECT Expected Count 592.3 400.7 993 Count 51 64 115 OBJECT Expected Count 68.6 46.4 115 Count 6 58 64 ADJUNCT Expected Count 38.18 25.82 64 Count 5 0 5 AGENT Expected Count 2.98 2.02 5 PREDICATOR Count 4 12 16 COMPLEMENT Expected Count 9.54 6.46 16 SUBJECT Count 2 3 5 COMPLEMENT Expected Count 2.98 2.02 5 Count 8 18 26 POSTMODIFIER Expected Count 15.51 10.49 26 Count 730 494 1224 TOTAL Expected Count 730 494 1224
Value Df Probability Chi-Square Test 1.42259E-22 1 .000
Number of valid
cases 1224
Table 3. Distribution of the Formal Realizations of Clausal Topics in News Items and Tourist Brochures
The writer of the travel texts moves the clausal topics away from the initial subject positions of the clause more frequently than the journalist. This pattern creates an expectation that the ‘suspended topic’ should have come earlier and is used by the travel writer to arouse the reader’s interest for the area that is being promoted, and so obtain a positive response. Thus, the possible realizations of the topic by subject constituents decrease and the variety of syntactic elements (adjuncts, direct objects, predicator complements, subject complement) that activate topical referents in mid or final positions increase. In the news items, however, the initial slot of the clause, where the subjects are typically located, is more frequently reserved for the activation of the referents which carry out topical information. Understanding the message is thus made easier for the reader, as the topics about which information is transmitted at the clause level are identified clearly from the outset. This would explain why appreciable differences have been found in the syntactic realizations of topics in the two subgenres. As expected, they seem to be determined by the informative and persuasive functions that characterize the journalistic and travel texts respectively. 26 A. Jesús Moya
The analysis of the data also demonstrates that there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic function of subject and the pragmatic dimension of topic. They are two distinct categories that fulfil two different functions: one, textual and pragmatic, the topic; the other, formal and syntactic, the subject. As Dik (1989, 1997) suggests, though (given) topics and subject tend to correlate in the same element, their interdependence is not complete. As for the relationship between new topics and subject, in contrast to Dik’s (1989) claims, the results of the analysis show that new topics do not necessarily occur in the final positions of the clause. The placement of clausal topics (either new or known) seems to be determined both by the speaker’s or writer’s rhetorical purpose in a specific context of communication and by the specific rules of the language in which s/he expresses him/herself (Mackenzie and Keizer, 1991: 175-6). This leads me to the conclusion that the expression component is not the only place where the order of constituents is established. It is also the result of the combination of pragmatic and contextual factors which play a key role in the expression level of the language and in its own language-specific regulations (Hengeveld, 2004a,b; 2005). In line with the Functional Discourse Grammar approach, I consider that the process of generating utterances starts with the encoding of the speaker’s communicative intentions in a particular text and works down to articulation at the expression level. Thus, the assignment of topic in English is the product of top- down decisions made by the speaker / writer on the basis of contextual aspects and communicative intentions. These discourse considerations affect the grammar and need to be accounted for in a discourse sensitive grammar model (Moya 2005).
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ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 29–43 ISSN 0210-6124
1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut
Celestino Deleyto Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected]
Eyes Wide Shut offers at least three perspectives on sex: sex as death, sex as commerce, and sex and love. In this essay I explore the third of these perspectives, that is, the relation between sex as love, one that has so far been neglected in critical accounts of the film. The nature of this relationship, as articulated by the text, culminates in the final scene in which Alice (Nicole Kidman) takes the initiative in the reconciliation with her husband Bill (Tom Cruise). This dialogue works as a complex summary of twentieth-century discourses about sex, including concepts such as the sexualisation of love, confluent love, intimacy, or the tension between love and desire. This scene, less ironic than it may seem, celebrates the most positive dimensions of sex and its inextricable link with love in our culture.
Key words: film studies, love, intimacy, heterosex, marriage, fantasy, Stanley Kubrick
Sexual desire has always been one of the central driving forces in narrative films, especially in Hollywood cinema, but since the cultural changes brought about by the nineteen sixties, that is, since the approximate time when Stanley Kubrick became consolidated as a cinema artist, there has been a gradual yet unstoppable increase both of the visibility of sex in cinematic representations and of its discursive centrality in western societies. Aids or no Aids, backlash or no backlash, the cultural pull of sexual discourses reached the end of the century unscathed. Kubrick was aware of this and with Eyes Wide Shut (1999) he aimed to make his ultimate statement (and, if possible, twentieth-century cinema’s ultimate statement) on sex. As Janet Maslin (1999) writes, for what would turn out to be his last film, the director chose the bedroom as the last frontier. In this essay I would like to explore the sexual discourses activated by the film and, more specifically, the links between sex and love, their cultural reverberations, and their power to explain an important area of experience in twentieth-century culture. For better or for worse, Kubrick always had a very keen sense of the cinematic and cultural importance of his own films. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was at the time the ultimate science fiction movie. Many filmmakers before had adapted classical English novels but Barry Lyndon (1975) presents itself as a monument to filmic adaptations of classical novels. In a period in which horror films were enjoying something of a commercial boom, The Shining (1980) was the horror movie to end all horror movies. Full-Metal Jacket (1987), from its formal and structural precision, was aimed at 30 Celestino Deleyto surpassing the critical edge of earlier Vietnam movies, etc. We may admire the boldness or resent the gall but a humble cineaste Kubrick certainly was not. Perhaps because of this and because of the crucial role of sex in the formation of our cultural identity it was only to be expected that critics were not going to let him once again corner the field. The critical reaction when the film first came out was unprecedented in its hostility, but it was a critical reaction which said more about our lingering cultural nervousness and anxieties concerning sex than about the film itself, even though it may appear that we live in a time in which, as Michel Chion says, “social taboos and rules of behaviour no longer forbid what is called ‘living out your fantasies’” (2002: 88). It may well be that, as many of its commentators have said, Eyes Wide Shut does not say anything original, innovative or profound about sex, but if nothing else, it sparked a critical reaction that brought back to light preoccupations and anxieties which some believed had been long overcome. Eyes Wide Shut is a film about sex appearing at a moment in which the representation of sex in non-pornographic films had started to be pushed to unprecedented limits both in Hollywood and, especially, in Europe, a trend which includes, among many others, such films as Sitcom (1997), The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998), Romance X (1999), Pola X (1999), Baise-moi (2000), À ma soeur (2001), Intimacy (2001), Lucía y el sexo (2001) or Nine Songs (2004). In this context, it is little wonder that the movie was accused of being tame and old-fashioned. The fact that Kubrick chose to adapt more or less faithfully a novella by Arthur Schnitzler (Traumnovelle) published in the nineteen twenties meant, at least partly, that the director gambled on the idea that very little had changed in the sexual arena in the last seventy years. This brought about the generalised critical opinion that Kubrick, a legendary recluse for the last few decades, no longer knew what was happening in the real world in matters sexual (Whitehouse 1999: 39; Dargis 1999). This was, however, not a very forceful argument: the changes from novella to film, although few in number, are indeed significant enough, and even those passages in which there are no apparent differences in the plot are important to understand the evolution of sexual discourses in our century. Rather than being cutting edge in sexual matters (at least if we compare it with some of the examples mentioned above), the movie attempts to summarise a whole century of sexual discourses, narrativizing and highlighting the most important cultural developments in the field in the twentieth century. For this purpose, the “modernisation” of a story originally written in the early decades of the century may be considered particularly apposite. It is evident from the outset that Kubrick is not making a run-of-the-mill erotic movie. His by then almost conventional use of wide angle follow focus tracking shots, the for some exasperating slowness in the delivery of dialogues, the centrality and length of the sex party scene, the ritualistic proliferation of the female nude both in and outside this scene, or the very casting of the then-real-life couple of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as his protagonists are among the factors that immediately suggest that what is being said about the sexual mores of a contemporary affluent married New York couple is to be taken not just as one more narrative but as carrying wider significance. Michel Chion comes again to our help when he summarises the subject of the film: “The subject of Eyes Wide Shut is the everyday life of a couple of mortal human beings, from the point of view of the vastness of history and the infinity of the 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut 31 world” (2002: 41), thus neatly conceptualising the film as 2001, part two. I would qualify Chion’s statement in one important way, though: the film is not just about a couple’s everyday life but, more specifically, about their sexual life, about the partners’ respective sexualities, and about the ways in which sexual discourses define not only their identities but also their anxieties, frustrations, and hopes. Beyond a few brief shots depicting the domesticity of the Harman household, there is no life for the characters beyond sex. The formal elements mentioned above and others deployed by the filmmakers turn the fictional world of Eyes Wide Shut into that of a sexual fantasy or, depending on the point of view, a sexual nightmare, but one which, in any case, asks important questions about the influence of sexual discourses on contemporary experiences of sex, especially about the sexuality of stable heterosexual couples. What then does the film have to say about sex? In my view, it offers at least three perspectives on sex which may not be totally consistent with one another but make for a multilayered, complex exploration of the subject with more dimensions than can be covered in an academic article. The three perspectives are sex as death, sex as commerce, and sex as love. A cursory glance at the abundant criticism which has focused on the film’s sexual discourses immediately shows the critics’ preference for the first two of these perspectives, illustrated, respectively, by Amy Taubin’s psychoanalytically-inspired critique of a masculinity ridden with anxiety about its own identity and expressed “through a confrontation with a woman who’s dead or dying” (1999: 26), and by Tim Kreider’s contention that the film is a powerful critique of a corrupt and decadent high culture on the brink of disaster, a culture based on prostitution as its defining transaction (2000: 41, 43). While these two perspectives underline important aspects of Eyes Wide Shut it is my contention that Kubrick’s last film is not exhausted by these readings and that they, in fact, leave out a crucial part of the spectator’s engagement with the story: the sexualised view of love that has increasingly dominated sexual and affective discourses in our culture. The film’s plot is ridden with sexual obsession and sexual corruption but beyond endorsement or critique of retrograde patriarchal attitudes towards female sexuality, a more positive, albeit heavily qualified, counterdiscourse gradually emerges from the narrative culminating in the final scene, a counterdiscourse which activates not just the link between sex and love in Western culture, a link with a long although rather uneven tradition, but, specifically, the centrality of sex in the conceptualisation of twentieth- century love. In order to explore the presence of this discourse in the film, I propose to concentrate on its most maligned scene (or perhaps its second most maligned one, after that of the sexual party at the mansion), the final sequence, one which critics have so far not taken very seriously. Although this scene will remain the central focus of my discussion throughout, I will also refer to several significant moments in the rest of the narrative. In general, Kubrick was attacked for striking a false note with an unconvincing happy ending in which the couple get back together for no apparent reason (Taubin 1999: 33; Ebert 1999; Howe 1999). Some, equally averse to the happy ending but more reluctant to admit that the filmmaker could possibly go wrong, speculated that parts of the film were not his responsibility (Hoberman 1999) or affirmed that, as in his earlier movies, this happy ending was an instance of his famous irony and was therefore not to be taken at face value but, rather, as an indictment of marriage and heterosexual love 32 Celestino Deleyto
(Kreider 2000: 48; Loyo 2004). The unpopularity of happy endings, especially those involving love, among critics and film scholars need hardly be elaborated. Unlike popular audiences, the critical institution much prefers a story with a tragic outcome or one in which love or any sort of emotional commitment is denounced, problematised, or looked at ironically rather than defended or celebrated, especially if it is heterosexual. Critical reaction in the case of Eyes Wide Shut was therefore hardly surprising: how could Kubrick do it, how could he give us such a bland and conservative ending as his final word on the matter of love and sex? If he was indeed responsible for it, he must have been deploying his ruthless irony. After all, The Killing (1956), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket, among others, had already featured famous ironic endings. Either that or he had finally lost his grip. As a consequence, few bothered to look closely at what actually happens in the scene. The final scene takes place in a busy Manhattan toy shop, with Alice (Kidman) and William (Cruise) looking exhausted after their ordeal of the previous night, and their daughter Helena (Madison Eginton) gleefully running ahead and showing her excitement at various items. One of these is a toy pram of which her mother seems to approve even though it is old-fashioned. Here the text seems to anticipate criticism of its view of relationships and indirectly prepare us for the oncoming dénouement, in which that which is “old fashioned” will be chosen by the couple as the way ahead. The time is, as it has been throughout the narrative, the Christmas season and Christmas lights can be seen out of focus in the background, giving the mise en scène a red glow which is important for an understanding of its meanings and textual perspective in a film in which colours play a crucial part. Three colours a rich ochre or gold, a whole array of blues ranging from cold and metallic through dark and discolouring to bright, and a red of various intensities constitute the film’s basic colour scheme. The meanings attached to them, however, are not immediately obvious. Gold, for example, tends to be associated with Alice and suggests the warmth of her surroundings, but it also presides over the first indication of the couple’s infidelities at Ziegler’s party, where it appears to be related to the sumptuousness that accompanies sexual indiscretion (although upstairs in Ziegler’s bathroom, the golden richness of the background is suddenly dropped in favour of much colder colours and of the red of the sofa and of the background of the female nude painting hanging on the wall). In spite of the careful crosscutting between the two protagonists, the sumptuous mise en scène of the party reminds us of earlier Kubrick films, particularly of a similar party in The Shining which, apparently taking place only in the male character’s imagination, contributes, within the conventions of the horror genre, to the representation of the crisis of the protagonist’s masculinity. In this case, the dreamlike lavishness of the background suggests a sexual fantasy which is more evenly shared by the two principals. Blue, on the other hand, is associated with jealousy, creeping in through the window to offset the golden glow of Alice and Bill’s bedroom when she relates her erotic fantasy and dominating the shots of Bill’s obsession with Alice’s sexuality, especially his imaginary reconstruction of her sexual encounter with the other man, what we could describe as the fantasy of a fantasy. It is also associated with death, particularly at the morgue, as is red, the colour of sex and passion. Red can, in fact, be seen as reinforcing the psychological and cultural link between sex and death: first seen in the rich hangings in the opening shot of Alice undressing with its early- 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut 33 century peep-show overtones, and most spectacularly dominating the orgy scene through lights, carpets, and cloaks (emphasising the links of the young women with Alice as sex object), it is also associated with death in Mandy’s (Julienne Davis) o.d.’ing, and in the scenes at Domino (Vinessa Shaw) and Sally’s (Fay Masterson) apartment, where blue (or purple) are also prominent and were the connections between female sexuality and death, continue to run rampant. Interesting too is how the lush yellow tones of Alice’s bedroom turn into blue when Bill comes home after his sexual escapade: blue had slowly crept in during their first scene together but it now dominates the mise en scène. In general, both Alice and Bill seem to move between the three colours depending on the way in which their sexuality is approached at each particular moment. The association of red and passion is perhaps most problematic in an orgy scene in which, as most commentators have pointed out, passion is totally absent, but then we are dealing here with a ritualised view of sexuality which, almost as in a religious ceremony, acquires a sacrificial dimension with, once again, femininity almost automatically evoking death where it should perhaps conjure up the idea of life and, to borrow Dan Brown’s words in his best-seller The Da Vinci Code (2003), the sacred feminine. As if to underscore the ironic use of the colour and its lack of passion, Ziegler’s red pool table dominates a later scene in which the cold rationality of the host’s explanations of sexual transgressions erases the possibility of any type of emotion least of all sexual arousal. In this respect, it is worth mentioning that red had also been most prominent in the scenes (including the orgy scene) in which Bill had been on the verge of having sex with women other than Alice. It is for this reason that the return of the colour red in the final scene bears some analysis, especially since both characters, in an unequivocally Kubrickian move, remain totally composed throughout. What is relevant at this point is that for their reconciliation, however tentative and problematic it might be, the return to their relationship of a sexual passion not devoid of danger but frankly acknowledged by the characters becomes a necessary ingredient of what they have learned in the course of the narrative. Red also dominates Alice’s declaration of love for her husband. In trying to salvage what is left of their relationship, she appears to be rescuing also the warmest and most passionate connotations of the colour red. Alice, who has taken the initiative every time the two characters are together, spells out the terms of their reconciliation (formally, the film emphasises her dominance, the shots of Bill being little more than reaction shots in the shot/reverse shot sequence). As I have already mentioned, the Christmas lights are visible in the background evoking rebirth, a new life, a new cycle; the bustle of everyday life can be felt around them and we know that their daughter Helena is near although after the cut to the closer distance of the two principals we do not see her again. This is a private moment which takes place not in isolation from society but in its midst: for all their social and economic privilege, Alice and Bill are not particularly special people but one of the many couples no doubt present in the toy shop at that moment, couples which may well be going through crises not very different from theirs. What has happened /is happening to them is not exceptional but typical, and the way Alice understands the bond that exists between them is meant to carry resonance well beyond their particular predicament. The use of Cruise’s and Kidman’s star images here remind us of Richard Dyer’s (1979: 111) account of the star’s power as a blend of uniqueness and normativeness: through 34 Celestino Deleyto the two actors that embody them, Alice and Bill are unique figures of identification while at the same time, and no less powerfully, representing relevant social types and, in this case, a relevant type of contemporary affective relationship. In the first part of the dialogue, Alice brings together all their experiences of the previous hours under the label of dreams, from which they have now awoken. This is not just a metaphor since most of their experiences have indeed been dreams or, at least, daydreams, but the metaphor is a traditional one which takes us back to Renaissance drama both in England and Spain. More specifically, the film evokes the ending of the fourth act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the four young lovers awaken in the morning from the erotic adventures of the night, after the juice of the magic flower has finally paired them off “correctly,” and Titania, the queen of the fairies, returns to the arms of Oberon, after having had sex with Bottom, magically turned into a donkey, the symbol of sexual potency. The different characters, human and not human, now come back to civilised society a little embarrassed by their nightly behaviour but strengthened and having learned and matured from the experience. What is more, their awakening is marked by a feeling of wonder to which, if they are wise, they will cling in their future daily routine. They are very different from another Shakespearean hero, the Prince Hal of the closing moments of Henry IV Part II who, having become king of England, rejects his old friend Falstaff: “being awaked, I do despise my dream.” Bill’s only useful contribution to the dialogue happens at this point reinforcing the idea that he is no Prince Hal: “no dream is ever just a dream.” Metafictionally, the text is also suggesting that the spectator should not just discard this film, or indeed any film, as a mere fantasy, thus implicitly agreeing with those psychoanalytic critics who place the social value of films precisely in their being reconstructions of our individual fantasies (Cowie 1984). More specifically, sex and sexual desire are not just individual fantasies situated outside society and outside history but, on the contrary, are a crucial part of the construction of our social identity and define, to some extent, our place in history. Presumably, therefore, what these two characters have discovered is, in very broad strokes, not the benefits of infidelity but the importance of sexual fantasy. In Bill’s case, if he has understood anything, it is precisely that a couple’s sexuality is a matter of not just one but two people. Bill alarms both the spectator and Alice when he suggests that now that their troubles are over, their love will last forever. Alice, showing a measure of compassion in her expression, as if to intimate her understanding that, but for her vigilance, her husband could easily revert to an uncomprehending childishness, immediately corrects him and asks him not to think in terms of “forever.” In other words, she begs him not to think along the lines of the traditional discourse of romantic love, as a narrative of the couple based on the project of a life together, but, rather, in terms of what Anthony Giddens calls “confluent love,” a type of love which is also based on commitment to one person, but which can also be terminated more or less at will by either partner at any particular point (1993: 137). It is Giddens’s contention that this type of relationship predominates in contemporary affective protocols while traditional romantic love is on the retreat. More recently, David Shumway (2003: 24-27) has argued that the discourse of romance has been partially replaced by the discourse of intimacy, a discourse which promises deep communication, friendship, and sharing as opposed to passion, adventure, and intense emotion, a discourse which incorporates a variety of new 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut 35 erotically invested bonds between individuals. It can be argued that when Alice says to Bill “But I do love you,” she is inviting him to understand and adapt to these contemporary views of love and expressing her reluctance to agreeing to a cultural norm which may be a thing of the past. Alice is therefore not only being cautious here, rearming herself against any possible (even probable) suffering that Bill’s sexual indiscretions may inflict on her in the future. She is also trying to put into practice what they both have learned about modern relationships. Like so many before her both in films and in society, she has learned to modify her expectations of love in order to adapt them to an ever-changing reality. Finally, and most conspicuously, Alice establishes a link between love for her husband and sex, a link which is all the more striking because it constitutes the film’s final word. Within the text’s general fidelity to Schnitzler’s original, Kubrick departs from it in a crucial way here. Fridolin (the novella’s male protagonist) does utter the word “forever,” and his wife, Albertine, does contradict him with modern common sense, although she does not articulate her objection as eloquently as Alice does. But her rather enigmatic words “Never enquire into the future” are actually the final words of the dialogue. She does not say “I love you” nor does she propose sex as the ostensible solution to their problems. Conversely, there is a much clearer sense at the beginning of the novella that the couple love each other and that the very brief passage that narrates the equivalent episode to Ziegler’s party serves, before anything else, as a turn-on for the couple to have passionate sex when they return home. It could be argued that in the original there is a situation of marital bliss at the beginning to which the characters return at the end after having overcome their problems. In Eyes Wide Shut, on the other hand, there is never any clear indication of the couple’s love for one another, and sex between them, or the very brief glimpse we get of it, is far from passionate. Ziegler’s party is no turn-on but a detailed account of Alice’s and, especially, Bill’s tendencies towards extra-marital flirtation. In this sense, the road walked by the characters in the film has been longer and rockier than in the novella, and its provisional destination one which reflects part of what has happened in western relationships in the intervening decades between the two texts. In any case, Alice singles out, in the final word of the film, one of the century’s most crucial cultural developments in the field of affective relationships. But can the single word “fuck” summarise, Rosebud-like, a whole century of thinking about love? Well, in a sense it can. For sociologist Steve Seidman (1991: 66-84), one of the most important developments in the formation of modern sensibility has been what he calls “the sexualization of love,” the process whereby sex changed from being a destructive to a beneficent power, bringing about good health, mental vigour, social success, and happy conjugal love. Not only did the antithesis between sensuality and love disappear, but also in the eyes of many cultural critics and psychologists love became no more than a product of the sex drive. For Giddens (1993: 62), as we have seen, traditional romantic love was replaced by confluent love, a love that for the first time introduced the ars erotica into the core of the conjugal relationship and made the achievement of reciprocal sexual pleasure a key element in whether the relationship was sustained or dissolved. Although, as Seidman argues, there are still limitations to this approximation between love and sex, by the nineteen sixties and seventies, the countercultural period with which Kubrick has often been associated, both concepts tend to become 36 Celestino Deleyto indistinguishable, at least in certain contexts. For example, Woody Allen’s films of the seventies and early eighties reflected, in their constant preoccupation with the boundaries between love and sex, the growing difficulty of the separation. The neo- conservative backlash of the eighties may have put a damper on this process of discursive fusion but, as most Hollywood films from the eighties and nineties have proved, in a sense there was no turning back. Whereas for Albertine sex was not culturally available as the solution to an affective problem, at the end of the century it had become the standard way of expressing our love for one another: I do love you, says Alice, so let’s have sex to prove it. Torben Grodal (2004: 28, 30) has recently challenged this perception, taking issue, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, with the contemporary tendency to reduce all types of emotions, particularly, love and desire, to a single origin, namely sex. For him, love and desire are clearly differentiated emotions that have different historical origins and that may interact with each other in historically specific manners but must be kept apart in cultural analysis. Film genres reinforce this division, with romantic films being about “personalised bonding” and pornographic films about “anonymous desire” (2004: 26). That is, for him not only are the two emotions different in theory and in people’s real experience but cultural discourses such as films also keep them separate, in spite of the insistence of ideological critics who tend to either collapse the two or categorise them according to fixed ideological apriorisms: that love is repressive (for women) and desire is liberating, or, in other words, that the only liberating way of conceiving love is by equating it with desire. In his view, the fashionable link of love with patriarchy and desire with emancipation, fluid gender roles, and the body does not stand up to serious historical investigation (Grodal 2004: 38). Grodal’s project is to distinguish between the representations of two different emotions in films. To the extent that he manages to free different expressions of love from ideological preconceptions, his views are refreshing and welcome. While no doubt encouraging and inspirational for people whose alternative sexual habits have previously been socially denigrated, the insistence of much of film theory on equating heterosexuality and/or romance with conservativeness and patriarchal oppression runs the risk of becoming just as oppressive and inhibiting for many other people. However, there are other aspects of his theory that are more questionable. The issue becomes cloudy, as Grodal himself has to admit, because “love often encompasses sexual desire and powerful emotions are often classified as sexual desire […], even if the emotion in question has nonsexual roots” (2004: 33). It is significant that, in order to separate love and desire, the author needs to restrict his account of sexual desire to those cases in which it is anonymous, unrelated to a specific person. Although he aspires to isolate the two categories from one another, they are only two extreme instances of a continuum which in reality incorporates different combinations of the two. Even “recreational sex” –sex for its own sake– (Seidman 1991: 127) need not have the anonymous, mechanical aura which Grodal reserves for pornography. Among many examples, this author uses Eyes Wide Shut to support his views, but his brief invocation of Kubrick’s film does nothing but expose the gaps in his analysis. For him, the film is about the conflict between promiscuous and exclusive relations, and the ending suggests that Alice chooses her loving relationship with her husband over her promiscuous feelings as expressed in her sexual dream (Grodal 2004: 32-33). The 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut 37 first problem with this is that neither Alice nor anybody else can choose what to dream and, if my reading above is accepted, she never actually rejects her dreams but, rather, learns from them and, like the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, incorporates them into her waking life. Promiscuity is incompatible with the exclusive bond which she still aspires to re-establish with her husband. Yet sexual fantasy is never rejected. On the contrary, it is accepted and promoted as an important part of their sexual identity as a couple. Secondly, and more importantly, as we have seen, her love for her husband is not devoid of sexual desire even though this desire is evidently not promiscuous. Grodal does not refer to Alice’s final word in the film because it would contradict his classification. Sex is for Alice the most immediate way in which to seal their reconciliation and to express their love for each other. Love may be different from sex, and the type of sexual desire which is celebrated in pornography may have little to do with love but, in the twentieth century, and, specifically, in cinematic discourses, a romantic love which is separated from sexual desire is, if not impossible, at least residual. One of the historical developments that made this sexualised view of romantic love possible in the last century was a modified view of female sexuality, and the progressive weakening of century-long cultural associations of women with danger and corruption. In this respect, Bill has a long way to go. Alice’s sexual fantasy at the beginning of the film provokes Bill’s irrational jealousy and his desire for “revenge fucking” (Herr 2000: 109). Bill’s sexual odyssey is one marked by anxiety, guilt, and revulsion and by the constant proximity of death in one way or another. Even before Alice’s revelation, his flirtation with the two models at Ziegler’s party is interrupted by Mandy’s o.d.’ing upstairs, which, but by his quick intervention, might have ended up in her death. As soon as Alice finishes telling him her fantasy, he gets the phone call announcing the death of one his patients. In front of her father’s corpse, Marion Nathanson (Marie Richardson) declares her impossible love for the doctor just before her fiancé arrives in the scene. Shortly afterwards, prostitute Domino invites him to her apartment and, although their imminent sexual encounter is ostensibly interrupted by Alice’s phone call, Bill and the spectator find out later on that Domino is HIV-positive. At the fancy- dress shop, Milich’s teenage daughter (Leelee Sobieski) insinuates herself to Bill as she hides behind him from her father’s death threats. The protagonist has done his best to be present at the sexual party but once inside the mansion he just stands there before being chosen by the mysterious woman (Abigail Good), who may or may not be offering her life to redeem him for his trespassing. When, the next evening, he returns to Domino’s apartment, he is greeted by Sally (Fay Masterson) who again openly flirts with him before revealing that her flatmate is HIV-positive thus putting a damper on the proceedings. The climax of this narrative pattern is his visit to Mandy’s corpse at the morgue where the necrophilic dimension of his undertakings finally comes to the open. Although she does not offer herself to him literally, both the mise en scène and the high- angle shot of the woman’s naked corpse suggest an invitation to which Bill is on the verge of succumbing. Death is never more than one step away from the protagonist’s sexual undertakings. Alice’s story is the narration of a fantasy. Her sexual encounter with the naval officer is Bill’s fantastic construction of an infidelity which never actually happened. The narrative rhetoric of the film clearly distinguishes between this fantasy and the 38 Celestino Deleyto reality of Bill’s nocturnal adventures. Yet, at the same time, the film’s visual rhetoric severely undercuts the realism of the reality sections and turns the whole of the male character’s escapades into a fantastic journey. Even if Dr. Harford is played by Tom Cruise, it is only as a male fantasy that we can understand the frequency and openness of the sexual insinuations he receives and, more importantly, the proximity of death in all of them. His failure to complete any of the sexual encounters made available to him may be related to his unconscious disgust towards a sexuality which he invariably relates to castration anxiety and death, even as he apparently seeks sexual fulfilment. Although not exactly a horror film, the male protagonist’s tormented psyche turns the beautiful bodies of the women he meets into unexpected versions of the female monsters who, as Creed (1993: 88-121) argues in her study of horror movies, patriarchal society constructs as formidable creatures with the power and the unshakeable will to castrate and destroy men. Creed’s theory is based on a feminist revision of Freudian theory according to which women are not feared because they are castrated as Freud held but because they are seen as all-powerful mothers whose early attachment to the male child constantly threatens to engulf men and make them disappear through sexual contact with them. The figure of the castrating woman is not the reality of women but the incarnation of male fantasised fears, a fantasy that can only appear in a patriarchal society that represses female sexuality by associating it with hostile, destructive drives (Lurie 1980). This theory seems particularly apt to explain a beleaguered contemporary masculinity which routinely blames women for its predicament. Bill, whose wanderings are ostensibly caused by “the discovery” of his wife’s unruly sexuality, can be seen as a powerful filmic representation of this cultural phenomenon. Visually and even narratively these young women are not monsters but such is the power of deeply entrenched male anxieties that the protagonist cannot help constantly linking them with death. As in the patriarchal scenario depicted by Susan Lurie, this fear of death at the hands of the sexual woman is unconsciously turned into Mandy’s beautiful but lifeless (or beautiful because lifeless) corpse at the morgue. In a twisted version of Lacan’s petit objet a he transfers his own death impulse on to the woman and as a result his attraction towards her is an attraction towards his own death, an attraction that in the tense scene at the morgue threatens to engulf him, if only for a few seconds. At the end of his nocturnal wanderings, Bill seems to be just as far as he was at the beginning from being able to incorporate a healthy view of sex into his idea of romantic love and, therefore, into his love for Alice. In fact, there is little in what we have discovered about the character’s psyche that shows any interest in her love. Rather, as a result of her “confession,” he would appear to want her dead. Critics have commented on the physical resemblance between Alice and all the women he meets in the New York night. This resemblance will cue us to see his relationship with women in a different light later on but, for the moment, it could be said that Mandy now occupies the position that, unconsciously, Bill would like his wife to occupy. This wish to punish Alice for her fantasised infidelity is a mark of his inability to understand her sexuality and of an immaturity which bodes ill for the future of their relationship. In other words, in his dealings with all these women, Bill remains enclosed, to misquote from Shakespeare, in the less than gorgeous palace of the self, and seems so far unequipped to reach out to the other. 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut 39
On the other hand, not everything is fear and anxiety in Bill’s encounters with women. He becomes clearly interested in, if not fascinated by Domino and, especially, by the anonymous woman who saves him at the sexual party (who may or may not have been Mandy: Victor confirms Bill’s fear that she was, although the spectator may, of course, choose not to believe Victor according to the credits, the two characters are played by two different actresses). He meets both of them in openly sexualised contexts. In both cases they are interrupted before having sex but his later attitude to them betrays that they meant more to him than just the prospect of anonymous sex, certainly not the kind of sex that he sees being performed at the party. He returns to Domino’s apartment with a present the following evening, and later on is clearly very upset when he finds out that Mandy is dead, afraid obviously that she is the same woman who offered her life in exchange for his the previous night. His confrontation with her corpse at the morgue may be interpreted in terms of male pathology and castration anxiety but, from a different perspective, Bill feels both guilty because her death may have been his fault and upset about the fate of a woman in whom he had become interested the previous night. In neither case is this the attitude of someone who is only after anonymous sex. Alongside the macabre constructions of his tortured mind these women are also human beings who cross paths with him and in whom he becomes genuinely interested. Richard Jameson offers an interesting reading of the young women’s physical resemblance with Alice. For him, Bill’s propensity to come across shadows of his wife suggests a deep ambivalence about “honouring his marriage vows” and sexual adventure (1999: 28). Bill is a man with a sexual identity crisis that may have been triggered by Alice’s confession. This crisis, which is definitely relevant to explain end- of-the-century masculinity, and which Tom Cruise has embodied in various guises in his films, manifests itself in his fear of women and heterosex, yet it may simultaneously have other psychosexual roots: if we read his odyssey as dream or fantasy, what exactly is the function of the apparently unmotivated and vicious homophobic insults lashed out at him by the gang of young people in the street seconds before Domino reassuringly invites him to her house? And what of his encounter with the gay receptionist (Alan Cumming) at Nick’s hotel? Although these are only fragmentary, otherwise unmotivated hints, it feels as if Bill has not completely discarded homoerotic desire as part of his identity, which would contribute to his general anxiety. Yet this sexual hesitancy is coupled in Cruise’s character with a rather traditional view of marriage and heterosex. What apparently is undoubtedly a sexist, vengeful reaction to Alice’s confession could also be seen as a fantasy in which the only way the protagonist can rival his quarrelsome wife’s infidelity is by imagining himself being desired by a long series of Alice look-alikes. He can only be unfaithful by remaining faithful. In an admittedly perverse way, in his sexual escapades Bill is confirming his affection for his wife, an affection that his tormented mind and his unfixed sexual identity have so far not allowed him to express more directly or productively. When he goes out of the family home after their fight he spends the whole night looking for his wife, the wife he feared he had lost in the bedroom when, from his very limited patriarchal perspective, he discovered that she was also a desiring subject. In their rather inchoate manner, Bill’s erotic fantasies reveal a desire to go beyond his sexual anxieties and find a more healthy 40 Celestino Deleyto way to return to his wife. Whether or not his sexual odyssey has taught him a lesson, the spectator has certainly had the chance to learn from it. As we have seen, the focus on Alice is much more fragmentary than on her husband throughout the narrative. Yet, the few scenes in which she appears are dominated by her presence. In the long confession scene she implacably exposes patriarchal misconceptions of female desire and her words in the final scene reveal that she is more mature than her husband and that there are no indications of a crisis of sexual identity comparable to his. She is, rather, a married woman who discovers the dangers of fantasy but also its inescapable power and its more positive aspects. She admits in the confession scene not only that she had a powerful erotic fantasy about being with the naval officer but that, at that time, she simultaneously felt closest to her husband, and her love for him “was most tender and sad.” She has not been unfaithful to her husband but she has come to understand that sexual infidelity may not be incompatible with love for her partner, that in contemporary society it may be, in fact, an essential ingredient of any relationship, even when it threatens to destroy it. As in Bill’s later various encounters with desiring mirror images of her, Alice, in her fantasy, turns her husband into the ideal lover he was far from being in real life. It is not only the young women Bill meets that look like Alice. The naval officer is also a stand-in for Bill. We may remember here that one of Tom Cruise’s most popular previous parts had been that of a marine in A Few Good Men (1992) (of course, we only see an image of the officer through Bill’s visualisation of an imagined sexual encounter between him and Alice and never directly from her perspective). In her fantasy Alice is constructing an ideal husband whom she can love and desire sexually (one that is different from the sexually indecisive real man she looks away from when he tries to initiate sex in front of the mirror at the beginning of the film). That is, Alice is not so much struggling between love and desire as imagining an ideal combination of the two. Bill is not the partner of her dreams but she would rather turn him into her affective and erotic ideal than look elsewhere. Alice’s and Bill’s attitudes towards their relationship are, therefore, clearly different from one another, a difference which the spectator already notices in their alternate flirtations at Ziegler’s Christmas party, yet they have one thing in common: they both need to supplement their affection for each other with sexual fantasies. In this respect they resemble the married couple of Harold Pinter’s play The Lover (1963) in which a married woman receives a lover in the afternoons who in the end turns out to be her husband in disguise. Their fantasies torment them for different reasons but what they learn, or at least Alice learns, is that these fantasies are necessary to keep their relationship afloat. The acknowledgement of the importance and the inevitability of fantasy in the affective bond may also have the beneficial effect of ridding their sexuality of the feeling of guilt and fear that they, particularly Bill, had associated it with throughout the film. In a different register, a character in Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), a film which in spite of its story’s temporal displacement is also centrally about the relationship between love and sex in contemporary society, a character finds her sexual inhibition magically lifted after she confesses to her husband that she had been unfaithful to him with his best friend the previous year and proceeds to engage in a session of wonderful, therapeutic sex with her husband in the barn. This is also the sense of Alice’s final proposition to Bill: so far, sex has been fraught with 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut 41 danger and frustration for them and the measure of their reconciliation will depend on their ability to turn it once again into the joyous, healthy, and pleasurable affair that it has become in dominant twentieth-century cultural discourses. Alice’s words constitute a frank acknowledgement of human limitations and, above all, a rejection of obsolete patriarchal views of marriage. Bill’s potential for change remains highly doubtful and in this Eyes Wide Shut suggests that, by the end of the century, it is men that are finding it harder to adapt to the demands of the new sexual and affective scenario. Still, critics have found the film’s view of sex conservative and definitely not worthy of Kubrick’s profound vision of the world. They would have preferred a wilder orgy, a more openly liberatory view of sex or the protagonists to have split up at the end: “The movie has denied them each the possibility of finding freedom in the flesh of others, and, in its odd way, it ends up representing a recommitment to the holiness of monogamy. It’s really not about sex but the denial and avoidance of polymorphous sex” (Hunter 1999). That “polymorphous sex” may be seen at all as a positive expression of contemporary people’s sexuality is a measure of how much things have changed in the sexual field in the course of the twentieth century, but why the characters would have found more freedom in the flesh of others than in each other’s flesh is unclear to me. As Shumway (2003: 231) argues, while new paradigms better suited to the diversity of individual needs emerge, it may be time to recognise that it is as illegitimate to condemn marriage out of hand as it is to impose it on everyone. In any case, Hunter’s review, like many others, is instructive because it confirms the film’s general view that in our society as much is at stake in the field of love and sex as there is in nuclear holocaust, war, and destruction. In a much more sympathetic view, Michel Chion states:
As in life, the married man and woman meet with extramarital temptation and, as in life, those to which they give way are far less numerous or important than those to which they do not. Everyday life is made up of the hundreds of things that we dream of doing […] but which remain no more than potentialities until life tells us, “it’s too late.” (2002: 43)
Eyes Wide Shut criticises, while visually reinforcing, men’s limited vision of women as sexual objects, but it also explores in complex and convincing ways the links between love and sex, between affective relationships and sexual fantasy, between sex as a male construct signifying anxiety, guilt, and death, and sex as a crucial ingredient in a healthy relationship, between sex as commodity and sex as emotion. Bill’s attitude throughout the film may not make him the most obvious candidate for a last-minute change. Alice’s “I love you” may be more a wish a desperate attempt to restore something beyond repair than a true expression of her feelings. Sex with her husband when they return home may indeed turn out to be as alienating as some viewers would like it to be. But Alice cannot be blamed for trying and the film should not be damned for allowing her to do so. In a very tentative fashion, in this final scene the film attempts to tip the balance in favour of the more positive dimensions of sex and its inextricable link with love in our culture. The colour red that suffuses the mise en scène acquires a new nuance, shedding its connotations of danger and death, and bringing back emotion and excitement into the characters’ lives. It is as if Bill and Alice had recovered the warmth that they had lost through their crisis. After all, it is 42 Celestino Deleyto
Christmas, and this may be the first moment in the whole film that the spectator is aware that the festivities are not only about materialistic spending, but also about renewal, about the beginning of the new year, a time of change but also a time of hope that we will not fall prey again to the same mistakes we made in the previous year. In the end, more often than not, our hopes come to nothing, but for one brief moment we can still imagine that things will go differently, especially if we have learned something from the past. The function of art is also to emphasise those moments. This is the moment of epiphany, an epiphany that does not sanction the death of marriage at the hands of “polymorphous sex,” but one which, in one stroke, sexualises heterosexual love (confirming the most important development in the field of affective relationships in the century) and rescues sex from the devastating effects caused by centuries of social taboos and psychological anxieties. That this process can finally take place within the couple and that darkness and disintegration have been at least temporarily averted is an acknowledgement that, beyond cultural norms and beyond academic prejudice and posturing, life goes on and, in spite of the growing difficulties, a sizable percentage of contemporary couples still struggle on and keep trying to make sense of what compels them to do so.1
Works Cited
Brown, Dan 2003: The Da Vinci Code. Reading: Corgi. Chion, Michel 2002: Eyes Wide Shut. Trans. Trista Selous. London: BFI. Cowie, Elizabeth 1984: “Fantasia.” M/f. 9: 70-105. Creed, Barbara 1993: The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge. Dargis, Manohla 1999: “Peep Show: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.” LA Weekly, http://www.laweekly/com/ink/99/34/film-dargis.html (28/06/2001). Dyer, Richard 1979: Stars. London: British Film Institute. Ebert, Roger 2001: “Eyes Wide Shut.” Chicago Sun-Times, http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1999/07/071601.html (28/06/2001). Giddens, Anthony 1993: The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grodal, Torben 2004: “Love and Desire in the Cinema.” Cinema Journal 43.2: 26-46. Herr, Michael 2000: “Completely Missing Kubrick.” Vanity Fair April: 104-111. Hoberman, J. 1999: “I Wake Up Dreaming.” The Village Voice, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9929/hoberman.shtml (28/06/2001). Howe, Desson 1999 : “In Kubrick’s Eyes: Mesmerizing Revelations.” The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/ eyeswideshuthowe.html (28/06/2001). Hunter, Stephen 1999: “Kubrick’s Sleepy ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.” The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/eyeswideshuthunter.html (28/06/2001).
1 Research towards this essay was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, project no. BFF2001-2564. I would also like to thank Atlantis’ anonymous readers for their suggestions and Joseph Natoli, Brian Hosmer, Chantal Cornut-Gentille, Anita La Cruz and Constanza del Río for their help with earlier versions of the essay, and my 2004 Michigan State University Study Abroad programme students for the ideas they shared with me about the film. 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut 43
Jameson, Richard T. 1999: “Ghost Sonata.” Film Comment 35.5: 27-28. Kreider, Tim 2000: “Eyes Wide Shut.” Film Quarterly 53.3: 41-48. Loyo, Hilaria 2004: “End-of-Millennium Cynicism in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).” Memory, Imagination and Desire in Cotemporary Anglo-American Literature and Film. Ed. Constanza del Río Álvaro and Luis Miguel García-Mainar. Heidelberg: Winter. 161-71. Lurie, Susan 1980: “Pornography and the Dread of Women: The Male Sexual Dilemma.” Take Back the Night. Ed. Laura Lederer. New York: William Morrow. 159-73. Maslin, Janet 1999: “‘Eyes Wide Shut’: Danger and Desire in a Haunting Bedroom Odyssey.” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/071699eyes-film-review.html (28/06/2001). Schnitzler, Arthur 1999 (1926): Dream Story. New York: Warner Books. Seidman, Steven 1991: Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980. London and New York: Routledge. Shumway, David R. 2003: Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. New York and London: New York UP. Taubin, Amy 1999: “Stanley Kubrick’s Last Film.” Film Comment 35.5: 24-26, 30-33. Whitehouse, Charles 1999: “Eyes Without a Face.” Sight and Sound 9.9: 38-39, 45.
Films Cited
The Killing. Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1956. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1964. 2001: A Space Odyssey.Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968. Barry Lyndon. Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1975. The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980. A Midsummer Nights Sex Comedy. Dir.Woody Allen, 1982. Full-Metal Jacket. Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1987. A Few Good Men. Dir. Rob Reiner, 1992. Sitcom. Dir. François Ozon, 1997. The Idiots (Idioterne Dir. Lars von Trier, 1998. Romance X. Dir. Catherine Breillat, 1999. Pola X.Dir. Leos Carax, 1999. Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1999. Baise-moi. Dir. Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000. À ma soeur. Dir. Catherine Breillat, 2001. Intimacy. Dir. Patrice Chéreau, 2001. Lucía y el sexo. Dir. Julio Medem, 2001. Nine songs. Dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2004.
ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 45–55 ISSN 0210-6124
“A Stranger in a Strange Land”: An Existentialist Reading of Fredrick Clegg in The Collector by John Fowles
Andrés Romero Jódar Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected]
This essay analyses the influence of French Existentialism in John Fowles’s The Collector, making use of three of Albert Camus’s works, Le mythe de Sisyphe, L’Étranger, and L’Homme révolté, and how the protagonist of John Fowles’s novel fits the pattern of the absurd man established by Camus. The Collector is not only just an allegorical representation of the power struggle between the Few and the Many, a recurrent topic in the fictions of Fowles; it is also a practical example of the evil nature of Camus’s absurd man, stemming from his absurd innocence. Clegg, like Meursault, the protagonist of L’Étranger, is an isolated (anti)hero who struggles against his passions in an existence of the Absurd. A Tantalus-like figure, the collector’s aimless efforts are the fruit of chance. He is a stranger in a strange land of Existence provoking the nausea, in Sartre’s terms, of both Miranda and the reader.
Key words: 1950s English literature, John Fowles, The Collector, Existentialism, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, the absurd, intertextuality, The Tempest
“L’homme absurde, qui est-il? Celui qui, sans le nier, ne fait rien pour l’éternel. Non que la nostalgie lui soit étrangère. Mais il lui préfère son courage et son raisonnement. Le premier lui apprend à vivre sans appel et se suffire de ce qu’il a, le second l’instruit de ses limites. Assuré de sa liberté à terme, de sa révolte sans avenir et de sa conscience périssable, il poursuit son aventure dans le temps de sa vie.1” (Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942: 93)
The Collector (1963) is the impressive first published novel by John Fowles. It stands at the very end of the literature of the 50s, “The Movement”, whose main issue was
1 “What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime” (Camus, 1988: 64) 46 Andrés Romero Jódar portrayed by the rebellion without a cause of antiheroes such as Arthur Seaton,2 or the American Haulden Caulfield.3 Frederick Clegg, the collector in Fowles’s novel, embodies that kind of aimless anti-hero who rebels against society and humanity without any kind of deep reason, enabling the author to criticize the behaviour glamorized in Movement fiction, in the theatre of the Angry Young Men, and in the pictures starred by James Dean, while introducing at the same time most of his philosophical ideas on life and being, percolated through the prism of Existentialism. In John Fowles’s own words: “I also wanted to attack […] the contemporary idea that there is something noble about the inarticulate hero” (in Vipond ed., 1999: 1). The work of John Fowles has already been widely criticised. In general terms, this novel has been accused of presenting just the theme of power “struggle in its simplest form” (Cooper, 1991: 1), and even of being “technically and intellectually Fowles’s least ambitious novel” (p. 20). Indeed, the novel is overtly explicit on the question of power, as it is in this and in every other novel by John Fowles, a writer who has invariably been highly conscious about the presentation of freedom pictured “always in extremis” (Conradi, 1982: 26). As Susana Onega has pointed out:
From the thematic point of view, every novel deals in one way or another with Fowles’s major concern, human freedom, focused from two major perspectives. From the point of view of man in isolation, freedom is presented as a process of individualization of the self; from the point of view of man in relation to society, as a power-bondage relationship (1989: 165).
In the situation presented in The Collector, Clegg is not only isolated from society (a realm he despises), he also imposes his authority over Miranda Grey, in the sense of forcing her into a power-bondage relationship. Still, the meaning of The Collector is far more complex than just the issue of freedom. As the author himself has pointed out, the novel expresses Fowles’s concern with Heraclitus’s philosophical ideas in general and the distinction between the Few (hoi arisoi) and the Many (hoi polloi) in particular. Fowles analyses this pre-Socratic philosophy in his collection of pensées, The Aristos (1964, revised in 1968), where he also comments on the writing of The Collector. The opposition between the Many and the Few is expressed in these terms:
Heraclitus saw mankind divided into a moral and intellectual élite (the aristoi, the good ones, not – this is a later sense – the ones of noble birth) and an unthinking, conforming mass – hoi polloi, the many […]. One cannot deny that Heraclitus has, like some in itself innocent weapon left lying on the ground, been used by reactionaries: but it seems to me that his basic contention is biologically irrefutable (author’s italics, Fowles, 1980: 9).
Although these ideas also affect the meaning of The Collector, in the novel this simplistic, manichean vision is dodged by means of several variations where the role of the “good” is not completely clarified. Indeed, the story portrays the confrontation
2 The protagonist of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), a novel mentioned in The Collector. 3 The protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). “A Stranger in a Strange Land” 47 between a representative of the Many (Clegg) imposing his will over a representative of the Few (Miranda). As Fowles puts it in The Aristos: “The actual evil in Clegg overcame the potential good in Miranda. I did not mean by this that I view the future with a black pessimism; nor that a precious élite is threatened by the barbarian hordes” (1980: 10). Between the ideal aristos and the ideal pollos, there are many intermediate states, and both characters in The Collector display many psychological traits which add a great complexity to Heraclitus’s ideas. This is what Mahmound Salami points to when he states: “Miranda and Clegg represents a conflict not only between but within each other, and not only between minds but within a mind” (1992: 46-7). But The Collector is even more complex than Salami’s remark suggests. The shadow of Existentialism hovers over the whole novel, adding to it a specific ideological stance. John Fowles was clearly influenced by this philosophical trend, headed by Sartre, Camus and Kierkegaard, especially from 1947 onwards, when the young writer-to-be joined the Maison Française in Oxford and started reading Old and Medieval French as well as Existentialism. All in all, Fowles’s ideas in connection with this philosophical movement may be said to have evolved from a pessimistic conception of the world, with an important presence of Camus’s work, very much in the line of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd, towards a more optimistic and positive conception of existence already perceptible in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969, and made manifest in Daniel Martin, 1977. Therefore, The Collector should be placed within that first pessimistic phase. The influence of Albert Camus in the novel is clear and at some points becomes a kind of everpresent intertextual referent, even if not as evident as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The aim of this essay is to explore the way in which Camusian Existentialism affects the composition and meaning of The Collector, and how Frederick Clegg, the collector of the title, embodies many of the French philosopher’s ideas, especially the figure of l’homme absurde. Albert Camus’s ideas are mainly collected in three important works: L’Étranger (1942), Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942), and L’Homme révolté (1951). Although Camus himself expressed his opposition to Existentialism, mainly to the existentialist “optimism” that prescribes the acceptance of tragedy because it gives relief from anxiety, his ideas cannot be separated from Sartre’s work and from the Existentialist movement. Camus’s is a decadent pessimistic conception of life and meaning, where only the “absurd” man can reach a moderate happiness. And with this absurdity Clegg can be identified. Let us consider briefly the main ideas of Camus absurde.
Ce monde en lui-même n’est pas raisonnable, c’est tout ce qu’on en peut dire. Mais ce qui est absurde, c’est la confrontation de cet irrationnel et de ce désir éperdu de clarté dont l’appel resoné au plus profond de l’homme. L’absurde dépend autant de l’homme que du monde (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942: 37).4
Keeping in mind this simple example of Camusian premises, a link can be established with The Collector. Camus argues that the absurd comes from the
4 “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world” (Camus, 1988: 26). 48 Andrés Romero Jódar confrontation between irrationality (irrationnel) and a desperate craving for clarity or meaning (désir éperdu de clarté). From this perspective it could be stated that the irrational side in Fowles’s story is represented by the character of Clegg, whereas Miranda Grey embodies the longing for meaning and clarity, the human quest for understanding. Camus’s distinction brings to mind Heraclitus’s ideas of the Many (Clegg), as an unthinking mass controlled by irrationality, and the Few (Miranda), always searching for the meaning of life and Existence (with a capital “E”, in the sense of human existence, as employed by Pollman, 1973). Another important subject for the construction of the theory of the Absurd is the question of contradictory behaviour. Camus expresses this fact in Le mythe de Sisyphe:
‘C’est absurde’ veut dire: ‘c’est impossible’, mais aussi : ‘c’est contradictoire’. Si je vois un homme attaquer à l’arme blanche un groupe de mitrailleuses, je jugerai que son acte est absurde. Mais il n’est tel qu’en vertu de la disproportion qui existe entre son intention et la réalité qui l’attend (1942: 47).5
Absurdity, then, lies in the contradiction brought about by a cause-effect relationship. The feeling of the absurd is created by the unstable bond between one’s yearnings and the following reaction. This is what actually happens in Clegg’s case. He loves Miranda in a Platonic, idealistic way, in the private fairy-tale world of his imagination, and the reaction this fact produces in him is disproportionate in relation to his expectations. Simply stated, Clegg, prompted by his yearnings, kidnaps Miranda (later on, he will be responsible for her death), becoming himself the absurd man who looks for disproportionate solutions. Thus, although he can be considered a monster, “an aloof and ogre-like monster” who “frustrates the possibility of his own and of Miranda’s self-maturation” (Onega, 1996: 40), Clegg is in fact affirming himself as an absurd man in an absurd Camusian world. The monstrosity that Clegg represents is the possibility that such an absurd world should invade the realm of knowledge and rationalism. In this sense, Leo Pollman’s ideas on Camus’s ideology are very illuminating. Camus has been said not to care about the “existentiality of Existence.” Rather the contrary. His main concern may be said to be the lack of meaning the subject faces in life, the feeling of being outside any possible meaningful relationship, and this considered just as something the individual has to overcome (Pollman, 1973: 169). In fact, this lack of sense is what makes Clegg a dangerous psychopath, standing outside the borders of what is considered to be the realm of conscious behaviour, regulated by moral principles and social laws. Clegg’s absurd world is legislated by his own rules, coming not only from his imagination, but also from his Nonconformist background and his biological limitation, all of which reflect Fowles’s class consciousness, and those rules prevent him from having any kind of relationship with any external subject. Cut out from the possibility of any kind of human relationship, he is plunged into the world of the Absurd.
5 “ ‘It’s absurd’ means ‘it’s impossible,’ but also ‘it’s contradictory.’ If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine-guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter” (Camus, 1988: 33). “A Stranger in a Strange Land” 49
The conjunction of all these ideas leads to a final pessimistic statement: human existence is radically absurd. All human cravings are the product of this ineffable quality of human Existence. In Camus’s own words:
Avant de rencontrer l’absurde, l’homme quotidien vit avec des buts, un souci d’avenir ou de justification (à l’égard de qui ou de quoi, ce n’est pas la question)[…]. Penser au lendemain, se fixer un but, avoir des préférences, tout cela suppose la croyance à la liberté, même si l’on s’assure parfois de ne pas la ressentir […]. La mort est là comme seule réalité (1942: 80-81).6
In the novel, this description of human existence is clearly portrayed by Miranda. In her cell(ar) she keeps on thinking about the possibility of being free, about the anguish of the future and the necessity of justifying everything that is happening to her. This behaviour is what destroys her. She is unable to face her real Existence, and thus, she is not able to face an existential/absurd world. In contrast to Miranda, Clegg lives without aim. He felt the impulse to love Miranda, but according to his narration, everything that happens, even kidnapping her, is not planned, everything is the product of chance. Aimless Clegg triumphs over Miranda on reaching the “essence” of Existential reality. Even winning the pools, which enables him to commit his atrocities, is just the result of pure chance. As Fowles puts it in The Aristos: “Hazard, the great factor we shall never be able to control, will always infest life with inequality” (1964: 11); hazard plunges Miranda into the underworld, and provokes Clegg’s “evolution” into an absurd man. This is what makes Clegg feel completely innocent from everything. Just as Meursault in Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), Clegg does not feel responsible for having committed any immoral act. In Le mythe de Sisyphe Camus depicts this aspect of the absurd man: “On voudrait lui faire reconnaître sa culpabilité. Lui se sent innocent. A vrai dire, il ne sent que cela, son innocence irréparable. C’est elle qui lui permet tout” (pp. 75-76).7 Clegg does not feel guilty because he is acting correctly within his own principles (in this sense he is the “aloof and ogre-like monster”, as Onega pointed out (1996: 40)), and within those moral premises, he is innocent and far more correct than many of Miranda’s friends. He even tries to justify himself at the end of the first part of his narration: “What I am trying to say is that it all came unexpected. I know what I did next day was a mistake, but up to that day I thought I was acting for the best and within my rights” (Fowles, 1998: 113). At this point he feels some kind of remorse. But this feeling is quickly repressed by that “irreparable innocence” which characterizes the absurd man, and so he exclaims: “Those last days I had to be sorry for her (as soon as I knew it wasn’t acting), and I forgave her all the other business. Not while she was living, but when I knew she was dead, that was when I finally forgave her” (p. 274). Clegg’s detachment from Miranda’s death grows according to his acceptance of the absurd
6 “Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for justification (with regard to whom or what is not the question) [...]. Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences — all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn’t feel it [...]. Death is there as the only reality” (Camus, 1988: 56). 7 “An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels — his irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything” (Camus, 1988: 53). 50 Andrés Romero Jódar world to the point of uttering the following statement: “I was acting as if I killed her, but she died, after all. A doctor probably could have done little good, in my opinion” (p.281). In his mind Clegg transforms himself into Miranda’s victim. She has died, and her death has brought him many unexpected problems. In keeping with this view, Clegg tries to arouse the reader’s sympathy for his absurd situation. Furthermore, within the sphere of his religious background, Clegg reacts passively to Aunt Annie’s behaviour — he never rebels openly, uttering his thoughts —. The family is Nonconformist, dissenters of the official Protestant English Church. In this sense, Clegg is also isolated not only from God but also from the religious mainstream in England. Thus, his religious behaviour fits the pattern of the Camusian absurd man, as it is defined in this religious aspect in Le mythe de Sisyphe:
Il n’est qu’une morale que l’homme absurde puisse admettre, celle qui ne se sépare pas de Dieu: celle qui se dicte. Mais il vit justement hors de ce Dieu. Quant aux autres morales (j’entends aussi l’immoralisme), l’homme absurde n’y voit que des justifications et il n’a rien à justifier. Je pars ici du principe de son innocence (Camus, 1942: 94).8
For Clegg, the notion of God is something he does not really care about. His religious ideas depart from the negative description of Aunt Annie and her beliefs. The reader is supposed to sympathise with Clegg against his aunt when she constantly repeats to him how lucky he is for having legs to walk, in contrast to his cousin Mabel, who is disabled. But this sympathy is broken when Clegg shows his real personality, and remarks: “I don’t blame her [Aunt Annie], it was natural, especially with a daughter who’s a cripple. I think people like Mabel should be put out painlessly” (Fowles, 1998: 16). God, his behaviour towards Annie and Mabel, and later on towards Miranda, are, as Fowles insists, a matter of upbringing. Chance has decided that he should be born in a family which has made him what he actually is; therefore, it is not completely his fault. And to this fact the biological question is to be linked. As one of the Many, Clegg is biologically less gifted and prepared than Miranda to become a moral being; in this sense, the danger he represents is the possibility of the masses controlling the Few. Therefore, Clegg rebels against the complete system of creation with his disproportionate reactions and behaviour. In other words, Clegg’s response against all his existence may be said to follow the pattern of a Camusian absurd (anti)hero. The last point to be considered in the description of the absurd man in Le mythe de Sisyphe is the theme of “le Don Juanisme” (Camus, 1942: 97). According to Camus, the greater the love, the more consolidated the absurd. Camus adapts the myth of Don Juan to his analysis as an example of human being opposed to the absurd man. Don Juan, as he is defined by Camus, is not an example of the absurd man, but rather his opposite, even though he contains in his figure some of the characteristics of the absurd. Don Juan, in Camus’s argumentation, does not think about “collecting” women, because collecting means being able to exist from and in the past. In contrast to this, the absurd man does not separate himself from the notion of time. Collecting is a way of
8 “There is but one moral code that the absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God: the one that is dictated. But it so happens that he lives outside that God. As for the others (I mean also immoralism), the absurd man sees nothing in them but justifications and he has nothing to justify. I start out here from the principle of his innocence” (Camus, 1988: 64). “A Stranger in a Strange Land” 51 narrowing the bond of the subject with the notion of time. Collecting creates an illusion of eternity which helps the absurd man destroy the anxiety of death and the end of Existence. This behaviour is exemplified by Clegg in his quest for collecting first butterflies, an important symbol of the soul in Greek philosophy, then photographs, which capture the moment and freeze time, and finally women, thus becoming himself an absurd Don Juan. In Camus’s own words: “Il [Don Juan] trouverait normal d’être châtié. C’est la règle du jeu. Et c’est justement sa générosité que d’avoir accepté toute la règle du jeu. Mais il sait qu’il a raison et qu’il ne peut s’agir de châtiment. Un destin n’est pas une punition” (p.103).9 Like Don Juan, Clegg considers his last acts as part of his destiny, nothing to be blamed for. That is, he still lives inside that insufferable innocence that allows his spirit to perpetrate any kind of action or misdeed, even though he knows that in many cases his acts are worth nothing. This is what Miranda implies when she calls him “Tantalus” (p. 100). Tantalus and Sisyphus are both classical figures of Greek mythology who share a common feature: both were punished by the gods. Their punishment at Tartarus was to perform an endless, aimless task. Sisyphus was compelled to roll a stone up to the top of a slope, the stone always eventually escaping him at the top and rolling down again. In Camus’s definition, Sisyphus became a useless worker in hell, “le travailleur inutile des enfers” (1942: 161). By contrast, Tantalus, a Phrygian king, was condemned for his crimes to remain standing forever, thirsty and hungry, chin deep in water, with fruit- laden branches hanging above his head: whenever he tried to drink or eat, the water and fruit receded out of reach. In this sense, Tantalus, as Sisyphus, symbolizes the aimless efforts human beings have to endure in order to reach an unreachable goal. This is the clearest symbol of Existentialist agony: the aimless nature of human life. Thus, by bonding Clegg to Tantalus, within this context of absurdity, the protagonist of The Collector becomes imbued with that feeling of aimless effort which makes him even more dangerous to Miranda. The lack of aim is what Miranda cannot understand from Clegg, who has nearly taken the quality of Absurd man to perfection. Up to this point of the analysis, Camus’s theoretical ideas have been taken from Le mythe de Sisyphe. However, the practical example of all these ideas is best portrayed in his novel L’Étranger (1942). Apart from the fact that both novels are first-person narrations in the form of a soliloquy, L’Étranger and The Collector in the kidnapper’s narration share many points in common, mainly in the behaviour of their respective protagonists, Meursault and Frederick Clegg. The very first sentence in Camus’s novel is a clear example of this fact: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte”10 (1985: 9). The coldness and indifference with which this sentence is uttered is echoed by Clegg’s own parallel statement of facts: “My father was killed driving […] Uncle Dick died when I was fifteen” (p.11). Both Meursault and Clegg are constantly accused of their lack of feelings, what characterizes them as monsters. But it is not exactly their absence of remorse that perturbs the other members of society. Rather, they are dangerous because
9 “He [Don Juan] would consider it normal to be chastised. That is the rule of the game. And, indeed, it is typical of his nobility to have accepted all the rules of the game. Yet he knows he is right and that there can be no question of punishment. A fate is not a punishment” (Camus, 1988: 71). 10 “Mother died today” (Camus, 2000: 9). 52 Andrés Romero Jódar of their inability to establish a solid boundary between moral and immoral acts. As Mahmound Salami points out: “Whether in Miranda’s narrative or in his own, Clegg is constructed as a lost man with mixed desires and a split subjectivity” (1992: 54). Clegg is divided between what is moral for him and what is immoral for the rest. He contains in himself his own double (he is both Ferdinand and Caliban standing in a kind of complementary Jungian ego/shadow bond) but he acts within his own parameters of reality, his world of the Absurd, just as Meursault does not seem to understand why he is being judged and condemned to be beheaded in a public place. Being lonely heroes, they both feel strangers in a strange land, detached observers of reality. This feeling of alienation is what makes Clegg feel like the aristos in the novel. He considers himself superior to the rest of mortals, but living in a wrong place. Thus, he remarks: “I never had anything to do with women […] It’s some crude animal thing I was born without. (And I’m glad I was, if more people were like me, in my opinion, the world would be better)” (Fowles, 1998: 13). But the highest moment of this self- assurance appears at the end of the novel when he is already in search of “someone ordinary I could teach” (p.282). This confidence in his own absurd world is another source of evil in Clegg. Of course he does not evolve in the same sense as Miranda, who had she not died, “might have become something better, the kind of being humanity so desperately needs” (Fowles, 1980: 10). Clegg develops his absurd world to perfection, and, in this sense, he “evolves”. He becomes the perfect absurd man, dangerous to society and to the aristos-to-be Miranda. He will keep on collecting “death”: his butterflies, photographs and her doll-like women, all of them following a controlled pattern marked by the initial “M” of their names. This ambiguity (both pleasure and disgust) of death is another reference mark of the Camusian absurd man. This is the reason why Meursault blames his mother when, at the end of her life, she found a new “boyfriend”. Meursault considers that his mother tried to start again her life in the asylum, looking for a new beginning, but he knows there is nothing after death. That is, he reacts against any kind of hope in a future existence after death. Thus, the absurd man lives imbued by a materialistic world of possession, and, at a certain point, without any kind of yearning for eternity. That is why everything is indifferent for Meursault in L’Étranger and why “for Clegg […] going upwards doesn’t mean conforming to the criteria of the upper classes. […] It simply means possessing, exerting power, and finally destroying the thing he cherishes, as he has to kill the butterflies to own them.” (Onega, 1989: 31-2). Death is the final halt in the road of living, nothing else is to be expected. The absurd man, however, is dazzled by the brightness of other realities and beliefs, mainly by the holding out of hope — hope in a better existence in or after this life. This is portrayed in both novels through the image of the sun. The sun, as symbol of the Light, the utmost truth of Existence, oppresses both Meursault and Clegg in two different but interrelated ways. The blindness provoked in Meursault by the sunlight is for him the main cause of his crime — he shot a man to death —, but it also becomes an oppressive force during his mother’s funeral, even disturbing his feelings. The sun appears as a repressive force against which the absurd man tries to fight in a Sisyphus- like way. There is no escape from the sun, an element also used in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), where a suffocating sun oppresses Winnie with its blazing light. In the case of The Collector, there is even a certain reference to L’Étranger, or an uncanny “A Stranger in a Strange Land” 53 example of intertextual coincidence in the writing of a book, at the moment of Miranda’s death: “The last words she spoke were about ten when she said (I think) ‘the sun’” (p. 273). The funeral of Meursault’s mother was also arranged for ten in the morning, and the presence of the oppressive sun completely dislocates the Camusian hero from his common reality. Meursault feels haunted by that supreme knowledge of Existence in the sun, whereas Clegg does not seem to understand its meaning. It is only Miranda who does when she recovers consciousness for an instant just before the moment of her death. At this point it may be said that Clegg has reached a complete separation from eternal life, now he is the absurd man who does not care about that symbol of supreme knowledge which haunts Existence. Clegg will keep on for ever in the futility of his aimless acts. The issue of Freedom is one of the cornerstones of Existentialism. Freedom is highly affected by chance, and therefore, the existentialist struggle for life is a fight against a deterministic fate. Chance does not work as Determinism, chance affects life but does not control it. Existentialists are not determined to behave in a certain, already predetermined manner. They are freely affected by chance. Thus, another point that should be analysed is the relationship between Camus, Fowles and Shakespeare on this issue of Freedom and the common symbol of the tree. Let us centre the discussion on a reference in L’Étranger: “J’ai souvent pensé alors que si l’on m’avait fait vivre dans un tronc d’arbre sec, sans autre occupation que de regarder la fleur du ciel au dessus de ma tête, je m’y serais peu à peu habitué” (Camus, 1985: 120).11 This fragment brings to mind an important scene in The Tempest, where Prospero is talking to Ariel about the latter’s freedom:
Thou [Ariel], my slave, as thou report’st thyself, wast then her [Sycorax’s] servant; and, for thou wast a spirit too delicate to act her earthly and abhorr’d commands, refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee […] into a cloven pine; within which rift imprison’d thou didst painfully remain a dozen years. […] It was mine [Prospero’s] art, when I arriv’d and heard thee, that made gape the pine, and let thee out (1994:7, I. 2. 270-294).
The idea of being imprisoned in the trunk of a tree is what links both references. This is the painful feeling Miranda has in The Collector. She is imprisoned by the Calibanesque monster Clegg, a Sycorax-like figure, and just as Ariel asks Prospero for his freedom, Miranda negotiates her release with aimless Clegg. Miranda will even try to introduce Clegg into the world of language, echoing the role of Prospero with Caliban. But she is doomed to fail in her labour, for she is not a mature aristos yet. In Patricia Waugh’s terms:
The concern with freedom in [Fowles’s] case is, however, a consequence of the perceived analogy between plot in fiction and the ‘plot’ of God’s creation, ideology or fate. It’s a concern with the idea of being trapped within someone else’s order. At the furthest metafictional extreme, this is to be trapped within language itself, within an arbitrary system of signification which appears to offer no means of escape (1990: 119).
11 “I often thought in those days that even if I’d been made to live in a hollow tree trunk, with nothing to do but look up at the bit of sky overhead, I’d gradually have got used to it” (Camus, 2000: 75). 54 Andrés Romero Jódar
From this perspective, The Collector may be said to fictionalize the successful revenge of Caliban on Prospero. Caliban blames the magician for having taught him language, which he uses to curse Prospero. He, the inferior being, the son of a witch, and the deposed inheritor of Sycorax’s island, has his belated revenge in The Collector by kidnapping Miranda, both Fowles’s and Shakespeare’s, and taking her to his absurd world from which no means of escape are offered. Miranda is trapped in the net of Clegg’s absurd language, which she cannot understand and which leads her to a certain death. Miranda fails to understand the Fowlesian concept of the “nemo”: “I trace all these anxieties back to a supreme source of anguish: that of the nemo. […] The nemo is a man’s sense of his own futility and ephemerality; of his relativity, his comparativeness; of his virtual nothingness” (Fowles, 1980: 47-9). The “nemo” is the acceptance of the principle of being nobody, what one has to accept in order to escape the anguish of existence. It means the acceptance of the futility of actions and hope to dodge chance. Until the very end, Miranda retains hope in salvation, in a new life, without ever accepting her own tragedy. She cannot glance at the nemo and it is this that leads her to death. By contrast, Clegg does not care about this nemo, since it does not belong to the absurd world of materiality. Nothing leading to eternity is important for him, since he is an absurd man. And in order to become the perfect absurd man, he has to overcome suicide at the end. In Camus’s terms, suicide is not any kind of solution to the question of Existence or its agony. It is just the end of existence and nothing else. It is this divorce between man and his life that constitutes the feeling of the absurd. As the critics have pointed out, Clegg’s ideas are also affected by a romantic idealism of the courtly love type, he imagines himself as the knight errant dying with his princess. However, he easily overcomes this impulse of hope. Suicide is hope indeed, in the sense that there is a hope that after death all the agonizing problems of existence will be solved. Suicide presupposes a hope for another life and a hope for eternity and remembrance, as Clegg claims at the end of section three: “All I had to do was kill myself. […] We would be buried together. Like Romeo and Juliet. […] She [Miranda’s corpse] was waiting for me down there. I would say we were in love, in the letter to the police. A suicide pact. It would be ‘The End’” (pp. 276-77). However, Clegg overcomes this impulse, by finding Miranda’s diary and realising the futility of suicide. It is at this point that he becomes the complete absurd man in Camusian terms. He has accepted the absurdity of existence and has “evolved” into a more materialist being. He is the perfect collector in the absurd world, and Marian (“another M! (p. 283)) will be his future “apprentice”. Echoing Heraclitus’s contention that: “The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle” (Kahn, 1979: 75), at the end of the novel, Clegg is left trapped “within the maddening vicious circle of [his] own mental world” (Onega, 1996: 49). In conclusion, The Collector is not only an allegorical representation of the power struggle between the Few and the Many, but also a practical example of the evil nature of Camus’s absurd man, stemming from his absurd innocence. Clegg, like Meursault, is an isolated (anti)hero who struggles against his passions in an existence of the Absurd. A Tantalus-like figure, the collector’s aimless efforts are the fruit of chance. He is a stranger in a strange land of Existence provoking the nausea (in Sartre’s terms, 1980) of Miranda (and the reader). His is not the evolution to perfection of knowledge of the “A Stranger in a Strange Land” 55 nemo, but rather a progressive development into utter absurdity and Sartrean bad faith (mauvaise foi). However, as Camus clearly pointed out, there is not a single idea which explains everything, but an infinity of essences which gives sense to an infinity of objects. Therefore, this reading of The Collector must, inevitably, remain open. The only possible certainty that one has to acknowledge is the power of this novel to adapt Camusian existentialism into a literary masterpiece.
References
Beckett, Samuel 1973 (1961): Happy Days: a Play in Two Acts. London: Faber. Camus, Albert 1942: Le mythe de Sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1966 (1951): L’Homme révolté. Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1985 (1942): L’Étranger. Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1988 (1955): The Myth of Sisyphus [Translated from the French by Justin O’Brien]. London: Penguin Books. ——— 2000 (1982): The Outsider [Translated from the French by Joseph Laredo]. London: Penguin Books. Conradi, Peter 1982: John Fowles. London and New York: Methuen. Cooper, Pamela 1991: The Fictions of John Fowles. Power, Creativity, Femininity. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Fowles, John 1977: Daniel Martin. London: Cape. ——— 1980 (1964): The Aristos. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. ——— 1996 (1969): The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Vintage. ——— 1998 (1963): The Collector. London: Vintage. Kahn, Charles H. 1979: The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Onega, Susana 1989: Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles. London: U. M. I. Research Press. ——— 1996: “Self, World, and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles” in Twentieth Century Literature. New York: Hofstra University. Pollman, Leo 1973 (1967): Sartre y Camus, literatura de la existencia. Madrid: Ed. Gredos. Salami, Mahmound 1992: John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Salinger, Jerome David, 1958 (1951): The Catcher in the Rye. London: Penguin. Sartre, Jean-Paul 1980 (1938): La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard. Shakespeare, William 1994 Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Glasgow :Harper Collins Publishers. Sillitoe, Alan 1960 (1958): Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: Pan Books. Vipond, Dianne L., ed. 1999: Conversations with John Fowles. Mississippi: University Press. Waugh, Patricia 1990 (1984): Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.
ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 57–70 ISSN 0210-6124
Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility
Clara Escoda Agustí Universitat de Barcelona (U.B) [email protected]
This essay argues that Julie Taymor’s film Titus (1999) offers a successful deconstruction of the violence in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), thus continuing the debate on the film’s explicit violence. The essay begins by analyzing the added scenes that correspond to the visions and flashbacks of the protagonists, arguing that Taymor does not deconstruct violence by subverting its values and then pointing out alternative discourses or new patterns of interaction, but by reproducing it as a symptom of a larger, cultural reality. However, she also wants to actively implicate the audience in imagining alternative paths of conflict-resolution to the violence portrayed, and she does so by introducing the figure of the witness, with which the audience must identify. The witness characterizes itself by being able to empathize with difference, and this quality is visually represented by his androgynous look, as well as by his non-hierarchical mode of relating. Strategically, the witness’s experiences are shown in a fragmented manner, thus, if the audience wants to provide closure, it must recreate the hidden story from these unconnected elements of repair. Finally, this exercise on the part of the audience acquires the same character of solitary responsibility as that of the witness with which it identifies.
Key words: identity, testimony, violence, media, intertextuality
We may begin this essay with a question: is Julie Taymor’s film Titus (1999) a stylistic exercise which aims at deconstructing violence? David McCandless claims, for instance, that her off-Broadway stage production of Titus Andronicus (1994) was more successful in achieving a deconstruction of the violence in Shakespeare’s text than the subsequent film: “the film, by contrast, uses violence as much as it interrogates it and grants the audience a significantly greater degree of control over contemporary anxieties” (2002: 490). He further states that “exceeding their function as post-traumatic visions, the three penny-arcade nightmares such as Lavinia’s become merely extravagant exhibitions” (2002: 502). Taymor’s off-Broadway production, indeed, used the device of a theatre-within-a-theatre to create a space where “strange, abstract tableaux depicted violated and transmogrified bodies … de-familiarizing the use of violence as entertainment” (2002: 493). This article affirms, on the contrary, that Taymor both questions and deconstructs the discourses of our contemporary society which legitimate, or contribute to perpetuate, violence, and she does so through cinematic means. Indeed, Taymor portrays violence first naturalistically and then in a stylized 58 Clara Escoda Agustí manner, deliberately eliciting a “masochistic gaze” from the audience that identifies with the bodies maimed by violence, with the “form-altering physical trauma” of the protagonists (McCandless 2002: 488, 494). She does so particularly in a series of scenes which are not in Shakespeare’s text, where she undercuts realism by means of flashbacks and visions of the experiences of violence the protagonists undergo. In these flashbacks, violence is portrayed in an hyperbolic, stylized manner, sometimes by making use of kitsch aesthetics, other times, as McCandless points out, by “overdressing and embellishing them” (2002: 490), and still other times by making use of the grotesque. In all instances, though, violence is de-familiarized and the audience’s expectations are subverted as scenes of deep trauma are turned into what seems to be an apology of violence. As Elsie Walker has expressed in an article that comments on the film’s naturalistic and stylized use of violence, “Titus prompts a more complicated response [than the one some critics have attributed to it], hovering between detachment and engagement” (2002: 197). At moments such as these, where violence seems most out of control, Taymor freezes the frames, renders them in slow motion, and creates a tableau where violence is recognizable as a cultural phenomenon. These scenes point at cultural discourses and spaces, such as video games, media and cinematographic icons. The violence on screen is then like a tableau which remits, like a symptom, to a cultural space where violence is justified, legitimated, and even dealt with apologetically. Titus is, in this sense, a postmodern exercise, yielding, as Frederic Jameson puts it, “social information primarily as symptom … it tells of contradictions as such, which constitute the deepest form of social reality” (1991: 151) standing in for the referent, as he deems it, for a long time to come. On the whole, Taymor creates spaces for self-reflexivity and uncanny recognition, interstices of thought whereby the audience may question the kind of ideology and gaze it is participating in. And indeed, in Eileen Blumenthal’s Playing with Fire, Taymor argues that “stylizing an act of violence distances the audience from the event and thus potentially enables them to receive it on many different levels” (1999: 184). At the same time, though, and taking Jane Howell’s BBC production of Titus Andronicus (1985) as an intertext, Taymor develops the figure of the witness, a young child and an external instance to the violence of events.1 In Taymor’s production, this figure, who is not informed by the same ideological regime as the rest of the characters in the story, performs acts of restoration and repair of physical and psychological damage. This figure challenges the audience to imagine alternative ways of conflict- resolution to the ones presented, thus breaking the cycle of violence to which the characters seem inevitably subject. However, since the boy’s story remains hidden, and we cannot know his version of events, what he has seen and, ultimately, what has led
1 It is worth mentioning that, in Howell’s production, the witness is not only present but emphasized through the huge glasses he uses, foregrounding not action but observation. Furthermore, Osheen Jones, the young actor who embodies the witness in Taymor’s film, played a similar role in Adrian Noble’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996), as he watches the events unfold from his bedroom. By using in Titus the same actor as Noble did in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Taymor establishes an intertextual relationship between the two films, presenting the witness not as a singular, concrete individual, but as a dramatic entity that is universalized. Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) 59 him to act as he does, the audience must recreate the witness’s view of things, the kind of processes he has engaged with through empathy, if it wants to understand his acts of restoration. The film links the witness with Lavinia, suggesting that both, because of their marginal position as woman and as witness, initiate a different process of dealing with the other. Instead of engaging in a hierarchical relationship with difference, excluding it and dominating it in order to build and reinforce one’s identity around notions of privilege, both Lavinia and the witness blend with each other. In order to supply her loss after having been raped and having had her hands mutilated by Tamora’s sons, Taymor portrays Lavinia as initiating a different process of subjectification, as she blends as much with objects as with animals. Also, encouraged by the need to find solutions and alternative ways of relating, the witness’s subjectivity becomes a site where binary oppositions dissolve, as his androgynous look reveals, initiating a process of including alterity. The film ends with an act of restoration that the witness carries out as he decides to spare the life of Aaron’s mulatto child, yet at the same time, it avoids displaying or setting as an example any specific, explicit solutions to violence. In the absence of any neat, coherent closure, it is the spectators who must carry out the final deconstructive process, fill in the blank spaces that the witness does not make explicit, as they instinctively seek to give the movie a closure by explaining the witness’s reaction, and thus they set in motion alternative strategies of relating, in a utopian, creative move.
Inside and outside the events
The essay analyzes two critical added scenes where violence is both exhibited and then framed, or called attention upon: the first one has to do with Lavinia’s remembrance of the rape and mutilation Chiron and Demetrius perform on her. The scene remits us to Hollywood cinema and media discourses, since she appears as a glamorized victim; as a Marilyn Monroe that fearfully and passively accepts the siege to which she is submitted by the exacerbated masculinity of Tamora’s sons. The second one is Titus’s dinner of apparent reconciliation, which ends in a series of grotesque killings, and where violence is again de-familiarized. The scene uses the same mise-en-scène techniques as a video game. Particularly the slow motion screening that emphasizes the violence of the event and the glamour of the hero, in this case Lucius’s, as he fires a gun at Saturninus. Both scenes are inscribed in a logic of violence as a phenomenon that is consumed, both in the private sphere and in the public sphere. They are subjective, traumatic visions, which appear from the very beginning as ideologically distorted and mediated. Lavinia has incorporated in her own subjectivity the images of womanhood and of the beauty myth that are expected from her in a post-capitalist society. In the same vein, Lucius, as well as the guests who uncritically applaud the spectacle they have attended, has ingrained the cultural expectations which associate masculinity with violence. The two scenes reflect an ethical positioning that Walker describes as being “as much about violence as about how we experience violence as entertainment. In a world where the media and movies present a desensitized view of violence, Taymor wishes to reinstall a sense of shock at violence” (2002: 197). 60 Clara Escoda Agustí
In the first added scene Lavinia recreates the rape and mutilation Chiron and Demetrius carry out against her, encouraged by their mother Tamora, in order to enact revenge on Titus through her daughter’s body. Both in the film and in the play, Marcus, Titus’s brother, gives Lavinia a stick so that she may write her attackers’ names on the sand. While writing those names, in the film we are given access to her remembrance of the rape through an added scene. Lavinia appears as a frail teenager icon on a pedestal, or as Marilyn Monroe, producing an intertextual link with The Seven Year Itch (1955). Chiron and Demetrius become two enraged tigers and Lavinia is metamorphosed into a doe, with a doe head and doe arms, shying away from the tigers’ pure impulsivity as she pulls her skirt down. The fact that Lavinia may be entertaining such a surreal vision of herself as her own, as the most faithful representation of herself highlights her own precariousness as a subject. Taymor supplants Lavinia’s subjective voice and vision by its media and cinematic representations in order to point to some women’s precarious positions and invisibility; their being spoken for by media discourses, or their having their subjectivity distorted by the ways in which they are represented. Lavinia’s vision is, in this sense, an “extravagant exhibition” (McCandless 2002: 502), but one which aims at denouncing the extravagance of discourses on gender which we take as natural. Like a symptom, the flashback mirrors society’s extravagance. Shakespeare’s text describes Rome as a “wilderness of tigers” (III, I, 55), referring to the quest for political power and the rivalry that exists amongst the men, and Lavinia is often described as a doe, following the Petrarchan myth of female chastity and unattainability. These gendered images from Shakespeare’s text, when played out today, evoke contemporary discourses on femininity which, even if not based on the need for women to be chaste and unattainable, are equally damaging for the female. Taymor claims that she wanted “the effect of wind blowing up [Lavinia’s] petticoat, causing her to use her doe arms to keep the skirts down. The famous image of Marilyn Monroe holding her dress down over the subway grate seemed an apt modern iconic parallel to add to this scene of humiliation and rape. I was interested in exploiting our store of not only classical, but also contemporary myths” (Blumenthal 1999: 188). What Taymor may be suggesting, therefore, is that contemporary myths still perpetuate rigid distinctions between masculinity and femininity. The flashback dramatises both male and female social process of identity construction as distortion. Males are authentic, aggressive, and to unleash their libido to assert themselves on the other. Paradoxically, in being encouraged to become more faithful to their inner impulses, they experience a mutation into something other, - just as Tamora’s sons become wild animals in Lavinia’s flashback scene - since these impulses push them to the limits of their own resemblance and identity. Lavinia’s shy, vulnerable, fragile behaviour suggests that a whole series of discourses such as the beauty myth still define femaleness as a goal, as something inauthentic yet which must be achieved. For a woman to be desirable, she must become, through dieting, make-up, and an acute self- consciousness, what she is not, an inauthentic form of herself. In the words of Naomi Wolf “women must aspire at personifying beauty and men must aspire to possess women who may personify it (1991: 15). 2 Indeed, at a time when women are beginning
2 This translation of Naomi Wolf’s El Mito de la Belleza, is mine, and so are the translations of Lipovetski (2000) and Baudrillard (1993). Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) 61 to have access to power spheres, they are at the same time made aware of their bodies and of themselves as women, and are being redirected, on the whole, towards practicing narcissistic and individualistic values, which are designed to keep them self-centered, rather than politically or globally oriented. In Lipovetski’s own words, “the fetishism of female beauty functions like a vector of docile work force, without solidarity, not very vindictive, in a moment when women begin to have access to power spheres” (2000: 139). Lipovetski goes on to argue that the contemporary beauty myth that Marilyn Monroe epitomizes is directly linked to the “manoeuvres of disciplinary programming of bodies” (2000: 134). The images of women distributed by the media accentuate “fear to signs of old age, engender an inferiority complex, shame of oneself, hate for one’s own body” (2000: 128). Thus, women can succeed in the terrain of narcissism, achieving great self-vigilance and self-control, but are kept away from specific economic and political spheres. This is what the repressed Lavinia suggests when she shamefully pushes her petticoat down with the doe arms. Yet at the same time, if we look closely at the image, we see Lavinia’s lips are still swollen from the tongue cutting, which directly subverts the Monroe myth turning it into a grotesque body. Monroe, commodified and codified into her own image, betrays the simulacrum by showing signs of male violence, which is seen as a direct consequence of these female-objectifying discourses. Taymor unveils the signs of violence that the simulacrum attempts to mask, that is, the violence that discourses such as the beauty myth effect against women’s subjectivities. Jean Baudrillard argues that the simulacrum operates by “supplanting the real by the signs of the real (1993: 11) …, masking the absence of any deep reality” (1993: 18). Indeed, simulacra create an irreconcilable scission between what is and what is being represented, or a fact and its representation, showing the extent to which the identity of the affected character has been eroded not so much by the physical violence performed on her, but by the violence of the discourses on gender which contribute to portraying women as passive and objectified, and encourage a dominating, aggressive male behaviour. Thus, by evoking an image from the realm of cinema and propaganda instead of a traumatic vision, Taymor denounces not the specific perpetrators’ violence but the unnoticed violence of the discourses that construct a disposable femaleness and an aggressive masculinity. The simulacrum, indeed, contributes to perpetuate a scopophilic way of looking, as Laura Mulvey calls it. Scopophilia is a cinematic strategy, used particularly by mainstream Hollywood cinema, in its overt manipulation of visual pleasure, which elicits from the specifically male audience a controlling and curious gaze, associated with taking other people as objects. Mulvey explains the two most common types of visual pleasures in cinema, which correspond to the male and female types of identification. One has to do with the empowered look, the other with the narcissistic, passive identification with the image that is seen: “the first one arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen … through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like” (1989: 18). On a general level, the image of Lavinia would provoke a scopophilic gaze on the part of the male audience, derived from the fact that Lavinia is constructed as a female sexual icon. However, Taymor seems to progressively 62 Clara Escoda Agustí undercut this type of gaze as the image displays itself on a more detailed level. Indeed, we observe that the unconscious male fantasises of control and domination implicit in the scopophilic gaze are made explicit through Lavinia’s swollen lips (a result of male violence and control) and in the form of doe arms (the Petrarchan sign of vulnerability and unattainability). Thus, male fantasies of objectification of the female become uncannily explicit before the male audience. Men’s unconscious is played out as real, made literal, and subverted by this literalizing. The scene turns a potentially pleasurable look on the part of the male audience “to passionate detachment, highlighting the way in which film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms” (Mulvey 1989: 26). The second traumatic, added scene is initiated by Titus himself as he prepares a dinner in order to enact revenge on Tamora and Saturninus. After Titus has killed her sons, he bakes a pie with their meat and he holds a “reconciliation” dinner in which Tamora must “devour” her own sons. Subsequently, a series of grotesque killings begin to take place which, by their grotesqueness, undermine Titus’s dedication to revenge as a justified cause. After sacrificing Lavinia, Titus stabs Tamora in the neck. Then Saturninus jumps on Titus, hastily grabs a candelabrum, bites the burning candle out of the holder and plunges the candle spike into Titus’s abdomen. Ironically, it culminates with Lucius – the “good man,” and with whom the audience most readily identifies - shooting the emperor in the head, terminating violence through an imposition of violence. So, at the moment when the audience runs the risk of actually being desensitised because of the grotesqueness of the scene - the grotesque serves to detach the audience from the suffering involved in an act of violence; when suffering is not emphasised as real, the audience experiences the movie as being less violent (Prince 2000: 23) - and when we are set in the position of voyeurs, Taymor suddenly paralyses the scene and turns it, with an accelerated background rock music, into a scene which no longer seems to belong to the terrain of cinema, but to that of video games, as Lucius’s T-bird gun points aggressively at Saturninus. Through the use of slow motion and the framing of the scene into a video game tableau, the spectator perceives he/she has been engaging in a celebration of violence, and we can easily perceive the film has become something else – a video game. In this dislocation, or collapsing of the film narrative and the imposition of violence as spectacle, Taymor manifests her critique of the titillation of violence as it is repeatedly evoked in videogames: as a sign of self-control, glamour and status. Indeed, after this critical moment, the scene zooms out to reveal that the banquet has been taking place in the Colosseum, in Pula, Croatia, a site that epitomises the use of violence as spectacle. As Lucian Ghita states, “the seats are occupied by spectators of different nationalities, ages and races, looking silently … they watch with their own eyes, ‘they are we’” (2004: 19). As the German director Wim Wenders pointed out, violence appears in many contexts “where you cannot reflect on it any more, where you cannot experience it any other way than consuming” (quoted. in Prince 2000: 33). And indeed, as McCandless puts it, even the guests at the table are portrayed as passive consumers, “soulless figures exhibiting an automatonic, culturally conditioned, vacant aesthetic appreciation for violent spectacle” (2002: 496). These spectators approve of Titus’s killing of Lavinia unquestioningly, as they toast to it in a synchronized way. Our presence is replicated, echoed by the Colosseum’s audience from all nationalities, and Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) 63 also by the guests who toast to the crimes. Thus Taymor leads her audience to occupy a position of passive consumers of violence and, right at this moment, she produces a video game tableau and leaves it critically before our eyes in order to undermine and call attention to, precisely, what she has been portraying. Thus, she puts us in a situation of voyeurs - which Wenders argued has become widespread in our contemporary society - but she asks us to reflect on our passivity and numbness, eliciting a questioning gaze from the audience. This situates Taymor’s movie at a great distance from what Stephen Prince calls, in his book Screening Violence, the “social disconnect of many contemporary filmmakers” (2000: 33), who use violence as an easy way to reach the viewer emotionally and to solve narrative issues. The device of slow motion to frame violence began to be used during the 1960s, particularly by filmmakers such as Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, who initiated stylized portrayals of violence, as in The Wild Bunch (1969) or Straw Dogs (1971). This became one of the dominant aesthetic forms of ultraviolence, or the stylized presence of violence on screen. While, in Prince’s words, this particularized and stylized showing of violence served to legitimize “the in-your-face bloodletting” that made the movies so notorious, he adds that Penn and Peckinpah were “both radical social critics … who wished to deglamorize movie violence in order to show how ugly and awful real violence was” (2000: 13). Showing violence on screen is, therefore, an ambivalent act, since violence must first be framed, and thus, partly legitimized, in order to be subsequently questioned and deconstructed. Following Walker’s reflections, what Taymor wants to convey by mixing modes of representation is that “no single approach [to violence and rape] is adequate: illusionist, ‘naturalistic’ cinema is deceptive, suggesting that such a devastating ‘reality’ can be ‘captured’ on film; ‘theatrical’ stylization which works on stage may distance a film audience simply because it is so unusual in cinema” (2002: 198).
Hearing with our eyes
What the three slow-motion scenes suggest is that public violence is intimately connected with private, or gender violence, since both are produced by notions of privilege, and rejection of class, gender or racial difference. Media and cinema discourses reinforce patterns of masculinity and femininity which, as we have seen, correspond to those of a disciplinary society that aims at controlling bodies and inscribing very specific meanings on them, which serve to perpetuate, precisely, established hierarchical relations. Guy Debord argues that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (1983: 4). And he continues, referring precisely to its power to create docile bodies, passive consumers, that “spectacle is the guardian of sleep” of modern society (1983: 21). Indeed, media and cinema discourses seek to reach society at large, because they are, so to speak, a mass spectacle. However, video games are directed to more particularized targets, namely, each specific and isolated individual. And indeed, Taymor portrays Chiron and Demetrius at the court’s leisure room not as interconnected but interrelating separately with a different video game screen, achieving, each of them, a separate state of excitement. Virginia Vaughan argues that, wearing “the punkish garb, 64 Clara Escoda Agustí they are identified with England’s and America’s contemporary youth culture” (2003: 73). Media discourses, in being directed to the masses, is more homogenizing yet less specific; however, video games are a private spectacle through which violence, instead of homogenizing a social group, is interiorized by each individual. It is easier, therefore, that this continuous, individual exposure leads to particular acts of gender and sexual violence such as the one the two brothers carry out against Lavinia. Through Chiron’s and Demetrius’ hyper-stimulated state, Taymor shows that video games produce a type of masculinity that is hyper-violent. Indeed, Tamora’s sons are portrayed as surrounded by culturally mediated images of masculinity which reach them through video-games, television advertisements, and music videos, and which mix the titillation of violence with that of sex, producing a type of masculinity intimately connected with dominance, which ends up with the dispossession of Lavinia. Most of the time, they appear surrounded by brands of beer and by Coca-Cola, which suggest the dominance of capitalist icons, as well as the fact that they have learnt their codes of behaviour through media and propaganda discourses, which portray a dominant masculinity as bearing particular status and prestige. But they also appear with accompanying loud rock music, tracking down all traces of dialogue and suggesting they learn their codes of behaviour from music videos as well, a space where woman is the rock star’s possession and, in her beauty, signifies only his status as opposed to that of other males. And after Lavinia’s rape, indeed, Tamora’s sons “flee the scene like rock stars” (Reynolds, Lehmann and Starks 2003: 226). Lehmann, Reynolds and Starks argue that “Chiron and Demetrius are clearly presented as boys whose digital mastery of virtual beings is inseparable from their desire to decimate, even as they inseminate, real bodies. Indeed, the culture of video games, as Haraway observes, is a potent incubator for the production of ‘high-tech, gendered-imaginations … imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences’” (2003: 225). The figure of the witness, which was already present in the BBC version of Titus Andronicus of 1985, and which Taymor chose to keep, is the alternative, albeit silenced, version of the events, as well as an alternative mode of constructing identity and social relations. The movie opens in a 50s-style kitchen, with a boy immersed in the cultural discourses of violence that come from T.V. He is wearing a mask that externalises his non-identity, or the absence of any contesting, empowered subjectivity that may counteract the forces of his environment. Suddenly, a clown kidnaps him and takes him to Titus’s world, and his soldiers become Titus’s soldiers, moving in a toy-like, synchronized manner. Taymor explains: “but it is like he conjures up the violence. It’s coming from T.V. violence, the sounds of the Three Stooges, then it escalates into real war in 30 seconds” (2005: 1). In the Roman Colosseum the boy is raised in midair and celebrated, applauded, as a future warrior; thus, he enters Titus’s society as a warrior, which is what our contemporary toys were preparing him for. Quoting Roach, W.B. Worthen describes each adaptation as a surrogation: “an act of memory and an act of creation from that memory” (1998: 1101). Given Taymor’s theatrical background, which she, furthermore, uses throughout for her stagey representation of violence, it is possible that she might have been familiar with Sarah Kane’s text Blasted, which she wrote five years earlier, in 1995. Kane dramatised, by making a war irrupt into a hotel in Leeds where an unequal, exploitative gender relation Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) 65 was taking place, the idea that private, gender violence is intimately connected with public and larger scale violence such as that of war and war terrorism. Worthen claims that a performance or adaptation is not uniquely “a performance of a text” (1998: 1102), but it “uses a palimpsest of texts … to perform a new iteration” (1998: 1102). And indeed, Taymor also juxtaposes apparently unconnected spheres through the device of the “Alice-in-Wonderland time warp” (Ghita 2004: 9) in order to engage us in issues of gender construction and violence. Titus’s world could represent the boy’s subconscious of war and terror, just as it has been argued that the soldier in Kane’s play may stand in for the male protagonist’s subconscious as he constructs his male identity through exclusion and domination of the other. It is, however, through Young Lucius, the witness, that the movie develops a different approach to violence since, contrary to the rest of the characters, he manages to refract the violence around him instead of absorbing it. Stephen Prince argues that “filmmakers cannot control the reactions of their viewers;” therefore, “filmmakers who wish to use graphic violence to offer a counter-violence message, that is, to use violence in a way that undercuts its potential for arousing excitatory responses in viewers, may be working in the wrong medium” (2000: 29). Prince suggests that “a critique of violence may be best pursued on screen in its absence, that is, by not showing” (2000: 32). This comment is very much in agreement with McCandless’s statement that Taymor “uses violence as much as she interrogates it” (2002: 290). However, by not showing violence, by simply showing alternative ways of solving social conflicts, we run the risk of neglecting the extent to which violence is culturally rooted as a way of solving these conflicts, and of losing sight of the conflicts to which non-violent ways of interacting are an alternative. In this sense, Taymor gives voice to this marginal figure in order to suggest the extent to which these alternatives are relegated to the margins, and thus, to suggest the need for them to become more central. In literary and artistic manifestations of the twentieth century, the witness suggests the marginalisation to which alternative discourses or resolutions to those of violence are relegated. The degree to which witnesses are forced to be silent and marginal suggests the degree to which violence takes up space in our contemporary society, and this sense of violence being overpowering is certainly a feeling Titus’s audiences must leave the cinema with. Walker argues that “we are aligned with Young Lucius in viewing events beyond our control” (2002: 202). But as he takes on a more active role, in his transformation into active participant, he “represents the possibility of restitution, faith, resilience and tenderness” (2002: 202). Indeed, the figure of the witness represents values of caring, attention to vulnerability and identification with the other, expresses our contemporary society’s contempt for alternative discourses to a dominant, aggressive masculinity, its passivity towards unequal power relations and a sanctioning of a violent, consumerist society, and the marginality, in short, to which discourses foregrounding empathy, nurturing and care for the other are relegated. The witness is a figure of empathy throughout the film, as we observe how shock and horror register on his face when Titus chops off his own hand, as well as at diverse moments of violence. Most importantly, after Lavinia has been raped we are immediately shown his reaction, in the next scene, as he looks from a window at the rainy street. His face appears framed by the window, producing an icon of empathy and sadness. And indeed, Young Lucius tries to restore Lavinia’s lack, and to comfort her by giving her, in the form of a present, 66 Clara Escoda Agustí a pair of prosthetic hands. This last scene both frames the witness as a silent and contemplative figure, and shows his first act of repair. The witness is also the figure who externalizes and makes visible the conflict between using violence or searching for alternative, non-violent discourses that Taymor wants the audience to feel and to attempt to resolve. Crucial ideas regarding the validity of violence are debated in Titus’ family dinner with Lavinia, Marcus, Titus himself and Young Lucius. In this scene Young Lucius sees a fly and stabs it impulsively. When Titus sees it, (and Titus at this point has begun to lose his sanity, which further situates his discourse as marginal) he tells Young Lucius that the fly might have had a family, people who loved it: “But how if that fly has a father and a mother? How would he hang his slender gilded wings and buzz lamenting doings in the air! Poor harmless fly/ That, with his pretty buzzing melody, Came here to make us merry! and thou hast killed him” (Shakespeare III, ii, 67-70). In other words, he sets into motion a discourse of identification with difference and attention to vulnerability. Yet Young Lucius, enticed by the desire to please his father and uncle, uses culturally available discourses of revenge and racism in order to regain Titus’s approval: “Alas! my Lord I have but killed a fly” (Shakespeare III, ii, 63). Thus, he argues he has killed the fly because it reminded him of Aaron, picking his differential element, his being black, as a justification: “Pardon me, sir. It was a black, ill-favoured fly, like the Empress’ Moor. Therefore I killed him” (Shakespeare III, ii, 72-3). Titus, then, immediately switches sides and is trapped into a discourse that legitimizes violence. Walker argues that this scene expresses Taymor’s concern with the ways in which children are initiated into an ongoing legacy of violence: “the moment is horrible because the child suddenly puts on ‘the antic and monstrous disposition of the revenger’” (2002:202). Young Lucius, therefore, externalizes the conflicts Taymor wants the audience to feel. Indeed, she has claimed that she wanted the audience “both to suffer with the images of violence and at the same time to bear the dilemmas in their minds” (Blumenthal 1999: 184). It seems clear that the conflicts she dramatises are those between dividing or blending, an act of exclusion of difference, or an act of love through incorporation of the other, of difference, or the abject. On the other hand, it is this marginal position that grants the figure of the witness a degree of power, because in operating from a position of apparent inactivity or passivity, detached from the urgency to act and intervene, and by not being directly implied in the scene, or informed by the same ideological regime, the witness works out alternative discourses. Thus, his inherent marginality grants him a platform towards social change. Indeed, not feeling compelled to act and to participate in the violence, he remains an observer who does not confront the other but, as many critics put it, can blend with the other. Thus, Taymor’s witness is the space that, geared by a different regime of signs, “connects the spectator to this space of potential allegiances and metamorphoses” (Reynolds, Lehmann and Starks 2003: 230) that Lavinia, as a woman, and thus as even more marginal and excluded from the male construction of identity, also exemplifies. Critics such as Lehmann, Reynolds and Starks have observed potential regeneration in Lavinia’s representation. They argue that the film employs abjection “paradoxically, as a means of going through and beyond victimisation” (2003: 225), the victimisation it simultaneously exposes and attempts to transcend. The fact that Lavinia is portrayed as Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) 67 half doe and half tree in the image immediately following her off stage rape or, later on, as she is attached to the prosthetic hands the witness gives her, suggests that Lavinia opposes the rest of the characters’ need for a stable, unitary subjectivity, as she blends and hybridizes continually with difference. Vaughan affirms that Lavinia refuses to become a symbol of lack or dispossession through mutilation and rape by blending into something else. This leads Vaughan to state that Taymor uses the image of blending in order to suggest empowerment at critical and recurring moments in the film. Quoting Bakhtin, Vaughan states that the “surreal intervals that depict Lavinia as part tree … epitomise the grotesque: ‘The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects’” (2003: 73). In Lehmann, Reynolds and Starks’s words, “Lavinia’s body becomes a borderland in its own right” (2003: 229). The disciplinary apparatuses which operate on women’s bodies, and which thrive on establishing boundaries such as animate/inanimate, life/death, animal/human, beauty/abjectness are suddenly made to dissolve, threatening to erase the conventional meanings by which we read the world and by which we build notions of purity and impurity, normalcy and abnormality, exclusion and privilege, etc. Because the witness is not compelled to participate in the violence, he does engage in the restoring and inclusive process of blending with the other, with the abject, instead of excluding it. Just as Lavinia blends with the abject, with nature or with objects, in order to escape her condition as victim and as lacking, and to reconstruct her otherwise mutilated subjectivity, the witness is also a site where a series of binary oppositions dissolve and collapse, giving way to a different understanding of the self and of social relations. Indeed, his androgynous presence already signifies a blending of male and female qualities, and his embracing of Aaron’s and Tamora’s child, who is a racially blended child, suggest Taymor’s desire to blur traditionally opposed categories which are claimed in order to perpetuate privilege. “Both Lavinia and the witness refuse to respect borders, positions, rules … [disturbing] identity, system, order” (Reynolds, Lehmann and Starks 2003: 228). That’s why some critics like Walker have identified the scene of contact and repair between Lavinia and Young Lucius (as he gives her a pair of prosthetic hands) as being very significant; precisely because the wooden hands are the site where opposites converge: “manufactured and human, wood and skin, still life and life, inhuman and human, the sinister and the beautiful, fragmentation and wholeness, the inflexibility of wood and the flexibility of the hands that are perfectly fitted for Lavinia” (2002: 203). Identity, and particularly male identity, has traditionally been construed upon an understanding of the subject as stable and unitary, and as excluding difference, or that which is abject -that which the subject must detach itself from in order to form a separate identity. The abject is thus the division that underlies the subject’s fragile sense of identity. Diana Fuss, in Essentially Speaking, argues that “to the extent that identity always contains the specter of non-identity, or otherness, within it, identity is always purchased at the price of the exclusion of the Other, the repression or repudiation of non-identity” (1989: 103). Thus, “woman is produced in social signification as the other on which the very existence of man depends, as much as other asymmetrical relations: that of exploitation, privilege and patriarchy” (1989: 70). Chiron and Demetrius exemplify this type of masculinity particularly as they enter their room with Aaron and 68 Clara Escoda Agustí talk about Lavinia, describing the female as a disposable object, against which their masculinity is reinforced. Indeed, they play with a pillow simulating phallic signs as they replicate Shakespeare’s lines: “she is a woman, therefore may be wooed, she is a woman, therefore may be won, she is Lavinia, therefore must be loved” (Shakespeare II, I, 85-87). A series of power inequalities is foregrounded as well as a mode of relating with the other based on exclusion and exploitation. In contrast, the movie ends with Young Lucius approaching Aaron’s interracial son, and taking it up in his arms. As he approaches the child, his once faint cries, which nobody from Lucius’s new government wants to hear, become louder and louder. The cries of the child multiply into many babies crying, so that the voices of the powerless, the vulnerable, so far so easily manipulated, become increasingly audible. He takes Aaron’s child from the cage in which he’s been put –and which de-humanizes him as Other- and takes him away towards a digital horizon. The witness is the figure who hears and sees, as opposed to the members of Lucius’s government, who will retaliate any former member of Saturninus’s court. Also, after Lavinia is raped, she produces a silent wail, which is voiceless (her tongue has been cut off) but speaks visually because of the bleeding wound. As Lehmann, Reynolds and Starks put it, by expelling it directly to the camera, Taymor forces us to “hear with our eyes” (2003: 229). It is only Young Lucius, who feels compelled to offer Lavinia a pair of new hands, who also accepts this burden of “hearing with his eyes.” Felman argues that “the burden of the witness –in spite of his or her alignment with other witnesses- is a radically unique, non- interchangeable and solitary burden … To bear witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude” (1992: 3). And indeed, the solitude with which the boy carries the hope that is embodied in the mulatto child is a correlate of the solitude in which, culturally and historically, the witness takes responsibility for its burden. In Taymor’s film, just as Felman describes it, the audience is encouraged to inspect its own responsibility in front of violence and to bear the solitude of striving for non-violent solutions. The fact that the blank, unwritten horizon towards which the witness is heading is a digitally produced horizon seems to self-reflexively point, on the part of the director, to its nature as fantasy, as wish. In the words of Lehmann, Reynolds and Starks, it is “too ambiguous to provide neat closure” (2003: 237), that is, to produce relief in the audience. The scene, however, remains for a long time before our eyes, and is rendered in slow motion, eliciting the audience to recreate the witness’s view of events, to work through possible solutions, to activate a creative move toward utopia. Taymor has pointed out her need to find solutions to the violence, not just to portray its devastation: “I had to acknowledge the positive and the hopeful in this movie” (2005: 1). She reflects on the fact that she needed to create an “openness” in order to include the possibility for change: “unless you have that openness, it won’t happen” (2005: 1). However, Taymor makes it clear that she only wants to suggest this openness, not to provide closure or set forth an explicit alternative, and thus make the audience work out possible solutions. The witness, with his different values and understanding of identity, functions like a riddle that the audience must unravel in order to understand the film, to give it closure and to make it coherent, and Taymor makes the audience build towards solutions, carry out the deconstructive process while they watch the movie, and particularly in the final scene. Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) 69
Taymor’s film does not deconstruct violence by subverting its values and then pointing out alternative discourses or new patterns of interaction; that is, by directly proposing alternative models of conflict-resolution, but, instead, it reproduces violence as symptom of a larger cultural reality, and then she calls attention upon it by freezing the camera and framing this violence into a recognizable tableau, so that the audience may question the kind of gaze it is participating in. Yet the audience must also build the discursive connections that might explain the witness’s acts of atonement, thereby engaging in a creative act that assumes the position of the witness and takes responsibility for what it has seen, thus leaving its previous role as passive consumer of this violence. This creative move of imagining alternative, holistic visions of society - the move towards utopia - implies a deconstruction of violence and demonstrates that a different conceptualisation of identity and social relations is being set to work in the audience’s mind.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean 1993 (1978): Cultura y simulacro. Trans. Antoni Vicens and Pedro Rovira. Barcelona: Kairós. Blumenthal, Eileen 1999: Julie Taymor. Playing with Fire. Theatre, Opera, Film. New York: Harry N. Abrahams. Debord, Guy 1983: Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub 1992: Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge. Fuss, Diana 1989: Essentially Speaking. Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York and London: Routledge. Ghita, Lucian 2004: “Reality and Metaphor in Jane Howell’s and Julie Taymor’s Productions of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” ‘CLCWeb.’ Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6: 1-22. http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu. Jameson, Frederic 2003 (1991): Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP. Julie Taymor Interview. http://www.reel.com. Kane, Sarah 2001: Complete Plays. London:Methuen Contemporary Dramatists.. Lipovetski, Gilles 2000: La tercera mujer. Trans. Rosa Alapont. Barcelona: Anagrama. McCandless, David F. 2002:“A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.4: 487-511. http://muse.jhu.edu. Mulvey, Laura 1989: Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U.P. Prince, Stephen, ed. 2000: Screening Violence. London: Athlone. Reynolds, Bryan, Courtney Lehmann and Lisa Starks 2003: “‘For Such a Sight Will Blind a Father’s Eye:’ The Spectacle of Suffering in Taymor’s Titus.” Performing Transversally. Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future. Ed. Bryan Reynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 215-43. Shakespeare, William 1998 (c,1594) Titus Andronicus. Ed. Eugene M. Waith. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Vaughan, Virgina Mason. 2003: “Looking at the Other in Julie Taymor’s Titus.” Shakespeare Bulletin 21.3: 71-80. Walker, Elsie. 2002: “‘Now is a Time to Storm:’ Julie Taymor’s Titus (2000).” Literature Film Quarterly 30.3: 194-207. 70 Clara Escoda Agustí
Wolf, Naomi 1991: El Mito de la Belleza. Trans. Lucrecia Moreno. Barcelona: Emecé. Worthen, W.B 1998 “Drama, Performativity and Performance.” PMLA 113. 5: 1093-107.
Films Cited
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1996. Dir. Adrian Noble. Straw Dogs 1971. Dir. Sam Peckinpah Titus Andronicus 1985 Dir. Jane Howell Titus 1999. Dir. Julie Taymor. The Seven Year Itch 1955. Dir. Billy Wilder The Wild Bunch. 1969, Dir. Sam Peckinpah
ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 71–88 ISSN 0210-6124
A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: The Term Hierarchy
Carolina Rodríguez Juárez Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria [email protected]
The theoretical framework of Functional Grammar proposed by S. C. Dik highlights the relevance of implicational hierarchies for the different grammatical operations found in natural languages. In the case of the grammatical operation of Subject assignment, a group of priority hierarchies which predict the accessibility of term positions by virtue of their intrinsic properties have been claimed to directly impinge on the operation of Subject assignment. These typological hierarchies present term properties which are related to the term itself and to their referents. After balancing the postulates of Classical Dikkean Functional Grammar in general and the above-mentioned priority hierarchies in particular to a sampling of written material from the LOB Corpus, the main conclusion that emerges is that the internal structural complexity of the term must be recognised as a new relevant parameter for Subject assignment in English. Thus, I propose a new hierarchy, viz. the Term Hierarchy, which predicts the accessibility of term positions taking into account the internal structural complexity of the term in question.
Key words: accessibility, functional (discourse) grammar, implicational hierarchies, Subject assignment
1. Introduction
Within the model of Functional Grammar (henceforth FG) as outlined in Dik (1997a, b), the different grammatical operations which may be found in natural languages such as relativisation, Q-word questioning, anaphora, raising, and Subject/Object assignment are closely related to the concept of accessibility, which is crucial to understanding the possibilities terms have to take part in grammatical operations. In Classical Dikkean Functional Grammar, the notion of accessibility which Dik borrows from Keenan (1976, 1987) and Keenan and Comrie (1977) is defined as “the capacity of a term position to be the target of some grammatical operation. A term position T to which an operation O can be applied is accessible to O; otherwise it is inaccessible to O. If it is inaccessible to O, there is apparently some accessibility constraint which prevents O from applying to T” (Dik 1997b: 356). The constraints which govern term accessibility have a hierarchical, functional, and intrinsic nature and seem to be related to cognitive aspects associated with the degree of closeness of the constituents with respect to the deictic centre of the speaker. Thus, the properties restricting the accessibility of terms are 72 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez organised in a hierarchical fashion, with those features which are more accessible located in the first positions of such implicational hierarchies: “there are connections between grammatical and cognitive accessibility in the sense that, to a certain extent, those constituents which are most accessible to grammatical processes are at the same time most accessible in a cognitive sense” (Dik 1997a: 41).1 One of the original ambitions of Classical Dikkean Functional Grammar was to devise a grammar which apart from being pragmatically and typologically adequate was also psychologically adequate. However, it is only now that FG has developed into a new architecture known as Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) that psycholinguistic findings and explanations have really been taken into account (Hengeveld 1997, 2004a/b; Hengeveld and Mackenzie [to appear]). In such a theoretical model, and with the main aim of achieving psychological adequacy, production is described as a top- down rather than bottom-up process in which the speaker’s intention is the starting point, leading to the proposal of a radical shift from sentence to discourse in the object of study. Another contribution of FDG is the postulation of a modular reorganisation of the different levels of representation which constitute the grammatical component (included in a wider theory of verbal communication, where a conceptual, a contextual, and output component are also envisaged) with the interpersonal, representational, and structural levels working simultaneously and individually organised into a hierarchical layering (Mackenzie and Gómez-González 2004). In this attempt to improve FG, Mackenzie (2000, 2004) has also proposed his own model, Functional Incremental Grammar, whose main contribution is to achieve psychological adequacy by seeing “discourse production as a dynamic process occurring in real time and the expression of the clause as a similarly real-time process” (Mackenzie 2004: 182). The main concern of the current study is to study the syntactic function Subject with regard to a particular language, viz. English. Within FDG, syntactic functions are located at the structural (morphosyntactic) level, and are regarded as grammatical notions which become operative once the pragmatic (interpersonal level) and semantic (representational level) functions have been assigned. Expression rules will finally determine the term which should be assigned Subject or Object function. Thus, there has been a change from FG to FDG in the sense that syntactic functions are no longer defined as purely perspectival notions which show the viewpoint adopted by a speaker when presenting a particular State of Affairs (henceforth SoA) (Dik 1997a: 251); rather, they are now regarded as grammatical notions which are the result of pragmatic and semantic choices at higher levels (Hengeveld 2004b: 373-74). In order to provide a descriptive analysis of Subject in English, a written sampling gathered from the LOB corpus was analysed, which was made up of two groups of
1 It must be noted that the Dikkean definition of accessibility differs from the mainstream sense of this term as conceived in psycholinguistics (Clark and Clark 1977: 474-76), where accessibility is ascribed to the production of utterances with special relevance for adjective ordering and phonological production. Thus, for instance, adjective accessibility determines that the most intrinsic and less subjective adjective will be placed closer to the noun; phonological accessibility predicts that the phonological shape of common words will be retrieved more readily than that of rare words. A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy 73 constructions which differ in the constituent which carries Subject function.2 On the one hand, an analysis was carried out of those instances in which the first argument (with any of the semantic functions belonging to it: Agent, Positioner, Force, Processed [Exp], Zero [Exp]) has been more accessible to Subject than any other term in the predication resulting in active constructions. The second group, by contrast, is constituted by structures in which Subject function has been assigned to a non-first argument (to second or third arguments) resulting in what has traditionally been described as passive constructions. The global sample includes 2,313 examples, of which 797 are examples of passive sentences and 1,516 are instances of active constructions.3 In a previous study (Rodríguez-Juárez 2003), the relevant Subject positions (as well as the Object positions of active sentences and the implicit or explicit by-phrases of passive constructions which could potentially be selected as Subject) were analysed with reference to different priority hierarchies which have been proposed as relevant to the grammatical operation of Subject assignment and which seem to directly influence the chance for a term to be assigned the function Subject (and also Object): the Definiteness, Person, Number, Animacy, Concreteness, and Entity Hierarchies (Dik
2 The reason why the LOB corpus of British English was chosen for this study lies in the fact that its usefulness has been widely claimed (Kennedy 1991: 98; 1996: 218) and attested in a variety of research studies and grammars which have used it for the description and exemplification of various phenomena (Biber et al. 1998; Huddleston and Pullum 2002; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Moreover, I decided to initially limit the data to examples of written language with a view to later testing the results of this corpus-based study on a corpus of oral data. 3 In order to gather the relevant constructions needed for our analysis, different verbal search- words are used, which show a list of concordances including the relevant verb in its context and two or, if required, more lines before and after the search-word. These contexts include the Subject of active and passive constructions as well as the implicit or explicit by-phrase of passive verbal forms and the Object of active forms, which are the arguments which in the underlying representation of the clause could potentially be selected as Subject. The different types of search- words used are selected in terms of factors such as polarity, mood and finiteness, although the search is always conditioned by the various possibilities given by the retrieval tool (Wordsmith Tools) used to extract the relevant structures. In order to determine the sample size from the so- called population, a first stage was to carry out some disambiguation processes over the whole population so that the sample would only include relevant examples of active and passive constructions. After the disambiguation processes, the global sample of passive and active examples was made up by 9,603 and 37,355 examples respectively. The following step in the selection of the relevant sample consisted in calculating the size which the sample should theoretically have by applying statistical methods which calculate the number of examples which should be considered as homogeneous and representative of the whole population (Blecua et al. 1999: 63). In order to obtain the sample, it was necessary to calculate the minimum number of examples which would be required so that the sampling results could then be generalized to the whole population with a margin of error of 0.05 (5%) (Neuber 1980: 48-49). These statistical methods were applied to each of the groups which constitute the population of passive and active constructions. Thus, the global number of passive and active sentences which according to the statistical methods should be analysed in order to work with a representative sample should be made up of 797 and 1,516 examples respectively, obtaining a global sample of 2,313 examples. For further information on the selection of this sample the reader is referred to Rodríguez-Juárez (2003: 189-97). 74 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez
1997a: 279).4 A hierarchy is conceived in FG as a sequence “of properties, claimed to be of absolute or statistical validity, such that a preceding property can occur without the following properties but not the other way around” (Dik 1997a: 31). The relevance of hierarchies for the study of natural languages lies in the fact that they reflect both cognitive aspects, which are determined culturally as well as psychologically, and pragmatic aspects, which are associated with the deictic centre of the speaker. Hierarchies, in addition, should be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, they can be conceived as implicational universals which describe priorities that are typologically relevant and which typify the types of linguistic patterns which may be found across languages. Moreover, implicational hierarchies reflect aspects which differentiate natural languages as regards the linguistic subdomain to which the hierarchy has been applied, by characterising, for instance, where the cut-off point is (i.e. the point up to which a language proceeds in the hierarchy) for a particular language. Thus, in the case of Subject assignment, implicational hierarchies characterise the constituent or constituents which can possibly be assigned Subject function in natural languages. The second aspect of hierarchies is that they may be applied to the description of an individual language with regard to a particular grammatical operation, indicating the different degrees of accessibility of the constituents of a predication and showing language-internal frequency distributions: “(…) those items which do occur in a language (= the items preceding the cut-off point for that language in the hierarchy) will be used less and less frequently as we proceed through the hierarchy form left to right” (Dik 1997a: 33). It is within this second, more specific, descriptive interpretation that hierarchies are studied in the current investigation. The results obtained from the descriptive analysis of the sampling of Subject positions show that, apart from the aforementioned priorities which influence the degree of accessibility for an argument to be assigned Subject function, a factor such as the internal complexity of the term might also condition the possibilities of Subject selection, with simple terms functioning as Subjects appearing more frequently than embedded complex constructions. Although the effect of the type of constructions on the organization of constituents within a clause has been noted and described by various scholars such as Keenan (1976) and Keenan and Comrie in the Accessibility
4 These hierarchies specify the following priorities: the Definiteness Hierarchy (definite > other specific > non-specific), the Person Hierarchy (first / second person > third person), the Number Hierarchy (singular number > plural number), the Animacy Hierarchy (human > other animate > inanimate force > other inanimate), the Concreteness Hierarchy (concrete entities > abstract entities), and the Entity Hierarchy (first-order entities > higher-order entities) (Dik 1997a: 279). All these hierarchies predict the term accessibility to Subject by virtue of their intrinsic properties, some of which are related to the referent of the term rather than to the term itself (Animacy, Entity, Concreteness), whereas others make reference to the grammatical operators of definiteness, number, and person (Definiteness, Person, and Number). Functional constraints, in addition, also condition the accessibility of terms to Subject and have been gathered in the Semantic Function Hierarchy (Arg-1 > Goal > Recipient > Beneficiary > Instrument > Location > Temporality) which predicts that those terms which carry any of the semantic functions belonging to the first argument will be the most accessible to Subject, followed in frequency and in level of difficulty by terms carrying the semantic functions Goal, Recipient, etc. A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy 75
Hierarchy (1977: 66), determining universal constraints in relative clause formation, and Huddleston and Pullum with reference to information-packaging constructions in inversions, extrapositions, and existential, cleft, and passive clauses (2002: 1365-1447), here the formulation is attempted of a different priority hierarchy to be applied to the description of English with regard to the grammatical operation of Subject assignment, indicating the different degrees of accessibility of the constituents of a predication in terms of their internal structural constitution. Thus, in the present paper a written corpus of English is analysed in terms of the accessibility of terms to Subject with a special focus on the degree of influence of the relevant priority hierarchies. The main conclusion ensuing from this analysis is that a further additional parameter is needed in the theory of perspective postulated by Dik as regards the structural complexity of terms (1997a: 254). Therefore, it is the main concern of this paper to provide an answer to the question of whether a new parameter in the study of Subject assignment in the English language is appropriate. In order to prove this hypothesis, in Section Two some preliminary assumptions that must be dealt with before attempting the proposal of a new hierarchy will be presented. Section Three is devoted to the presentation of the competing motivating factors which, supported by the analysis of relevant data, provided sufficient evidence for the formulation of the new hierarchy. The last section closes this paper with a proposal for a different type of intrinsic restriction which also conditions the accessibility of term positions to Subject and which predicts their degree of accessibility in terms of their internal constitution. These constraints are collected in the priority hierarchy which I have come to call the Term Hierarchy.
2. Terms: some preliminary assumptions
In order to attempt my own formulation of a further priority hierarchy as directly influencing the choice of Subject selection, it is advisable to first provide an account of the concept term as conceived within a functional approach. Terms are linguistic expressions whose main function is to refer to various types of entities which can be found in real or imaginary worlds. Within the theoretical framework of FG, there has been a reformulation of the ontological classification of entities as initially proposed by Lyons, with the addition of two types of entities to the first-, second-, and third-order entities (1977: 442-47). As a result, five types of entities are recognised in FG, each one carrying their own variable. First-order entities (x) have as referents individuals, things, and places which exist and can be conceived as being located in space. Second-order entities (e) are situated in space and time and designate SoAs describing Actions, Processes, States, and Positions, and “can be said to occur, begin, last and end; they can be perceived: watched, heard, felt, etc.; and they can be said to be sudden, gradual, violent, etc” (Dik 1997a: 292-93). The referents of third-order entities (X) are possible facts that can be situated neither in time nor space but that can be “believed, known, or thought; they can be reason for surprise or doubt; they can be mentioned, denied, and remembered; and they can be said to be true or false in relation to the occurrence of some SoA in some world” (Dik 1997a: 292-93). Fourth-order entities (E), on the other hand, are required by those predicates which designate speech acts such as giving advice 76 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez or permission, making an offer or a promise, ordering or warning, and asking a question or stating a fact. The fifth and last type of entities involved in the presentation of SoAs, zero-order entities (f), are associated with terms which refer to properties or relations which are attributable to a first-order entity. For an example of a term which refers to a zero-order entity, we have the following sentence taken from the sample:5
(1) ... enthusiasms which sometimes brought him to the verge of absurdity, where he was saved by his sharp wit. (168/G16-107)
Apart from this classification of terms based on the type of entity they are used to refer to, a further classification depending on the internal constitution of such terms may be attempted, distinguishing between simple or primary terms and complex or secondary terms. Simple terms are simple nominal groups formed by nouns, personal pronouns, and demonstratives whose referents are prototypically first-order entities, but that may also be used to refer to higher-order entities. In the sample obtained from the corpus analysed here, different cases of examples could be found in which a simple term constituted by a third person singular pronoun was being used to pick out a second-, third-, and even fourth-order entity which had already been introduced in the previous discourse.
(2) Senator Robertson’s committee has to pass Mr Weaver’s nomination before it (second-order entity) can be considered by the full Senate. (13/A01-105)
Examples of simple nominal groups headed by nouns such as welcome/absolution, fact/thought or question/story which refer to second-, third-, and fourth-order entities respectively were also registered:
(3) General de Gaulle’s official welcome last week to Britain’s moves towards the six was taken as a friendly gesture in Whitehall. (8/A02-9) (4) Then a thought struck her. (1378/P20-108) (5) Against this industrial setting Mr Richardson has told Miss Delaney’s story. (1061/C03-25)
As regards complex terms, there was evidence in the data of Siewierska’s claim (1991: 33) that there seems to be a close connection between the internal complexity of terms and the type of entities they refer to, since all the terms analysed in the sample which refer to zero- or first-order entities are simple terms, whereas the types of entities complex terms generally refer to are second- (2.9%), third- (58.8%), and fourth-order
5 The references at the end of each example indicate (i) the number assigned to that example in the total corpus (168), (ii) the type of text from which the example was taken (A: press: reportage; B: press: editorial; C: press: reviews; D: religion; E: skills, trades, and hobbies; F: popular lore; G: belles lettres, biography, essays; H: miscellaneous: government documents, foundation reports, industry reports, college catalogue, industry house organ; J: learned and scientific writings; K: general fiction; L: mystery and detective fiction; M: science fiction; N: adventure and western fiction; P: romance and love story; R: humour), and (iii) the number and line assigned to the text in the LOB corpus (in (1), 16 and 107, respectively). A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy 77
(38.2%) entities. The internal constitution of complex terms is that of embedded constructions which, from a semantic point of view, act as restrictors (A: [Ф]), and which may be classified into embedded predications (e: [predication]), embedded propositions (X: [proposition]), and embedded clauses (E: [clause]) (Dik 1997b: 94). Furthermore, complex terms, as conceived by Dik, are required by different types of matrix predicates which impose semantic restrictions on the predicational, propositional, or clausal term which follows them. Thus, the types of matrix predicates which are relevant to Subject assignment in English are as follows. The group of predicates which require a complex predicational term may be subdivided on the one hand into directive (order, ask), practical manipulation (force, cause), and volitional (want) predicates, which from the semantic point of view require that the realisation of the SoA designated by the complex term be posterior (Post), and on the other hand, into predicates of direct perception (see), achievement (manage, fail), and phasal predicates (begin, continue, stop), whose semantic restrictions impose that the realisation of the SoA be simultaneous (Sim).6 As regards propositional terms, the types of matrix predicates which require them are those which express intellectual and emotional attitudes (believe, presume; fear, hope), manipulation (convince, persuade, teach), acquisition or loss of knowledge (learn, know, forget), and indirect mental perception (see, hear). Finally, the matrix predicates which require clausal terms are those designating speech acts such as say or ask (Dik 1997b: 96-113). Complex terms may be further divided into finite embedded constructions and non-finite embedded constructions. The traditional correlate of finite embedded constructions is the subordinate nominal clause which requires the presence of an explicit subordinating marker (except in the case of that-clauses, where the conjunction that may not be specified in the sentence). Sentences six and seven below illustrate cases of Subject assignment to terms expressed by means of finite subordinate clauses, a that- clause and an interrogative clause introduced by a wh-word respectively:
(6) That the Seljuks brought nothing but chaos and destruction to Asia Minor is not borne out by the facts. (430/G45-167). (7) What success Hahnemann had in Clarence’s case is not known. (441/G06-103)
Any of the semantic and pragmatic functions which may be assigned to first-order simple terms may also be assigned to complex terms. As regards the type of syntactic function which may be assigned to an embedded construction, Dik manifests that “if the embedded construction occurs in second argument position, Subject assignment to it may or may not be possible” (1997b: 123). In fact, in those cases in which Subject has been assigned to an embedded term, the resulting construction is quite marked and fairly unnatural. As a result, at a higher level of the underlying clause structure, the
6 Dik presents a further classification for those predicates which require a predicational complement taking into account whether the SoA was finally accomplished or not (1997b: 114- 15). Thus, he distinguishes between implicational predicatives such as manage (which imply the accomplishment or realisation of the SoA described in the complement), contra-implicative predicates such as fail (which imply that the SoA presented in the complex term was not finally executed) and non-implicative predicates such as want (which are neutral as to whether the SoA was finally realised or not). 78 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez reorganisation of the order of the constituents allows such a complex construction to be introduced by means of the dummy it, and be placed at the end of the embedded construction according to the LIPOC principle (language-independent preferred order of constituents) which among other things establishes that “other things being equal, constituents prefer to be placed in order of increasing complexity … Clitic < Pronoun < Noun Phrase < Adpositional Phrase < Subordinate clause” (Dik 1997b: 127). This preference is attested in the corpus material as example eight illustrates, in which the dummy it occupies the Subject position and the embedded construction has been postponed and placed at the end of the main clause:7
(8) It is felt that the above correction is not entirely satisfactory as it is based on fixed wing theory. (297/J73-133)
Non-finite embedded constructions are subdivided into infinitival constructions, which can function as first and second arguments as well as satellites; participle constructions which generally function as satellites; and nominalisations, which are constructions which present features which are typical of nouns and which can also have access to Subject and Object functions. The types of non-finite constructions which are relevant to the grammatical operation of Subject assignment are the first and last types. Among the group of infinitival constructions, Dik distinguishes between those in which all the argumental positions are explicitly represented by a term, which means that it is a closed infinitival construction, and those in which one of the argumental positions has been left unspecified, open infinitival constructions (1997b: 147-54). The Subject of closed infinitival constructions is introduced by means of the preposition for followed by an object form:
(9) “Sir, it is all very well for ‘Canuck’ to suggest that there is no need for losing days at all for shops.”(2028/B24-150)
Non-finite clauses with Subject assignment introduced by the dummy it and as a result placed in final position in the sentence are normally linked to adjectival predicates rather than to verbal predicates (Dik 1997b: 149). In fact, in the present corpus no examples of closed infinitival construction were found in Subject position. In open infinitival constructions, on the contrary, although the Subject is not explicitly encoded in the predication, it is semantically implicit, since it co-refers with the Subject of the matrix verb and can be treated as an example of zero anaphora (Dik 1997b: 148):
(10) Rehabilitation of refugees from East Pakistan (ei) still remains (Aei) to be accomplished. (169/G65-108) (11) More than once it had happened to me (xi) that my reason for asking (Axi) to be excused attendance at St Bride’s on a given Saturday afternoon had been accepted as valid… (197/G14-138)
7 The LIPOC principle also predicts that no further material will occur after the subordinate clause, except if that material is as complex as or more complex than the material contained in the embedded clause (Dik 1997b: 127). A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy 79
(12) There are often few chairs on steamers which visit Adriatic islands, and those few (xi) are shackled together, (Axi) to be queued for until a morose sailor consents to unlock them. (341/K22-12)
The covert Subject of open infinitival constructions does not always co-refer explicitly since on many occasions it has a generic value (anybody) which is represented by means of the operator (gxi) indicating that “as a referent for this term, choose any entity which fulfils the selectional requirements imposed in this argument position” (Dik 1997b: 150). In the material analysed here, only one example of this type of generic Subject in an open infinitival construction has been attested:
(13) (gxi) To be a little considerate about radios and gramophones and noise generally is rated highly among good manners. (100/E26-115)
The other type of non-finite embedded construction relevant to the analysis of Subject assignment in English corresponds to nominalisations, which are characterised by presenting one or more properties regarded as typical of primary nominal terms. The first type of nominalisation proposed by Dik is that of headed nominalisations, whose nominal value comes from the noun around which the construction revolves. These nouns present the common feature of having a generic meaning such as fact, belief, news, circumstance, etc, and are normally followed by that-clauses. This last feature leads Dik to regard this type of nominal clauses as examples of finite subordinate clauses (1997b: 157), a suggestion which is followed here in the analysis of the Subject of a sentence such as the one exemplified in (14), which is regarded as a complex term realised by means of a finite subordinate clause:
(14) ... and the fact that Jones is British will, he believes, reflect prestige upon Britain. (951/R01-11)
The second type of nominalisations which Dik calls non-headed constructions revolve around a nominalised verb and are realised by means of complex or secondary terms which refer to second-, third-, or fourth-order entities such as John’s denial of the charges and the presidential elections (1997b: 159). These terms have encoded the semantic and morphosyntactic features of first-order expressions as the Principle of Formal Adjustment predicts: “Derived, secondary constructions of type X are under pressure to adjust their formal expression to the prototypical expression model of non- derived, primary constructions of type X” (Dik 1997b: 158). Nominalised verbal predicates are initially derived from predicate formation rules, although in subsequent stages they may become lexicalised and, as a consequence, appear listed in the lexicon: “this is only one instance of a quite general process of loss of productivity and subsequent lexicalization” (Dik 1997b: 168). Although fundamentally using Dik’s division between simple and complex terms as a basis when formulating this new hierarchy, the classification proposed by Martín- Arista was also adopted, which distinguishes two types of nominalisations depending on whether the nominalised verbal predicate has been encoded as a noun (lexical nominalisation), or as a non-finite form in infinitive or –ing (syntactic nominalisation) (1999: 184). As a result, and bearing in mind all these considerations, I analyse all the 80 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez examples of expressions which contain simple nouns, pronouns, and lexical nominalisations whose structure is that of a nominal group as simple or primary terms. Secondary or complex terms include the examples of syntactic nominalisations which have the constitution of finite and non-finite embedded constructions.
3. Formulation of the Term Hierarchy: competing motivations, evidence and facts
As Kuno has pointed out (1976: 438), syntactic manifestations should be accounted for not exclusively from a syntactic standpoint, but from a semantic perspective which might explain the behaviour of syntactic constructions. Thus, in this section, the results obtained from the descriptive analysis of the data are shown in the light of the types of terms which have been selected as Subject. These percentages provide solid evidence which will be translated into the shape of the Term Hierarchy. Apart from the purely syntactic analysis of Subject positions, this article will deal with the way in which the other intrinsic properties relevant in the operation of Subject assignment in English behave when the prediction claimed by the Term Hierarchy has been violated. Finally, other types of competing motivations which might also influence the higher degree of accessibility to Subject of simple terms over complex ones are considered, namely the organisation of information structure and the ease of language processing. Table 1 shows the results obtained from the descriptive analysis of the types of term which have been selected as Subject in the whole sample of active and passive constructions and reveals that the more frequently attested type of Subjects has the internal structure of simple terms (98.4%), whereas only 1.6% of the Subjects analysed present the internal structure of a complex term. Thus, at this stage the Term Hierarchy that I intend to substantiate could be provisionally formulated as follows:
simple terms > complex terms or primary terms > secondary terms.
Total corpus Subject No. % Simple terms 2277 98.4% Complex terms 36 1.6%
Table 1. Types of Subjects
A more detailed analysis of complex terms furnishes interesting evidence as regards the type of complex term which could be assigned Subject function (Table 2). Thus, in the case of Subject assignment to a non-first argument (passive constructions) only two instances of Subject assignment to a finite subordinate clause in an initial position are registered (examples (6) and (7) above) as opposed to 31 cases with extraposed Subject introduced by anticipatory it (see example 8). In addition, the realisation of non-finite subordinate Subjects is even less frequent, as can be shown by the fact that only two examples are found, one of which presents the Subject term in initial position (example 13 above). Furthermore, in most of the cases in which such terms are assigned Subject A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy 81 function, the resulting passive construction is rather marked as a result of the reorganisation of the constituent order of the elements partaking in the underlying representation of the predication described. Likewise, the study of the active constructions shows that only one example has undergone Subject assignment to a finite clause (example 14 above), supporting the proposed hypothesis that complex terms are less accessible to Subject than simple terms and that, when this is the case, such constructions are held to be rather marked. Finally, and as far as complex terms are concerned, the figures obtained in the analysis of the data enable us to conclude that finite embedded constructions have access to Subject (1.5%) more frequently than non- finite embedded ones (0.1%).
Embedded Passives Actives Total corpus clauses Nº % Nº % Nº % Finite 33 1.4% 1 0.1% 34 1.5% Non-finite 2 0.1% 0 0.0% 2 0.1%
Table 2. Subject accessibility of embedded constructions
The most common linguistic pattern which has been attested in the total corpus of active and passive constructions, as far as the analysis of the Term Hierarchy is concerned, is associated with cases in which the two terms which could potentially be assigned Subject function (Subject and Object of active constructions and Subject and by-phrase of passive constructions) have the internal constitution of simple terms (ST) (see Table 3); this pattern (ST > ST) has been registered in 82.2% of the cases. In those instances in which both a simple term and a complex term (finite clause (FC) or non- finite clause (NFCL)) compete with the possibility of being assigned Subject function, the simple term is assigned Subject function in 16.2% of the examples, and it is only in a very low percentage (1.6%) that a complex term (particularly a finite embedded construction (1.5%)) is more accessible than a simple term (for concrete examples see sentences number 6, 7, 8 and 13).
Linguistic Patterns: No. Global % Subj > Obj / Subj > by-phrase ST > ST 1902 82.2% ST > FCL 230 9.9% ST > NFCL 145 6.3% FCL > ST 34 1.5% NFCL > ST 2 0.1% Total corpus 2313 100%
Table 3. Term hierarchy: linguistic patterns (global corpus)
82 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez
In the light of the preceding results, the Term Hierarchy could be reformulated as follows: simple terms (nominal groups) > complex terms (finite clauses) > complex terms (non-finite clauses). This scale is intended here as a tool to study the frequency distributions of the different types of terms which according to the internal constitution of the argument might be selected as Subject in English. Tables 4 and 5 break down the percentages of passive and active constructions separately:
Terms: Subj > by-phrase No. % Irrelevant cases:8 ST > ST 762 95.6% Unfulfilled: FCL > ST 33 4.1% NFCL> ST 2 0.3%
Table 4. Validity of the Term Hierarchy in passive constructions
Terms: Subj > Obj No. % Irrelevant cases: ST > ST 1140 75.2% Fulfilled: ST > NFCL 145 9.6% ST > FCL 230 15.2% Unfulfilled: CLF>ST 1 0.1%
Table 5. Validity of the Term Hierarchy in active constructions
In those instances in which the Term Hierarchy is unfulfilled because a complex term has been selected as Subject instead of a simple term, the priorities established by the Animacy, Entity, and Concreteness Hierarchies are also highly violated due to the fact that the complex terms which are assigned Subject function are mainly abstract, inanimate, third-, and fourth-order entities, in contrast with the other term which could have also been assigned Subject, viz. a concrete first-order entity which in most of
8 All those examples in which the Subject and the Object of active sentences and the Subject and by-phrase of passive sentences present the same feature (i.e. the two terms are either simple terms or complex terms, or in the case of the other priority hierarchies, the two terms are definite, or third-persons, or abstract) have been described as irrelevant for the present study since it is not possible to see which feature has won out the other. However, for the calculation of the global conclusions taking into account the whole population, the irrelevant examples are counted as instances in which the hierarchy is not violated, and as a result, are included in the group of examples in which the prediction established by the hierarchy is fulfilled (Table 7). A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy 83 the cases has a human referent (Table 6).9 Those instances in which a human term has not been assigned Subject function appear to be conditioned by the priority presented in the Definiteness Hierarchy which predicts the higher degree of accessibility of a definite term (example 15) or a specific indefinite one (the embedded construction in example 16) over a specific indefinite and a non-specific indefinite term which from the semantic point of view is not specially significant (by anyone/by people).
(15) Mr Hugh Gaitskell (specific, definite) argued that no final decision should be taken until a conference of commonwealth Premiers had been held (specific, indefinite). (2077/A06-182) (16) It may well be argued [by someone / people (non-specific, indefinite)] at this point that the above type of reasoning is all very well for simple two-element circuits (specific indefinite). (276/J69-113)
Most of the examples related to the study of the Person Hierarchy are irrelevant in the present discussion, since both terms competing for Subject position are third persons. The only three cases in which the hierarchy has been violated, because a third person has had access to Subject instead of a singular or plural first person, belong to learned and scientific texts (represented by J in the LOB corpus) which are normally characterised by an impersonal style. It is obvious that the differences in style and register, and especially the differences between written and spoken English, reflect differences in the type of lexical associations and grammatical constructions used. In fact, this paper is aimed to serve as a stepping stone for further projects in which spoken language could be analysed in terms of the Term Hierarchy (as well as the other priority hierarchies).10 As for the restrictions on lexical associations, it seems appropriate to highlight that the type of constructions in which the Term Hierarchy has not been
9 In Table 6, “d” stands for definite; “i” for indefinite, “-s” for non-specific, “t” for third person, “f” for first person, “in” for inanimate entity, “h” for human, “sg” for singular, “pl” for plural, and ordinals “0, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th” for zero-, first-, second-, third-, and fourth-order entities. The percentages of fulfilment and violation have been calculated taking into account only the relevant examples in which the analysed arguments present different properties. 10 Biber et al. (1998: 73-76; 101-05) present a corpus-based study in which they analyse the distribution and function of that-clauses and to-clauses in two registers, viz. conversation and academic prose, and conclude that in general terms that-clauses are more common in conversational English but relatively rare in academic prose, whereas to-clauses show the same distribution in the two registers but are regarded as less common than that-clauses in conversation. These distributional differences seem to be constrained in part by differing lexical associations, which are more restricted in the case of that-clauses than in the case of to-clauses, since the latter may be complements not only to verbal predicates but also to a large number of adjectives. In fact, the grammatical associations of these constructions show that in extraposed constructions to-clauses are more common in academic writing than in conversation (and more frequent than extraposed that-clauses). This is due mostly to the fact they have a very strong association with adjectival predicates which allow the static packaging of information which is normally preferred in academic prose. As discussed in section 2 in this paper, in the current research, however, only verbal predicates are taken into account because these allow alternative choices of Subject assignment, whereas to-clauses as complements of adjectives do not. 84 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez accomplished feature matrix predicates which require both propositional terms (example 17) and clausal terms (example 18):11
(17) It was learned that Lord Home will afterwards go to stay privately with Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother at Birkhall. (27/A29-126) (18) Finally, it may be mentioned that as the Portuguese pushed their exploratory voyages down the west coast of Africa, they added the acquisition of negro slaves ... (284/J58-124)
Hierarchies Properties No. % Fulfilled Unfulfilled Irrelevant d>i 1 2.9%
i>d 4 11.4% 31 4 Definiteness 1 i>i 1 ------(88.6%) (11.4%) i>i(-s) 30 85.7%
t>f 3 100% 0 3 Person 33 t>t 33 ------(0.0%) (100%)
in>h 34 100% 0 34 Animacy 2 in>in 2 ------(0.0%) (100%)
sg>pl 34 100% 34 0 Number 2 sg>sg 2 ------(100%) (0.0%) 2nd>1st 1 2.9% 3rd>1st 20 58.8% Entity- 0 34 4th>1st 13 38.2% 2 Abstraction (0.0%) (100%) 3rd>3rd 1 ------3rd>0 1 ------
Table 6. Behaviour of the priority hierarchies when the Term Hierarchy has been unfulfilled
So far, we have seen that the higher or lower degree of accessibility of terms to Subject is conditioned by purely syntactic constraints as has been presented in the Term Hierarchy, but this restriction on the complexity of terms is also motivated by factors of a different nature which condition the order in which constituents are presented. One
11 Biber et al. (1998: 103) account for the differing registering patterns found between that- clauses and to-clauses in terms of the kind of verbal predicates complemented by these complex clauses. Thus, the higher level of occurrence of that-clauses in conversation is directly associated to their common co-occurrence with three matrix predicates: think, say and know: “These [predicates] are used to report two of the most important activities and states of humans: what they think/know, and what they said!”, hence they are not used very often in academic writing. Examples of that-clauses in academic prose report research findings by using verbal predicates such as show, indicate, suggest, etc. A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy 85 of these competing motivations is associated with the ease of language processing. Thus, complex terms are considered to be more difficult to produce and process (partly due to their abstract nature), and, consequently, in information planning, speakers will tend to choose a structure which the hearer will be able to interpret with the least amount of processing effort (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997: 201). Moreover, the fact that non-finite clauses as Subject are much less frequent and therefore more marked constructions than finite clauses (thus occupying the right extreme of the hierarchy) may be explained in relation to the difficulty in processing these constructions in comparison with finite clauses. These do not show such a high degree of syntactico-semantic compression, in the sense that these are typically introduced by subordinating markers and have explicit Subjects; by contrast, non-finite clauses do not exhibit their Subject in most of the cases and are not introduced by means of subordinating conjunctions. Finally, language acquisition processes also seem to reflect the relationship between linguistic complexity and language production in the sense that it has been shown that children take longer to learn complex language devices (Clark and Clark 1977: 338). On the other hand, the selection of a particular type of term as Subject may also be motivated by the way the information is organized within the overall discourse. Recent works on how information structure conditions syntactic structure have been written among others by Halliday (1967, 1985), Kuno (1972a, 1972b), Prince (1981), Davison (1984), Lambrecht (1994), Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004). Thus, for instance, Davison claims that noun phrases (i.e. simple terms) are the constituents that are typically used as topics in Subject position, although in lower percentages other constituents such as prepositional phrases, adverbs and even whole clauses (complex terms) might be marked as topics (1984: 806-09). This fact might also explain why simple terms are less marked as Subjects and, as a result, are more frequent than embedded constructions which are more marked and consequently less usual and more complex. The lower degree of occurrence of complex terms in Subject position is also due to the general tendency in information packaging constructions to place heavy constituents at or towards the end of the clause.12 This tendency justifies the higher degree of occurrence of extraposed embedded clauses as opposed to the basic ones, a phenomenon which is further motivated by the fact that it is easier to process the subordinate clause in those instances with extraposition than when the complex clause is in the initial Subject position (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1382; 1403-05). These underlying motivations which explain the higher degree of accessibility to Subject of simple terms over complex terms are more in the line of the postulates of FDG, since it combines language and cognition/processing and resorts to discourse related phenomena as competing factors determining Subject selection.
4. Conclusion
It is an uncontroversial fact, at least within Classical Dikkean Functional Grammar, that the accessibility of a term to Subject function is conditioned and restricted by
12 In Classical Dikkean terminology this tendency is referred to as the LIPOC principle (see section two in this paper). 86 Carolina Rodríguez Juárez hierarchical, functional, and intrinsic constraints. These restrictions are presented in the form of implicational priority hierarchies which are associated with semantic and intrinsic properties attributed to such terms and which were briefly presented in the introduction to this paper. In this study, one of the main concerns is to prove the hypothesis which suggests that a new parameter in the study of Subject assignment on the English language is possible, and indeed necessary, as regards the internal constitution of terms. Moreover, the higher or lower degree of accessibility of terms to Subject function in terms of their internal constitution is also supported by other competing motivations such as ease of language processing and information structure. Thus, taking all these underlying factors into account, a new priority scale, the Term Hierarchy, is presented, which predicts term accessibility to Subject function in terms of its structural internal complexity. The formulation of this new priority hierarchy also observes the distinction between simple and complex terms, with simple terms being more accessible to Subject position than complex ones (i.e. finite and non-finite embedded constructions). Schematically, this hierarchy could be represented like this: simple terms > finite complex terms > non-finite complex terms. The applicability and validity of this hierarchy is tested in the analysis of written data both in those constructions in which a first argument has been assigned Subject function (active sentences) and in those in which a non-first argument has been more accessible to Subject (passive sentences). The analysis entertained in this paper can be taken to provide incontrovertible evidence that the accessibility of a complex term to Subject is less frequent and more marked (1.6%) than Subject assignment to a simple term (98.4%) both in active and in passive constructions (Table 7).
Passives Actives Total corpus Terms No. % global No. % global No. % global Fulfilled 762 32.9% 1515 65.5% 2277 98.4% Unfulfilled 35 1.5% 1 0.0% 36 1.6%
Table 7. Validity of the Term Hierarchy: global conclusions
In this paper I hope to have made some contribution towards a better understanding of the theory of perspective in general and Subject assignment in particular through the postulation of a new parameter within those intrinsic constraints on the accessibility of terms to Subject function assignment in English.
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ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 89–100 ISSN 0210-6124
Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image
Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez Universidade de Santiago de Compostela [email protected]
In 1980 the Irish poet Eavan Boland published In Her Own Image a volume of poetry which stands as a landmark in her career as a writer for its subversive potential to revise creational myths that have contributed to the traditional construction of female subjectivity. The aim of this paper is to discuss Boland’s textual strategies in In Her Own Image and see how she subverts the traditional female iconography that constrains the female psyche and disempowers women. Rather than a set of ornamental female figures, Boland’s volume produces more authentic representations of women that move away from man’s own image and from his icons, which have often been taken as “natural” within the construction of female subjectivity. Resistance to such genderings provides, as the volume illustrates, emancipatory possibilities for the woman writer who regains control over her own body image within the very terms of a culture and of a particular poetic tradition.
Key words: Eavan Boland, In Her Own Image, Ireland, women’s poetry, female iconicity, subjectivity
Awareness of a gendered cultural context often enhances our understanding of a poem, especially when a woman poet challenges traditional images that have long been taken as “natural” within the construction of female subjectivity.Socialised to be passive and silent or to avoid taboo subjects such as the female anatomy and sexuality or devalued topics such as maternity or children, women poets must confront and resist such genderings in order to examine and write about their own experience. But as Haberstroh (2001: 6) suggests, adopting a subject position, or creating a female voice, has additional complications because women have often served as objects for the male poet.1 The Irish poet Eavan Boland describes the gradual increase of female authorship as a revolution, for it implies the assumption of a female voice as a conscious subject
1 The present paper appears inscribed within the framework of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education, entitled “Poesía y género: Poetas irlandesas y gallegas contemporáneas (1980-2004)” (HUM2005-04897/FILO). I would like to express my gratitude to the project’s supervisor, Dr Manuela Palacios González, for her endless support and encouragement. I must also acknowledge my debt to Dr Jorge Sacido Romero, who contributed to this paper with his enlightening comments and critical eye. 90 Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez position away from silence as a former object for the male poet: “[Women] have gone from being the objects of Irish poems to be the authors of it” (2001: 96). Even so, such a revolutionary shift first requires exorcising those female icons embedded in Ireland’s political troubles or, in Boland’s own words, the “entrenched and even dangerous relation between the Irish national assumptions and the Irish poem” (2001: 97). Gender relations are at the heart of cultural constructions of social identities and collectivities. The question of adopting a subject position becomes further complicated if the female voice is located in a postcolonial territory, as is the case of Ireland. The present paper aims to discuss Eavan Boland’s third volume of poetry In Her Own Image (1980, republished in her Collected Poems 1995a) for its subversive potential, as its very title suggests, to both revise and rearticulate creational and foundational myths underpinning traditional female iconography, which often appear associated with the construction of female subjectivity. The earlier volume stands as a landmark in Boland’s creative work, illustrating a shift in poetic language from a generalised persona to a particular, specific subject position that sets out to dismantle those aspects of femininity which place constraints on the female psyche and disempower women. Departing from man’s particular image to find one’s own requires a process of reconstruction for women: it is precisely within that liminal place, which becomes the scenario of these poems, that interpretation may occur, where ideas of “shame and power and reinterpretation, which are at the heart of the postcolonial discourse, can be recovered as raw data” (Boland 1997: 13). For women writers, resistance urgently demands reconstruction (Boland 1995b: 65) by means of a counter-narrative able to destabilise the male controlling gaze. The title of the volume –In Her Own Image– defiantly subverts the very first example of female iconography subservient to the Law of the Father, both literally and metaphorically speaking, as rendered in Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1.27). Thus deprived of singularity, female subjectivity is only defined in terms of the objectifying gaze as man’s dependant, and women’s own biological capacity for reproduction is actually annulled. Boland’s In Her Own Image defies the hegemonic conceptual scheme that underlies such an assumption by the inclusion of the female body and its complex sexuality in the poems, thus subverting the biblical myth of woman’s creation as Adam’s appendix: “And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from Man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man” (Gen 2.22). Instead, as the persona in “Exhibitionist” cries out, the time has come to “start / working from the text, / making / from this trash / and gimmickry / of sex / my aesthetic” (Boland 1995a: 68). The poem’s defiant poetic voice describes a woman’s exhibited naked body that the female persona has previously modelled in a feminine version of man’s creational myth in Genesis, a woman who no longer waits passively to be created. If God’s inspiring breath gives life to clay-modelled Adam, Boland’s poems exemplify a similar attempt to create an independent female subject, which necessarily requires a subversion of previously established yet ineffective icons: “I subvert / sculpture, / the old mode; / I skin, / I dimple clay, / I flesh, / I rump stone” (1995a: 68). The volume illustrates, as this writer would have it, an act of displacement, as Judith Butler asserts: if female sexuality is constructed within power relations, then “the postulation of a normative sexuality that is ‘before’, ‘outside’, or ‘beyond’ power is a Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image 91 cultural impossibility and a politically impracticable dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself” (Butler 1990: 30). In this light, In Her Own Image offers subversive possibilities within the very terms of culture itself, of a particular poetic tradition working through Boland’s dismantling of patriarchal modes of representation by rewriting them: “I was a poet. But I was about to take on the life of the poetic object. I had written poems. Now I would have to enter them … I would have to reexamine modes of expression and poetic organization … I would have … to disrupt and dispossess” (Boland 1995b: 28, 29). Throughout the volume, Boland is engaged in replacing mythic icons that have traditionally intervened in the construction of female subjectivity with more authentic, often troublesome portraits of women. However, this task has proved for Boland difficult and painful, one to which she persistently came back through the course of both her poetry and her critical reflections. Such female portraits were to be part of a tradition which denies women a place, except as an icon, void of a suitable language to represent her experience as a woman writer:
I knew … that I had a mind and a body. That my body would lead my poetry in one direction. That my mind could take up the subtle permissions around me and write disembodied verse, the more apparently exciting because it denied the existence of the body and that complexity. I knew, in other words, that I was a half-named poet. My mind, my language, my love for freedom: these were named. My body, my instincts: these were named only as passive parts of the poem. Two parts of the poem awaited me. Two choices. Power or powerlessness. (Boland 1995b: 26)
The collision between female sexuality and poetic language and its conventions is dramatised in Boland’s In Her Own Image (1980), whose poems include and represent the female body and its complexities. In this sense, “Tirade for the Mimic Muse” –the poem that inaugurates the volume in a tantalising way– works as a subversive parody of the Miltonian invocation to the heavenly muse for poetic inspiration, while also addressing what Boland sees as a controversial connection between gender and nation. It is both a plunge into “an ancient world of customs and permissions” (Boland 1995b: 27) and an urgent call for revision: “They had been metaphors and invocations, similes and muses … Custom, convention, language, inherited image: They had all led to the intense passivity of the feminine within the poem” (Boland 1995b: 27-28). For Boland, the national muse is irreconcilable with the female poet’s creative capacity, for this icon belongs to a set of “passive, ornamental images of women” inscribed in the poetic tradition she inherited, which suggested the “generic, the national, the muse figure” (2001: 105). The muse, a conventional symbol of poetic inspiration, has been considered as a major intervening force in translating experience into art. In confronting the problem of this stereotype, women poets often “reject gendered figures like the conventional muse … for they become their own muses, validating female experience as both starting point and subject of their literary work” (Haberstroh 2001: 6). Furthermore, the iconography of the national muse signals women’s ambivalent position in Western cultural hegemony. On the one hand, gendered bodies and sexuality play pivotal roles as territories, markers and reproducers of the narratives of 92 Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez nations and collectivities, thus becoming icons of a national embodiment. On the other, it is precisely such an association between the female and nature, along with its dynamics of reproduction, that has excluded women from the collective body politic and, more generally, from the productive sphere of culture and society. As Yuval- Davies (1997: 15) has suggested, the concept of nation has been traditionally conceived of as an eternal and universal entity, which is constituted as a natural extension of family and kinship relations that are, in turn, based on natural sexual divisions of labour according to the mechanics of production versus reproduction. It is clear then that gender relations appear at the heart of cultural constructions of social identities and collectivities. Within patriarchal discourse, women are considered as biological reproducers of the nation, and are thus constructed in traditional nationalist discourse as symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour: the icon of a mother symbolises in many cultures the spirit of the nation, as is the case of Mother Russia, Mother India or Mother Ireland.2 Even so, the use of female iconography to represent national identity in postcolonial territories arises as a result of the generalised feminisation of nature. González Arias (2000: 48) suggests that the Irish territory has been feminised both by English allegorical representations and by Irish myths of colonial resistance, although with different aims in view:3 the submissive Hibernia stands, ideologically speaking, in opposition to the muse created by Irish nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as embodied by the female allegories of Dark Rosaleen or Cathleen Ní Houlihan.4 Yet, the mythical exercise of equating women with ‘mother’ nature on the basis of their natural cycles and fertilising power in the case of ‘Mother Ireland’, and with virginal maids in the case of the Irish muse, also justifies the exclusion of women from official culture. Here lies the paradoxical nature of female representation in most hegemonic cultures: while women often come to symbolise the collective unity, they are
2 Yuval-Davies (1997: 45) has looked into the various ways in which the female body has come to represent the concept of nationhood. Thus, the French Revolution was symbolically referred to as ‘La Patrie’, the figure of a woman giving birth to a baby; in Cyprus, a crying woman refugee on roadside posters was the embodiment of the pain and anger of the Greek Cypriot collectivity after the Turkish invasion. Finally, in peasant societies the dependence of the people on the fertility of ‘Mother Earth’ has contributed to this close association between collective territory, identity and womanhood. 3 As Innes (1993: 12-13) argues, the political union of England and Ireland through the fusion of parliaments was represented in Punch as a marital fusion where Ireland would play the role of the young, virginal and complacent wife – Hibernia – to a dominant and powerful Britannia. 4 As González Arias (2000: 76) suggests, these female allegories derive from the Irish poetic genre of the aisling, which was consolidated in the eighteenth-century as poetry of resistance to British invasion. The aisling would present a male poet who encounters a visionary young woman who, having been ravished by the masculine invader, asks to be restored to her former condition (Kearney 1997: 120). This female allegory works as a representation of grieving Ireland, anxious to be rescued from British oppression (Innes 1993: 19). Eavan Boland explains how such an inheritance partakes of a confusion between the national and the feminine which is especially pernicious for modern women poets in Ireland: “For a very long time – in our ballads or aisling poems of the eighteenth century, our nineteenth-century patriotic verse up to and past Yeats – the feminine drew authority from the national in an Irish poem, and the national was softened and disguised through the feminine” (Boland 2001: 106). Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image 93 also excluded from the collective of the body politic, and they retain an ‘object’ rather than a ‘subject’ position. Henceforth, the construction of womanhood and female subjectivity has in itself a property of ‘otherness’, of a counter-narrative that emerges from the margins of cultural production through an exercise of displacement.5 If, as Anderson (1993: 19) argues, nations are not eternal or universal phenomena, but specifically modern and a direct result of patriarchal developments in European history, then the politics of associating a female image with a particular national space or Mother Earth mirrors a male objectifying principle which defines both women and nature as given, universal entities (Foucault 1972: 149). As Henri Lefebvre notes, a national space is a social product which contains and regulates the social relations of both production and reproduction: “Ideology produces specific kinds of spaces which may serve as tools of thought and action, a means of control, hence of domination and power” (1991: 26). Boland’s poem articulates itself as a struggle to resist such pairings and icons which the objectifying male gaze has produced in Western culture, for “the silent feminine imagery in the lore of the nation went badly with my active determination to be a poet” (1995b: 70). Boland consistently explores the connections between gender, art, and national identity, while also signalling the “ugly limits” (1995b: 65) of a particularly subservient ideology that has shaped nationalist discourse:
The heroine, as such, was utterly passive. She was Ireland or Hibernia. She was stamped, as a rubbed-away mark, on silver or gold; a compromised regal figure on a throne. Or she was a nineteenth-century image of girlhood, on a frontispiece or in a book of engravings. She was invoked, addressed, remembered, loved, regretted. And, most importantly, died for. She was a mother or a virgin … Her identity was as an image. Or was it a fiction? (Boland 1995b: 66)
As Boland herself points out, such representations of the nation and the national spirit as a particular sort of woman are especially perverse, for they prominently enhance the paradox of women’s actual absence from cultural production and from the national enterprise: “I was starting to notice the absence of my name in it. I was feeling the sexual opposites within the narrative. The intense passivity of the female; the fact that to the male principle was reserved the right not simply of action but of expression as well” (1995b: 66). When the national muse convention is eventually reversed, such an icon appears no longer as a heavenly creature to the eyes of the female poet and beholder: far from a divine realm, the muse is expelled to “the strange scenario of what happens to a tradition when previously mute images within it come to awkward and vivid life: when the icons return to haunt the icon-makers” (Boland 1995c: 485). Grotesquely parodied,
5 Some of Boland’s later poems occasionally celebrate the blissful communion of mother and child; even so, they more commonly acknowledge the painful necessity of the mother’s separation from her progeny, as is the case of “Pomegranate.” For Boland, as for Kristeva, to be a mother is to be a ‘split subject’, a self that is riven by its intimate encounter with the other (Kristeva 1986: 297). By extending this vision of mother as ‘split subject’ to Mother Ireland, Boland elicits a conception of national identity, that like the maternal subject, is open to heterogeneity, dehiscent rather than integral, dispersed rather than consolidated, centrifugal rather than centripetal. 94 Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez the poem represents the muse as an aged prostitute, which points to the process of commodification that the traditional gendered icon implies, while also enhancing her powerlessness to conjure up inspiring images for a modern female subject:
I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout So here you are fumed in candle-stink. Its yellow balm exhumes you for the glass. How you arch and pout in it! How you poach your face in it! Anyone would think you were a whore – An ageing out-of-work kind-hearted tart. I know you for the ruthless bitch you are: Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse – Our Muse of Mimic Art. (Boland 1995a: 55)
Those ancient rituals which the muse required as preliminary for her inspiring breath prove now to be ineffective, “witless empty rites” (l. 23) when it comes to writing on women’s real experience through formerly devalued subjects: “The kitchen screw and the rack of labour, / The wash thumbed and the dish cracked, / The scream of beaten women, / The crime of babies battered, / The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief / That seeks asylum behind suburb walls–” (ll. 31-36). As Boland herself argued, “the life of the Irish woman – the ordinary, lived life – was invisible and, when it became visible, was considered inappropriate as a theme for Irish poetry” (2001: 104). The persona’s tortuous way to womanhood, as dramatised in this poem, necessarily requires what Boland would call a “generous restructuring of context” (2001: 105), namely to reject objectified female imagery in order to become a subject, a speaking voice. At this moment, the Tennysonian glass “cracked” (l. 50) and the muse that had so far sponsored this inherited tradition ceases to be taken seriously to become “the muse of mimic art.” This muse’s “Eye-shadow, swivel brushes, blushers, / Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks” (ll. 11-12), which further emphasise its objectified status as the recipient of male desire, become a central motif in “Making Up,” where cosmetics eventually hide the persona’s “naked face” (1995a: 70) in order to please the male gaze. Such unconditional oblivion of one’s female subjectivity brings about, as the persona covertly suggests, a degradation through the act of prostitution: “It’s a trick. / Myths are made by men” (1995a: 71). Boland’s “Anorexic” partakes of a similar concern by addressing the lack of identification with one’s own image. The anorectic female voice of the poem may personify Irish women themselves, starving to defy the patriarchal values that confine their sex by rejecting their traditional identification – as well as objectification – with a radiant and abundant Hibernia: as Edna Longley suggests, the anorectic is “Cathleen ní Houlihan in a terminal condition” (1994: 173), better suited to representing the real situation of Ireland through part of her history. In more generalising terms, the woman experiencing such a disorder has become, Maud Ellmann argues, “the enigmatic icon of our times” (1993: 2), symbolising not only her own malaise, but that of society at large.6
6 In a poem revealingly entitled “Aisling” (1983), Paul Muldoon asks whether Ireland should be symbolised by the disease anorexia: “Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora/Artemidora, or Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image 95
The poem’s persona witnesses her split self, corresponding to these two representations of the female, by alluding to her former earth-motherly “curves and paps and wiles” (l. 5) that she has successfully erased through self-starvation in a process of disembodiment to eventually become “starved and curveless. / I am skin and bone. / She has learned her lesson” (ll. 15-17).7 Fasting responds to an economy of sacrifice, in the hope that bodily change will bring about spiritual transfiguration. Thus, self-inflicted hunger is a struggle to release the body from all contexts, and especially from that of corporeality itself. The poem’s persona recreates such an exercise of religious atonement by depriving herself of food to discipline her sexual desire, as exemplified in her duality virgin/witch, a response to male cultural representations of creation myths: “Flesh is heretic. / My body is a witch. / I am burning it.” (ll. -3). This is true inasmuch as knowledge, subjectivity and sexuality originate in eating, as Genesis explains:8 “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat … And the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Gen. 2.6-7). If, as the narrative in Genesis implies, food is the route to knowledge and to sexual awareness, then anorexia implies a strategy of disembodiment, a replacement by virginity, an attempt to rise above the flesh and to overcome the temptation that the pair witch/bitch represents: “I vomited / her hungers. / Now the bitch is burning” (ll. 12-14). Thus, starvation provides this surrogate for Eve with a means for annulling sexuality, associated in the poem with Hell, Satan and the fall: “the fall / into forked dark, / into python needs / heaving to hips and breasts / and lips and heat / and sweat and fat and greed” (ll. 40-46). And yet, this denial –or “self denials” (l. 6), rather– entails the isolation and annihilation of the self, as the poem’s persona expresses: “My dreams probe / a claustrophobia / a sensuous enclosure” (ll. 20-23).
Venus bright/or Anorexia, who left/a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?” (cited by Longley 1994: 173). According to Fogarty (1994: 97-98), Muldoon’s mock goddess functions as an allegory of the futile actions of Irish republican prisoners on hunger strike. As a result, the visionary woman acquires generic significance, rather than being herself the centre of subjectivity. By contrast, Boland’s ‘I’ does not represent a male and universalising vision, but a female and self-critical voice. For further discussion see Wheatley (2001: 123-134) and Bell (1985). 7 As Ellmann suggests (1993: 11), the Irish have had a long tradition of starvation as a means of rebellion, from Medieval legal procedures of “fasting to distrain” – known as troscud – to modern Irish hunger strikers after the Easter Rising of 1916. For a discussion of eating disorders and female sexuality in Boland’s “Anorexic,” see also González Arias (1996: 10-12). 8 As Maud Ellmann argues, “it is through the act of eating that the ego establishes its own domain, distinguishing inside from outside. But it is also in this act that the frontiers of subjectivity are most precarious. Food, like language, is originally vested in the other, and traces of that otherness remain in every mouthful that one speaks – or chews. From the beginning one eats for the other, from the other, with the other; and for this reason eating comes to represent the prototype of all transactions with the other, and food the prototype of all objects of exchange” (1993: 53). 96 Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez
Ellmann (1993: 16) argues for the complicity between the themes of hunger, writing and imprisonment.9 Indeed, in this poem, incarceration could be read as a deadly wish to adapt to man’s image, to Adam’s “rib” (l. 18), a dreadful and purifying journey that terminates with the annihilation of the persona’s subjectivity: “I will slip / back into him again / as if I have never been away. / Caged so, / I will grow/angular and holy / past pain / keeping his heart / such company / as will make me forget / in a small space / the fall” (ll. 30-41). By using anorexia both as a real illness and as a metaphor for culture, Boland probes its relationship with iconic foundational myths in the construction of female subjectivity, whose prevalence can produce “tragic states of distorted identity in individual women” (Allen-Randolph 1993a: 13). Similarly, the poetic persona in “In His Own Image” reflects on her miserable status as dutiful wife, tired and overworked in any town’s suburb where “the bacon flitch,” “the cups deep on the shelf,” and the “kettle’s paunch” become the “meagre proofs” of her existence (1995a: 57). Not only is she bullied by her companion, but also ironically moulded according to his own image by renouncing her subjectivity and adopting his own: “Now I see / that all I needed / was a hand / to mould my mouth / to scald my cheek, / was this / concussion / by whose lights I find / my self-possession, / where I grow complete.” (1995a: 58). A tragic revision of the creational myth in Genesis presents the sculptor’s hands unmaking the female face in physical and psychological abuse: “He splits my lip with his fist, / shadows my eye with a blow, / knuckles my neck to its proper angle. / What a perfectionist! / His are a sculptor’s hands: / they summon / form from the void, / they bring / me to myself again. / I am a new woman.” (1995a: 58). If “Anorexic” and “In His Own Image” explore the limits of female corporeity in different ways, “Menses” addresses the very centre of it. Traditionally, female periods appear associated with a concept of pollution, thus reinforcing women’s symbolic devaluation and their connection with nature, with the biblical curse on women after the Fall, as the poem’s persona suggests: “To be the mere pollution of her wake! / a water cauled by her light, / a sick haul, / a fallen self” (1995a: 63). It is precisely this determinist connection with nature that the persona loathes (“I am the moon’s looking glass. / My days are moon-dials. / She will never be done with me.”), the compulsion to motherhood, to a victimised version of femininity which traditional sexuality implies that she regrets: “As when I’ve grown / round and obscene with child, / or when I moan / for him between the sheets” (1995a: 65). However, the poetic representation of the feminine and of its bodily functions as the traditionally repudiated and excluded constitutes, as Butler suggests (1990: 27), the possibility of a critique and disruption of the male hegemonic conceptual scheme.
9 In her perceptive approach to this topic, Ellmann illustrates her argument by analysing several examples of the fasting artist, from Emily Dickinson to Richardson, Rimbaud, Kafka and W.B. Yeats. Particularly illuminating is her reading of the latter’s The King’s Threshold, where the artist –conceived of as a surrogate for the community –starves to perfect the work of art. In this sense, the artist’s flesh is transfigured into words, as required by this art of disembodiment. Furthermore, Ellmann reads both Yeats’s The King’s Threshold and Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” as a parable for the crisis of high art in bourgeois culture, where artistic autonomy is represented as autophagy. Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image 97
The poem “In Her Own Image,” which is also used as the title of the whole volume, is a defiant, shocking and troublesome example of the complexities of female subjectivity. The parental relationship with a female child and the question of her expected education in the adult world inevitably brings to mind W. B. Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter”, included in his volume Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and republished in his Collected Poems (1982). This poem, written for his only daughter Ann, has become a complex statement about patriarchy insofar as it rests on a set of pre-established, masculine standards that intervene in the construction of female subjectivity. As a father, the persona justifies his daughter’s need of protection from the outside world, metaphorically alluded to by means of the rough storm howling outside his tower, in itself an image which suggests a phallocentric vision: “Once more the storm is howling, and half hid / Under this cradle-hood and coverlid / My child sleeps on” (Yeats 1982: 211). The prevalence of the patriarchal, hegemonic conceptual scheme can be deduced from the alleged virtues that the persona wishes for his daughter in body and mind. Following the premises of an idealised femininity, the poetic voice wishes for beauty, “beauty and yet not / Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught / Or hers before a looking-glass” (Yeats 1982: 212), which actually works as a denial of female sexual desire, identified in a negative sense with mythic icons such as Helen of Troy and Aphrodite, while also signalling vanity as a natural feature of the female. Psychologically speaking, the actual absence of a complex, opinionated mind becomes a real virtue: “An intellectual hatred is the worst, / So let her think opinions are accursed” (Yeats 1982: 213). The idea of daughters and motherhood has opened up a wide range of philosophical enquiry in feminist criticism, as well as a landscape of intimacy and bold subversion in recent women’s poetry. The overt violence underlying “In Her Own Image” targets at dismantling traditional visions of motherhood as understood by means of patriarchal conceptual schemes, thus offering a “territory in which to explore unresolved relationship between inner and outer violences” (Allen-Randolph 1993a: 10) as encouraged by inherited images and identities. The poem draws on the motherhood metaphor to address the complex and ambivalent relationship between the writer and her own creation, here a daughter strangled at her mother’s own hands, which suggests the “speaker’s estrangement from her own poem” (Kelly 1993: 47). As in “Anorexic,” the poem explores the theme of female incarceration and entrapment in the passivity of the persona’s assigned role as shown in the “ring on my wedding finger” (1995a: 56), in the ineffective female iconicity of an inherited tradition with which the persona cannot identify herself, nor wishes to perpetuate any longer: “She is not myself / anymore she is not / even in my sky / anymore and I / am not myself.” (1995a: 57). Such a lack of identification with a particular image brings about, as Kelly (1993: 47) has noticed, a crisis leading to a ritual burial of the persona’s creation or daughter: “I will not disfigure / Her pretty face. / Let her wear amethyst thumbprints, / a family heirloom, / a sort of burial necklace” (Boland 1995a: 57). Furthermore, some of the imagery employed in Boland’s poem recalls once more “A Prayer for My Daughter”: Yeats’s metaphoric wish for his child to become “a flourishing hidden tree” and live like “some green laurel / Rooted in one dear perpetual place” is ironically realised in Boland’s burial of passive female iconicity: “and I know 98 Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez just the place: / Where the wall glooms, / where the lettuce seeds, / where the jasmine springs” (1995a: 57).10 The motherhood metaphor to refer to the issues of inheritance, creativity and gender has been consistently used by Boland in both her poems and her non-fiction. Her essay “Daughters of a Colony” (1997) argues how “being a woman in Ireland touches on a strange adventure of powerlessness” (1997: 10) while drawing on the mother-daughter relationship –both real and imaginary– to illustrate her argument. In this particular sense, and as Kristeva (1984: 72) would have it, Boland’s In Her Own Image exploits poetry’s potential to fracture and multiply univocal designation in order to serve as a perpetual source of subversion within the very terms of culture itself. The volume could be placed in what Boland called the “borders of myth and history” (1995b: 172), the liminal zone where personal circumstance transmutes into collective experience and is thus invested with symbolic significance. For women poets, such a progression becomes especially pertinent, for it paves the way for the construction of female subjectivity when traditional and subservient male icons are eventually overcome:
If I call it Cathleen Ní Houlihan or Dark Rosaleen, I am only giving it disreputable names from another time. But the fusion of the national and the feminine –the old corrupt and corrupting transaction between Irish nationalism and the Irish poem– continues to leave its mark. It is this which the poems of women and by women have disrupted; it is this which their poems have subverted. Irish women poets can therefore be seen as the scripted, subservient emblems of an old image file come to life. In a real sense, the Irish woman poet now is an actual trope who has walked inconveniently out of the text of an ambitious and pervasive national tradition, which found its way into far too much Irish poetry. Her relation to the poetic tradition is defined by the fact that she was once a passive and controlled image within it: her disruption of that control in turn redefines the connection between the Irish poem and the national tradition. (Boland 2001: 101).
This is the scenario which Boland sees as a properly poetic realm, which signals the existing gap between what she terms “history” –“the official version: the expressive interpretation” of events– and the “past,” the “unofficial” version where most officially unimportant women’s lives appear inscribed (1997: 12), the “culture and experience of women in a country like Ireland – with all their historical silence” (1997: 13). As the volume illustrates, the search for a past comes along with an exercise of construction
10 In a famous essay entitled “Professions for Women” (1931), Virginia Woolf had actually employed similar imagery to express her rejection of inherited female stereotypes, which she named –after Coventry Patmore’s famous celebration of Victorian femininity– the “Angel in the House,” a major obstacle in Woolf’s determination to become a writer: “She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily …she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others … her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty … and when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words” (Woolf 1993: 102). Woolf’s first stage towards her own voice in writing inevitably brings about killing such stereotypes in an act of rebellious self-defence for, as she argues, “had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing” (Woolf 1993: 103). Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image 99 and, in the case of women, of reconstruction, in an attempt to create an independent female subject, which necessarily requires a subversion of previously established icons. In Her Own Image exemplifies what Boland would later call a “generous restructuring of context” (2001: 105), namely to reject objectified female imagery in order to become a subject, a speaking voice partaking of female suffering, of the sexual and psychological wounds inflicted on women throughout history. Boland’s poems challenge male hegemonic conceptual schemes, myths, the female iconic through an emerging authoritative voice, while also questioning traditional poetic rhythms, probing what Boland called the “anti-lyric,” raising questions that pertain to “voice and the self … the unwritten, the act of power” (Allen-Randolph 1993b: 122). The voice of these poems comes from a female persona whose image has been brutally distorted: even so, through the process of regaining consciousness the devalued self brings herself out of myth by the empowering act of telling her story, of regaining authority over her body image.
Works Cited
Allen-Randolph, Jody 1993a: “Private Worlds, Public Realities: Eavan Boland’s Poetry 1967 – 1990.” Irish University Review 23.1: 5-22. 1993b: “In Interview with Eavan Boland.” Irish University Review 23.1: 117-130. Anderson, Benedict 1993: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bell, Rudolph 1985: Holy Anorexia. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. Boland, Eavan 1980: In Her Own Image. Dublin: Arlen House. ——— 1995a: Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet Press. ——— 1995b: Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: Norton. ——— 1995c: “Writing the Political Poem in Ireland.” The Southern Review 31.3: 485-498. ——— 1997: “Daughters of Colony: A Personal Interpretation of the Place of Gender Issues in the Postcolonial Interpretation of Irish Literature.” Éire – Ireland 32.2-3:9-20. 2001: “The Irish Woman Poet: Her Place in Literature.” My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art. Ed. Patricia Haberstroh. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse UP. 93- 107. Butler, Judith 1990: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Ellmann, Maud 1993: The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment. London: Virago. Fogarty, Anne 1994: “‘A Noise of Myth’: Speaking (as) Woman in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory. 17.1: 92-102. Foucault, Michel 1972: “The Eye of Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. 146-165. González Arias, Luz Mar 1996: “‘Foodless, Curveless, Sinless’: Reading the Female Body in Eavan Boland’s ‘Anorexic’.” Outskirts 2: 10-12. 2000: Otra Irlanda: La estética postnacionalista de poetas y artistas irlandesas contemporáneas. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad. Haberstroh, Patricia, ed. 2001: My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse UP. Innes, C.L. 1993: Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society: 1880–1935. Athens: U of Georgia P. 100 Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez
Kearney, Richard 1997: Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture and Philosophy. London: Routledge. Kelly, Sylvia 1993: “The Silent Cage and Female Creativity in In Her Own Image.” Irish University Review 23.1: 45-56. Kristeva, Julia 1984: Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. 1986: “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP. 292-300. Lefebvre, Henri 1991: The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson. Oxford: Blackwells. Longley, Edna 1994: The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. Meehan, Paula 1997 (1994): Pillow Talk. Meath: The Gallery Press. Wheatley, David 2001: “The Aistriúchán Cloak: Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language.” New Hibernia Review 5.4: 123-134. Woolf, Virginia 1993: The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Vol. 2 of The Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Yeats, William Butler (1921) Michael Roberts and the Dancer. Dublin: Cuala Press. ——— 1982: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan. Yuval-Davies, Nira 1997: Gender & Nation. London: Sage Publications.
ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 101–113 ISSN 0210-6124
Nilda de Nicholasa Mohr. El Bildungsroman y la aparición de un espacio puertorriqueño en la literatura de los EEUU
Nilda, by Nicolasa Mohr. The Bildungsroman and the Creation of a Puerto Rican Space in the Literature of the USA
Pilar Bellver Sáez University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA [email protected]
In his classic study The Way of the World Franco Moretti argues that the characteristic journey from youth to maturity that the Bildungsroman narrates amounts to a symbolic representation of the integration of the bourgeoisie self into modernity. According to Moretti, this genre becomes obsolete by the end of the First World War, when the loss of faith in the civilizing ideals of modernity make it impossible to represent integration into a coherent social whole. However, many critics argue that the genre is being revitalized by writers who stand in the margins of modern society due to their gender, race or class. Nilda, by, Nicolasa Mohr, illustrates the transformations the Bildungsroman undergoes in the hands of the US born-and-raised Puerto Rican writer of the second half of the 20th century. In Nilda the education of the heroine does not symbolize the poor immigrant’s successful acceptance and integration into mainstream culture. On the contrary, the awakening of the self serves as a metaphor for the appearance of a distinctive Puerto Rican space within the American literary experience, a complex space from which Mohr reaffirms her heritage while at the same time she critically examines pervading patriarchal roles within Puerto Rican culture.
Key words: Bildungsroman, Latino literature, Puerto Rican literature, Puerto Rican women writers, feminist literature, US ethnic writers, twentieth-century novel
En The Way of the World Franco Moretti considera que el Bildungsroman es el género paradigmático de la modernidad, entendida como la consolidación europea del modelo capitalista burgués y la transformación de las sociedades tradicionales bajo el empuje de los ideales ilustrados de razón, progreso y bienestar social. La experiencia de aprendizaje que se retrata en este tipo de novelas representaría, por lo tanto, la paulatina interiorización y legitimación de los valores propios de un nuevo orden social burgués (Moretti 1987: 16). Si aceptamos que el Bildungsroman es un género que simboliza el paso de las sociedades tradicionales a las modernas, es lógico pensar que el género seguirá dando expresión artística a las vivencias de aquellos colectivos que no han completado esta transición histórica a la modernidad por razón de su sexo, clase u 102 Pilar Bellver Sáez origen nacional. Desde una perspectiva feminista las editoras de The Voyage In. Fictions of Female Development consideran que el Bildungsroman es el género idóneo para dar expresión a la experiencia de marginación y progresiva emancipación vivida por la mujer a lo largo del siglo XX (Abel, Hirsh y Langland 1983: 13). Bonnie Hoover Braendlin, en referencia a las literaturas étnicas norteamericanas, habla no sólo de una reevaluación sino también de una transvaluación del género, es decir, de una modificación de sus características temáticas y formales tradicionales que se da al entrar en contacto con nuevas realidades culturales (1983: 75). Nilda: A Novel (1973) de Nicholasa Mohr ejemplifica mejor que ninguna otra obra de su época las transformaciones por las que atraviesa el Bildungsroman en manos del escritor norteamericano de origen puertorriqueño en la segunda mitad del siglo XX. La novela se sitúa de pleno en el llamado tercer periodo de la literatura puertorriqueña escrita en los EEUU, periodo en el que el Bildungsroman se convierte en testimonio imaginativo de las masivas migraciones de puertorriqueños a los EEUU desde finales de los años 40 como consecuencia de la desigual modernización de la isla (Muñiz 1999: 83). Escrita dos décadas antes que el clásico When I Was Puertorican (1993), de Esmeralda Santiago, o que otros conocidos Bildungs latinos, como The House on Mango Street (1989) de la chicana Sandra Cisneros, Nilda es además el primer Bildungsroman norteamericano que relata la experiencia de un colectivo hispano en los EEUU desde la mirada de una protagonista femenina. En Nilda el conflicto tradición-modernidad que caracteriza al Bildungs clásico se reformula como una disyuntiva entre el apego a las tradiciones culturales de origen y la integración en el todo cultural y social estadounidense. Sin embargo, en la novela de Mohr la experiencia de formación de la protagonista no va a culminar con la interiorización y legitimación de los valores que el nuevo orden angloamericano representa, tal y como preconizaban las teorías sociales asimilacionistas que se popularizan en el imaginario cultural estadounidense desde la II Guerra Mundial.1 La paulatina toma de conciencia de la protagonista tampoco se describe como la afirmación de una diferencia cultural que pasa por buscar las raíces culturales del emigrante hispano en su país de origen, a la manera de los movimientos políticos y culturales de los años 70. Más bien, el proceso de aprendizaje de la joven Nilda culmina con la aparición de un tercer espacio socio-cultural heterogéneo que no se identifica plenamente ni con el pasado isleño de sus padres ni con el presente cultural angloamericano, pero que muestra características de ambos. Desde esta perspectiva, el Bildungsroman de la protagonista no simboliza tan sólo un momento de transición entre dos culturas sino que plantea la utopía de un cambio más amplio. El final abierto que caracteriza esta obra sugiere que es la sociedad la que debe cambiar para poder
1 El concepto de asimilación o aculturación surge en la sociología norteamericana de los años 30. En términos generales se entiende por asimilación la pérdida gradual de la identidad cultural de origen y la adopción de los valores y el comportamiento cultural de la sociedad receptora. Dentro de este modelo se considera que esta pérdida cultural es un paso previo y necesario para la integración en la estructura política y económica del país receptor. María de los Ángeles Torres (1998: 169-74) considera que el mito asimilacionista cobra fuerzas durante la II Guerra Mundial, cuando se fuerza a los inmigrantes europeos a tomar partido por una sola cultura y luchar en nombre de América. Nilda, by Nicolasa Mohr 103 acomodar este nuevo tipo de identidad híbrida que la joven protagonista de la novela representa. Nilda es en apariencia un Bildungsroman tradicional. En la definición clásica del género se establece que el Bildungsroman es la crónica de un viaje individual a la madurez, entendida como la toma de conciencia progresiva sobre el papel que el individuo debe desempeñar en la sociedad.2 A partir de esta definición, la crítica ha ido estableciendo una serie de ingredientes narrativos básicos para el género, entre los que destacan: el protagonismo único del personaje, la presencia de elementos autobiográficos, la existencia de un conflicto generacional y el consecuente abandono del hogar, el enfrentamiento al sistema educativo, el paso por una serie de ritos de iniciación y de pruebas amorosas, y el retorno del héroe al hogar como un ser transformado por sus experiencias (Buckley 1974: 17-18). En Nilda se encuentran muchos de los ingredientes de este Bildungs clásico. En esencia, la novela es la crónica de un proceso individual de maduración. La protagonista es una niña puertorriqueña que emigró con su familia a los EEUU al poco tiempo de nacer. La narración abarca desde julio de 1941 hasta mayo de 1945 y cubre las experiencias vividas por la protagonista desde los once a los catorce años. El centro dramático de la narración lo constituye el mundo interior de la protagonista y los pequeños cambios en su psicología que van marcando su paulatino descubrimiento del mundo y de su identidad. Como en el Kunstleroman, una de las más populares variaciones de este género, la heroína de esta novela tiene una fuerte vocación artística. Nilda tiene talento para la pintura y deja constancia de sus impresiones del mundo y de la gente que la rodea en dibujos y recortables que guarda cuidadosamente en una caja debajo de la cama. El arte se convierte así en un instrumento esencial en el camino del (auto)conocimiento. A su vez, la vocación artística de la protagonista establece un vínculo autobiográfico con la escritora. Mohr es una reconocida artista gráfica y fue ella misma quien realizó las interesantes ilustraciones que acompañaron la primera edición del texto. Pese a que en Nilda se dan muchos de los ingredientes característicos del Bildungsroman clásico, también se reformula una de sus características más importantes. Nilda representa un cuestionamiento de la ideología individualista y burguesa que marca desde sus orígenes al género. Frente al interiorismo psicológico del Bildungs clásico, en Nilda la crónica de lo individual da pie a la denuncia de una situación colectiva de discriminación racista y sexual. Así, en el primer capítulo de la novela se establece la perspectiva ideológica que va a dominar el relato. Desde las primeras páginas de la obra, Nilda se presenta como miembro de un colectivo étnico oprimido. La novela comienza una calurosa tarde de verano en la que Nilda se entretiene dibujando con un pedazo de tiza en el suelo de la calle. Esta escena de calma e inocente juego infantil se interrumpe cuando Jacinto, el
2 Se acepta como definición clásica del término la dada por Wilhelm Dilthey en 1906, cuando en referencia al Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre (1795) de Goethe y al Hesperus (1795) de Jean Paul afirma: “ ... they all portray a young man of their time: how he enters life in a happy state of naiveté seeking kindred souls, finds friendship and love, how he comes into conflict with the hard realities of the world, how he grows to maturity through diverse life-experiences, finds himself, and attains certainty about his purpose in the world” (Mahoney 1991: 98). 104 Pilar Bellver Sáez dueño de la bodega, abre la boca de riego para que la gente se refresque con el agua y provoca con ello la ira de la policía: “ ‘Shit. God damn you bastards, coming here making trouble… The whole God damned bunch of you spicks’” (Mohr 1973: 5-6). Esta primera escena de desafío a la autoridad y de violencia verbal marca el tono de una obra en la que el crecimiento de la protagonista se va a representar como una serie de enfrentamientos y choques con una sociedad hostil. Los obstáculos que se interponen en el camino de la formación de Nilda tienen un claro origen racista y provienen de un mundo 'exterior' angloamericano en el que se considera al puertorriqueño miembro de una raza inferior. Tal y como se revela en las palabras finales del capítulo, Nilda no va a ser el relato de la aculturación de un yo emigrante hispano sino la crónica de los obstáculos sociales que se interponen en su crecimiento y desarrollo: “She walked home, trying to step on the areas where the pavement was wet. Nilda started thinking of camp and what it might be like with all kinds of trees and grass and maybe a lake ... She tried to guess what it might be ahead for her, maybe something better. These thoughts helped erase the image of the white policeman who loomed larger and more powerful than all the other people in her life” (Mohr 1973: 7). El cuestionamiento de la ideología burguesa e individualista del Bildungs clásico se manifiesta asimismo en el protagonismo que cobra la comunidad puertorriqueña en el texto. Esta novela no es solamente el relato de una adolescencia sino también un retrato de la comunidad puertorriqueña que la rodea. La crítica norteamericana Ellen McCraken habla del modo en que el concepto de 'otro' se utiliza en los textos latinos como un significante flotante, es decir, como una marca textual sin contenido preciso que sirve para identificar diversas experiencias de marginalidad (McCraken 1990: 203). En otras obras de Mohr esta ausencia de protagonista es fácil de constatar. Textos como In Nueva York (1977) o Rituals of Survival: A Woman's Portfolio (1985) se estructuran como una serie de viñetas e historias que se centran en personajes diferentes y que, en conjunto, nos ofrecen un retrato complejo de la diversidad de personalidades y tipos sociales que se dan cita en los barrios puertorriqueños de Nueva York. Nilda, por el contrario, es una novela de claro protagonismo individual. Y sin embargo, los personajes secundarios que rodean a la niña son esenciales para comprender las circunstancias de su educación, ya que cada uno de ellos representa respuestas diferentes a la situación de marginación social y económica en la que vive el puertorriqueño en El Barrio. En este sentido la familia de la protagonista se convierte en un verdadero microcosmos de la sociedad inmigrante puertorriqueña del momento. Los hermanos, por ejemplo, encarnan diferentes salidas a la pobreza y a la marginación social que acechan el futuro del joven en este tipo de barrios. Jimmy, el hermano mayor, es heroinómano y traficante de drogas y nos recuerda al héroe trágico y rebelde del Bildungs masculino de esta tradición3; Víctor es trabajador y diligente, cree
3 El Bildungsroman masculino de estos mismos años tiende a relatar una experiencia de crecimiento urbana, marcada por la violencia y por un fuerte sentimiento de alienación que nace del contacto del inmigrante con la urbe moderna y del choque entre las tradiciones culturales de la isla y la cultura angloamericana dominante en el continente. Obras como Down These Mean Streets (1967) de Piri Thomas o Carlito's Way (1975) de Edwin Torres nos presentan al emigrante Nilda, by Nicolasa Mohr 105 vehementemente en el sueño americano y acaba casándose con una muchacha blanca y mudándose a un barrio acomodado; Paul y Frankie, los hermanos menores, dejan la escuela a una temprana edad y se enrolan en el ejército norteamericano. Los padres también representan tipos reconocibles de la sociedad puertorriqueña del momento. Emilio, el padrastro, es un refugiado comunista de la Guerra Civil española, un firme creyente en la necesidad de actuar colectivamente frente a la injusticia que nunca llega a realizar sus sueños y que muere enfermo y empobrecido. Lydia, la madre, representa a la mujer tradicional, una mujer resignada a su destino que ha sacrificado sus más íntimos deseos personales al cuidado de la familia y los hijos. El padrastro y la madre son los únicos personajes que aleccionan a Nilda sobre las dificultades y las opciones que le presenta la vida, y también los únicos que interrumpen el fluir narrativo y el ágil diálogo del texto con monólogos de cierta longitud. La madre y el padrastro cumplen de este modo la función de mentor del Bildungsroman tradicional y se convierten en las figuras que influyen positivamente en las acciones del héroe. Es necesario observar que en la novela de formación tradicional es poco habitual que sean los padres los que cumplan este papel de guía. En general, en este tipo de textos lo que impulsa al héroe a la búsqueda de nuevas opciones personales es un desacuerdo de tipo generacional. Sin embargo, en Nilda son los padres los que inculcan a la niña un fuerte sentido de independencia y es la familia, en general, la que provee el estímulo emocional y moral necesario que hace posible el desarrollo de la protagonista. En concreto, la madre es quien verbaliza en el texto un mensaje antipatriarcal. El resto de los personajes femeninos se muestran más bien como modelos negativos de comportamiento. Por ejemplo, Petra, su mejor amiga, se queda embarazada muy joven y se ve obligada a casarse y abandonar la escuela. La tía Delia vive obsesionada por la violencia callejera y se encierra en su casa y en un mundo de locura personal. La madre es precisamente quien hace comprender a Nilda el peligro de guiarse por estos modelos de conducta. Sus constantes arengas a la hija tienen invariablemente como tema la necesidad de evitar los errores que ella cometió, de superarse intelectualmente y de escapar al futuro de mujer que se le ofrece. Como en otros Bildungsroman de la tradición femenina, la oposición madre/hija culmina narrativamente con la muerte de la madre hacia el final de la obra. Esta muerte representa un paso necesario en el proceso de aprendizaje del personaje y anuncia la consolidación textual de una nueva perspectiva de la feminidad. Así la madre habla por última vez con Nilda en el hospital. En esos momentos Nilda es incapaz de comprender el mensaje que la madre trata de transmitirle, pero sus palabras finales van a quedar por siempre impresas en su mente. Margarita Fernández Olmos considera que este discurso final constituye “el mensaje fundamental de Mohr a las jóvenes lectoras del texto” ( 1989-1990: 119):
“Do you have that feeling, honey? That you have something all yours ... you must ... like when I see you drawing sometimes, I know you have something all yours. Keep it ... hold on, guard it. Never give it to nobody ... not your lover, not your kids... it don't belong to
puertorriqueño como un héroe callejero que busca desesperadamente una salida al embrutecimiento al que se siente condenado por la sociedad. 106 Pilar Bellver Sáez
them ... and ... they have no right ... no right to take it. We are all born alone ... and we die alone. And when I die, Nilda, I know I take nothing with me that is only mine.” Nilda began to cry again, this time quietly. After a bit, she said. "Mama, I don't understand you.” (Mohr 1973: 277)
Si la madre verbaliza el mensaje feminista del texto, el padrastro, Emilio, es quien educa políticamente a Nilda. En las horas tranquilas de la siesta, Emilio le habla con nostalgia de su infancia en una pequeña aldea del norte de España, le relata los horrores de la Guerra Civil y le advierte sobre los peligros del fascismo. Su acérrimo anticlericalismo contrasta con la profunda religiosidad de la madre, quien a lo largo de la obra va buscando alivio a sus problemas tanto en las enseñanzas de la Iglesia como en las interpretaciones de curanderas y espiritistas sobre el más allá. En esta obra la figura paterna es la que hace comprender a la protagonista la dimensión política de los comportamientos sociales que la rodean. Así, poco antes de morir, el padrastro le alerta: “ ‘Nilda, when I die, don't go around weeping no stupid tears for me. Tell your mama not to give them damn priests no money to bury me. Don't be a sucketta! Be smart, Nilda. Go to school; learn something important, no fairy tales. They mustn't take your mind and use you. Your mama, she is too far gone with that crap. But you, Nilda.... ‘” (Mohr 1973: 205). Al térrmino de la novela, Nilda ha asimilado el mensaje de sus mentores, quienes mueren simbólicamente para anunciar el nacimiento de una nueva subjetividad. Paradójicamente, el rechazo final de la joven a los roles sociales que la madre y el padrastro representan es, tal y como explica Ismael Muñiz, una manera de reunirse con ellos, una manera de asimilar su mensaje sin por ello renunciar a la propia individualidad (Muñiz 1999: 92). Es más, aunque Nilda es la protagonista de la novela, los personajes que la rodean son los que ofrecen el afecto, la seguridad y la guía moral necesarias para su maduración. Este protagonismo compartido no solamente esconde una crítica al individualismo que caracteriza la experiencia del héroe en el Bildungsroman tradicional. El protagonismo de la familia de la heroína representa además una crítica al estereotipo de la familia emigrante puertorriqueña como una entidad desintegrada y básicamente incapaz de velar por la salud moral y espiritual de sus miembros. Esta crítica se extiende a la visión que muchos norteamericanos tienen de la familia hispana en general. Mohr ataca directamente la idea de que el peso de la familia en las sociedades hispanas coarta la independencia del individuo e inhibe su desarrollo. Lo que va a obstaculizar el desarrollo de Nilda en esta novela no es la familia, sino el racismo y la discriminación a la que se ve doblemente sometida como mujer y como miembro de un colectivo marginal. Es por ello que el Bildungs de la protagonista da pie a una importante reflexión sobre el modo en que las fuerzas sociales determinan las vivencias del individuo. El comentario social de la autora recae sobre todo en el papel que juegan las instituciones públicas en la perpetuación de situaciones de marginación. En teoría, estas instituciones son las que brindan al inmigrante la ayuda económica e intelectual necesaria en su camino hacia la prosperidad y la asimilación. Por el contrario, en esta novela, tanto la escuela como las oficinas de asistencia pública se distinguen por su carácter represivo, por su falta de sensibilidad hacia las necesidades de estos colectivos empobrecidos, y por su ceguera cultural. Nilda, by Nicolasa Mohr 107
En Nilda se dedican dos capítulos completos a la descripción de las escuelas de El Barrio. La escuela se muestra como una institución que, lejos de estimular el crecimiento intelectual y la confianza del individuo en sí mismo, inculca en los niños puertorriqueños un sentimiento de inferioridad. Miss Langhorn, la profesora de la escuela elemental, transforma las lecciones en arengas patrióticas sobre la necesidad de superar los orígenes culturales y de convertirse en buenos americanos. Para ello, no duda en golpear las manos y los nudillos de sus estudiantes cada vez que les escucha hablar en español. Una vez en la escuela superior, Miss Maureen Reilly, la profesora de idiomas, se afana por hacerse entender en un español defectuoso, hablado además con un acento peninsular que tiene muy poco que ver con la realidad cultural de los estudiantes a quienes enseña: “ ‘I must go back to Spain and just listen to the way they speak. There they speak Castilian, the real Spanish, and I am determined, girls, that this is what we shall learn and speak in my class; nothing but the best! None of that dialect spoken here. If only you could hear yourselves chat chat chat! Like a bunch of Chinamen!’”(Mohr 1973: 214). Por su parte, el episodio que tiene lugar en las oficinas de la asistencia pública marca un hito en la evolución psicológica de la protagonista. En este capítulo Nilda acompaña a su madre a solicitar ayuda financiera del estado. Las necesidades económicas de la familia han aumentado. El padrastro ha sufrido un ataque al corazón que le impide volver a trabajar y Sophie, la novia de su hermano mayor, se ha mudado a vivir con ellos porque su madre la expulsa de casa cuando descubre que está embarazada. Cuando les llega finalmente el turno, Nilda y su madre pasan a la oficina de la asistente social, quien comienza a hacer preguntas a la madre en un tono seco y agresivo hasta que interrumpe el diálogo bruscamente porque algo llama su atención: “‘Let me see your hands! Wake up, young lady, let me see your hands!’ Startled, Nilda saw that Miss Heinz was speaking to her. Extending her arms and spreading out her fingers, she showed the woman her palms …. ‘Why don't you clean your nails, young lady?’ Nilda kept silent. ‘How often do you bathe?’ Still silent, Nilda looked at her mother. She wanted to tell her to make the woman stop, but she saw her mother was not looking her way; instead she was staring straight ahead” (Mohr 1973: 68). El mundo protector y seguro que representa la familia para Nilda se resquebraja en ese momento. La madre ha mentido a algunas de las preguntas de la asistente por temor a que le negaran el dinero y, a los ojos de la niña, ha sido además incapaz de defenderla de las agresiones de una extraña. No obstante, esta escena no concluye con una nota de derrota o amargura. Nilda no se nos muestra tan sólo como una víctima inocente e impotente del sistema sino que sabe responder a estas agresiones externas con las armas a su disposición. En concreto, Nilda pone su imaginación al servicio de la venganza. Durante el tiempo que ha durado la entrevista, Nilda ha ido dibujando mentalmente a Miss Heinz como un monigote hecho de papel de celofán. La reacción a las humillaciones a las que la asistente social las ha sometido a ambas llega al final del capítulo, cuando Nilda se imagina a sí misma pinchando el monigote con una lima de uñas y haciendo desaparecer de este modo al sujeto de la agresión: “Oh how I hate her ... I would like to stick her with this stupid nail file. Then she would begin to die. No blood would come out because she hasn't any. But just like that ... poof! She would begin to empty out into a large mess of cellophane. Everybody in that big office would 108 Pilar Bellver Sáez be looking for her ... Poor Miss Heinz. First her eyebrows disappeared, just like that! And now she's all gone. Disappeared, just like that!” (Mohr 1973: 71). La tensión temática entre el mundo familiar e íntimo de la protagonista y las fuerzas sociales externas que se representan en estos episodios se manifiesta también a otros niveles en el texto. En primer lugar, la tensión yo/sociedad que caracteriza al Bildungsroman tradicional hace que la obra se desarrolle temporalmente en dos planos. Uno es el plano de la conciencia individual y en él se va imprimiendo la historia personal y familiar de la protagonista. El otro es el plano de la realidad exterior y en él se ven representados los sucesos históricos que sirven de telón de fondo a la narración. Más concretamente, la historia de Nilda transcurre durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. La narración se salpica de alusiones a este conflicto bélico. Por ejemplo, se menciona que uno de los hermanos va al frente; asimismo, a lo largo de la narración se van describiendo diversos actos patrióticos relacionados con la guerra, como las rifas populares para recaudar fondos o la inmolación pública de caricaturas de los líderes fascistas. Pese a que la temática de la guerra figura prominentemente en la novela, el tiempo histórico en el que se enmarca el relato se supedita en todo momento al tiempo interior de la protagonista. De este modo, el tema bélico queda relegado a un segundo plano de interés. Este tratamiento del tema de la guerra guarda relación con la perspectiva marginal desde la que se retrata la vida de la protagonista. Para los muchachos jóvenes del barrio, la guerra y el ejército representan una salida a sus problemas y una posibilidad de integración en la sociedad angloamericana dominante. Desde la perspectiva infantil y femenina de la protagonista, la guerra es un eco lejano, un discurso político en el que la autora no profundiza porque no le ofrece a su protagonista perspectivas de autorrealización personal. Es más, las referencias a los grandes sucesos históricos se subordinan narrativamente a la descripción de pequeñas anécdotas cotidianas y de los pensamientos infantiles de la protagonista. En esta obra tienen más importancia las conversaciones callejeras de los niños que los discursos de los políticos en la plaza. A la gran narrativa histórica de la guerra se contrapone la intrahistoria del barrio, es decir, la historia hecha de personajes y sucesos de aparente insignificancia. Este énfasis en la pequeña historia no aleja la obra del modelo de Bildung tradicional. Por el contrario, el carácter épico que adquiere la cotidianidad ha sido descrito como una de la características más prominentes del género. Para Franco Moretti, el Bildungsroman es un tipo de novela que se caracteriza precisamente por glorificar y embellecer la cultura del día a día. Esta glorificación de lo diario convierte al hombre corriente en héroe de una aventura que se contiene dentro de los límites sociales establecidos (Moretti 1987: 35). Mas en Nilda no se pinta solamente un retrato positivo del mundo de lo cotidiano sino que además se plantea una importante crítica a aquello que por razones ideológicas queda fuera de sus límites. A través de las vivencias de la protagonista, en Nilda se sacan a la luz las experiencias cotidianas de uno de los grupos étnicos más marginados y menos conocidos de la historia de los EEUU. De este modo, el Bildungsroman, con su énfasis característico en el hombre medio y su reivindicación de la cotidianidad, se convierte en el género idóneo para la recuperación y reconstrucción de una identidad histórica marginal. Nilda, by Nicolasa Mohr 109
La tensión yo/mundo sobre la que se articula el Bildungs tradicional se expresa a su vez en esta novela como una dicotomía espacial. Pese a sus problemas, el barrio es el espacio con el que se identifica a la protagonista. Más allá de sus límites se encuentra la otra América, la América blanca y feliz que se ve en las películas, y que a Nilda le parece irreal hasta que sale por primera vez de casa y toma conciencia de su existencia: “The ride took them past many little houses, most painted white, some with picket fences surrounded by trees and grass … It reminded her of the movies. Like the Andy Hardy pictures, she almost said aloud. In those movies Mickey Rooney and his whole family were always so happy. They lived in a whole house all for themselves … Families and kids, problems that always had happy endings … It didn't seem real, yet here was the proof because people really lived in those little houses” (Mohr 1973: 9). Como en el Bildungsroman clásico, el viaje interior de la protagonista se manifiesta narrativamente como un desplazamiento geográfico. Nilda viaja sola en diversas ocasiones fuera del barrio. Cada una de sus incursiones en este mundo exterior marca un estadio formativo en la conciencia de la protagonista. No obstante, en este caso el viaje no la va acercando progresivamente hacia una utópica aculturación. Por el contrario, el proceso de maduración que marcan estos viajes se define como una toma de conciencia gradual sobre las diferencias que la separan de este mundo exterior. Por ejemplo, Nilda asiste en dos ocasiones diferentes a un campamento de verano. En la primera ocasión se trata de un campamento católico situado en el estado de Nueva York. El lugar es lúgubre, la comida pésima y el trato hostil. De hecho, la falta de condiciones higiénicas y los problemas estructurales en el edificio fuerzan a los organizadores a cerrar el campamento al segundo día de las vacaciones. La corta experiencia de Nilda en este lugar marca el primer contacto de la protagonista con el mundo exterior, un mundo que se le presenta como algo ajeno e intolerante: “Nilda sat at one of the tables and daydreamed that she was going home. She missed her familiar world of noise, heat, and crowds, and she missed her family most of all. All the nuns, priests, and brothers were very white and had blue or light brown eyes. Only among the children were there dark faces ... She wondered if Puerto Rican were ever allowed to be nuns, fathers, or brothers” (Mohr 1973: 16). Por el contrario, la segunda experiencia de Nilda en los campamentos públicos de verano es gratamente positiva. Este episodio, situado aproximadamente hacia la mitad de la obra, se destaca como uno de los momentos más importantes de la novela. En su primera noche, la narradora nos describe a una Nilda aprensiva y asustada; mas el trato afable de las monitoras, el sol y el ejercicio al aire libre pronto le hacen sentirse segura. La vida en el campamento no está exenta de conflictos suscitados por las diferencias sociales que separan a las niñas. Nilda entabla amistad justamente con las otras niñas del grupo que se ven socialmente diferenciadas: Stella, una muchacha griega de tono oscuro y Josie, una niña pobre del orfanato que miente sobre sus orígenes e inventa historias de un pasado familiar de lujo y de riqueza. Pero lo más importante de este capítulo son las diferencias que marcan el comportamiento de la protagonista y que permiten que el lector perciba un cambio significativo en su evolución psicológica. Nilda ya no es la niña asustada del primer campamento sino que ha aprendido a expresar y defender sus propias opiniones. Por ejemplo, cuando las niñas del campamento destrozan la vieja maleta de Josie y cubren su cama con letreros insultantes, Nilda es quien denuncia el incidente a las profesoras. O cuando Olga, una 110 Pilar Bellver Sáez niña española de la sección de las mayores, se acerca a hablar con Nilda y menosprecia sus costumbres y su forma de hablar el español, Nilda le responde con una nueva y estudiada indiferencia: “Nilda watched Olga turn away and disappear over the next mound of grass. Picking up a single green blade, she popped it into her mouth and began to chew. It had a bitter taste at first, then she got used to it and she chewed slowly, imitating some of the cows she had seen eating in the countryside...” (Mohr 1973: 157-58). Lo que motiva estos cambios de actitud en la protagonista es la primera toma de contacto con ese yo íntimo que su madre, antes de morir, le aconsejara guardar celosamente y cultivar. Este paso decisivo en el camino del autoconocimiento se describe en la novela como una epifanía. Uno de los primeros días en el campamento Nilda sale sola a pasear y descubre accidentalmente un pequeño claro en el bosque alejado del camino principal. Este lugar, cubierto de flores fragantes, se convierte en su jardín secreto, un espacio propio y privado al que acude cuando necesita pensar: “She took off her shoes and sneakers, and dug her feet into the earth like the roots of the shrubs. Shutting her eyes, Nilda sat there for a long time, eyes closed, feeling a sense of pure happiness; no one had given her anything, or spoken a word to her. The happiness was inside, a new feeling, and although it was intense, Nilda accepted it as part of a life that now belonged to her” (Mohr 1973: 155). En este espacio mágico y secreto Nilda se realiza por primera vez como individuo. El mundo interior y el exterior finalmente convergen en un mismo punto y la personalidad de la protagonista supera el conflicto entre la imagen afectuosa y positiva de sí misma que recibe en el hogar y la imagen negativa y estereotipada que le ofrecen algunos sectores de la sociedad. Como sus dibujos y sus recortables, el jardín representa además un canal de acceso a su creatividad. El jardín en este texto nos recuerda a la habitación propia de la que hablara la escritora británica Virginia Woolf a principios de siglo XX para explicar la necesidad de alcanzar independencia económica y mental para poder crear. El hecho de que en la novela este espacio propio se represente mediante la imagen de un jardín tiene además importantes connotaciones culturales. No en vano la tranquilidad y exuberancia del paraje traen a la memoria de la protagonista las historias que evoca su madre cuando les habla nostálgicamente de su Puerto Rico nativo: “Nilda remembered her mother's description of Puerto Rico's beautiful mountainous countryside covered with bright flowers and red flamboyant trees” (Mohr 1973: 153). Por un lado, en la imagen de este jardín idílico subyace una crítica a las contradicciones de la modernidad. Si en el Bildungsroman clásico el héroe generalmente abandona su vida en el campo para integrarse felizmente en la maquinaria social urbana, en este texto la salida de la protagonista al campo se interpreta como una liberación de las limitaciones que impone la vida en la gran ciudad. La estructura jerárquica de las urbes modernas, con sus barrios pobres, sus guetos de color y sus ricos vecindarios suburbiales, representa en este caso las injusticias de una modernidad que distribuye desigualmente sus riquezas y que obstaculiza las posibilidades de realización de jóvenes como la protagonista. En Nilda, al igual que ocurre en otros Bildungs puertorriqueños posteriores, la construcción de la identidad de la protagonista pasa por una crítica a las fuerzas históricas que moldean su destino como miembro de un colectivo oprimido. La presencia de este jardín en el texto subraya los efectos de una Nilda, by Nicolasa Mohr 111 experiencia de colonialismo que, tanto en la isla como en el continente, ha desplazado al puertorriqueño a los márgenes de la modernización. Por otro lado, el jardín evoca una imagen de paraíso natural frecuente en la literatura puertorriqueña y, sobre todo, en la literatura puertorriqueña continental. Barradas (1980) mantiene que, tanto en la isla como en el continente, el escritor puertorriqueño concibe la palabra poética como un instrumento de identificación y afirmación cultural ante la presión a la homogeneización que se impone desde la cultura angloamericana. En un primer momento de la literatura puertorriqueña continental, explica Barradas, el mito de Puerto Rico como paraíso perdido representa precisamente una forma de conectar y reivindicar esta identidad puertorriqueña. En la obra de autores más recientes como Sandra María Esteves o Tato Laviera, esta rememoración nostálgica se supera y la idea de retorno a la isla se concibe más bien como una evaluación crítica de los comportamientos culturales del puertorriqueño (Barradas 1980: 45-47). Nilda se inscribe en esta línea de crítica y revaluación poética de los elementos que conforman la identidad cultural del emigrante puertorriqueño. En concreto, la presencia de este jardín íntimo en la vida de Nilda representa una crítica a los comportamientos sociales machistas que prevalecen en la cultura insular. El descubrimiento del jardín secreto hace rememorar a la protagonista los paisajes del Puerto Rico natal que su solía describir su madre. Pero Nilda, a diferencia de su madre, es capaz de integrar estos recuerdos en un nuevo espacio en el que se siente por primera vez libre e independiente y desde el que puede asumir la figura y las enseñazas finales de la madre sin tener que aceptar por ello su mismo rol social. La nueva identidad de Nilda contrasta claramente con la imagen sumisa y sacrificada de la mujer puertorriqueña de la generación anterior; su recién conquistada libertad le permitirá viajar simbólicamente entre ambos mundos, y construirse de este modo una nueva identidad a su medida, una identidad que crece en los intersticios de ambas culturas. El jardín personal al que accede la protagonista al final del texto simboliza la aparición de un nuevo espacio socio-cultural que identifica la experiencia continental del puertorriqueño, y en particular de la mujer puertorriqueña, como algo diferente tanto de la cultura estadounidense que los margina como de la cultura puertorriqueña insular. Desde esta perspectiva, la novela de Mohr no sólo se anticipa dos décadas a la reivindicaciones feministas de las novelistas puertorriqueñas que escriben en inglés desde el continente. Este espacio plural que habita simbólicamente su protagonista remite también al concepto de frontera, a la búsqueda de un terreno discursivo desde el que poder abordar las peculiaridades de la identidad del emigrante de origen hispano en los EEUU. Desde que la escritora chicana Gloria Anzaldúa popularizara el uso de este término en su influyente Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), el concepto de frontera ha sido utilizado por estudiosos de diferentes disciplinas para representar el espacio fluido y ambiguo que habita el hispano en los EEUU, un espacio caracterizado por albergar múltiples identidades que no se fusionan en un todo armónico, sino que se encuentran en un “proceso continuado y a veces doloroso de confrontación” (Torres 1998: 177). En contraste con la visión de la cultura como algo homogéneo y enraizado en un espacio geográfico concreto, la noción de frontera se caracteriza por aceptar la ambigüedad y la indefinición geográfica como un elemento 112 Pilar Bellver Sáez esencial de la identidad, y por convertir de esta manera el desplazamiento y la ruptura en una zona fértil de experimentación poética. Es en este espacio ambiguo y fronterizo en el que Mohr hace culminar la experiencia de crecimiento de su protagonista. Al final, Nilda no propone una solución fácil a los conflictos planteados. La novela, que ya nace de una experiencia de emigración y ruptura social, acaba justamente con la desintegración final de la familia. Al morir los padres, Nilda queda al cuidado de una tía y debe abandonar el barrio para irse a vivir con su nueva familia a un barrio más acomodado en las afueras de la ciudad. Sin embargo, este final no augura la aceptación incondicional del modelo social que ha hecho tan amargo el crecimiento de la protagonista, ni tampoco le lleva a plantearse un regreso al pasado en busca de las claves de su identidad. Aunque la propia protagonista no sea plenamente consciente de ello, los lectores del texto saben que Nilda ha ido conquistando un espacio propio que la identifica como un nuevo tipo de mujer y de puertorriqueña. Es significativo a este respecto que, en la escena final de la novela, Nilda le enseñe ilusionada sus dibujos a una prima y que le hable en particular de aquellos que se refieren al campamento de verano, donde por primera vez Nilda tomó conciencia de su identidad. Es obvio que Nilda no es tan sólo la historia de un proceso de aprendizaje social sino también la crónica de un momento cultural específico: el vivido por los emigrantes puertorriqueños en los EEUU a partir de los años cuarenta, cuando comienza el proceso de modernización de Puerto Rico y miles de campesinos empobrecidos se ven obligados a emigrar del campo a la metrópolis. El característico abandono del hogar con el que comienza el Bildungs tradicional se representa en este caso como un forzoso emigrar que marca los orígenes culturales de la protagonista. De este modo, la crónica de adolescencia rebasa los límites de lo individual y se convierte en una crítica a las limitaciones del sueño americano, pero también en una reflexión sobre las dificultades que los que han crecido y se han formado fuera de la isla encuentran a la hora de identificarse con la cultura predominante hispana del Puerto Rico de primera mitad de siglo. La novela de Mohr no plantea la aculturación final de la protagonista ni tampoco convierte al personaje en un ser socialmente inadaptado. Nilda culmina con la madurez e independencia del personaje y la aparición de esta nueva subjetividad se hace coincidir con la creación de un tercer espacio socio-cultural heterogéneo que no se identifica plenamente ni con el pasado isleño de la protagonista ni con el presente cultural angloamericano, pero que muestra características de ambos. Dicho de otro modo, en el panorama literario norteamericano de los años setenta, Nilda debe ser leída como el prólogo a una nueva tradición literaria puertorriqueña y latina que proyecta su multiculturidad en el futuro cultural del continente americano.
Works Cited
Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch y Elizabeth Langland, eds. 1983: The Voyage In. Fictions of Female Development. Hanover: UP of New England for Dartmouth College. Barradas, Efraín 1980: “Puerto Rico acá, Puerto Rico allá.” Revista Chicano-Riquena 8.2: 43-49. Braendlin, Bonnie Hoover 1983: “Bildung in Ethnic Women Writers.” Denver Quarterly 17.4: 75- 87. Nilda, by Nicolasa Mohr 113
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton 1974: Season of Youth.The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard UP Fernández Olmos, Margarita 1989-90. “Growing Up Puertorriqueña: The Feminist Bildungsroman and the Novels of Nicholasa Mohr and Magali García Ramis.” Centro 2:7: 56- 73. Mahoney, Dennis F. 1991: “The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe’.” Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia: U of South Carolina P. 97-117. McCracken, Ellen 1990: “Latina Narrative and Politics of Signification: Articulation, Antagonism, and Populist Rupture.” Critica: A Journal of Critical Essays 2.2: 202-207. Mohr, Nicholasa 1973: Nilda. Nueva York York: Harper & Row. ——— 1977: In Nueva York. Nueva York: Dial Press. ——— 1985: Rituals of Survival. A Woman’s Portfolio. Houston: Arte Publico Press. ——— 1989: “Puerto Rican Writers in the U.S., Puerto Rican Writers in Puerto Rico: A Separation Beyond Language: Testimonio.” Breaking Boundaries. Latina Writing and Critical Reading. Ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado et al. Amherst: The U of Massachussets P. 111-116. Moretti, Franco 1987: The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso. Muñiz, Ismael 1999:Bildungsroman Written by Puerto Rican Women in the United States: Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda: A Novel, and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. Atenea 19.1-2: 79-101. Thomas, Piri 1967: Down These mean Streets. Nueva York: Knopf. Torres, Edwin 1975: Carlito’s Way. Nueva York: Saturday Review Press. Torres, María de los Angeles 1998:“Transnational Political and Cultural Identities: Crossing Theoretical Borders.” Borderless Borders. U.S Latinos, Latin Americans, and the Paradox of Interdependence. Ed. Frank Bonilla et al. Filadelfia: Temple UP. 169-181.
ATLANTIS 28.1 (June 2006): 115–129 ISSN 0210-6124
Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl
Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo Universidad de Sevilla [email protected] Manuel Almagro Jiménez Universidad de Sevilla [email protected]
Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is not simply a new recreation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in hypertext format; it also tries to develop some of the implications in the original text from the paradigms of contemporary science and criticism. This study is an attempt to bring to light the ways in which these paradigms, characterized by their emphasis on fragmentariness, are made to interact dialogically with Shelley’s novel in order to produce a postmodern version of the old Promethean myth. Apart from exploring the filial connections that one might expect in any rewriting exercise, this essay focuses on the way Jackson questions the concept of authorship, origin(ality) and literary property, and related issues such as intertextuality and assemblage, all of which are indices of the theoretical concerns underlying Jackson's text and of the ways in which it follows, re-writes or invites us to re-read Shelley's “hideous progeny.”
Key words: hypertext, re-writing, intertextuality, postmodern literature, Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, Frankenstein
I
After the Egyptian god Osiris had been torn to pieces by Seth, Isis, the wife of Osiris, searched for the parts of his body and, by gathering his scattered limbs, eventually restored him to life as a fertility god. This myth was later used by Ezra Pound (1973) in his series of essays “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” for its symbolic potential to illustrate the Modernists’ specific perception of tradition and their use of it as an act of resurrecting, ordering, and remembering. Thus, what is literal in the original myth becomes metaphorical in Pound’s version.1 In many ways Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is an instance of how two
1 The Osiris myth seems to have had a special appeal to Modernist writers. It is also visibly present in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, bringing together the leitmotifs of resurrection (of Osiris and the Tim Finnegan alluded to in the title) and re-membering (at the level of language, by means of the portmanteau words and multilingual puns which make up the best-known stylistic feature of this 116 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia and Manuel Almagro possibilities offered by the same myth can be assembled into one and the same narrative. She combines the literal and the metaphorical in her re-enactment of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both as an act of bringing back to life and as an act of remembering. On a first reading, Patchwork Girl can be defined as a work that is essentially a re- writing of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel in which two of the dominant themes are fragmentation and resurrection. However, Patchwork Girl’s most outstanding quality lies in the fact that it is organized as a special kind of text, which, just like Victor’s creature, is the end result of certain technological developments. The appropriate term for such a text is hypertext.2 George P. Landow’s definition of hypertext is regarded as canonical: “[T]ext composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path” (1997: 3). Another definition, to be found in The Electronic Labyrinth, focuses on a more practical aspect but also alludes to some of its essential qualities: “Where should the story begin? How will it end? These are two of the primary questions an author must answer when creating any fiction. Hypertext foregrounds such questions of boundaries; in this non-linear environment, the author has the freedom to discard old structural conventions and traditional ideas of closure” (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/ hfl0130.html). Not only does hypertext, by its very nature, resist closure and allow play, it also partakes of a condition of mutability, as the product leaves room for changes in the format, colour, fonts, cascade, etc. In this sense also, Patchwork Girl is not simply one more text that reflects the aesthetics of fragmentation and hybridity; it is a hypertext that allows for material and technological possibilities that would be unthinkable in a printed version. As a consequence, the relationship between reader and text also becomes provisional and mutable inasmuch as different possible readings arise: one ordered, as in the chart view, and another chaotic or random-like, simply by clicking on any word in a given lexia. To put it a different way, hypertext requires a “cyborg reader,” not only because of his/her prosthetic relationship with the text but also because the text forces us to adopt a gaze which is equally modular and fragmentary.3 In the case of Patchwork Girl, reading appeals to our demiurgic power and turns readers into a sort of Dr. Frankenstein putting together the different pieces of the textual corpus, and thus creating our own monstrous, aberrant reading. As we can read in one of the sections, graveyard: “I am buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself.”4 text). An extensive study of the use of the figure of Osiris by Joyce can be found in Mark L. Troy (1976). 2 An interesting account of some of the cognitive processes involved in reading this specific hypertext can be found in an essay by Hayles (2000) in which she calls for a “medium-specific analysis”. In this, Hayles is simply describing with a particular example what others, such as David Bolter (1991) and Espen J. Aarseth (1997), have discussed at a more theoretical level. 3 Here we are expanding Donna Haraway’s (1991a) iconography of the cyborg as a metaphor for the fragmented subject to a process of reading which in the case of the hypertext also takes place in a modular, fragmented way. 4 The present notion of hypertext has been anticipated by postmodern criticism in directing attention towards concepts such as dispersal, dismemberment, net, web, palimpsest, rhizome, hybridity, carnival and heteroglossia found in the works of such diverse critics as Roland Barthes, Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl 117
Before going any further, a general description of Patchwork Girl might be helpful. Shelley Jackson’s hypertext consists of five main sections:
1. body of text.5 where we find the monster’s narration and certain theoretical speculations about hypertextual and human bodies. 2. graveyard: this section contains the stories of different donors told by the monster. By clicking on the different organs, access is obtained to the catalogue of donors and their biographies, showing in the process the matrilineal genealogy of the protagonist, and generating a realistic portrait with a strong literary flavour. The inscription on the headstone reveals the nature of the contents:
Here lies a Head, Trunk, Arms (Right and Left), and Legs (Right and Left) as well as divers Organs Appropriately Disposed May They Rest in Piece.
3. journal: this is Mary Shelley’s journal recording her relationship with her creature. 4. story: with extracts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, interacting with the female monster’s modern adventures. 5. crazy quilt: this is made up of two parts in which the same content is repeated, the only difference being that in the second part the quotes used are not documented or presented with different typographies as they are in the first part (scrap bag). However, the lexias are presented with different colours in order to evoke the idea of that “crazy quilt,” the governing metaphor for this section. It indicates a further step in the idea of “unceremonious appropriation” which questions the notion of literary property.
The hypertextual format allows for much of this material to be organized differently, with a special emphasis this time on the visual, in two other sections: her, where we find the image of a woman’s body, traversed by multiple dotted lines resembling the scars and seams of her patched anatomy; and phrenology, which reproduces the figure of a large head divided into different sections by dotted lines. By clicking on these we access either women’s names, leading in turn to the stories of women from whose prosthesis the
Linda Hutcheon, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin or Donna Haraway. But the fragmentary is not exclusive to postmodernism. As we suggest at the beginning of our essay, fragments are a pivotal concept both thematically and structurally in Modernism, an example of which may be found in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” (l. 430). 5 In order to avoid confusion with quotations, we have chosen italics to indicate the titles of both sections and lexias. 118 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia and Manuel Almagro monster is assembled, or theoretical statements that explore the notion of multiple subjectivity, this time not at the level of anatomy (as in the her section) but at the level of consciousness. Other layers or tissues may also be mentioned in this summary. For example, hercut 4, where the instructions of the software program are revealed under one torn fragment of the image, so that we get a glimpse of the different tissues of a multilayered artifact and its scaffolding, in a kind of metafictional strategy whereby the material circumstances of the process of creation are made apparent. Occasionally, another layer shows the presence of a metafictional subtext where the writer (a fictionalised persona of Shelley Jackson) is represented engaged in the process of writing. Thus, some lexias refer to the material moment of writing (as for example the this lexias), or generate spaces of indefinition by making the fictive and the real overlap (as in one sip). Others, such as this writing, self-referentially analyse the peculiarity of hypertextual reading/writing:
Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest. When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future.
Another case in point would be the lexia dotted line. Because of its border-like quality (“a permeable membrane”), the image of the dotted line is used to explore the interaction between connectedness and separation (“the two sides of a page flow moebiously into one another. Pages become tunnels or towers, hats or airplanes, cranes, frogs, balloons, or nested boxes”). It also evokes the many creative possibilities of changing from the two- dimensional to the three-dimensional and of generating something new in the process. By being “permeable,” “potential,” “paradoxical” and “discontinuous,” this specific typography becomes both a model of subjectivity and an indication of the experience of hypertextual writing and reading. As the next lexia in the “sequence” summarises: “I hop from stone to stone and an electronic river washes out my scent in the intervals. I am a discontinuous trace, a dotted line” (hop).
Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl 119
II
As a re-writing of a classic text such as Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl is contained within a double frame of reference: on the one hand that of critical theory, particularly poststructuralism,6 and, on the other, that of a scientific language which, via many references, pervades the hypertext with allusions to contemporary physics and biology. Both frames are characterized by their emphasis on fragmentariness and, both at textual and anatomical level, Shelley Jackson proposes models of cultural production and subjectivity that are far from closed, unitary and coherent. That these two frames can be made to interact can be seen in the way Barthes distinguishes between the concept of Work and that of Text in terms of the language of science, ascribing them to the Newtonian and the Einsteinian paradigms respectively (1977: 156). If hypertext is a turn of the screw in the progress “from work to text” then we must highlight the element of “unreadability,” mentioned by Barthes as a key difference between Work and Text (1977: 157) arising from the typical resistance to closure, likewise an essential dimension of hypertext. Another concept relevant to this discussion is intertextuality because it helps us to understand the possibility of meanings existing in different texts simultaneously (almost as a tribute to quantum physics). In particular, it allows us to see the text as a space in which different texts coalesce, or, as Kristeva suggests, are “constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (1980: 66). Seen in this light, the body of allusions to critical theories and theorists performs a prosthetic function inasmuch as those allusions work as implants of alien tissue in a piece of fiction. Foremost among the critics alluded to is Derrida, explicitly mentioned in memento, parodically interviewed in interrupting D. and whose work is alluded to variously, for example, in already (“one could say that I existed already before I severed past alliances”) or in it thinks, where an echo of the all-too-quoted “death of the subject” seems to resonate (“There is a kind of thinking without thinkers. Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow intimate with monsters”). The rest of this lexia introduces another of these critical implants, Donna Haraway (1991a) and her cyborg iconography: “We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourselves: steaming flanks and solid redoubtable hoofs galloping under a vaporous machinery.” As regards scientific discourse, it is alluded to in various ways in Jackson’s hypertext. Haraway’s terminology is used to bring the description of the body to a new scale, that of the cell: “The body as seen by the new biology is chimerical. The animal cell is seen to be a hybrid of bacterial species. Like that many-headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity, bacteria that were originally freely living, self sufficient and metabolically distinct” (bio). The body is also described (in swarm) as “a multiplicity of anonymous particles” with “no absolute boundaries: I am a swarm.” Attention must be paid here to the notion of “swarm,” which evokes the question of scale and which, together
6 In an interview, Jackson states the relevance of theory as one of the necessary frames of reference for her work: “[P]art of my motivation for writing Patchwork Girl in the first place was to interrogate hypertext in terms of its relationship to the rest of literature, so it was a foregone conclusion that my hypertext should have one foot in theory” (Amerika, 1998). 120 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia and Manuel Almagro with the notion of “scraps,” alludes to the existence of discrete elements with no inherent significance and yet waiting to be arranged into some meaningful pattern. In other lexias, the materiality of the body is noticeably emphasized: “we are unlike angels (who have diplomatic immunity to the laws of physics)” (angels); and in flow, apart from its metafictional quality, a classic portrait of a siren is contrasted with images taken from the language of physics enabling the hybrid subject to see herself as a sort of “quantum sky- diver.” In rest of my life, the question of the breakdown of a linear sequence of reading (and of writing) is considered to finally “fall back into the muddled bedsheets, into the merged molecular dance of simultaneity.” Another group of allusions is focused on the relationship between body and text, implying that the same language is shared by the discourse of criticism and of science alike. Thus, for instance, in seamed adhesive, the same expressions refer to both the textual and the anatomical: “Being seam’d with scars was both a fact of eighteenth century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition.” Similarly, in born, this double reference is made more complex, for to the phrase “hideous progeny,” which depicts both literary and biological filiation, is added a reference to the language of physics by means of the monster’s confession, “I am a disturbance in the flow.” This is rounded off in a lexia entitled pattern (or designs) which, paradoxically, emphasizes the random and chaotic nature of reading. Sometimes we even see how scientific phenomena are taken as models to illustrate or justify essential aspects of the rhetoric of the text/hypertext, evidencing that the two frames of reference (critical, scientific) do not exist independently, as they have been presented here, but complement each other and coexist in interrelated fashion particularly in the lexias of the section body of text, where a theoretical conception of the text is explored within this double frame.
III
As a re-writing of an earlier text, Patchwork Girl or A Modern Monster, by Mary/Shelley, & Herself presents a problem of filiation starting with the title. In the same way that in Shelley’s novel the creation of the monster and even the text was at first attributed to her husband, likewise Jackson’s hypertext seems to originate in different authors: Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, and the monster “herself.” This deliberate confusion about authorship is also detected in the diversity of sources and borrowings from the literary tradition. Thus, a sample list might include those from her literary mother, Mary Shelley (journal), theorists such as Derrida (sources), not to mention the original owners of the monster’s implants presented in the shape of memories and testimonies, particularly the whole graveyard section and the many allusions to the notion of “phantom limb.” This sense of indebtedness is also apparent in lexias such as she goes on (“we are ourselves ghostly,” “we are what we remember”), where a representation of a “haunting” presence that unconsciously determines our identity is offered, also as a memory of the different “body parts.” The problem of literary property is often made analogous to that of physical (body) property: whose text/body is this? is the question raised by the ambiguous title page (Mary/Shelley and Herself). Thus, in am I Mary, body property is made equivalent to text property through the phrase “ghost writer” which plays with its implicit notions of “haunting” and “authorship,” and in births the monster states that “birth takes place more Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl 121 than once.” An example of the so-called “unceremonious appropriation” is the interesting case of the third footnote to bad dreams where the anonymity of the donor of a textual “implant” is acknowledged. In relation to its original text, Shelley Jackson’s work can be interpreted as “the road not taken.” Her starting point is the monster’s request to Frankenstein that the scientist create a female partner for him “as deformed and horrible as myself” (Shelley 1992: 144), a possibility the doctor considers too terrible and finally rejects, throwing into the sea “the relics of my work” (Shelley 1992: 170). Jackson, however, decides to create that character who never existed in the original, her strategy being the use of material which in the original occupies only a minor eccentric position.7 In doing so, Jackson recovers by extension the feminine/maternal body which is so decidedly negated and excluded in Shelley’s text (as can be deduced from the successive deaths of most of the female characters in the novel: Victor’s mother, Justine, Elizabeth and the female monster). Frankenstein’s relics have a counterpart in Jackson’s notion of “workbasket,” a reservoir of literary material from which to create a new work. By making use of the well-known body/text analogy, Jackson moves from the anatomical to the textual by comparing discarded limbs to “deleted passages” or even lost pages, and emphasizing, in opposition to the Romantic intentional quality (agon), the random-like component of postmodernist literary creation (alea).8 This filial relationship between original and “copy” is extensively explored in the first part of the story section containing literal quotes from relevant passages of Shelley’s novel. For instance, the lexia plea records the monster’s request to his creator, promise details Victor’s promise to create the female monster whilst treachery focuses on the scientist’s final refusal to do so, fearing that “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight for its own sake in murder and wretchedness” (Shelley 1992: 165). Later on, Jackson’s female monster cuts her literary umbilical cord with Shelley’s novel to start an independent life of her own, or as she says, to “set out to write my own destiny” (birth). However, that liaison is never completely severed and there is a whole section in which we can see the intertextual relationship between the two works. In journal, Mary Shelley, who has become a character in Jackson’s hypertext, gives an account of her relationship with her creature, enabling us to compare the different attitudes of Victor Frankenstein (in Shelley’s text) and Mary Shelley (as fictionalized author in Jackson’s text) towards their respective creatures. Thus, for example, we may contrast Frankenstein’s abhorrence of the monster with Mary’s maternal admiration and pride (as in learn or infant); or in terms of gender difference, the opposition between the masculinist laboratory and machinery of
7 In the Introduction to her work, Mary Shelley uses biblical language to refer to her creation: “And now once again, I bid my hideous progeny to go forth and prosper.” (1992: 10) This comment turns Shelley (as author) into a God(dess) of her creation/creature. It is the ambivalence inherent in the metaphorical expression “hideous progeny” which serves as inspiration to Jackson to literally reproduce both the creature and the text. 8 This is not a new idea in the history of literature. Examples can also be found in Vladimir Nabokov’s idea of “discarded limbs” at the end of Lolita or the literary theory in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds or in the genesis of James Joyce’s Ulysses, originally conceived as a short story for Dubliners. 122 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia and Manuel Almagro
Victor Frankenstein and the feminine imagery of the quilt and workbaskets of Mary’s “room of her own” (written).9 Many of these differences reflect the specific contexts in which Shelley’s and Jackson’s texts were composed. In this regard, we can begin by comparing the titles in full. We notice that Frankenstein; or a Modern Prometheus draws attention to the protagonist, a scientist, whereas Patchwork Girl, or A Modern Monster focuses on the monster, a marginal figure. In terms of organization, Shelley’s novel has a very noticeable “Chinese box” structure which creates a distance between the story being told and the reader. This contrasts greatly with the hypertextual organization of Jackson’s work, whose different ontological levels (author, character, reader) mingle monstrously. At the level of content, we can compare the death of each monster. In Shelley’s novel we find the typically Romantic immolation of the monster on a funeral pyre, whereas in Jackson’s there is an “insurrection” of the limbs or prostheses, in an act characterized by postmodern dismemberment, fragmentation and dispersion. These differences between the two works are obviously conditioned by the ideological context of both texts and have a parallel in the diverse critical responses of readers with different theoretical backgrounds. Thus, it is interesting to compare, for example, Harold Bloom’s reading of Frankenstein as the epitome of the exacerbated Romantic expression of the self (solipsistic, Promethean, and significantly supported by references to Milton, Blake and Byron), with those of Shelley Jackson and modern readers in the theoretical context of postmodern criticism, where identity is defined (following Haraway, Helène Cixous and Derrida) in terms of the fragmentary, the composite, and the hybrid. In contrast to these differences a number of similarities between the two texts can also be observed. These affect two basic elements shared by both works: the use of fragmentariness and the question of re-writing as an instrument in the composition. In the case of Shelley Jackson, she is working with two intertexts dealing with the idea of animation or creation of life from inanimate creatures: Frankenstein and The Patchwork Girl of Oz, although here we are only interested in the former insofar as it also inscribes itself in a tradition of literary and mythological re-writings.10 Both Shelley’s and Jackson’s works can be considered as founded on a process of remembering (pun intended) from left-overs. But this process differs from one text to the other. Thus, in Frankenstein, the subject is reconstructed by means of an education that not only affects his senses but is at the same time based on the texts from a library (ultimately a symbol of the process of accommodation and cultural integration). However, even though the monster can read those books, he still does not participate in that culture which excludes him as something monstrous, an aberration.11 In the case of Patchwork Girl, the limbs of the female monster keep their autonomous status, and each of them speaks “hysterically” of its origin, bringing
9 Most feminist criticism on Frankenstein agrees on interpreting Victor’s creation of the monster as the masculine attempt at usurping the maternal and life-giving potential of female sexuality. See Moers (1977), Mellor (1988), Homans (1986), and Gilbert and Gubar (1979) 10 Of course we could see Jackson’s work as part of a succession of versions of the Prometheus myth, which would include the figures of Faust, Vathek and, naturally, Frankenstein. 11 Feminist (Gilbert and Gubar [1979], Moers [1977]) and psychoanalytic (Mitchell and Rose [1982], Collings [1992]) critics of Frankenstein have remarked that the monster’s acquisition of language by eavesdropping on the conversations of the De Lacey family is analogous to the position of woman who, like Eve or Mary Shelley, is forced to establish an oblique relationship to both language and culture, having been excluded from these two Symbolic processes. Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl 123 to light the memory of their donors (their actual origin!), which in this case, over and above their organic quality, suggests ultimately a reference of a textual nature. In the case of Frankenstein, books do not contribute to the monster’s integration but help him to acquire consciousness of himself as a subject while Dr Frankenstein’s diary specifically allows him to establish his own genealogy. In Patchwork Girl, on the other hand, the literary is the referent that provides a final meaning for a subject whose limbs are articulating and integrating themselves. It would seem that there is also a divergence in the fact that, in Frankenstein, the fragmentary is limited literally to the organic body while in Patchwork Girl the fragmentary also includes the social body, the cultural and literary corpus and the text. This, moreover, is not linear because its materiality is constituted by software and its physical existence is only momentary and temporary, being the result of electronic impulses on a screen. Yet only on a first reading can we sustain this divergence, since a more detailed analysis can show the traces of fragmentariness that reveals a composite, hybrid, monstrous (textually speaking) quality in Mary Shelley’s novel at different levels too. For example, she refers to the anonymous Fantasmagoriana, or Collected Stories of Apparitions of Specters, Ghosts, Phantoms, etc of 1812, which excited in her “a playful desire of imitation” (Shelley 1992: 14). At a different level, Victor Frankenstein makes use of the tradition of alchemy and the occult sciences. He devours the work of Paracelsus and Agrippa, recognising in his testimony (paradoxically given his abomination of his composite creature) his own monstrous and fragmentary nature. His visits to the “charnel houses” can be compared to visits to a library. In the same way as Jackson refers her text/monster to a literary antecedent (Frankenstein), so the scientist sees his creature as related to an earlier literary model: “…but when those muscles and joints were capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived” (Shelley 1992: 58). Here the reference to Dante’s Divina Commedia is most appropriate since in that work there is also an attempt on the part of the poet to resurrect his beloved Beatrice by means of the alchemy of the word. Dante’s Inferno is also used, together with Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” as a reference to deal with questions of fear and guilt (Shelley 1992: 59). As far as the figure of the monster is concerned, he is also, in Shelley’s novel, constituted by the things he reads. However, we must not forget that there is a monstrosity that is cultural as well as anatomical, similar to bodies too, where: “we have guidelines as to which arrangements are acceptable, are valid words, legible sentences, and which are typographical or grammatical errors: ‘monsters.’” The monster achieves humanity through the books that he accidentally finds in a suitcase. In this, he forms part of a tradition that includes sources as varied as Don Quixote, Prince Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, and later on, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Leopold Bloom, who, according to Ricardo Piglia (2005), represent the process by which subjectivity is constituted through the experience of reading. His thesis implies that not only the text, but also the reading subject is composed of an unharmonious panoply of texts. Frankenstein’s monster reads these books −Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Plutarch’s Lives− and sets them up against his experience (“many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition,” Shelley 1992: 129), and tries to measure his own misfortunes against those of the literary characters he has just become acquainted with and who, due to his abhorrent deformity, constitute his only intercourse with the world. Thus, his lament “[n]o Eve soothed my sorrows or shared my 124 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia and Manuel Almagro thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator, but where was mine?” (Shelley 1992: 131) is an interesting echo of a biblical passage he knows not through the Bible (which he has not read) but through Paradise Lost. This play with characters from the literary tradition has its counterpart in the way donors are providers in Jackson’s work; in other words, what has a metaphorical value in Shelley becomes literal (and parodic) in the case of Jackson. We sum up by arguing that just as Jackson’s text possesses a monstrous and fragmentary quality which is parasitic on Frankenstein, so, in turn, Shelley’s text, contrary to what one would expect in an “original,” is far from being a coherent and unitary whole.12 Patchwork Girl also dismantles this notion of a unitary origin in the lexia whole? which questions the idea of “wholeness” –moral, aesthetic, bodily, etc– even for those who, like angels, are defined essentially by that concept: “though they don’t seem reft by racial and cultural differences, seem to believe in hierarchy, in assigned moral parking spots as if souls acquired goodness stepwise, in integral packets.” Likewise, in order to dismantle the myth of alleged unitary origin, this time with the help of scientific language, Jackson borrows a piece of that discourse dealing with the molecular composition of myxotricha paradoxa. This is what we see in mixo, itself inspired by an earlier text by Donna Haraway (1991b).13 This is a new example of the interaction of the two frames of reference, one that is explicit both in its original source (the discourse of biology and the discourse of Haraway’s social criticism) and in its final application (the discourse of biology, again, and of literary criticism implicit in Jackson’s work). That the reader has simultaneous access to this multifarious material is only made possible by the hypertextual dimension of this unorthodox novel. We should not ignore the fact that Jackson’s re-writing is assisted by the specificity of the electronic format because this system allows her to highlight certain questions that lie at the core of Mary Shelley’s original. Fragmentation, for instance, which is an issue in Shelley’s text, is obviously an inherent quality of the hypertext format (“haphazard hopscotch,” we read in this writing); also the idea of the coexistence of different versions and voices in Shelley’s story is presented in Patchwork Girl as a potentiality offered to the reader by the very nature of the hypertext (“as many stories as I care to put together,” this writing). Similarly the question of creation/re-creation of life has
12 Mary Shelley’s novel has already set the idea of an exclusive, disembodied, patriarchal origin in the figure of Milton’s God (one of the myths by which her monster tries to make sense of his miserable existence) in opposition to that of the bodily, multiple and fragmented origin in Victor’s act of creation. This opposition, suggested by Shelley, somewhere between a transcendental, invisible and powerful signifier on the one hand and dispersed, disempowered signifieds on the other, again seems to anticipate some of the tenets of poststructuralism. For an exploration of Milton’s God as a divine version of the Lacanian father, see David Collings (1992). 13 “I use Mixotricha paradoxa as an entity that interrogates individuality and collectivity at the same time. It is a microscopic single celled organism that lives in the hind gut of the South Australian termite. What counts as ‘it’ is complicated because it lives in obligatory symbiosis with five other kinds of entities....This is codependency with a vengeance! And so the question is – is it one entity or is it six? But six isn’t right either because there are about a million of the five non-nucleated entities for every one nucleated cell. There are multiple copies. So when does one decide to become two? When does this whole assemblage divide so that you now have two? And what counts as Mixotricha? Is it just the nucleated cell or is it the whole assemblage? This is obviously a fabulous metaphor that is a real thing for interrogating our notions of one and many". (Haraway 1991b: 64-98). Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl 125 its counterpart in Patchwork Girl in the way characters and texts are brought to life simply by an electronic impulse, “assembling these patched words in an electronic space” (this writing).
IV
Besides the obvious differences between the texts by Mary Shelley and Shelley Jackson, the re-writing process undertaken by the latter involves certain implications that go beyond the mere re-creation of a classic story. The first of them is that the postmodern author is given the best opportunity to establish an analogy between the textual and the anatomical, which systematically generates a specific subtext in the work.14 Such an analogy is explored in depth in the whole section body of text (with its self-explanatory title) where most lexias make explicit allusion to the same issue. Thus, in typographical, metaphor me, and cuts, the rhetoric of the text is made analogous to anatomic harmony and the etymological meaning of “syntax” is evoked as the need for a “skeleton” that will articulate all the jumble and chaotic material. As Jackson states in a review of her own work, “[b]oundaries of texts are like boundaries of bodies, and both stand in for the confusing and invisible boundary of the self” (1997: 535). In this way, similar analogies between body and text recur in other lexias such as dispersed, where the monster describes herself as if she were a text; in blood, where this association is explored at a molecular level so that cells are equated with words; and in birth, where the creation of the protagonist takes place twice, “under the needle, and under the pen.” All the above examples can be summed up in the statement “the metaphorical principle is my true skeleton” (metaphor me), which explicitly stresses the afore-mentioned body-text relationship and the way each is defined in terms of the other. As a result of this interaction, the text generates a set of interrelated metaphors configuring the thematic scaffolding of the narrative. When the monster defines herself as a “mixed metaphor,” she is not simply alluding to her hybridity (both anatomical and textual), but also to all those “borrowed parts, annexed territories” which, like Frankenstein’s creature, acquire a life of their own and generate a conceptual space in which this hypertext is erected. This metaphorical principle alluded to by Shelley Jackson manifests itself in passages as diverse as those described below.15
14 Jackson stresses the centrality of this analogy when she explains that “[t]he stitched-together monster is an easy metaphor for any text, but especially hypertext, as the still uneasy offspring of a new technology and an old one: books, literature” (Amerika 1998). 15 Jackson herself admits that, having planned to write a hypertext, she was already predisposed to follow “a meandering course”, and emphasizes the importance of metaphors in the genesis of this work: “The graveyard section began, for example, as a rhetorical trope in the course of a long, looping mediation....[T]he section of Patchwork Girl...is structured like a graveyard, where you dig up body parts and learn their histories. Of course these [Storyspace] rectangles full of rectangles also brought to mind a quilt. Which is not unlike a graveyard, since traditional quilts are often machines for reminiscence, bringing together scraps of fabric, once in use, that memorialize family members and important times. And is also very like a Frankenstein monster (these multiply determined metaphors kept turning up). So I made a quilt, where each patch is itself a patchwork (in crazy-quilt style) of quotes from divers sources” (Amerika 1998). 126 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia and Manuel Almagro
If we begin with the most visible image of the story, the monstrous, we have to admit that this is not only a literal quality or attribute of the protagonist (one acknowledged in I am, a self-portrait where she gives a clear account of her fragmentary, hybrid, indefinite and queer nature) but it also bears a metaphoric value inasmuch as it embraces other related concepts that enable us to depict a very specific model of both textuality and subjectivity. Such a model necessarily re-values a body of concepts that have been historically stigmatized both by science and by culture. Consequently, terms such as prosthetic, parasitic, impure, bastard, grotesque, dismembered, deviant, mutant, aberrant, abject, polluted, or incongruous are given an unusually positive connotation in a text whose main merit lies precisely in its rich potential to create new forms out of disparate material. The lexia degradation explains this traditional rejection of fragmentariness by the classic aesthetic canons which explicitly recommended artists to avoid “motley assemblages,” “patchwork,” “chequered or mosaic work” and “ponderous abortions.” Ironically, these aberrations are the most prominent features of the protagonist’s physiognomy, as she declares in why hideous? (“Every part of me is human and proportional to the whole. Yet I am a monster, because I am multiple, and because I am mixed, mestizo, mongrel”); or in manmade where she adds that her monstrosity lies in her being “made, not born.”16 Two other metaphors, important to the extent of providing the titles of two sections of the hypertext, are “quilt” and “graveyard.” Both suggest a genealogy and a model for text and subject which are thus presented in terms of “assemblage” rather than “unity.” Collage or mosaic composition is suggested everywhere in the work, highlighting the fragmentary quality of experience, whether cultural, biological, or textual. Hence the entire graveyard section proposes an extended approach to this notion of multiple subjectivities which the reader accesses through the different stories of the buried limbs and pieces. In names, she gives an account of this multiplicity, a notion that at times interacts paradoxically with the idea of wholeness: “I was both multiply estranged and gathered together in a dynamic union” (her, me). Similarly, the story section explores the same question from a different standpoint. Here we find several episodes that narrate the female monster’s adventures on board a ship that took her to America and how she was forced to assume different disguises that generated a lot of speculation about her identity among the other passengers. The hypotheses ranged from those of her being a “Pygmalion-like trained gorilla” or a “satanic seductress,” to those of a homosexual or a disfigured woman. The lexia guises is hence a good occasion to meditate on the problem of identity, something that can no longer be defined in traditional terms.17 In line with Judith Butler’s (1990) theories, Jackson seems to be proposing that an “identity” paradigm (which implies an ontological, essential and stable condition) be replaced by a “performance” paradigm (which assumes instead the provisionality and precariousness of subjectivity). The “performance” paradigm is
16 Apart from the ones already analysed, Patchwork Girl includes other figurations of the monstrous, from Haraway’s technologically sophisticated cyborgs, to a more popular and folkloric version of monsters like the one offered by the circus freaks in a tail, or even the engraving reproduced in chimera resembling the classical iconography of medieval bestiaries, a repertoire that shows that the monstrous has a long tradition in the history of Western culture. For further analyses on monstrosity, see Creed (1993), Baldick (1987), Bann (1997), Nigg (1999), and South (1987). 17 A comic turn of the screw to this episode is provided by this idea of re-cycling that is recurrent throughout the whole fiction, since the disguise ends up being a part of a “patchwork quilt made by a lady in Minnesota” (guises). Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl 127 assimilated when, in the same vein, gender is comically deconstructed and reduced to “an entire portmanteau of lady-like gestures” (femininity). “Quilt” and “graveyard” are not only metaphors that explain important topics in the novel but are also structural devices since the arrangement of the material in the hypertext bears a resemblance to the referents of the terms. Thus, as explained above, graveyard is the site from which other (textual) lives are resurrected, while quilt organizes critical material in a non-hierarchical order, “without pattern or plan” (crazy). It should also be borne in mind that “quilt” is often regarded as a metaphor of female collective creation. In this respect, it can be contrasted with classic (and masculine?) forms of composition where seams are made to look as invisible as possible, whilst in sewing they are clearly visible in order to indicate the different patches. This connection between writing and sewing is made explicit in two almost identical lexias (written and sewn) which should be read in parallel, where Mary Shelley writes her monster into life and assembles her by “stitching deep into the night by candlelight.” Creation of life through sewing is also suggested by the many allusions to surgery, which would emphasize once again the afore-mentioned body/text relationship. Viewed from this perspective, the monster’s scars and joints would be the epitome of the discontinuous writing and reading of hypertext. Finally, another set of metaphors deals with the question of donors and prostheses, an idea that has many different versions in the history of literature. Imitation of the classics has always involved the appropriation of certain aspects and authors in the tradition, as if they were implants. The underlying implication is that literature is universal and timeless and that any text/body has the potential to become part of future texts/bodies, as suggested in universal: “Your bodies are already claimed by future generations, auctioned off piecemeal to the authors of further monsters.” Such an intertextual model for body and text is also illustrated by the phrase “unceremonious appropriation” in sources, where Jackson acknowledges her critical debts but cannot, at the same time, avoid mocking the traditional notion of “literary property.” In both a literal and metaphorical sense, the prosthesis is a highly evocative concept since it implies questioning the traditional boundaries of the subject: those existing between the self and the other, the original and the copy, the whole and the fragment, the mortal and the immortal. Another related idea that generates interesting connotations is that of the “phantom limb,” a neurological syndrome that accounts for the amputee’s awareness of a missing limb. Once again, Shelley Jackson resorts to scientific discourse and, making use of this richly suggestive phenomenon in the lexias aggrieved, ghosts, bethieved, tries to explain how the monster (and by extension all readers) can perceive the “presence” of an “absence.” The entire séance episode carries this metaphoric value insofar as it implies bringing other texts, stories and characters back to life. The dead, both in the form of their donated prostheses or in the resource of borrowing texts from the past, are considered to be part of the present living body/text although “they are not here to stay.” They are not “permanent residents” but “nomads,” “ghosts” and “guests” (see what shape). Through such imagery, Jackson vindicates a sort of virtual, unstable existence, one that cannot be trapped within the traditional constraints of the biographical genre. Instead, in a life she proposes the possibility of an open, never-ending writing/life very much in line with the attributes of hypertextual literature: “I was not one person and there is more than one way to write this. I wish there were a way to show that every latest word I write has space for anything after it. Everything could have been different and already is.” 128 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia and Manuel Almagro
Appropriating an organ, or a text, might lead to a process of fractalization on the basis of fragmentariness, so that the origin of meaning becomes dispersed through multiple allusions. A hand, for example, does not refer us to a single donor but can be seen as the sum of different fingers, each of which alludes to its own separate literary origin (the hand of Moll Flanders, the hand of Milton’s daughter, in hands). Or it can be a matter of scale when the idea of fragmentation is taken to the level of the cell, the microscopic or the genetic (in mosaic girl, bio, hazy whole, mixo). Moreover, not only the idea of primeval unity but also of future unity is dismantled, as in the parodic vision of the resurrection of the bodies (in resurrection and remade). Because conventional closure, one that would restore the text or the subject to that utopian unity, has been proved invalid, Jackson suggests an alternative scenario that accepts the multiple, discontinuous and protean as major human/literary conditions. In the last episodes of story, which is the only section that can be read in a linear sequence, the monster discovers that her assembled body is coming apart, and that her fate is not resurrection (in its biblical sense) but rather insurrection of the different limbs. In diaspora she gives a detailed account of her actual disintegration (“My foot strove skyward,… my guts split open and something frilly spilled out… my right hand shot gesticulating stump- first eastwards, the fingers on my left scattered like shrapnel”) in a process that could be perfectly identified with the very mechanics of the present (hyper)text: “limbs ejected like sprung seed-pods, bearing only a raw beginning, the place to start a story from, and the thing ending no longer the same thing at all in the ending, so not ending, not beginning either.” In the light of this, through the realization that the monster is constantly returning to her original fragmentary state, we can conclude by emphasising that hypertext technology is guided by the same principles of discontinuity and endless recombination and, as such, does not allow the story to reach a conclusion that would justify a unique and coherent version. Just as the monster wonders (when experiencing her gradual dismemberment in an accident) whether there might be “a right way to go to pieces,” the reader is always left in doubt as to the correctness of her/his readings. However, in the end it is only the reader, bringing to bear his/her experience of other texts with their various references to Romanticism, Modernism or Postmodernism, who can gather this body, this text, together in one piece.
Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen J. 1997: Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP. Amerika, Mark 1998: “Stitch Bitch: The Hypertext Author As Cyborg-Femme Narrator.” Amerika On-Line 7. At http://www.telepolis.de/r4/artikel/3/3193/1.html. Baldick, C. 1987: In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bann, S. 1997: Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity. London: Reaktion Books. Barthes, Roland 1977: “From Work to Text.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. 155-164. Bolter, Jay David 1991: Writing Space: a Hypertext. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Butler, Judith 1990: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl 129
Collings, David 1992: “The Monster and the Imaginary Mother: A Lacanian Reading of Frankenstein.” Frankenstein. Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford Books of St Martin’s Press. 245-58. Creed, B. 1993: The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Electronic Labyrinth, The. At http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/. Eliot, Thomas S. 1976 (1922): “The Waste Land.” Selected Poems. London: Faber. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar 1979: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination.New Haven: Yale UP. Haraway, Donna 1991a: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. New York : Routledge. 1991b: “Otherworldly Conversations; Terran Topics; Local Terms.” Science as Culture 3(1): 64-98. Hayles, Katherine N. 2000: “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Postmodern Culture 10 (2). At http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmc10.2.html. Homans, Margaret 1986: “Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal.” Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. Ed. Margaret Homans. Chicago: Chicago UP. 100-19. Jackson, Shelley 1995: Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. 1997: “Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl.” At http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/ articles/jackson.html. Kristeva, Julia 1980: “Word, Dialogue, Novel.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. Landow, George P. 1997: Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. Mellor, Anne K. 1988: “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 220-32. Mitchell, Juliet and Jacqueline Rose 1982: “Introduction II.” Feminine Sexuality: Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton. 27-57. Moers, Ellen 1977: Literary Women. Garden City: Doubleday. Nigg, J., ed. 1999: The Book of Fabulous Beasts: A Treasury of Writings from Ancient Times to the Present. New York: Oxford UP. Piglia, Ricardo 2005: El último lector. Barcelona: Anagrama. Pound, Ezra 1973: “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.” Selected Prose, 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions. 21-43. Shelley, Mary 1992 (1818): Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Ed. M. K. Joseph. Oxford: Oxford UP. South, M. 1987: Mythical and Fabulous Creatures : A Source Book and Research Guide. New York: Greenwood Press. Troy, Mark L. 1976: Mummeries of Resurrection. The Cycle of Osiris in Finnegans Wake. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell International.
REVIEWS
RESEÑAS
Juan E. Tazón Salces and Isabel Carrera Suárez, eds., 2005: Post-Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations (Studies in Comparative Literature 45), Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 239 pp.
Christopher Rollason Metz, France [email protected]
I
It is now a commonplace to state that Spanish is one of the handful of languages capable of rivalling English at global level, and, indeed, to praise the vitality and dynamism of Spanish-speaking cultures in the contemporary world. However, detailed and rigorous comparative studies of the two language and cultural systems (or polysystems), Hispanophone and Anglophone, in their multiple synchronic and diachronic manifestations remain relatively rare. The volume under review thus appears as the concretisation (to a reasonable degree successful) of a valuable and necessary effort. What we have before us is a collection of twelve essays on disparate subjects falling (mostly) within the broad area of Anglo/Hispanophone cultural relations, preceded by a brief editorial introduction but otherwise not explicitly linked. All the articles are in English, a choice which could be seen as a possible source of imbalance: a 50-50 language breakdown might have suggested an alternative take on the power-relations between the two systems. Neither polysystem is at any point actually defined, and it is taken for granted that the reader has a clear picture of what both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds are, have been and are becoming. The textual presentation is not entirely consistent. Some articles quote the Spanish-language texts discussed in the original with English translations, while others offer their quotations only in English and others again leave their Spanish extracts untranslated: it would surely have been editorially preferable to apply a single set of "house rules." Of the contributors, three are native speakers of English and nine of Spanish, another factor militating against systemic equilibrium since three-quarters of the authors have had the disadvantage of not writing in their native language. The spirit of intercultural dialogue underlying the project as a whole is, however, never in doubt, as is witnessed from the beginning by the dedication to Patricia Shaw, formerly of the University of Oviedo and a key figure in the development of English Studies in Spain, "who first crossed borders and encouraged us all to follow." In their introduction, the editors draw attention to the "relatively scarce crossing of [the English-Spanish] language boundaries in cultural analyses even today," stressing that "there is still a vast terrain to be explored." The contributions have turned out, the editors note, to focus around "themes which relate to past historical connections and to a post/imperial present," offering a series of studies (three historical, eight literary and one cinematic) around a triad of key temporal moments: the colonial epoch in the Americas; the period around the Spanish Civil War; and the globalised contemporary environment (9). One article, it has to be said - that by Isabel Carrera Suárez comparing the Chilean writer Lucía Guerra with the Guadeloupe-born Maryse Condé - seems to be 134 Christopher Rollason somewhat tenuously related to the volume's theme: if the Condé novel discussed is certainly located in the US, it was originally written - like all her work - in French and is quoted in English translation, and the reader may legitimately ask how far this article really falls within the volume's declared rubric. That said, for the rest the collection offers a chronologically ordered series of case studies in Anglo/Hispanophone relations. The connections proposed relate variously to influences, parallels, translation and perceptions. Translation, with all its well-known pitfalls, is the most visible textual manifestation of intersystemic contact, and here merits one article (on Hamlet in Spanish). The comparison of texts or life-stories from different cultures can take the form either of identifying and examining ascertainable influences, or - as in what is called the "new paradigm" of comparative literature - bringing out mutually illuminative parallels while not positing a direct causal link. Both methodologies are represented in this book, with a relative predominance of the second. Where the "influences" approach is chosen, cultural perceptions - the preconceptions and stereotypes that one group entertains about the other - may appear as a major determinant on the influence.
II
Three of the essays concern what the editors call "historical encounters" (9). Francisco J. Borge, in "A Tropological Approach to New World Promotional Writings in Renaissance England," analyses a number of English imperial texts by Richard Hakluyt, Walter Ralegh and others, and compares these texts with Spanish-language writings by the likes of Bartolomeo de las Casas and, indeed, Columbus himself. What he finds is not so much difference as similarity: rather than differentiating, as some might, between "Catholic" and "Protestant" perceptions of the New World, he stresses the shared ideological tropes of the commentators from both sides, and sees both nations as participating, albeit as rivals, in a shared European imperial enterprise: if the English devalued the Spanish, both devalued the natives of the New World. By contrast, both Juan E. Tazón Salces ("The Menace of the Wanderer: Thomas Stukeley and the Anglo- Spanish Conflict in Ireland") and Jacqueline A. Hurtley ("Wandering between the Wars: Walter Starkie's Di/visions") focus in their studies on a single historical figure, offered as in some way representative of Anglo-Hispanic relations from the 'Anglo' side of the divide. Tazón Salces explores the career of Thomas Stukeley, an English Catholic adventurer who intrigued in Spain and died at the battle of Alcácerquibir in 1578, in an essay whose subtext suggests that Anglo-Spanish relations in the sixteenth century were constructed primarily in the register of plotting and spying, each side viewing its rival through an ideological prism as ineluctably and irreducibly Other (and yet, be it noted, both were ideologically united in a shared contempt for the despised Irish). Hurtley examines the trajectory of another conservative yet marginal figure, the Irish-born Walter Starkie, traveller in Spain and British Council representative there in the 1940s and 1950s. Starkie helped legitimate the presence of British establishment culture in Francoist Spain ("'the Council gained entry through post-Civil War Spain on Walter Starkie's persona grata status as a Roman Catholic and supporter of General Franco's cause" - 50), yet remained attracted to the non-official Spanish subculture embodied in Reviews 135 gitano lore. Hispanophone culture thus appears as a focus of attraction for (even conservative) Anglophones thanks to the vibrant folk and popular elements alive within it. Taken together, the book's three historical studies point up the existence not only of antagonisms between the two cultural worlds but of similarities between both and tensions within each, recalling the extreme complexity of all cultural interaction and the permanent need to guard against reductivism.
III
The older or canonic literary tradition is examined in another group of three essays, two dealing with the seventeenth century and one with the earlier twentieth century. The crucial issue of translation (here, English into Spanish) is tackled head-on by María del Carmen Bobes Naves, in relation to a text lying at the heart of the English-language literary canon, namely Shakespeare's Hamlet. Her essay "The Translation of Hamlet by Leandro Fernández de Moratín: Neoclassical Genius and Dramatic Rules" presents Fernández de Moratín's annotated rendering of the play (published in 1798) as a case of what Translation Studies today calls "domestication," i.e. the negation of the translated text's "foreign" elements in favour of a version deemed palatable to the home audience's tastes and preconceptions. In this case, the domestication is carried out through commentary and glossing, rather than operating directly on the text. Bobes Naves shows how, while censoring the play as such is largely eschewed, Fernández de Moratín's commentary systematically attempts, through censuring it, to neoclassicise the unruly Shakespearean text, "recommending" the excision of scenes and lines which do not fit the Procrustean bed of Aristotelianism. Her account is fascinating, though the thought occurs that it might usefully have been balanced by a parallel investigation of Cervantes in English: were this done, the foundations could be laid for a productive bidirectional translation model for both English and Spanish classic texts. Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day, and this visible, if fortuitous, link is underscored by the latter's presence in the volume - in relation not to translation but to literary influence. In his contribution "The Theatrical Construction of a Cavalier Mentality in Fletcher's Plays and a Jonsonian Riposte," Keith Whitlock expounds the ways in which episodes, characters and passages from Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares enter the source material of a number of plays by John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Spanish literature thus fertilized the English drama in the teeth of cultural prejudice, but the process remains ambivalent insofar as the characterisation of "the Spaniard," especially in Jonson, tends to be negative (vain, quarrelsome, treacherous, etc): the Other is admitted into "our" cultural production only tacitly and at a price. If Whitlock confidently speaks of "the sheer volume of Spanish source material," (64) in the Jacobean texts he studies, D. Gareth Walters, writing on Federico García Lorca and Dylan Thomas, chooses to explore not influences but parallels. In "Two Ages of Man in Lorca and Dylan Thomas: From the Adolescent Imagination to the Childhood Perception", Walters, while at no point suggesting that either poet knew of the other's work, offers a series of textual and conceptual parallels between the Welshman's and the Andalusian's explorations of the sensations of childhood and adolescence, drawing especially on the early work of both - Lorca's Libro de poemas and 136 Christopher Rollason
Canciones, and Thomas' 18 Poems. While not neglecting the differences between the two, he suggests that reading Thomas and Lorca side by side throws illuminative light on the theme of growing up - the broader implication being that even where there is no direct link Anglophone and Hispanophone perceptions of the world can usefully both offset and complement each other.
IV
The five remaining literary essays - all by women critics - form a group insofar as they concentrate wholly or mostly on contemporary writing, and engage directly with the discourses of feminism and/or postcoloniality. The majority employ the comparative paradigm of parallelism rather than that of influence. The authors in each case juxtapose texts from the Hispanophone universe with others from the Anglophone (or in one case Francophone) world in order to shed light on the circumstances and consciousness of subjects perceived as marginalised, namely women and/or members of minority groups. María Elena Soliño, in "When Wendy Grew Up: the Importance of Peter Pan in Ana María Matute's Primera memoria and Esther Tusquets' El mismo mar de todos los veranos," takes two contemporary Hispanophone texts by women writers (Tusquets is Catalan but wrote the novel in question in Spanish) and compares both with an older text (Peter Pan in its novelised version) by a male Anglophone writer, the Scot J.M. Barrie: given Tusquets' recognised status as a lesbian writer, this analysis further takes in concerns not only of gender but also of sexual orientation. In both Spanish texts, Soliño argues, the female protagonists "begin to find not only love, but also their own authorial voices" (apparently replicating Barrie's Neverland - in Tusquets' novel, indeed, "the two women enjoy the closest, and most fulfilling relationship of their lives"), but "only to end trapped in … frustrating silence" (181, 185). The male Anglophone master narrative thus appears as a dead end, reworked with ironic intent by the two Hispanophone women writers. In a comparable vein, Luz Mar González Arias, in "Revising Phallogocularcentrism: Lourdes Ortiz's 'Eva' and Irish Rewritings of the Myth of Eve," takes a master narrative - in this case none other than Genesis - and examines its subversion in parallel fictions by women from both Spanish- and (mainly) English-speaking universes: "Eva," a short story by the Spanish writer Lourdes Ortiz, and a selection of Irish poems by Mary O'Donnell, Kate Newmann, Anne Hartigan and (in Gaelic) Áine Ní Ghlinn. González Arias employs feminist perspectives taken from Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous to show how both Ortiz and the Irish poets interrogate and deconstruct the biblical story of Eve, while also warning against reductionism and cultural stereotypes: "Despite the fact that both countries are reputed to be the [sic] Catholic communities of Europe, it is somehow significant that the number of re/writings inspired by the Christian creation story seems to acquire higher dimensions in Ireland. This seems to be related to the higher degree of secularization in Spain as well as to the postcolonial nature of Ireland" (207). This presence, not for the first time in this volume, of Ireland, here explicitly seen as a postcolonial society, connects to the three studies relating to the condition of women in the New World, considered from both (post)colonial and gender viewpoints. Isabel Reviews 137
Carrera Suárez, in "The Americas, Postcoloniality and Gender: New World Witches in Maryse Condé and Lucía Guerra," juxtaposes the ideological construction of female witchcraft in two historical narratives, Guerra's short story "De brujas y de mártires," set in Guatemala in 1541, and Condé's novel Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem, located in the Massachusetts of 1692. As I have noted above, however, the presence in this particular volume of an essay comparing two respectively Hispanophone and Francophone texts does seem to be methodologically debatable. Ana María Bringas López, in her article "Perspectives on Caribbean Gender Relations in Narratives by Velma Pollard, Hazel D. Campbell and Micheline Dusseck," is on much firmer ground in her comparison of works by three Caribbean women writers - a group of stories by two Anglophone (both Jamaican) writers, Pollard and Campbell, and Ecos del Caribe, a novel by Dusseck, who, though Haitian-born, writes (in an interestingly multicultural gesture) in Spanish. Rather than differentiating between discrete postcolonial perceptions of racial and gender oppression, Bringas López sensitively brings out how these texts, transcending the language barrier, reflect the shared experience of Caribbean women, exalting "women's strength under hardship" and describing "a status quo which is far from being what it ought to" (117). In a comparable vein, Belén Martín Lucas, in her contribution "North American Native Autobiographies and Latin American Testimonios: The Dialogic Self," carefully explores the political and gender connotations of two genres associated with marginal elements within, respectively, Anglophone and Hispanophone cultures, taking, on the one hand, a Native American autobiography from the US, Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman, and, on the other, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, the testimonio of Guatemala's 1992 Nobel Peace laureate and defender of her indigenous community's rights. Employing John Beverley's definition of the testimonio as a print narrative "told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events" (121), Martín Lucas shows how Menchú's deployment of this genre exposes social and cultural contradictions in a similar fashion to Mary Crow Dog's English-language autobiography. Both texts, she argues, offer an alternative to hegemonic Euro-American notions of the self by narrating their authors' life-experiences as essentially collective and communal: here too, the stress is on common features found in minority writing in the two dominant European languages.
V
The final essay stands somewhat apart, as the only text in the volume devoted to non- print material. Guillermo Iglesias Díaz, in "Postmodern Mysteries: Allen and Almodóvar across Genre Boundaries," takes the comparative endeavour into the realm of cinema, perceptively examining how the conventions of the thriller movie are subverted in one Spanish and one US film, Pedro Almodóvar's Tacones lejanos and Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery. The perspective is one of parallelism rather than causation, with no suggestion of direct contact between the two auteurs: this study appears in a sense as a kind of "sampler," pointing up the importance of carrying the intersystemic dialogue beyond the realms of literature and history and into the wider contemporary area known as Cultural Studies.
138 Christopher Rollason
VI
Indeed, in the broader context adumbrated by this last essay, some suggestions may here be made for future work in this crucial area of intercultural studies. The present volume certainly opens up a multiplicity of perspectives and its essays mutually illuminate each other, but, with only a brief introduction and no concluding section, it falls short on synthesis. It does, however, stimulate the reader to imagine a cornucopia of future studies. In the literary field, one might think of Robert Graves and Claribel Alegría, neighbours in Deià, Mallorca; or of how in the Civil War period Portbou witnessed the border crossings of both George Orwell and Alejo Carpentier; or of Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote, breathing his last in the wilds of Orense. For cinema, one might suggest the films of Carlos Saura and how far the Anglophone critical response to them reproduces the "Spanish" stereotypes that Saura interrogates; for popular music(s), studies might include the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon with its US-led "rediscovery" of ageing Cuban musicians, or the controversy over Colombia's superstar Shakira and whether she "should" record in Spanish or English. Very possibly, the most fruitful area will prove to be that of postcolonial and transcultural studies and, in particular, the possible points of contact between Latin American literature and writing from the former British empire: in this connection, we may note the exemplary contribution of the remarkable recent study by Dora Sales Salvador, Puentes sobre el mundo (2004), which explores, in parallel, the creative appropriation of the language and literary forms of the hegemonic culture in the fiction of Peru's José María Arguedas and India's Vikram Chandra, concluding in favour of intercultural dialogue and bridge-building through literature. The coming globalised future will beyond all doubt generate more, not less, interaction between Anglophone and Hispanophone cultural systems. The volume here reviewed marks a valid and useful step in a process which will now call for further multiple, detailed, and, let us hope, enjoyable explorations by scholars from both sides of the language divide who are committed to the cause of communication and understanding between cultures.
Work Cited
Sales Salvador, Dora 2004: Puentes sobre el mundo: Cultura, traducción y forma literaria en las narrativas de transculturación de José María Arguedas y Vikram Chandra. Berne: Peter Lang.
Helen Cooper 2004: The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. xiii+542 pp.
Jordi Sánchez-Martí University of Alicante [email protected]
Throughout the past century the interest of scholars in medieval romance was centred on providing a definition that could be applicable to the entire English corpus. But the romance genre has proved elusive since, in spite of numerous attempts, no single description has been deemed fully satisfactory. One of the most successful definitions was suggested by Derek Pearsall, who describes a romance as “a narrative intended primarily for entertainment, in verse or prose, and presented in terms of chivalric life” (1976: 57). Despite its vagueness, Pearsall’s definition encapsulates the short-sightedness and prejudice against romance of critics who deny romance texts any role or concern beyond the merely recreational. As Nicola McDonald has recently argued, medieval popular romance has not received the serious critical attention it deserves because it “makes explicit its commitment to its audience’s pleasure and because it is structured to gratify that pleasure” (2004: 11). Obviously, this ludic element was to its contemporary audience’s liking, but it does not follow that romance fails to reveal the ideologies of its cultural context and to provide us with insights into the literary environment in which it circulated. Conscious of the neglect that has marginalized medieval romance from mainstream criticism for decades, in The English Romance in Time Helen Cooper has performed the tour de force of examining both the evolution and transformation of the romance genre from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare, and the impact it has had upon English literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The significance of the evidence provided by this book makes clear that, without a serious consideration of the themes, conventions, and motifs of romance, it will be impossible to articulate a literary history representative of the five hundred years covered by this study. Cooper’s project is therefore ambitious, and not only because of its chronological scope, but also because the adjective English in the title is used in a geographical sense and alludes to texts produced in England, in Latin and Anglo-Norman as well as in English. The author is likewise aware of the wider European context to which English romance belongs and thus also discusses its relations mainly with French (Chrétien de Troyes’s oeuvre and The Romance of the Rose) and Italian texts (by Boccaccio and Petrarch), but also with Catalan (Ramon Llull’s works, Tirant lo Blanch) and Spanish material (Don Quixote). While other recent book-length studies have already contributed to examining the nuanced currency of romance texts and themes in the early modern period (cf. Davis 2003; King 2000), the monograph under review has a more ambitious intention, namely, “to restore to modern readers the ‘literary competence’ ... that Renaissance and medieval readers brought as a matter of course to their reading or watching of romances” (2). That is to say, Cooper aims at restoring the horizon of romance expectations shared between authors and readers, and at tracing its evolution over the half millennium of literary history discussed in this book (cf. 22). In order to identify and describe the changes in meaning of the relevant romance motifs, Cooper adopts from genetic terminology the concept of meme, “an idea that behaves like a gene in its 140 Jordi Sánchez-Martí ability to replicate faithfully and abundantly, but also on occasion to adapt, mutate, and therefore survive in different forms and cultures” (3). The malleability suggested by this concept reflects the protean nature of romance, thus overcoming the semantic constraints of the word motif. Nevertheless, the alien quality of this word does not always facilitate the discussion in hand, and it remains to be seen whether this neologism will gain any acceptance among scholars. The book is structured around central romance motifs/memes and the study of their diachronic mutation, with each chapter devoted to explaining one of them. A lengthy introduction (1–44) comes before the analysis of individual motifs, aimed mainly at meeting the needs of Renaissance scholars unfamiliar with the romance tradition and with the literary production of the medieval period. While medievalists will find useful both Cooper’s fresh summary of the history of romance in England (22–40) and her identification of the genre’s ability to recycle familiar conventions as one of the reasons for its longevity (14–21), this introduction betrays the fact that the intended audience is made up of early modernists, from whom the author demands greater attention to the medieval period. This initial impression is confirmed by the extended interpretive summaries of great critical value supplied for medieval romances that contrast with the limited explanation given for most Elizabethan and Tudor texts. The memes chosen by Cooper are easily recognized from the repertoire of motifs with relevance for the romance tradition. The first chapter offers a thorough discussion of the quest, a romance feature that when present acts as the driving force of the text and determines not only the work’s plot but also its linear development. The knights who embark on a quest, whatever their goal, always encounter a personal dimension to their geographical wanderings. Thus, regardless of how the outcome of the adventure is judged, the knight who returns to the starting point is notably different from the one who departed in the beginning, as Sir Gawain exemplifies after his return from the Green Chapel. Although the construction of the knight’s identity is not the stated goal of the chivalric quest, it is always one of the results of the romance and is usually achieved by means of an inner journey that acquires a spiritual side with the romances of atonement (e.g. Sir Isumbras and Guy of Warwick). Cooper argues that this motif is developed clearly in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, where the quest adopts the penitential form of a pilgrimage, and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, whose allegorical quests evince their debt to the medieval romances. The chapter “Fairy Monarchs, Fairy Mistresses” concerns itself with the otherworldly figures who populate medieval romance, such as Morgan le Fay and Merlin, and who also leave their mark on creations by Spenser (Gloriana) and Shakespeare, (Titiana and Oberon). Here Cooper explains how romance negotiates the fairy in a way that transcends its folkloric roots to become a trademark of the genre. Characterized by their arbitrariness and beauty, the fairy creatures usually play a significant narrative role due to their supernatural powers, which on many occasions turn them into arbiters among mortals not only in matters of justice, for instance the Damsel of the Lake in Malory, but also in matters of love (cf. Amadas et Ydoine). The consideration in this chapter of one such power with fairy associations, namely prophecy, is particularly revealing of the Renaissance writers’ indebtedness to their medieval forebears and shows how the supernatural discourse of prophecies, such as the fourteenth-century Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, acquired different political overtones in new historical circumstances. Reviews 141
Contrary to the stereotype of the medieval woman as passive and submissive, in “Desirable Desire” Cooper contends that both Anglo-Norman and English romances endorse an ideological discourse that, removed from the misogyny of continental texts, attributes a more active role to women and acknowledges the narrative force of female desire. Thus, the main female character in the insular romances tends to be a young heiress who takes the responsibility of choosing her husband without or against parental consent. As Cooper argues, “English-language romance makes the actively desiring heiress its central model throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance” (223), a view that is well supported by her discussion of how Spenser and Shakespeare employ this meme. “Women on Trial” engages with the set of motifs produced by the romances telling the story of an individual woman who finds herself accused of unchastity, usually by a rejected suitor. The recourse to secular justice always produces support for the accusations; only by providential intervention is the innocence of the woman reinstated and the unfounded and calumnious nature of the accusation revealed. This theme, widespread in medieval romance, retained its popularity during the sixteenth century, most notably with Robert Greene’s Pandosto and in several plays by Shakespeare including Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and Much Ado About Nothing; additionally, some romances of calumny continued to be available in print, for instance Sir Tryamour and Valentine and Orson. Besides analyzing the variations of this motif and assessing its continuity since the late Middle Ages, this chapter also tackles the adultery issue and confutes C. S. Lewis’s widely circulated thesis that defended adultery as the main component of courtly love. Not only does Cooper confirm the broad reluctance of the Middle English romances to figure adultery, but she also maintains that “English Renaissance romance is even less hospitable towards adultery” (320). The question of dynastic continuity remained one of the main concerns of medieval romance and is discussed in this book under the heading “Restoring the Rightful Heir.” First, Cooper analyzes the motif of the Fair Unknown, in which a young man is ignorant of both his name and his family identity. It appears for the first time in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, and figures in various Middle English texts —most notably in Lybeaus Desconus— and in the characterization of Spenser’s Redcrosse. Next, the author examines the motif of the dispossessed heir who regains his kingship after numerous tribulations. Having discussed the presence of this theme in Middle English romances such as Havelok and its various reincarnations in Tudor England (343), Cooper explains how this meme acquires a political dimension in texts that interact with their cultural context. For instance, Blanchardyn and Eglantine invites a comparison with the circumstances of Henry VI, whose accession to the throne is interpreted as the restoration of the rightful heir. On the other hand, Queen Elizabeth’s virginity posed an internal threat to the line of succession and provided narrative matter for Spenser and Shakespeare. While the aforementioned chapters duly deliver the promises of the book, namely, to trace the evolution of romance motifs from their appearance in the Middle Ages down to the early seventeenth century, the other two clearly fall short of that promise. “Providence and the Sea” provides a comprehensive study of the romance motif of the rudderless boat, with a discussion of its mythic origin, its historical and legal dimension, and its use in romance narratives; however, this chapter fails to address the 142 Jordi Sánchez-Martí impact of this motif in Renaissance literature. Cooper also considers the theme of the magic ship controlled by a powerful woman and its currency in medieval romance, without assessing its post-medieval fortunes, and concludes by stating that “Spenser finds the motif unusable” (135). “Magic that Doesn’t Work” likewise focuses on the narrative effects of failing magic in medieval romance, whilst this motif’s presence in Renaissance literature receives marginal attention limited to an episode in Othello. Considering the stated purpose of this monograph, it seems that these two chapters could have benefited from redirection of the argument to justify their inclusion in this already lengthy study. After the aptly structured concluding chapter “Unhappy Endings,” the book closes with a most useful appendix (409–29): under the rubric “Medieval Romance in English after 1500” Cooper lists the romance texts composed in English before 1400 and with circulation after 1500. Here Cooper includes reference to the printed versions published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the adaptations and dramatizations that those romances underwent, and to some significant allusions in addition to providing standard information —such as the romances’ main critical editions, textual source, and manuscript history. The appendix puts such a wealth of information within easy reach that it is certain to become a reference tool for scholars interested in the post- medieval life of romance, superseding more limited previous lists (cf. Crane 1919: 30– 48; Meale 1992: 285 n. 8), and will encourage a renewed interest in the printed history of medieval romance. The English Romance in Time, written by a scholar who is equally comfortable with the medieval and the early modern period, exudes erudition. With rigour and accuracy, Cooper displays her familiarity with the primary texts from the two periods, and refers to them frequently to support her argument. Despite the fact that the printed originals are readily available to the author in the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford, Cooper admits that “Early English Books Online has transformed the accessibility of early prints” (viii). It follows that, by making this electronic resource available to Spanish scholars, we should be able to overcome the obvious inadequacy of our libraries in primary printed materials of the period. However, it is disturbing to confirm that only a handful of Spanish university libraries subscribe to this database, thus preventing both lecturers and students from using a formidable research and teaching tool. Ways need to be found to make this and other similar resources easily available to scholars in our country. The profusion of references to primary sources, however, contrasts with a more limited engagement with the secondary literature, maybe as a result of this volume’s size or of the project’s scope, that on occasion could have improved the study or helped a reader interested in opening up new avenues. For instance, the chapter “Women on Trial” could have profited from the recent book by Nancy B. Black (2003), and the analysis of gazing (234–39) could have also introduced ideas from John Burrow’s monograph (2002; esp. ch. 3). It seems more surprising that Cooper recommends “Gaston Paris’s account of the relationship between the various versions [of Floris and Blancheflour] in Romania 28 (1890 [recte 1899]),” since “later discussions have not always improved on that” (463 n. 41), when a thorough and dependable monograph was devoted to this topic only a few years ago by Patricia E. Grieve (1997). Reviews 143
While the amount of information may slow down the reading, this book is gracefully written with clarity and precision and has been carefully edited. Nonetheless, the work contains some factual errors and minor inaccuracies. Cooper states that “by 1529 ... Richard Hyrd was translating Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman” (37), when in fact Hyrd died in 1528 (cf. Fantazzi 2000: 31–32) and it is thought that his translation appeared in 1529 (STC 24856, 24856.5). To Vives’s list of popular romances from Spain, France, and Flanders, Hyrd adds a selection of texts from England, some of which have not been preserved in printed editions. Although scholars tend to take the inclusion in Hyrd’s list as a clear indication that a romance must have been printed (cf. Meale 1992: 286 n. 10), it cannot be given as a positive fact as Cooper seems to do when mentioning Lybeaus Desconus among “fourteenth-century metrical romances ... available in print” (38; but cf. 464 n. 56). In addition, the author suggests hesitantly the possibility of “the first edition [of The Lyfe of Ipomydon] perhaps dating from 1505” (440 n. 71), a conjecture that is utterly unfounded since for his edition Wynkyn de Worde borrowed the manuscript copy, now BL Harley 2252, from John Colyns, who had purchased it only in 1517 (cf. Meale 1982). Helen Cooper also mentions that Sir Isumbras survives “in fragments of five printed editions” (88; cf. 421), when only four are recorded in STC, and that the three printed editions known to us of King Ponthus were published from ca. 1509 to 1511 (439 n. 66) when they appeared from 1501? to 1511 (cf. STC 20107). I have also noticed the following inaccuracies in quotes: “fairnisse” (16) is given instead of “fairnise,” “thefore” (81) for “therfor,” “femynyntee” (295) for “femynynytee,” “adventurers” (320) for “adventures,” “advoutres” (loc. cit.) for advoutrers,” “n’ie” (435 n. 29) for “n’i,” “le” (loc. cit.) for “li,” and “tan” (478 n. 51) for “tant.” Besides on two occasions the quoted passages have been misreferenced: the lines cited from Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon on page 11 are 10559–61, not 10557–59, and the text from Malory on page 86 is from Book XIII chapter 16, not from XIII.17. Finally, in a book that has provided translations or glosses for many Middle English quotations, it seems inappropriate to find a passage from Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan untranslated (233). All in all, though, these quibbles and objections amount to minor points and they should not detract from a book that has been broadly successful in proving its key argument that “whilst romance motifs remain superficially the same ... the usage and understanding of them changes over time” (4). The book is especially valuable for the close analyses of many romance episodes that are treated with the critical respect they deserve, for its ability to establish direct relations among texts across period boundaries, and for its expertise in setting the literary texts under scrutiny in their cultural context. Though readers will certainly find the book demanding, they will be generously rewarded with issues raised by the author that will demand further scholarly attention. For all these reasons, The English Romance in Time is a major contribution that will have long-lasting influence and probably become a reference book for both medieval and Renaissance scholars with some interest in romance. Despite its exorbitant price ($125), this book deserves a place in our libraries.1
1 I am grateful to Dr Elizabeth Archibald for helpful comments, and to the Secretaría de Estado de Educación y Universidades and the Fondo Social Europeo for financial support (grant EX2004-1314). 144 Jordi Sánchez-Martí
Works Cited
Black, Nancy B. 2003: Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens. Gainesville, Fla.: UP of Florida. Burrow, J. A. 2002: Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Crane, Ronald S. 1919: The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance during the English Renaissance. Menasha: George Banta. Davis, Alex 2003: Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Brewer. Fantazzi, Charles, ed. and trans. 2000: Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Chicago: Chicago UP. Grieve, Patricia E. 1997: Floire and Blancheflor and the European Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. King, Andrew 2000: “The Faerie Queene” and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory. Oxford: Clarendon. McDonald, Nicola, ed. 2004: Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance. Manchester: Manchester UP. Meale, Carol M. 1982: “Wynkyn de Worde’s Setting-Copy for Ipomydon,” Studies in Bibliography 35: 156-71. ——— 1992: “Caxton, de Worde, and the Publication of Romance in Late Medieval England.” The Library 6th ser. 14: 283-98. Paris, Gaston 1899: Review of Il Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, ed. Vincenzo Crescini. Romania 28: 439-47. Pearsall, Derek 1976: “The English Romance in the Fifteenth Century.” Essays and Studies n.s. 29: 56-83. STC = A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, first compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged, begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, with a chronological index by Philip R. Rider. London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-91. 3 vols.
Fernando Galván y José Santiago Fernández, ed. and intr. 2005: Joseph Conrad. El corazón de las tinieblas. Madrid: Cátedra. 251 pp.
Jesús Varela Zapata Universidad de Santiago de Compostela [email protected]
Doris Lessing once wrote that Africa has served for Europeans as a kind of peg where they could go and hang their egos on (1958: 700). This is evinced when reading classics such as Blixen’s Out of Africa or Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” archetypal stories of European dreams and failures in which Africa and Africans are mere background and where even the exuberant or pristine landscapes are viewed from a Eurocentric perspective. Chinua Achebe resents this attitude since he considers that Africa is presented in an unfavourable light, “the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (1989: 4). Heart of Darkness is arguably the best known Western yarn set in Africa. Its 2002 centennial proved the popularity of a work that might otherwise be considered as elitist, if only due to stylistic and thematic complexities. On that occasion, major newspapers and TV channels included surveys of Conrad’s work, providing the general public with an opportunity to approach Conrad as well as related issues such as the Congo’s colonial and postcolonial history. Another important source of popularity for Heart of Darkness in the contemporary age has been the recreation of the story in Coppola’s (1979) Apocalypse Now, already a classic film that has been recently reissued (2001) with some extra scenes. Similarly, Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong features some scenes that echo the jungle passages in Heart of Darkness. On the other hand, recent political and cultural events have also placed this work in the limelight. Troubled times in the now independent Democratic Republic of the Congo (for a time known as Zaire), with the fall of the long-standing dictator Mobutu and subsequent coups-de-état and guerrilla warfare, have led many to believe that the colonial darkness mentioned by Conrad is still casting its shadow on this country. In fact, Kurtz’ ambition and anxiety about possession can be interpreted as a metaphorical representation of the Europeans’ belief that they were the legitimate owners of Africa, drawing artificial maps and sharing out portions of territory. The corruption of European imperialism seems to have been inherited by most of the African post- colonial regimes whose abuse of human rights and lack of civil liberties is a sad epilogue of the colonial oppression and an anarchic independence process. In this sense, Heart of Darkness is frequently mentioned in any discussion on Africa’s recent past. Similarly, the editorial success of King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild (1998), a book denouncing the appalling circumstances of colonialism, especially the hypocrisy that meant surrounding in a halo of spiritual and cultural enlightenment the most cruel forms of slavery, has increased the critical attention paid to Heart of Darkness. Therefore, we can say that Conrad has become over the past century one of the leading figures in English literature, a peculiar circumstance if we take into account that his mother tongue was Polish and the first foreign language he spoke was French. It was only in his maturity that he came into contact with English, starting the fruitful career we now admire. Apart from the popular impact of his work mentioned above, the 146 Jesús Varela Zapata scholarly interest is reflected in the existence of several academic journals entirely devoted to him, such as Conradiana, Joseph Conrad Today, L’époque conradienne, or The Conradian; the last decade has also produced myriads of articles, papers in journals and conferences, as well as reviews. Among the critical volumes recently published we can mention those by Firchow (2000), Hawkins and Shaffer (2002) and Moore (2004); Nakai (2000) has carried out a survey on the influence of Heart of Darkness on Postcolonial Literatures. There are also two useful companions that deal extensively with Heart of Darkness: Stape’s (1996) and Knowles’ & Moore’s (2000). As was to be expected, there have been many reprints of the original text; both Goonetilleke’s (1995) and Murfin’s (1996) editions include challenging introductions, bibliographical references and several appendices with materials such as Conrad’s comments on his work, reviews from the time of publication, historical and geographical documents and academic essays. Critical production on Heart of Darkness in Spain has not been so extensive; an interesting volume, Planeta Kurtz (ed. J.L. Marzo and M. Roig 2002), consists mainly of articles by leading international scholars such as Achebe and Said, and materials such as Orson Welles’s script for a radio broadcast of Heart of Darkness. In contrast, Conrad’s novella is one of the most readily available texts in Spanish translation, especially after being offered in promotional collections by leading quality newspapers. The most well- known edition in Spanish so far was published in 1997 by Alianza Editorial, with a translation of the original text by Araceli García Ríos and Isabel Sánchez Araujo, and a very brief introduction by Enrique Vila-Matas. It also includes a final section with detailed biographical information on Conrad, as well as assorted photographs, maps and other anthropological, historical and literary documents. Spanish scholars have to be credited for other interesting editions, as is the case with Rodríguez Celada in Ed. Colegio de España (1995). Fernando Galván and José Santiago Fernández have now edited for Cátedra another Spanish edition that will probably remain a reference for scholars and members of the public for a long time. The text itself is a reprint of the translation mentioned above; however, this new edition includes a long introduction that acquaints the reader with Conrad’s life and writing career, emphasizing how some details are especially relevant for a critical reading of Heart of Darkness. As expected, Conrad’s sailing years, the basis of most of the plots and themes in his fictional writing, feature prominently. In the introduction by Galván and Fernández Vázquez there is also wide coverage of the myriad critical interpretations of the novella published so far. It is clear from some of Conrad’s letters that when he started writing the story he had in mind a plot with a clear socio-political preoccupation; he had not even thought of including Kurtz, so that some psychological and symbolic implications of the story seem to have developed later, while the composition of the work was actually taking place. However, Conrad himself wrote in one of his letters that “A work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning [since] it acquires a symbolic character” (Jean-Aubry 1927: 204-5). This explains the reason why Heart of Darkness has been described by Robert Burden as “the ideal early modernist set text, brief yet heavy with meaning; a book containing within its covers many of the concerns that were to preoccupy in one way or another a whole generation of writers” (1991: ix). Reviews 147
Thus, we can read that Marlow's voyage has been taken as a kind of quest for self- knowledge, a reflection of the inner life of the protagonist in an atmosphere of dream and eventually nightmare, developed with the help of a rich imagery, especially of light and colour. The work has also been related to myths enshrined in the literary tradition such as the quest for the Holy Grail, an interpretation that is supported by the references to Marlow as an apostle or to the colonists as pilgrims. The myth of the descent into hell is present from the moment Marlow says he feels about to set off for the centre of the earth, reminding us of classical works as Virgil’s Aeneid or Dante’s Divine Comedy. Various psychological interpretations derive from Freud’s or Jung’s theories. In this way, Marlow’s journey along the river Congo is explained by Kimbrough (1988) as a fulfilment of an erotic dream conveyed in the phallic image of the river as a curling snake, while Kurtz has been considered as a manifestation of the Freudian id. On the other hand, the unspeakable rites performed by Kurtz have obvious satanic overtones that have prompted critics such as Watt (1979) to say that behind Kurtz stands the Christian legend of Lucifer, while Guerard (1958) interprets Kurtz's final cry as an act of repentance in Catholic terms. We can also see Kurtz as a kind of Faustian figure who becomes a supernatural being for the natives, adding a new dimension to his stay in Africa and suggesting the existence of a pact with the wilderness. The interpretation of Heart of Darkness would never be complete, however, if we did not consider the political issues raised in the text. For a long time, there has been a common belief that this is one of the most emblematic anti-colonial literary works, although it was written at a time when major writers such as Kipling were still extolling the imperial adventure. As is indicated in Galván and Fernández’s edition, Poland’s occupation by Russia and the personal suffering inflicted on Conrad by this circumstance (his parents, who were patriotic nationalists, were sent into exile where they promptly died) is considered as the main reason for the publication of a work with an obvious anti-colonial slant. Along these lines, it is thought that Marlow, the protagonist, embodies Conrad’s own vision of the colonial malady, while the first unnamed narrator serves to reflect in the book the traditional Eurocentric perception of colonialism as an achievement. In the final section of the introduction to the present edition there is also coverage of the most recent critical perspectives on the study of Heart of Darkness from the postcolonial field, such as Achebe’s seminal “An Image of Africa,” which was the starting point for the ideological reappraisal of Conrad’s work, highlighting the biased European view of the continent and its inhabitants. However, the editors follow the view of leading postcolonial intellectuals such as Phillips (2003) or Sarvan (1980) that Achebe is probably taking his criticism too far; henceforth several examples, such as the favourable description of Kurtz’s African lover, are provided to confirm this view. The volume edited by Fernando Galván and José Santiago Vázquez also marks a significant contribution in Spanish publishing because of the footnotes providing insightful explanations on the text. Some are concise and exclusively referential (so as to indicate that Deptford, Greenwich and Erith are coastal settlements between London and Gravesend, or the equivalence between the English and metric systems). Other notes are fully developed encyclopaedic entries such as the one that tells the story of the Erebus and Terror, two ships commanded by Sir John Franklin in his attempt to find a 148 Jesús Varela Zapata
North-West Passage to Asia through the Arctic. This note recalls the failure of the expedition and the possibility that the Englishmen involved, in utter desperation after being stranded for months, resorted to cannibalism; as is explained by the editors. This would call into question the assumed superiority of Western moral values and might reduce the agents of civilization to the category of pagan barbarians. This illustrative footnote also includes a suggestion for further reading; the reader would probably appreciate here a reference to Margaret Atwood’s brilliant recreation of the story in “Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew” (1995). There also other footnotes that are entirely devoted to a critical explanation of stylistic or thematic issues; thus, on page 145 the editors highlight a description of semi-nude dancing figures, since this scene, among others, has motivated the new line of postcolonial criticism mentioned above. There are hints about real characters that might have inspired fictional ones in Conrad’s story, such as Kurtz (p. 242) and his fiancée (p. 249); and many other notes on personal, geographical or anthropological issues that link the novella with Conrad’s stay in Africa. This edition by Cátedra also features a general bibliography on Conrad’s life and works, English editions of the text and a general survey of critical articles and books on Heart of Darkness. Spanish readers will also find useful the list of previous editions of the text, as well as the mention of translations into Catalan and Euskera. In this case, we would have appreciated the inclusion of a reference to the other two Iberian languages, Galician (there is a translation by Manuel Outeiriño 1997) and Portuguese (both in Portugal and Brazil several translations have been produced so far, among others by Aníbal Fernandes 1983, Teresa Amaro 2004 and Albino Poli 1997). This final bibliographical section alongside the long, documented introduction (actually covering half of the volume) and the illustrative footnotes contribute to the idea that this volume prepared by Galván and Fernández Vázquez is the most significant edition of Heart of Darkness in Spanish so far. While it will be of interest for the general public, its true importance lies in the fact that this may become a first choice reference in the lists of prescribed books at schools and universities.
Works Cited
Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount, 1979 (Redux, 2001). Achebe, Chinua 1989: “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Hopes and Impediments. Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday. 1-20. Atwood, Margaret 2004 (1995): “Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew.” Strange Things. The Malevolent North in the Canadian Literature. London: Virago. 7-40. Blixen, Karen 1988: Out of Africa. London: Penguin. Burden, Robert 1991: Heart of Darkness: An Introduction to the Variety in Criticism. London: Macmillan. Conrad, Joseph 1997 (1902): El corazón de las tinieblas. Trans. Araceli García Ríos and Isabel Sánchez Araujo. Intr. Enrique Vila-Matas. Barcelona: Alianza Editorial. 1983 (1902): O coração das trevas. Trans. and intr. Aníbal Fernandes. Lisboa: Estampa. 1995 (1902) El corazón de las tinieblas. Ed. Antonio Rodríguez Celada. Salamanca: Colegio de España. 1995 (1902): Heart of Darkness. Ed. and intr. D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke. Peterborough: Broadview P. Reviews 149
1996 (1902): Heart of Darkness. Ed. and intr. Ross C. Murfin. 2nd ed. Boston and New Cork: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s P. 1997 (1902): O coração das trevas. Trans. Albino Poli Júnior. Porto Alegre: L & M. ——— 1997 (1902): Corazón da escuridade. Trans. Manuel Outeiriño. Santiago de Compostela: Edicións Positivas. ——— 2004 (1902): O coração das trevas. Trans. Teresa Amaro. Porto: Público Comunicação Social. Firchow, Peter Edgerly 2000: Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Lexington: U of Kentucky P. Guerard, Albert 1958: Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Hawkins, Hunt and Brian W. Shaffer 2002: Approaches to Teaching Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer.” New York: Modern Language Association of America. Hemingway, Ernest 1985 (1939): The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. London: Granada. Hochschild, Adam 1998: King Leopold's Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jean-Aubry, G., ed. 1927: Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Vol. 2. London: Heinemann. Kimbrough, Robert, ed. 1998: Heart of Darkness. An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources. New York: Norton. King Kong. Dir. Peter Jackson. Universal, 2005. Knowles, Owen and Gene M. Moore, ed. 2000: Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Lessing Doris 1958: “Desert Child.” New Statesman 15 Nov.: 700. Marzo, José Luis and Marc Roig, eds. 2002: Planeta Kurtz. Barcelona: Mondadori. Moore, Gene M. 2004: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A Casebook. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Nakai, Asako 2000: The English Book and Its Marginalia: Colonial/Postcolonial Literatures After Heart of Darkness. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Phillips, Caryl 2003. “Out of Africa.” The Guardian February 22: 4-6. Sarvan, Charles P. 1980. “Racism and the Heart of Darkness.” The International Fiction Review 7.1: 6-10. Stape, John Henry, ed. 1996: The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Watt, Ian 1979: Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California P.
Carmelo Medina Casado y José Ruiz Mas, eds. 2004: El bisturí inglés. Literatura de viajes e hispanismo en lengua inglesa. Jaén: Universidad de Jaén y UNED. 307 pp.
José Carlos Redondo Olmedilla Universidad de Almería [email protected]
Es obvio que el hispanismo en lengua inglesa ocupa una parcela importante en el intercambio cultural entre el Reino Unido y España. La hispanofilia romántica que surgió a mediados del siglo XIX, con sus virtudes y excesos, no hizo sino evidenciar los lazos culturales que ya existían entre ambos países. Pero si algún valor poseyó esta hispanofilia, apoyada en la coyuntura romántica, fue el de, a la postre, actuar de lanzadera de toda una serie de prácticas intelectuales que reivindicaban el rigor en las fuentes y una metodología más seria en los estudios. Dentro de esta solidez, los editores de este libro han organizado de forma congruente el contenido del mismo, pues, tras una introducción sucinta de los propios editores, pero no por ello exenta de detalles sugestivos, se elige un itinerario progresivo donde el lector acepta el troquel de la temática más tópica y productiva que acompañó a estos estudios. Este es el caso de capítulos tan interesantes como: “El carácter español según los románticos ingleses” de José Alberich, “Viajeras por España: audaces, intrépidas y aventureras” de María Antonia López-Burgos o “Iohn de Nicholas & Sacharles’ The Reformed Spaniard and the Black Legend of Spain” de Eroulla Demetriou. Junto a ellos aparecen verdaderas cartografías, que con minuciosidad y rigor tratan su propio acervo; es el caso de los capítulos “Andalucía durante la invasión napoleónica según un enviado especial británico. Las cartas de William Jacob” de Manuel Bernal Rodríguez y de “Escritores viajeros. Tres ingleses de principios del siglo XIX en Jaén” de Carmelo Medina Casado. El capítulo “El viajero anglosajón por España. De la curiosidad al conocimiento” presenta un estudio objetivo e instruido sobre las obras literarias que actuaron como revulsivo para el conocimiento de España y su cultura. De nota hispana y sosegada podemos calificar el capítulo “ ‘Spanish Ladies’. La visión del viajero” de Blanca Krauel Heredia, contribución bien documentada que actúa como receso sociológico en el conjunto del libro. El capítulo liminar “A la búsqueda del Dorado. ‘Expatriates’” es una valiente tentativa y toda una avanzadilla en el campo del hispanismo en lengua inglesa, pues traza muchos de los nuevos parámetros sociales y globales sobre los que se asientan las relaciones literarias y artísticas entre el Reino Unido y España, recordándonos en buena medida a la ya clásica obra El planeta americano de Vicente Verdú. Tras la introducción, en el capítulo que abre el libro, José Alberich expresa en su trabajo cómo las observaciones que hacen muchos viajeros extranjeros sobre el carácter de las naciones, regiones o pueblos, se basan con frecuencia en la lectura de obras anteriores (Blanco White, The Modern Traveller, de Conder Ford, el Gil Blas, etc), opiniones que los viajeros modificarán a tenor de su idiosincrasia o de sus circunstancias personales. Recoge también Alberich cómo la peculiaridad de España debe mucho a los moros y aquí no vendría mal recordar que el autor reconoce este claro vínculo con el oriente sin relegarlo a la categoría de espejismo o de discurso imaginario tal y como Edward Said critica en Orientalism. Alberich, a modo de 152 José Carlos Redondo epítome, manifiesta que el viajero angloparlante elabora dos visiones del carácter español: el colectivo (para la vida pública e institucional) y el individual. La contribución de Manuel Bernal Rodríguez, centrada en el relato de William Jacob Travels in the South of Spain in Letters Written A.D. 1809 and 1810 (1811), presenta la hipótesis de que la verdadera intención de este viajero británico es la de actuar como “enviado especial” en misión cercana al espionaje. Tras el razonamiento que se deriva del estudio de sus “letters”, coge cuerpo la idea de que éstas parecen haber sido redactadas dos veces y para destinatarios diferentes: unos, los lectores que pertenecían a la minoría influyente y que podían tomar decisiones a favor de una intervención armada contra los franceses; otros, el público general. Eroulla Demetriou lleva a cabo un análisis en profundidad de The Reformed Spaniard de Iohn de Nicholas & Sacharles, un panfleto propagandístico anticatólico y antiespañol poco conocido hasta hoy que se publicó en la época en que se negociaba el “Spanish Match”, es decir, el casamiento entre el protestante príncipe de Gales, Carlos, y la católica infanta española, María. La autora, aparte de poner en duda la proclamada españolidad del autor, un supuesto converso a la Iglesia reformada, estudia la incidencia que tuvo este panfleto en la llamada Leyenda Negra de España. La aportación de Carlos García-Romeral Pérez muestra las distintas fuentes de información empleadas por los viajeros antes y durante la redacción de sus relatos por tierras españolas para posteriormente organizar y cotejar los textos fundamentales sobre España que tuvieron un mayor eco sobre la mayoría de los viajeros: La histoire de Gil de Blas de Santillana (1715), de Alain René Lesage, Les délices de l’Espagne et du Portugal (1707), de Juan Álvarez de Colmenar, y Lettere d’un vago italiano ad un suo amico (1759-69), del P. Norberto Caimo, entre otros. Junto a ello examina la diferente repercusión que tuvieron las colecciones de libros de viajes, obras de referencia geográfica, publicaciones periódicas, textos satíricos y moralizantes y textos de viajes e históricos en las principales narraciones de viajeros de habla inglesa en los siglos XVIII y XIX. El capítulo de Blanca Krauel Heredia presenta con detalle la imagen de la mujer española que las narraciones de los viajeros anglófonos que visitaron España entre el periodo comprendido entre el último tercio del s. XVIII y la primera mitad del s. XIX hacen al respecto. En la mayoría de los casos esta imagen de la mujer española se correspondía prácticamente con la imagen de la mujer andaluza. Con posterioridad la profesora Krauel pasa a determinar cuáles eran las distintas facetas que componían esta imagen. Se señalan, pues, elementos referidos a su indumentaria: la mantilla, la peineta, las flores, el abanico o su gracia, belleza, el grado de educación, las costumbres sociales o su comportamiento ante el amor. María Antonia López-Burgos se concentra en la visión particular que muchas viajeras británicas, a través de sus relatos, ofrecen sobre distintas facetas españolas. El periodo cubre principalmente desde mediados del siglo XVIII y llega hasta bien entrado el siglo XX. La autora indica asimismo las rutas seguidas por estas valerosas mujeres y los distintos problemas con los que se encontraron, así como las observaciones y comentarios que presentaban sobre los curiosos personajes que encontraban en España. La realidad que la autora refleja a través de las viajeras aporta sin duda una presentación propia y variada de la época retratada. Reviews 153
La contribución de Carmelo Medina Casado inicia su recorrido con una mirada introspectiva y global sobre el género a lo largo de la historia, para, una vez realizada esta ponderación, situarnos en un periodo histórico: la primera mitad del siglo XIX, y un espacio geográfico concreto: la provincia de Jaén. El espacio geográfico se nos torna atractivo por su atipicidad en lo que eran los circuitos habituales de los pasajeros. A pesar de ello, resulta interesante observar cómo esta tierra atrajo la atención de renombrados viajeros: Rochfort Scott, Samuel Cook Widdrington o Richard Ford entre otros. El autor destaca cómo muchas de las descripciones de los distintos autores sobre la gente, sus costumbres, las ciudades, son reconocibles en nuestro tiempo y cómo muchas de las reflexiones y de las posibles soluciones sobre determinados aspectos socio-económicos de la provincia eran acertadas y del todo razonables. Finalmente, José Ruiz Mas considera y analiza los rasgos que identificaron al residente anglosajón del Reino Unido en España durante la dictadura franquista y los años del periodo democrático en las últimas décadas del siglo XX. En este capítulo se aborda pues la figura del “expatriate” desde diferentes perspectivas y a lo largo de distintas épocas de la historia más reciente de España, bien sea esta la etapa pre-turística del régimen de Franco, la etapa del “boom” turístico o la etapa finisecular de los años de democracia. El autor intenta de igual modo una taxonomía de las diversas tipologías existentes bien a través de la figura del “expat” o de sus libros de viajes. La obra es, sin lugar a dudas, una buena lectura para entender el proceso de “alterización” que puede sufrir la cultura, en nuestro caso la hispánica vista por el prisma anglosajón. Ya Peter Burke (2001: 171) admitía cómo las imágenes literarias se desarrollan a veces independiente o semi-independientemente unas de otras. El hecho curioso y paradójico es que esta “mirada del otro” es tan rica, tan dual, tan plurivalente que hasta cabe una interpretación estructuralista, pues la misma fomenta la sensibilidad hacia las oposiciones e inversiones. Estas imágenes del otro, glosadas con detalle en este estudio, pueden leerse igualmente como inversiones de la imagen del propio escritor, eso sin ignorar que el enfoque estructuralista también tiene que ver con las asociaciones entre un signo y otro. Es precisamente por ello que las imágenes del otro pueden estar llenas de prejuicios y estereotipos y que incluso pueden socavar el principio de testimonio. Baste para ello recordar como Sebastián Quesada (2004: 150) mencionaba la manera en que los literatos costumbristas españoles reaccionaron contra los estereotipos forjados por los románticos extranjeros, y cómo, paradójicamente, acabaron por repetir los tópicos que estaban al uso; este es el caso de autores costumbristas como Serafín Estébanez Calderón (1799-1887) o Ramón de Mesonero Romanos (1803-1882). Pero lo que no cabe duda es que el Hispanismo y la literatura de viajes sí documentan un encuentro cultural y ofrecen una serie de respuestas a ese encuentro a través de los diferentes escritores estudiados en la obra. Ni que decir tiene que el libro es un verdadero testimonio por cuanto da fe del sentido e importancia de la lectura en los siglos XVIII y XIX. Erich Schön hablaba de la “revolución de las lecturas” para referirse a los cambios y a la influencia de la lectura en la sociedad europea de 1800; buena prueba de ello nos la trasmite el libro. El bisturí inglés presenta también la virtud de revelar el sentido de “metatexto”, parámetro típico de la literatura de viajes, ya que viene a recoger de manera acertada el carácter poliédrico de este tipo de literatura. El hecho queda reflejado de manera notable a través de la atención que prestan los autores sobre cómo las obras se pueden apoyar en otras para criticarlas, citarlas o 154 José Carlos Redondo usarlas como referentes. La obra constituye una acertada actualización en un ámbito donde quizás el mayor problema son el exceso de cuadernos y apuntes. De igual modo hay que afirmar que, a pesar de la extensa y documentada bibliografía de cada uno de los diferentes capítulos, se echa en falta un índice de obras y de autores en un trabajo típicamente multi-referencial, como es el caso que nos compete. Este registro resultaría de gran utilidad al lector al permitirle localizar los distintos términos sin tener que hojear el libro, y quizás sea este un detalle de fácil subsanación para futuras ediciones. El bisturí inglés se sitúa en el análisis de esa “hispanomanía” de los hispanófilos anglosajones que se preocupan por lo español. Para Tom Burns Marañón, del mismo modo que la anglomanía reúne a quienes encontraron en Inglaterra un luminoso lugar de reposo intelectual para sus fatigados espíritus, la hispanomanía es “el estudio de quienes vieron (y ven) en España un lugar diferente, caracterizado por lo sorpresivo y envuelto en emociones fuertes, en el cual intrépidos viajeros podían desenvolverse a gusto” (2002: 17). Pero junto a ello hay también una explicación de cierto tono melancólico como reconoce Burns Marañón, pues en esa hispanomanía muchos de los viajeros y “expatriates” anglófonos creyeron ver cosas en España que ya no encontraban en su sociedad originaria. Es una melancolía de saber que se ha perdido la inocencia y que ésta sólo se puede rehabilitar descubriendo un pueblo como el español, que todavía la mantiene. Podemos hacer extensiva al hispanismo aquella frase de Ana Clara Guerrero cuando se refería a la literatura de viajes de los viajeros británicos en la España del XVIII y afirmaba: “Del análisis pormenorizado de las páginas de los viajeros británicos se extrae, por tanto, una visión un tanto crítica... nos hacen contemplar bajo una nueva luz la España reformista ilustrada” (1990: 20-21). Queda pues manifiesto que El bisturí inglés, al situarse en dos disciplinas que son compañeras y referidas quizás en pocas ocasiones de manera tan acertada como “de viaje”, nos proporcionan información útil sobre España pero también sobre la mentalidad imperante en el lugar de origen del viajero. En cuanto al título, hay que reconocer que es, sin lugar a dudas, acertado y que actúa como indicador del escalpelo constituido por hispanismo y literatura de viajes, un elemento capaz de viviseccionar nuestra sociedad como pocos se atrevieron a hacerlo. Si, como dice Carlos García-Romeral Pérez, el libro de viajes no debe abordarse como un hecho individual sino colectivo, pues el lector, el viajero y el escritor van modificando sus puntos de vista y convirtiendo la curiosidad inicial en conocimiento transformable, literatura de viajes e hispanismo en lengua inglesa deben operar de igual modo. Estamos pues ante un buen libro que cumple con los requisitos de la disciplina. Bienvenido.
Obras Citadas
Burns Marañón, Tom 2002: “Los curiosos impertinentes y de mirada de otro”. El Español en el Mundo, Anuario del Instituto Cervantes. Madrid, Instituto Cervantes. 13-34. Burke, Peter 2001: Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Londres: Reaktion Books. Guerrero, Ana Clara 1990: Viajeros británicos en la España del s. XVIII. Madrid: Aguilar. Quesada, Sebastián 2004: Historia intelectual de España. Madrid: Acento. Said, Edward 1978: Orientalism. Nueva York: Pantheon Books. Verdú, Vicente 1986: El planeta americano. Barcelona: Anagrama.
María Pilar Safont Jordà 2005: Third Language Learners. Pragmatic Production and Awareness. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 184 pp.
Patricia Salazar Campillo Universitat Jaume I [email protected]
At a time in which the multilingual nature of many European countries, such as Sweden, Italy or Spain, has been acknowledged, Third Language Learners is an important contribution to the study of both interlanguage pragmatics and third language acquisition. Indeed, this volume is a timely contribution to the increasing body of current research into the acquisition of a third language by learners who belong to bilingual communities from the perspectives of pragmatic competence and awareness. In this line, the volume presents original research which broadens the scope of enquiry in two different areas, namely those of interlanguage pragmatics and third language acquisition. The book is divided into two parts: The first part (Theoretical Background) provides the general framework for the second one (The Study). Part 1 of the present volume is further divided into three chapters which deal with third language acquisition, pragmatic competence, and the sociolinguistic context of the study conducted, respectively. Chapter 1 presents some defining characteristics of the concept of third language acquisition. In order to understand the development of third language acquisition, the author also considers in this chapter two related disciplines, i.e. second language acquisition and bilingualism. According to Herdina and Jessner (2000), multilingualism refers to those languages learned after a second one. Learning an additional language entails restructuring the overall linguistic system of the learner, that is, the third language learner’s linguistic system is influenced by the constant change of the relationship established among the languages involved. Third language acquisition has been influenced by studies in second language acquisition. The author therefore accounts for the difference between these two related fields by stating the originality of approaching language learning from a perspective different from that of second or foreign language. In this sense, Cenoz (2000) reports on the main differences between second and third language or multilingual acquisition, which are as follows: (a) the order in which languages are learned, (b) sociolinguistic factors, and (c) the psycholinguistic processes involved. In second language acquisition, there are few possibilities of variation regarding the order of acquisition, as either the L2 is acquired after the L1 or they are learned simultaneously. However, when more than two languages are involved in the acquisitional process, the possibilities for order variation increase. The learning process of one language could be interrupted by another for a long or short period of time owing to external causes (for example, living in a foreign country) or internal ones (learners’ lack of motivation or interest). Sociolinguistic factors refer to the relationship between the languages being learned as far as linguistic typology is concerned, since languages which are typologically closer to the target language may favour its acquisition. The last difference between second and third language acquisition as pointed out by Cenoz (2000) deals with psycholinguistic processes. Acquiring a third language poses difficulties to internal 156 Patricia Salazar cognitive processing by presenting a unique situation of language acquisition (Clyne 1997). As stated by Safont in her book, more research is needed in order to discover the specific operations that affect multilingual processing. In this respect, the study reported in Part 2 may help to provide some explanation for third language development, as it dealt with monolingual and bilingual learners of English as a foreign and as a third language. The third section of Chapter 1 deals with bilingualism, a close field to third language acquisition. The author acknowledges the difficulty in defining this phenomenon. Despite this fact, a chronological list which aims at illustrating different definitions of the term is reported, including early definitions of the term (Bloomfield 1933) and recent ones (Hoffman 1991). Not only is the notion of bilingualism difficult to define, but equally so are the different types of bilingual competence. In this section, over 20 types of various degrees of competence are shown (Wei 2000). In spite of the apparent ambiguity and confusion related to variability in bilingual competence, there exist specific features characterising bilingual speech which reflect interaction between those languages known by the bilingual person. Of particular interest is the phenomenon of language switching, as it best illustrates the difference between monolingual and bilingual speech production. The relevance of language switches takes us to the last section of this first chapter, in which María Pilar Safont tackles the effect of bilingualism on third language acquisition. Studies such as Hufeisen (1998) and Jessner (1999) seem to indicate that knowing a second language facilitates the development of a third one. By the same token, research conducted in a Spanish setting (Lasagabaster 1997) also points to an advantage for bilingual subjects over monolingual ones. Moreover, Cenoz and Valencia’s (1994) study reveals the beneficial effect of bilingualism on the acquisition of English as a third language. Bearing in mind the above-mentioned studies, it may be assumed that bilingual learners will acquire an additional language faster and more efficiently than monolinguals. Yet, as pointed out by the author, scant research to date has investigated pragmatic competence in third language learners. For this reason, the study reported in Part 2 aims at addressing this lack by means of focusing on multilingual production of certain pragmatic realisations (i.e. requests). Therefore, the present study not only represents an innovation, but it also illustrates the increasing interest in the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The first section of Chapter 2 is devoted to describing several models of communicative competence which to a greater or lesser extent have taken into account the pragmatic component in a foreign context at beginner and intermediate levels. This foreign setting is fully explained in Chapter 3, whose first section deals with the status of the Catalan language among speakers of Valencian. From the perspective of second language acquisition research, the second section explores some aspects (relevance theory, politeness principle and speech act theories) which have had an impact on pragmatic competence. A proposal by the author to foster pragmatic competence in the foreign language classroom follows, which has as major assumptions the following: first, the need to teach pragmatic aspects in a foreign setting with a focus on comprehension and production. This is of the utmost importance for subjects learning a foreign language because, unlike second language learners, the former do not have many opportunities to be exposed to natural and authentic language use. The second Reviews 157 assumption claims that comprehension of pragmatic items might be achieved by fostering learners’ connections between their previous pragmalinguistic information and the new pragmatic information. Finally, Safont’s proposal for fostering pragmatic competence in the foreign language classroom centres on the need for providing pragmatic patterns in identifying and using specific speech acts based on findings from research in interlanguage pragmatics and foreign language acquisition. The suggested proposal for the promotion of pragmatic competence stems from the fact that this kind of competence is one of the main components of the global construct of communicative competence. Therefore, according to the author, production and comprehension of the sociocultural norms underlying target language use should be taken into account. Section three of this chapter is concerned with the notion of interlanguage pragmatics. This is a relatively new subfield within second language acquisition research which focuses on pragmatic competence and performance of second and foreign language learners. Studies carried out in this field of enquiry have ascertained the disparity between learners’ grammatical and pragmatic competence (Blum-Kulka 1996). As this fact has aroused interest in the study of pragmatic competence by second language acquisition researchers, the author presents research conducted taking this mismatch into account from both a cross-sectional and a developmental perspective. The fourth section centres on a specific speech act, namely that of requesting. For this reason, Safont offers a detailed description of its main parts: the head, which performs the function of requesting, and its peripheral elements, which mitigate or aggravate the force of the request. Following this description, there is a compilation of some studies examining foreign language learners’ use of requests (e.g. House and Kasper 1987; Trosborg 1995; Hill 1997). Results from these and other studies seem to show that the choice of requests is influenced by the situation, the elicitation method employed, and the level of the participants. However, Safont (this volume) points out the need for studies that (a) implement various elicitation techniques in order to contrast the effect of these instruments on request-acts behaviour, (b) account for beginners, and (c) investigate foreign language learners, since most studies have focused on second language learners. In order to address these needs, the study in Part 2 is innovative in that it focuses on learners of English in the Valencian Community. In fact, several laws have tried to regularise the inclusion of Catalan in the educational system of this region. This implies that certain bilingual programmes have been implemented since the 90s so as to guarantee a good command of Castilian and Catalan on the part of the students, as described in the second section of the present chapter. The two remaining sections focus, on the one hand, on multilingual education in the Valencian Community, and on the other, on foreign language learning in the university setting. This last section is of paramount importance due to the fact that the context in which the study was conducted is Jaume I University. This institution has as a defining feature the teaching of English as a compulsory subject in all BA degrees and diplomas, a fact that differentiates this University from the other existing universities in the Valencian Community. Once the general framework for the study conducted has been fully developed, Safont presents Part 2 of the volume, which starts with the description of the method 158 Patricia Salazar involved in the study. The author chose 160 monolingual and bilingual students at beginner and intermediate level. In order to avoid extraneous variables, all the participants were females belonging to two different disciplines, namely those of Industrial Design Technical Engineering and Primary Teacher Education. As far as the tasks selected to elicit requests are concerned, they consisted of an open role-play and an open discourse-completion test. The open versions of the above-mentioned tasks allow for more freedom on the part of the learners when choosing a form. In turn, a discourse-evaluation test was used in order to measure learners’ pragmatic awareness. The empirical study addresses four main goals: (a) the role of pragmatic instruction in developing pragmatic competence, (b) the effects of proficiency on pragmatic production, (c) the effects of task on pragmatic production, and (d) the role of bilingualism in pragmatic awareness. Results from the study point to the positive effects of instruction on pragmatic development as described in Chapter 5. Indeed, the author reports a significant increase in terms of both the number and type of strategies employed from the pre-test to the post-test. As for proficiency effects on pragmatic production, findings reported in Chapter 6 show that the higher the proficiency level of the subjects, the more request strategies they employ. In the same vein, it was also found that intermediate learners made use of more peripheral modification devices than beginners. In Chapter 7 Safont aims at ascertaining whether the task performed affects the use of requests. To this end, a written task (discourse-completion test) and an oral one (role-play) were employed. Statistically significant differences were found for a wider use of request strategies and modification devices in the written task. On this account, the author states that the nature of he tasks learners had to carry out influenced their pragmatic production. As we can see, these three last chapters were related to pragmatic production issues; however, Chapter 8 examines pragmatic awareness and the effect of bilingualism on third language acquisition. As the participants of the study were grouped into monolinguals and bilinguals, focusing on the possible differences related to pragmatic awareness was possible. Results from the present study coincide with previous research (Fouser 1997; Jessner 1999) pointing out that bilinguals show a higher degree of pragmatic awareness than monolinguals. The discourse-evaluation test revealed that bilingual subjects outperformed their monolingual counterparts in recognising pragmatic failure and in providing suggestions for those request formulas they found inappropriate. The concluding chapter is a final look at the main findings of the research described in the previous chapters, together with the following suggestions for further enquiry: first, Safont claims that further contrastive analyses are needed on subjects who have, and those who have not, received explicit instruction not only on requests, but also on other speech acts. Second, the extent to which different task types elicit pragmatic behaviour could also be examined with learners of different proficiency levels (i.e. beginner, intermediate and advanced) in the target language. A final suggestion for further research concerns a comparison of the results obtained in the Valencian Community with other suggested by studies from other bilingual communities that include similar bilingual programmes. Bearing in mind that bilingualism or multilingualism seems to be the rule rather than the exception. In many European societies, such as Spain, a young field of enquiry Reviews 159 is growing, to part of which the present study is an appropriate contribution. In fact, it focuses on interlanguage pragmatics and third language acquisition, while taking into account the actual sociolinguistic characteristics of language learners. For this reason, language educators and scholars working in the above-mentioned disciplines will find this volume an interesting and enriching source of information for understanding current and future research in those fields of applied linguistics.
Works Cited
Bloomfield, Leonard 1933: Language. New York: Holt. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1996: “Introducción a la pragmática del interlenguaje.” La competencia pragmática: Elementos lingüísticos y psicosociales. Ed. Jasone Cenoz and José Valencia. Bilbao: Servicio Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco. 155-75. Cenoz, Jasone 2000: “Research on Multilingual Acquisition.” English in Europe. The Acquisition of a Third Language. Ed. Jasone Cenoz and Ulrike Jessner. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 39-53. Cenoz, Jasone and José Valencia 1994: “Additive Trilingualism: Evidence from the Basque Country.” Applied Linguistics 15: 195-207. Clyne, Michael 1997: “Some of the Things Trilinguals Do.” International Journal of Bilingualism 1: 95-116. Fouser, Robert 1997: Pragmatic Transfer in Highly Advanced Learners: Some Preliminary Findings. Dublin: Centre for Language and Communication Studies Occasional Papers No. 50. Herdina, Philip and Ulrike Jessner 2000: “The Dynamics of Third Language Acquisition.” English in Europe: The Acquisition of a Third Language. Ed. Jasone Cenoz and Ulrike Jessner. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 84-98. Hill, Thomas 1997: The Development of Pragmatic Competence in an EFL Context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Tokyo: Temple University of Japan. Hoffman, Charlotte 1991: An Introduction to Bilingualism. New York: Longman. House, Juliane and Gabriele Kasper 1987: “Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requesting in a Foreign Language.” Perspectives on Language Performance. Festschrift for Werner Hullen. Ed. Wolfgang Lörscher and Rainer Schulze. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. 1250-88. Hufeisen, Britta 1998: “L3-Stand der Forschung- Was bleibt zu tun?” Tertiärsprachen. Theorien, Modelle, Methode. Ed. Britta Hufeisen and Beate Lindemann. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. 169- 83. Jessner, Ulrike 1999: “Metalinguistic Awareness in Multilinguals: Cognitive Aspects of Third Language Acquisition.” Language Awareness 8: 201-09. Lasagabaster, David 1997: Creatividad y conciencia metalingüística: Incidencia en el aprendizaje del inglés como L3. Published doctoral dissertation. Servicio Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco. Trosborg, Anna 1995: Interlanguage Pragmatics. Requests, Complaints and Apologies. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wei, Li 2000: The Bilingual Reader. London: Routledge.
Enric Llurda (ed.) 2005: Non-Native Language Teachers. Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession. New York: Springer. xii + 314 pp.
María del Pilar García Mayo Universidad del País Vasco [email protected]
Research on the perceptions of non-native speaker (NNS) English teachers, those held by themselves, by their students, or by native speakers (NS), is an issue relatively recent in the academic arena. In fact, and as mentioned throughout the volume under review, there seems to have been a surge of such studies since the establishment of the Non- native English Speakers’ Caucus in the TESOL organization in 1999 and the seminal work by Braine (1999) that same year. The lack of published material previous to the 90s on the challenges that NNS English teachers have to face in different parts of the world seems, at least, striking if one considers that the bulk of English language teaching remains in the hands of NNS teachers (more than 80% according to Canagarajah 1999). That is one of the reasons why the publication of the present volume, edited by Enric Llurda (Universitat de Lleida), is so fitting and should be welcome. Its goal is twofold: on the one hand, it helps to make research about NNS teachers widely available and, on the other, it fills a gap by presenting research carried out in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) settings such as the Basque Country, Brazil, Catalonia, Hungary, Israel and Sweden, together with other works on the better studied contexts of English as a Second Language (ESL). The contributors to the book also provide guidelines about how to boost NNS English teachers’ self-confidence and how to heighten their awareness of the knowledge they may convey to students. The book is made up of an introduction and 14 chapters organized into five sections, each of them presenting NNS teachers from a different perspective. In the introductory chapter, “Looking at the perceptions, challenges and contributions … or the importance of being a non-native teacher,” Enric Llurda briefly reviews how and when this interest in the role of NNS teachers arose by referring to the seminal work by Medgyes (1994) and Braine (1999) and also to authors whose work on the relationships between NS and NNS teachers and the differences in teaching cultures in a way set the stage for the topic dealt with in the current volume (Ballard 1996; Cortazzi and Jin 1996; Holliday 1994). After presenting the main aims of the book, Llurda briefly comments on each of the contributions and concludes with some remarks on the overall intention of the volume, which is, as mentioned above, to facilitate access to and understanding of the issues faced by NNS teachers all over the world. The first section of the book “Setting up the stage: Non-native teachers in the twenty-first century,” comprises two chapters. In chapter 2, “A history of research on non-native speaker English teachers,” George Braine critically reviews recent studies on NNS English teachers focusing on two research areas: (i) the self-perceptions of NNS English teachers, and (ii) students’ perceptions of NNS English teachers. His conclusion is that issues relating to being a NNS English teacher are now a established legitimate research area. Most of this research has been carried out by NNS teachers themselves, which could pose a methodological problem regarding the validity and reliability of the data obtained, but at the same time speaks for the value of the researchers who now acknowledge themselves as non-native speakers and openly talk about their problems. 162 María del Pilar García Mayo
The main findings of the research on NNS teachers’ self-perceptions reveals the realization of their lower language proficiency and different teaching behavior in comparison with their NS counterparts; research on students’ perceptions indicates that they tend to be more supportive of NNS teachers the longer they are taught by them. In chapter 3, “Cultural studies, foreign language teaching and learning practices, and the NNS practitioner,” Marko Modiano takes Sweden as an example of how English language teaching and learning practices are in a process of change that leads to consider the role of English as a lingua franca in today’s world. Within the backdrop of the multicultural nature of English, he presents the advantages of the NNS teacher over the NS teacher in language and also in cultural studies. In the second part of the book, “NNS teachers in the classroom,” we find four contributions. In chapter 4, “Basing teaching on the L2 user,” Vivian Cook argues that the concepts of L2 user (“a person who uses another language for any purpose at whatever level”) and multicompetence (the knowledge of two or more languages in one mind) have implications for language teaching. He presents the main characteristics of L2 users and argues that the goal of teaching should be trying to make students independent L2 users, rather than encouraging a closeness to NS models (see Ortega 2005, who mentions the crisis of the native speaker as a model and norm for L2 learning as one of the issues with important ethical dimensions in second language acquisition research). Cook presents the pros and cons of native and NNS teachers from the L2 user perspective and concludes with a re-examination of the role of the first language (L1) in the classroom. Chapter 5, “Codeswitching in the L2 classroom: A communication and learning strategy,” deals precisely with the issue of the role of the L1 in the second language classroom. Ernesto Macaro provides answers to questions related to the reasons that make code-switching (by definition only available to the bilingual teacher) a contentious issue in the L2 classroom and the purposes and frequency of codeswitching. He finally advances a pedagogical proposal based on an interaction between functionally based codeswitching (the use of the L1 is beneficial because it facilitates classroom interaction or improves the learning of the L2 or both, see also Storch and Wigglesworth 2003) and its quantitative use (the NNS teacher needs to be aware of what the threshold for L1 use is). In chapter 6 Josep María Cots and Josep María Díaz study the role of NNS EFL teacher talk from a functional perspective. The main goal of their contribution “Constructing social relationships and linguistic knowledge through non-native-speaking teacher talk” is to test whether the semantic notions of modality and participant inscription help to identify particular discourse strategies. The microanalysis of data from six EFL classes, four taught by NNS teachers and two by NS, identifies different strategies distributed alongside two continuums: (i) the representation of social relationships (from a discourse of power to a discourse of solidarity), and (ii) the representation of knowledge (from a categorical to a non- categorical discourse). As the authors themselves mention in the concluding remarks, their contribution offers interesting empirical evidence that can complement the more common use of data from questionnaires in this area of research. Finally, in chapter 7, “Non-native speaker teachers and awareness of lexical difficulty in pedagogical texts,” Arthur McNeill examines the issue of NS and NNS teachers’ sensitivity to language difficulties from a learner’s perspective. He reports empirical work based on a comparative study in which a secondary focus was the role of teacher expertise Reviews 163
(experienced vs. novice teachers) in identifying lexical problems. By contrasting the results obtained from the 65 teachers participating in the study with those obtained by 200 secondary school students in a vocabulary test, McNeill shows that ESL teachers who share their learners’ L1 are generally more accurate at identifying lexical problems in reading texts. Interestingly, the most successful teacher group was the novice non- native speaker group. The third part of the book is entitled “Perspectives on NNS teachers-in-training” and we find three contributions about this population, each focusing on a different aspect. Thus, in chapter 8, “Non-native TESOL students as seen by practicum supervisors,” Enric Llurda reports the results obtained from the answers to a written questionnaire sent to thirty-two practicum supervisors in graduate TESOL programs in North America where, as the author mentions, one out of three TESOL graduates is a NNS of English (120). The questionnaire enquired about the general characteristics of NNS students, their language skills, their performance in the practicum and their possibilities of professional opportunities. On the basis of the supervisors’ responses, the author concludes that not all TESOL students would be eligible for teaching responsibilities in ESL contexts at advanced levels and it would be those NNS teachers with a high language proficiency that will be better prepared and stand better chances of doing so. In chapter 9, “Chinese graduate teaching assistants teaching freshman composition to native English speaking students,” Jun Liu adopts an ethnographic case study methodology and focuses on the experience of four NNS Chinese teachers whose task is teaching first-year composition to NS in the United States. Using data from email messages and face to face interviews, the author reviews the participants’ reactions when they first learned what their teaching assignment was, the challenges they faced and the difficulties they had to cope with, how they tried to establish credibility as NNS teachers and what benefits they obtained from teaching first-year composition. The students’ opinions about their teachers are also discussed. Liu concludes by pointing out that the problems these particular teachers faced could be due to different sets of cultural expectations for teachers and learners and intercultural miscommunication and misunderstanding. He suggests that program directors should facilitate support to this type of NNS teachers who are, at the same time, graduate students taking their own courses. In chapter 10, “Pragmatic perspectives on the preparation of teachers of English as a second language: Putting the NS/NNS debate in context,” Tracey M. Derwing and Murray J. Munro present the context-specific characteristics of two teacher-training programs in Vancouver and Toronto. As teacher educators, their view of the roles of NS and NNS English teachers is pragmatic and they are mainly worried about the standards prospective candidates in their programs will have to meet for graduation. In their programs a match is established between the students and a cooperating teacher considering criteria such as the level of the ESL students’ linguistic proficiency, the personality of both the student and the cooperating teacher, past experiences of the cooperating teacher, communication skills of the student (both NS and NNS), gender and cultural background. Derwing and Munro disregard blanket statements about NS or NNS teachers as inappropriate and speculative concerns about NS vs NNS as unhelpful. Instead they believe that more attention should be paid “… to current teacher trainer activities that already seem to be addressing some of the real underlying issues.”(190). 164 María del Pilar García Mayo
The fourth part of the book, with three contributions, covers “Students’ perceptions of NNS teachers”, an under-researched area until very recently. In chapter 11, “Differences in teaching behaviour between native and non-native speaker teachers: As seen by the learners,” Eszter Benke and Péter Medgyes provide answers to the following questions: (i) in the learners’ judgment, which are the most characteristic features of NS and NNS teachers, (ii) in which aspects of teaching behaviour are the differences between the two groups the most apparent, and (iii) to what extent do learners’ perceptions correspond to those held by the teachers themselves. Four hundred and twenty two Hungarian learners of English answered a multi-item Likert-type scale questionnaire. In the light of the results obtained, the authors conclude that NS and NNS teachers form two easily identifiable groups. In general, learners spoke highly of the NS’s ability to teach conversation classes and to serve as perfect models for imitation, they are seen as friendlier and their lessons as livelier. The advantage of NNS teachers, according to the students, is related to the teaching and explaining of grammatical issues, to the more effective promotion of language learning, and to their acting as suppliers of the exact lexical item. These perceptions seem to match those held by the two groups of teachers themselves. In chapter 12 David Lasagabaster and Juan Manuel Sierra answer the question which gives the title to their contribution “ What do students think about the pros and cons of having a native speaker teacher?” The subjects participating in their study were 76 Basque university students who completed both a close and an open questionnaire. The results of the study are consistent with those reported in the contribution by Benke and Medgyes: the Basque students, like their Hungarian counterparts, preferred “… NS teachers for pronunciation, culture and civilization, listening, vocabulary and speaking, whereas they preferred NNS teachers in the areas of grammar and strategies” (233). The findings of the studies reported in chapters 11 and 12, both with students’ perceptions of their teachers, should be born in mind by both NS and NNS teachers in order to reflect on those aspects in which weaknesses are obvious. The last chapter in this fourth part of the book is “‘Personality not nationality’: Foreign students’ perceptions of a non-native speaker lecturer of English at a British university,” by Dorota Pacek. The author reports a small-scale study among Birmingham University international students to find out what two different groups of learners expected from an English language teacher (ELT) and to establish what their reactions were when they were taught by a NNS in an ESL context. Pacek used two questionnaires to survey vocabulary class students, aged 18-19, from different parts of the world and Japanese secondary school teachers of English (JST), aged 35-45. Her results show that nationality and students’ educational background seem to play an important role in what characteristics they perceive to be more or less important in a foreign language teacher. In general, learners could be persuaded by a NNS teacher if the latter introduces appropriate teaching methods and displays personality features favored by them. The final part of the book deals with “NNS teachers’ self-perceptions” and comprises two more chapters. In chapter 14, “Mind the gap: Self and perceived native speaker identities of EFL teachers,” Ofra Inbar-Lourie places her study within a socio- psychological framework and considers the issue of language identity (self and perceived) and how it is particularly relevant for EFL teachers. She reviews variables that have been noted to affect language teachers’ perceived native and non-native Reviews 165 identities such as “… pronunciation, familiarity with the target language and its culture, self-efficacy in teaching the various subject matter components and perceptions as to who qualifies as a native speaker of the language” (269). Using a self-report questionnaire with open-ended questions in a sample of one hundred and two mostly female EFL teachers in Israel, Inbar-Lourie asked them to ascribe themselves as NS or NNS of English. They were also questioned about how others (NS, NNS and their students) perceived them. The findings confirm the existence of a gap between self and perceived identities, a gap that is assumed by EFL teachers as belonging to the multi- identity reality they function in. The final chapter in this section, and also the one concluding the book, Chapter 15 “Non-native speaker teachers of English and their anxieties: Ingredients for an experiment in action research,” is by Kanavillil Rajagopalan who explores in detail the underlying causes of the so-called native speaker myth in English language teaching and the resulting marginalization of the NNS teacher. He presents quantitative and qualitative data from a questionnaire completed by 450 EFL teachers in Brazil and then puts forward a “pedagogy of empowerment” which will hopefully allow NNS teachers to overcome their lack of self-confidence. This idea brings back the points brought up in Vivian Cook’s contribution (chapter 4) and emphasizes the importance of making NNS teachers aware of their strengths. As is common in most edited books, writing styles differ greatly from one paper to another and there is some overlapping in the background section of some of the chapters. There are also some minor typographical errors that have already been forwarded to the editor. I believe, however, that this is a much-needed volume which offers everything it announces in its subtitle: the perceptions different groups of people, including themselves, have of NNS teachers and the challenges of the group. The work (i) brings to the fore the complex theme of the challenges NNS teachers face all over the world and the need for discussions and proposals based on empirical research, (ii) emphasizes the strengths and assets NNS teachers have and provides interesting guidelines to overcome their weaknesses, (iii) presents NNS teachers evaluated by students, NS teachers, practicum supervisors in TESOL programs and by themselves, (iv) features research conducted in both ESL and EFL contexts adopting several methodological instruments, and (v) provides a detailed reference section after each contribution, which will facilitate in-depth coverage of the different research topics presented in the contributions and a final and helpful index. This book will be useful not only to researchers in the field and graduate students pursuing a degree in TESOL but also to advanced undergraduates in teacher-training courses who need to be made aware of how much they, as NNS teachers, have to offer to their future students. The volume will, no doubt, encourage further studies that will lead to an informed decision- making process in the corresponding institutions.
166 María del Pilar García Mayo
Works Cited
Ballard, Brigid 1996: “Through language to learning: Preparing overseas students for study in Western universities.” Society and the Language Classroom. Ed. H. Colleman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 148-168. Braine, George 1999: Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Canagarajah, A. Suresh 1999: “Interrogating the ‘native speaker fallacy’: Non-linguistic roots, non-pedagogical results.” Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching. Ed. G. Braine. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 77-92. Cortazzi, Martin and Lixian Jin 1996: “Cultures of learning: Language classrooms in China.” Society and the Language Classroom. Ed. H. Colleman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 169-206. Holliday, Adrian 1994: Appropriate Methodology and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Medgyes, Péter 1994: The Non-Native Teacher. London: Macmillan. Ortega, Lourdes 2005: “For what and for whom is our research? The ethical as transformative lens in instructed SLA”. The Modern Language Journal 89(iii): 427-443. Storch, Neomy and Gillian Wigglesworth 2003. “Is there a role for the use of the L1 in an L2 setting?” TESOL Quarterly 37.4: 770-770.
Andrew Blake 2002: La irresistible ascensión de Harry Potter. (trad. E. Hidalgo Tenorio, 2005) Madrid: Edaf. 161 pp.
Mª del Carmen Espínola Rosillo Universidad de Granada [email protected]
Los lectores de todas las edades de los últimos ocho años se pueden dividir en dos grupos, el de los 260 millones que han leído uno o todos los libros de Harry Potter – habría que restar a los reincidentes– y los que jamás harían tal vulgaridad. A su vez, el primer grupo se puede subdividir entre una mayoría que ha sucumbido reiteradamente a la magia y otros a los que cada vez les hace menos efecto. La que escribe comenzó en el primer grupo de estos lectores pero tras seis volúmenes ha pasado al segundo. Igualmente, los críticos se pueden dividir en dos grupos que guardan proporciones inversas. Existe una mayoría que se resiste a reconocerle ningún valor y que tampoco entiende que nadie pueda hacerlo, como Harold Bloom, que se preguntaba en el año 2000 si 35 millones de compradores de libros podían estar equivocados y contestaba que sí, aunque lleva ya cinco años a la espera de que el fenómeno languidezca (Bloom 2000). Y por otra parte hay estudiosos como Andrew Blake, que hace cuatro años se dieron cuenta de que el fenómeno requería un análisis y lo hizo en The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (2002), que nos llega ahora en la cuidada edición traducida y anotada por Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio (2005). Este trabajo no ha perdido actualidad ni vigencia dado el éxito mundial del sexto libro de la serie durante el verano de 2005 y la cuarta adaptación a la gran pantalla. Blake ha revisado la edición incluyendo referencias a Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005), y aunque en el momento de la traducción se preveía que el posible título de la edición española fuera Harry Potter y el Príncipe Mestizo, Ediciones Salamandra ha optado por traducirlo como Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe, sacándolo al mercado el pasado 23 de Febrero de 2006. Por tanto, para el lector español, el libro de Blake aparece en el momento oportuno para llevar a cabo una reflexión sobre la lectura y cultura de masas, el consumo y la producción editorial, o la industria del entretenimiento. Desde el espectacular despegue de Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal (1999 [1997]) y tras seis entregas, el fenómeno no deja de asombrar, aunque en mi opinión quizá en menor medida visto el despliegue de marketing que se ha ido produciendo en cada nueva edición y que no acompañó en absoluto a la primera en inglés. Las cifras de ventas en EE.UU. de la sexta entrega que dio la afamada consultora Nielsen BookScan (http://www.nielsenbookscan.com.au/online.htm) confirman a Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005) como el libro de venta más rápida (fast-seller) de todos los tiempos. Las cifras oficiales de los puntos de venta registrados por BookScan fueron de 4,1 millones de ejemplares vendidos en las primeras 48 horas a partir de la medianoche del viernes al sábado del lanzamiento mundial. Aunque esta cifra contrastaba con los astronómicos 6,9 millones que anunció la editorial norteamericana Scholastic, la diferencia se explica porque los datos de Nielsen no incluyen centros de venta tan importantes como Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club ni los aeropuertos. Es evidente que el fenómeno literario, comercial y cultural requiere ser estudiado y el libro de Blake ofrece una interesante perspectiva desde el campo de los estudios culturales. Más concretamente se enmarca en los análisis de producción de la cultura que entroncan 168 Mª del Carmen Espínola Rosillo con la escuela de Frankfurt y sus figuras más sobresalientes, Adorno y Horkheimer. En esta línea, Blake explica el proceso por el cual el valor de uso en la recepción de Harry Potter como bien de consumo queda reemplazado por su valor de cambio, de manera que el lector –ahora convertido en consumidor– valora el producto basándose en su valor de cambio, es decir, su puesto en la lista de superventas (Horkheimer y Adorno 1995: 205; Adorno 1975: 12). Sin hacer mención explicita, Blake discute la literatura popular teniendo en cuenta lo que Adorno llama la pseudo-individualización, según la cual la producción de bienes culturales está dotada de un carácter de elección basado en la normalización misma, lo cual resulta paradójico. En el trabajo de Blake queda claro cómo la comercialización mundial requiere rasgos de distinción del producto, que, sin embargo, debe poseer todas las convenciones de los demás de su género (Adorno1941: 27-28). Sin la pseudo-individualización los libros de Harry Potter no se podrían comercializar con éxito pero sin la estandarización no se venderían en cifras millonarias por requerir un mínimo esfuerzo por parte del lector. No obstante, Blake se desmarca del pesimismo elitista de Adorno al considerar que la actividad del lector no queda atrofiada del todo, y no considera que la industria del entretenimiento degrade la cultura sino que puede ser instrumento de la misma. Las explicaciones de Blake sobre el impacto de Harry Potter no se limitan a considerar las campañas publicitarias mundiales, e indagan los factores ideológicos, políticos y culturales tanto de los libros como las películas y demás productos. La irresistible ascensión de Harry Potter consta de nueve capítulos en los que su autor se propone responder a lo que considera la pregunta clave: “¿Por qué ha logrado Harry Potter este reconocimiento universal en este momento?” (14). La secuencia de los capítulos obedece a una organización bien estructurada de los contenidos. En el primer capítulo, Blake nos introduce en el laberinto de preguntas sin respuesta que ha suscitado el fenómeno de Harry Potter. Los capítulos tres y cuatro están orientados a los aspectos socio-políticos de la “Inglaterra de la prosperidad,” que es como ha traducido la profesora Hidalgo el término Middle England, mientras que los capítulos restantes tienen un carácter menos teórico. De este modo, el lector va entendiendo cómo los libros responden a la evolución que ha sufrido Inglaterra hasta llegar a presentarse ante el mundo entero como un país con plena confianza en sí mismo y con unas claras ganas de forjar sus posibilidades en el futuro. El planteamiento que se realiza en el primer capítulo constituye el pilar del estudio cultural de Harry Potter. En él el autor deja claro que este es un fenómeno inagotable y se plantea sus motivaciones, y más concretamente su relación con el momento presente. Desde el principio el autor manifiesta su desacuerdo con reducir la explicación del fenómeno a tan sólo las estrategias de marketing millonarias de las editoriales y distribuidoras para comercializar tanto sus libros como las sucesivas películas y demás productos. Igualmente, Blake se sitúa al margen del debate entre entusiastas y detractores que alternativamente discuten la habilidad de Rowling para entroncar en la tradición británica o las historias infantiles o la falta de originalidad y capacidad narrativa. En lugar de entrar en ese debate, Blake se propone desentrañar las claves con que Rowling afronta las angustias de un mundo cambiante política y culturalmente y que convierten a Harry en un héroe a escala mundial (16). En los dos capítulos siguientes, “Harry Potter y la reinvención del pasado” y “Harry Potter y los templos de la penumbra” el autor presenta una Inglaterra aferrada a la idea Reviews 169 de aislamiento de la modernidad, donde la tradición es el lema que acompaña diariamente a la gente. Pero observa el modo en que dicho aislamiento empieza a ver su fin a partir de la década de los ochenta, cuando comienza a percibirse un espíritu de cambio en todos los ámbitos de la cultura, si bien los cambios eran una forma de mirar al futuro a través del pasado. Como corolario de lo anterior estos capítulos introducen el concepto de retrolución, definida por Blake como “una combinación de lo nuevo dentro de lo antiguo que se podría calificar casi de mágica” (31). Este término tendría la misma trascendencia tanto en el ámbito de la política con la llegada al poder en 1997 del Partido Laborista como en la cultura popular con el nacimiento literario de Harry Potter, que tuvo un papel destacado en el proyecto de alfabetización de la población inglesa que se llevó a cabo en el año 1999, proclamado Año Oficial de Lectura. En el capítulo cuarto, “Harry Potter y el giro cultural,” se estudia el cocktail que formaban la creatividad, el arte y la imaginación introducidos en el mundo laboral por el Nuevo Laborismo. Una editorial media como Bloomsbury vio subir sus ganancias como la espuma gracias a Harry Potter y obtuvo la recompensa por su apuesta por una literatura de masas nada elitista, al contrario que, por ejemplo, Faber & Faber. La inclusión de Harrry Potter como pieza fundamental del nuevo capitalismo es fundamental a la hora de estudiar la producción y consumo culturales. Harry Potter ha sido el vehículo por el cual editoriales como Bloomsbury o Scholastic y la productora Time Warner, depositaria de todos los derechos ajenos al libro además de los cinematográficos, han obtenido enormes beneficios. No es extraño, a la vista de la gran inversión y los beneficios que se están generando, que haya pasado a primer plano el control de los derechos de autor. Time-Warner ha ejercido y defendido los derechos de comercialización con mano de hierro pero de forma no menos implacable que los diferentes editores. Como la propia Bloomsbury, que sugirió a la editorial Verso el cambio de la portada de la primera edición inglesa del libro de Blake porque los colores azules y dorados se parecían demasiado a los de Harry Potter. La editorial alemana Carlsen llegó a demandar a Amazon.de por vender la edición de Bloomsbury alegando que distintos clientes obtenían diferentes descuentos, violándose así la ley alemana (Lathey 2005: 142). Pero el caso más sonado fue el del juez canadiense que dictó la controvertida sentencia que impedía a los catorce lectores que compraron Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince “enseñar, leer, poner a la venta o mostrar en público” (Grossman et al. 2005) sus libros comprados antes de tiempo por error del vendedor. Sin tantos miramientos, la portada que ha diseñado Edaf es una composición con un kiosco de prensa sobre el que aparecen unas gafas redondas y a cuyo pie se eleva una pila de ejemplares de la edición española de Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal de pequeño tamaño pero con la portada claramente reconocible. En los capítulos quinto y sexto, Blake se centra en “el viejo lector,” que se verá reemplazado por “el nuevo consumidor,” y analiza cómo el mundo literario ha cambiado desde la década de los ochenta, convirtiéndose la comercialización de libros en la máxima preocupación de libreros y editores. Para esto se han ayudado de nuevas estrategias de venta como la que puso de moda la cadena de librerías Borders, con la posibilidad de echarle un vistazo a los libros mientras se tomaba café entre los estantes de libros o con las nuevas tecnologías para poder asistir a clases virtuales de crítica literaria. En definitiva el capitalismo de consumo donde el único objetivo es el conseguir el mayor beneficio posible ha remplazado al capitalismo de producción, cuyo 170 Mª del Carmen Espínola Rosillo objetivo era la calidad literaria. También se hace mención a la guerra entre las editoriales de literatura infantil. Aunque esta ya existía antes de su llegada, Harry Potter renovó la industria editorial infantil por ejemplo con la introducción de una lista exclusiva de best-sellers infantiles en el New York Times que hasta entonces no existía. También algunos premios de literatura como el Whitbread introdujeron la ficción infantil para que esta pudiera optar por el premio. En el capítulo siete se hace una crítica al fundamentalismo cristiano y su actuación en países como los Estados Unidos y Polonia, donde se llegó a desaconsejar el uso de Harry Potter para campañas de alfabetización. Blake responde a las críticas haciendo ver que Harry Potter no tiene nada que ver con el “lado oscuro” ni tampoco es un intento de sustitución de la religión. Al contrario, se trata del uso de la magia en un mundo cotidiano donde las personas no buscan plantearse las grandes preguntas de la vida sino adentrarse en mundos de evasión. En el penúltimo capítulo, “Harry Potter y el linaje de los magos,” se relaciona uno de los temas de Harry Potter con el problema actual del racismo. El autor toma como principal ejemplo el rechazo claro que hay en todos los libros al desprecio de algunos personajes hacia los “no magos,” los muggles, y de forma más concreta hacia los personajes de origen mestizo (muggle y mago) llamados “sangre sucia.” Esta condena al racismo y la apuesta por el multiculturalismo se ven reflejadas en los cinco libros que estudia este trabajo. El mundo de Hogwarts representa una sociedad multicultural y esto se ve en sus personajes y cómo estos no son elegidos por su linaje para ir a una casa u otra y el modo en que se establecen relaciones entre personajes de distintas etnias como Harry y Cho Chang en El cáliz de fuego, o entre Víctor Krum y Hermione. El libro finaliza con el capítulo titulado “Harry Potter y la ‘recatalogación’ de Gran Bretaña,” donde vemos el impacto tan enorme que ha tenido el fenómeno Harry Potter en ese país y cómo ha sido un soplo de energía y confianza para esas posibilidades de futuro alejadas del hermetismo del pasado. Blake pone en perspectiva los múltiples elementos de la cultura del entretenimiento y la función de los libros para combinar pasado y presente de lo inglés en una ficción exportable a todo el mundo. El uso de neologismos como retrolution o rebranding, juegos de palabras como Cool Britania, o expresiones como Swinging London son retos para cualquier traductor que la profesora Hidalgo ha sabido afrontar encontrando inteligentes equivalencias y proporcionando útiles aclaraciones al lector en las precisas notas a pie de página. Volviendo a los grupos de críticos señalados al comienzo, parece que el mero hecho de resultar atractivo para una enorme mayoría de lectores o espectadores descarta cualquier tipo de mérito que no sea explicable en términos de marketing. En concreto en el mercado español, es cierto que según la encuesta de PRECISA para el Gremio de Libreros de 2004 (http://www.federacioneditores.org), J.K. Rowling aparece en el tercer puesto de la lista de autores más comprados en España pero es la octava más leída. Hecha esta salvedad, yo diría que el logro de hacer leer tanto a niños como a adultos las más de 600 páginas de las últimas tres entregas tiene que ver de algún modo con la habilidad narrativa. Eso sin entrar a valorar el modo en que Harry Potter ha revitalizado la literatura infantil y la lectura en general. Aceptando las limitaciones de estilo, sus clichés y falta de sutileza, o la incapacidad de hacer visualizar las escenas al lector que no hacen precisamente a Harry Potter aspirante a clásico infantil (Hender 2003), tampoco resulta convincente la apología realizada por Philip Nel (2005), según la cual J. K. Reviews 171
Rowling recibe los daños colaterales del sistema capitalista e intenta compensarlos con obras de caridad, mientras que en el plano literario la autora se presenta como heredera de Jane Austen en su capacidad para la sátira y la ambigüedad narrativa (Nel 2005: 245- 6). Aparte de libros como el de Blake, que centran el hecho narrativo y cinematográfico en sus contextos sin atender a consideraciones estéticas, en general resulta llamativo que la posición crítica se limite a mostrar asombro ante el éxito de unos libros con tan poca calidad literaria. Por dar un ejemplo notable, la escritora A. S. Byatt recurría a la psicología para desentrañar el éxito de Harry Potter y argumentaba que el atractivo para los niños reside en la perspectiva infantil desde la que están escritos los libros, aunque para los adultos la explicación sea un irrenunciable infantilismo. La autora señala un peligro que debemos observar: el efecto “igualador” (Byatt 2003) de los estudios culturales, que equiparan popularidad con mérito literario y por tanto acaban negando este último. Esto serviría igualmente de crítica para el libro de Blake, aunque sólo de manera implícita, puesto que el autor se sitúa al margen de consideraciones de mérito literario. Lo que parece incontestable son las lecciones de Harry Potter para economistas (Brown 2005), aunque no son menos ilustrativas para la crítica. La fórmula del éxito de Harry Potter sigue siendo un enigma pero se pueden señalar algunos de sus ingredientes: la ambigüedad de un personaje que atrae a niños y adultos, la mezcla de géneros, esa modernidad anticuada o retrolucionaria del internado, la combinación de heroísmo y celebridad, el entusiasmo del público y desesperación de la crítica, el misterio y sus soluciones, y la maquinaria del entretenimiento a pleno rendimiento. En definitiva, La irresistible ascensión de Harry Potter es un estudio original y de interés para que el lector medio entienda el fenómeno cultural sin necesidad de erudición. El libro está redactado como un ensayo que evita la discusión de autores para centrarse de forma amena en las claves socio-culturales, narrativas e ideológicas de la literatura de masas. Andrew Blake ha conseguido dar una explicación que equilibra los factores de producción y consumo de unas creaciones que, pese a su apariencia de fórmula pre-establecida, han alcanzado un éxito imprevisible.
Obras Citadas
Adorno, Theodor W. 1975: “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6:12-19. Adorno, Theodor W. 1941: “On Popular Music.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9: 17-48. Blake, Andrew 2002: The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter. London: Verso. Bloom, Harold 2000: “Can 35 Million Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.” Wall Street Journal 11 julio: A26. Brown, Stephen 2005: “Harry Potter Brand Wizard.” BusinessWeek online 21 julio. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2005/di20050721_060250.htm (2/01/2006). Byatt, Antonia S. 2003: “Harry Potter and the Childish Adult.” New York Times 11 julio: A13. Grossman, Barbara, Aaron Milrad y Annie Na 2005: “Understanding the Harry Potter Injunction: Protecting Copyright and Confidential Information.”http://raincoast.com/harrypotter/understanding-injunction.html (28/12/2005). Hender, Philip. 2003: “A Crowd Pleaser but no Classic.” The Spectator 12 julio: 30. Horkheimer, Max y Theodor W. Adorno 1994: Dialéctica de la ilustración: fragmentos filosóficos. Madrid: Trotta. 172 Mª del Carmen Espínola Rosillo
Lathey, Gillian 2005: “The Travels of Harry: International Marketing and the Translations of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books.” The Lion and the Unicorn 29: 141-51. Nel, Philip 2005: “Is There a Text in this Advertising Campaign?: Literature, Marketing, and Harry Potter.” The Lion and the Unicorn 29: 236-67. Rowling, Joanne K. 1999 (1997): Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. Traducción de Alicia Dellepiane Rawson. Barcelona: Salamandra. ——— 2001 (2000): Harry Potter y el cáliz de fuego. Traducción de Adolfo Muñoz García y Nieves Martín Azofra. Barcelona: Salamandra. ——— 2005: Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury. (Traducción 2006: Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe, de Gemma Rovira. Barcelona: Salamandra).
Christian Isobel Johnstone 1815: Clan-Albin: A National Tale, edited by Andrew Monnickendam (2003). Glasgow: The Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS), 2003. i-xxi 561 pages + notes 562-98
Alexis Easley University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota [email protected]
For over three decades, the Association for Scottish Literary Studies has republished a variety of important Scottish texts, including John Galt's The Member (1832) and James Hogg's The Three Perils of Man (1822). The most recent volume in the series, Clan- Albin: A National Tale (1815), by Christian Isobel Johnstone, marks an especially significant milestone in the history of Scottish fiction. Andrew Monnickdam's carefully edited volume highlights the importance of Johnstone not only as a key figure in the development of the Scottish novel but also as a long neglected yet influential woman writer whose contribution to literary history is just beginning to be understood. The career of Christian Johnstone (1781-57) today seems nothing short of miraculous. In addition to publishing two regional novels, Clan-Albin (1815) and Elizabeth de Bruce (1827), Johnstone published a cookbook, the Cook and Housewife's Manual (1826), which went through several editions. Johnstone also co-edited the Inverness Courier (1817-24), Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle (1824-32), Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Weekly Magazine (1832-33), and Johnstone's Edinburgh Magazine (1833- 34). When Johnstone assumed the editorship of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in 1834, she became the first woman to serve as paid editor of a major Victorian periodical. In addition to breaking new ground for women in the publishing industry, Johnstone was an important social reformer and proto-feminist thinker. Indeed, as Monnickendam points out, she was willing “to challenge commonly accepted beliefs about patriotism, gender, religion, nationalism, aesthetics and a multitude of other topics” (vi). Even though Johnstone left behind a significant body of work, her biography remains somewhat of a mystery. We know that in 1781 she was born Christian Isobel Todd in Edinburgh. Her class status is unknown though it is likely that she was middle- class, given her high level of education and the fact that she had to earn her own living. She married a “Mr. M'Leish” and was subsequently divorced in 1812. Three years later, at the age of 34, she married again, this time to printer John Johnstone. The Johnstones were most likely well known in Edinburgh literary circles. James Bertram, a clerk in the editorial offices of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, mentions one subscriber “who seemed never to tire of questioning me about Mrs. Johnstone” (16). News of Johnstone's achievements also seemed to reach London, where Thomas Carlyle remarked in an 1834 letter, “Mrs. J., we often say here, would make half a dozen Cockney 'famed women'“ (1970: 311). Beyond these details, little is known about Johnstone's professional and personal life because her papers have not been located. Scholars searching for the missing archive have been rewarded with only a few letters to and from Johnstone housed in the National Library of Scotland. In his introduction to Clan-Albin, Monnickendam addresses this problem and consolidates what primary and secondary materials are available into concise, practical form. He includes a bibliography of works written by and about Johnstone as well as a brief summary of the novel's publication history. This 174 Alexis Easley baseline of information will no doubt inspire future research, and, as Monnickendam points out, might also “attract the attention” of those who know the location of Johnstone's missing papers (v). Of all Johnstone's works, Clan-Albin has received the most critical attention. Recent scholarly work has established the novel as a key text in defining and complicating the national tale as a literary genre within the context of Scottish Romanticism. Clan-Albin has been the subject of scholarly articles by Ferris (1997), McMillan (2003), and Monnickendam (1998) and has been treated in more abbreviated form in Womack (1989), Gifford and McMillan (1997), and Trumpener (1997). Ocurring at a period of renewed interest in Johnstone as well as in Scottish Romanticism more generally, the republication of Clan-Albin by the ASLS is timely indeed. Nineteenth-century literary scholars and historians will be pleased to have the benefit of Monnickendam's excellent editorial apparatus as they navigate through this complex, fascinating novel. To edit a text that has been out of print for over 150 years is a challenge, especially a novel such as Clan-Albin, which is layered with political, literary, regional, historical, and cultural references. Monnickendam's critical introduction provides useful historical and political context for the novel's four books, which incorporate allusions to contemporary political events in Scotland, Ireland, and Spain, 1783-1810. For example, he situates Johnstone's depiction of antagonist Archibald Gordon within the context of Scottish reaction to the Highland Clearances, which displaced traditional clan structures and introduced the figure of the “bad laird, disrespectful towards Ireland, a terrible soldier and a coward” (viii-ix). Likewise, in his discussion of the Spanish sequences in the novel, Monnickendam is careful to contextualize Norman McAlbin's heroism within the Romantic discourse on the Peninsular War, which conventionally serves as the “proving ground for the young male” (xi) as he battles for liberty against Napoleon. Monnickendam is also careful to locate Clan-Albin within the literary milieu of its time. He explores how Johnstone contributed to a broader ethnographic effort to document the customs and beliefs associated with Highland culture. Likewise, he links Johnstone's novel to the work of contemporaries such as Fanny Burney and Mary Brunton. Monnickendam demonstrates that while the novel clearly relies upon Romantic literary conventions and precedents, it has a somewhat problematic connection to the national tale as a literary genre. At first glance, Clan-Albin seems easy to place in the legion of novels that were inspired by Scott's work, yet Monnickendam argues convincingly that Johnstone's novel is “at odds with the whole concept of union and patriotism that dominates the fiction of Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and their contemporaries” (v, xiii). Though the novel seems to depict the Peninsular campaign as a “proving ground” for McAlbin, it also emphasizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of war. Johnstone conspicuously does not include Wellington among her list of heroes in the campaign, which is fascinating considering that the novel was published in the same year as the victory at Waterloo. Likewise, as Monnickendam points out, she “emphasises time and time again the cold, the pain, the moans of the wounded, the catastrophe of war” (xii). In her representation of Catholicism, Johnstone is equally unconventional. Rather than participating in the anti-Catholic discourse that held sway during the years before the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, she criticizes protestant Reviews 175 fanaticism and argues for tolerance. Johnstone, in Monnickendam's view, emphasized how a healthy sense of national pride, when taken to the extreme, can be transformed into “national prejudice” and ultimately, into international conflict (xv). Monnickendam's use of the term subversive to describe Clan-Albin is supported by recent studies of the national tale in Scotland during the early nineteenth century. Dorothy McMillan, for example, points out that Scottish fiction of the period highlighted the “problem of maintaining more than one national identity” (2003: 30). Likewise, Ina Ferris has recently argued the national tale “was motivated by a desire to gain sympathetic attention for the peripheral nation from the metropolis,” yet at the same time it represented an “uncertain destabilizing movement from the boundary that may discomfit as much as confirm the language of the metropolis” (1997: 208-209). The ambiguous and sometimes contradictory allegiances inherent in the Scottish national tale are difficult to situate within “Romanticism” as a monolithic category. As Ian Duncan has recently pointed out, the “case of Scotland may thus provoke a salutary defamiliarization of some of the fundamental categories that structure literary history, including the temporal borders of periodization and the topological borders of nationality” (2004: 10). Some scholars of nineteenth-century fiction would certainly place Walter Scott with Christian Johnstone in the category of ambivalence toward the colonial/British nationalist project. However, they would no doubt agree with Monnickendam's assessment of Clan-Albin as a novel that occupies a contradictory and subversive location at the borders of Romantic and Enlightenment ideologies as well as at the conflux of British and Scottish national identities. The resurgence of interest in Scottish literature of the early nineteenth century has led to increased investigation of gender issues in the construction of Scotland as both a metropolitan center and cultural periphery. Notions of borderlands and cultural translation for Scottish women writers were complicated by their marginal status within the legal and literary institutions of patriarchal British society. As Carol Anderson and Aileen Riddell have pointed out, “Several of the women novelists [working in the national tale genre] pre-date Scott,” (1997: 180) yet their works have been overlooked in many histories of Scottish literature. Recent collections such as McMillan (1999) and Gifford and McMillan (1997) provide a useful context for Johnstone’s treatment of gender issues in Clan-Albin. In his introduction to the novel, Monnickendam makes a strong case for Johnstone's proto- feminism, particularly her use of the figure of Lady Augusta as a rational center around which the novel's plot takes shape. She, like Johnstone, is progressive in her views toward education, emigration, and the preservation of Highland culture. As Monnickendam points out, she is in a sense Johnstone's “alter-ego” (vii). Likewise, other female characters, such as Monomia and Moome are of central interest in the novel, in many ways overshadowing the conventionally heroic Norman McAlbin. In Clan-Albin, Monnickendam argues, “women are the more rational beings, preferring healing to fighting, humanism to patriotism and reason to emotion” (xiv). Monnickendam's essay provides an effective introduction to the text of the novel itself, which he has expertly annotated. Even in Johnstone's own time, many of the references to Highland culture required explanatory notes. Johnstone's annotations of her own text are included by Monnickendam as footnotes in the text of the novel. Monnickendam points out that these notes were most likely inspired by contemporary 176 Alexis Easley ethnographic studies such as Ann Grant's Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1811). He supplements Johnstone's annotations with his own extensive explanatory comments, which are collected in an appendix. The endnotes provide definitions for Gaelic terms as well as interpretations of various biographical, political, and cultural allusions. Taken together, they provide a fascinating snapshot of Scottish cultural history. Monnickendam identifies (and sometimes corrects) Johnstone's frequent epigraphs and quotes from literary sources. However, just as interesting as the factual information Monnickendam provides are his more speculative notes, such as his commentary on Johnstone's possible allusion to the historical figure George Buchanan (567). Monnickendam's edition of Clan-Albin is a welcome addition to the Association of Scottish Literary Studies annual series. This handsome, accessible volume will no doubt find a receptive audience among scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of Scottish studies, literature, history, and cultural studies. As Monnickendam points out, it is an “outstanding-though never easy-novel,” (viii) which asks us to investigate the relationship between the British union and the process of cultural translation in new, innovative ways.
Works Cited
Anderson, Carol and Aileen Riddell 1997: “The Other Great Unknowns: Women Fiction Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century.” A History of Scottish Women's Writing. Ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 179-95. Carlyle, Thomas 1970 (1834): Vol. 7 of Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Charles Sanders. 28 vols. Durham: Duke UP. Duncan, Ian 2004: “Introduction.” Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1-19. Ferris, Ina 1997: “Translation from the Borders: Encounter and Recalcitrance in Waverley and Clan-Albin.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9.2: 203-22. Gifford, Douglas and Dorothy McMillan, eds. 1997: A History of Scottish Women's Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Grant, Ann 1811. Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme & Browm Johnstone, Christian Isobel 1815. Clan-Albin: A National Tale. London: Longman. McMillan, Dorothy, 2003: “Figuring the Nation: Christian Isobel Johnstone as Novelist and Editor.” Études écossaises 9: 27-41. ed. 1999: The Scotswoman at Home and Abroad. Glasgow: ASLS. Monnickendam, Andew 1998: “The Good, Brave-hearted Lady: Christian Johnstone and National Tales.” Atlantis 20.2: 133-47. Trumpener, Katie 1997: Bardic Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton UP. Womack, Peter 1989: Improvement and Romance. London: Macmillan.