Transatlantica, 1 | 2014, “Exile and Expatriation” [Online], Online Since 09 July 2014, Connection on 29 April 2021

Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal

1 | 2014 Exile and Expatriation

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6804 DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.6804 ISSN: 1765-2766

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Electronic reference Transatlantica, 1 | 2014, “Exile and Expatriation” [Online], Online since 09 July 2014, connection on 29 April 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6804; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ transatlantica.6804

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Exile and Expatriation Dossier dirigé par Catherine Collomp et Isabelle Richet

Introduction Catherine Collomp and Isabelle Richet

The Exile Experience Reconsidered: a Comparative Perspective in European Cultural Migration during the Interwar Period Renato Camurri

Hirschman’s Choice: Exiles and Obligations of an anti-Fascist Jeremy Adelman

“Our Life Was Divided in Many Facets”:Anna Foa Yona, an Anti-Fascist Jewish Refugee in Wartime United States Stefano Luconi

L’américanisation d’un intellectuel français : le cas d’Yves Simon (1903-1961) Florian Michel

(Neither) Expatriates (n)or Immigrants? The American Colony in Paris, 1880-1940 Nancy L. Green

The “Irresponsibility of the Outsider”? American Expatriates and Italian Fascism Isabelle Richet

“Relief is a political gesture:” The Jewish Labor Committee’s interventions in war-torn Poland, 1939-1945 Catherine Collomp

American Jewish Mobilization in France after World War II: Crossing the Narratives Laura Hobson Faure

Reconnaissances

An Interview with Ron Rash Frédérique Spill

Deux entretiens avec Colum McCann Cécile Maudet

Trans'Arts

Weegeedu 26 mars au 18 mai 2014 Galerie du Château d'Eau (Toulouse) Muriel Adrien

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Tiki Pop : L’Amérique rêve son paradis polynésien, musée du quai Branly, Paris, 24 juin-28 septembre 2014 Commissaire d’exposition : Sven Kirsten Gwennaëlle Cariou

Kamau Daaood in Bordeaux: A Report on His Residency, Edited by Sophie Rachmuhl “sound moving / skyward:” experiencing the oral poetry of Kamau Daaood, a Griot in Bordeaux (March 23-April 12, 2012) Nelly Mok

Vision as OfferingInterview of Kamau Daaood Monday April 9, 2012, by Nicole Ollier and Sophie Rachmuhl, edited by Sophie Rachmuhl and Kamau Daaood Nicole Ollier and Sophie Rachmuhl

Actualité de la recherche

The Nations Within / Les Nations dans la nation Université Paris 7 - Diderot, 15 novembre 2013 Augustin Habran

Isabelle Montin : « Le Retour du travail : travail et société chez John Dewey » Paris, 6 février 2014 Clotilde Nouët

Journée d’Études internationale « The Politics of Visibility in the American West » Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, 21 mars 2014 Claire Cazajous-Augé and Céline Rolland Nabuco

Colloque international « Transferts, transgressions, transformations : évolution de la ville américaine / Transfers, Defiance, Alteration : Evolutions in American Cities » Université de Franche-Comté (Besançon), 10-12 avril 2014 Clément Lévy, Nathalie Roelens, Sandrine Baudry, Zeenat Saleh and Marta Alvarez

One-day symposium “Memories of the Civil Rights Movement / Mémoire(s) du mouvement pour les droits civiques” University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, February 28, 2014 Wendy Harding

Comptes rendus

Will Hermes, New York 73/77. Des Ramones à Philip Glass, cinq ans au cœur d’une ville en feu traduit par Stan Cuesta, Paris, Rivages Rouge, 2014 Claude Chastagner

Célia Camoin, Louisiane. La théâtralité comme force de vie Paris, Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, collection Lettres Francophones, 2013 Nathalie Dessens

Romain D. Huret, American Tax Resisters Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2014 Alix Meyer

Catherine Armstrong, Landscape and Identity in North America’s Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745 Farnham, Ashgate, 2013 Carine Lounissi

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Laurence Gervais, La Privatisation de Chicago Paris, PUPS, 2013 Dominique Crozat

The Unendorsable Frank Zappa Paul Carr, ed., Frank Zappa and the And, Farnham (Surrey), Ashgate, 2013 Bernard Genton

John Carlos Rowe & Eric Haralson (eds). A Historical Guide To Henry James. Annick Duperray

Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle Mathilde Arrivé

Isabelle Alfandary, Le Risque de la lettre. Lectures de la poésie moderniste américaine Andrew Eastman

Juliette Nicolini, Gilbert Sorrentino, l’œil d’un puriste Béatrice Pire

Alan Bilton, Silent Film Comedy and American Culture Yves Carlet

Will Norman, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time Agnès Edel-Roy

Philippe Ortoli. Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino David Roche

Jeffrey Einboden, Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages Jacqueline Jondot

Lena Hill, Visusalizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition Kathie Birat

Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions. The Movement of Images in Early America Richard Phelan

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Exile and Expatriation Dossier dirigé par Catherine Collomp et Isabelle Richet

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Introduction

Catherine Collomp and Isabelle Richet

1 The essays gathered in this issue offer new perspectives on transatlantic relations between Europe and the United States. They deal with specific, other than labor, forms of migration. Generally constrained by political forces, exile evokes a forced abandonment of one’s homeland, while expatriation, on the contrary, indicates a chosen movement across borders, springing from a diversity of motives, be they economic, political, intellectual, cultural or personal.

2 Yet these two notions have more in common than is generally perceived. If always decided under constraint, exile also represents the choice of freedom over silence and oppression; on the other hand, expatriates often feel compelled to leave their country by a dissatisfaction with its dominant political or cultural order (Reagan Wilson, 1991; Loyer, 2009, 368). In addition, the two notions belong to the common semantic field of the circulation of people and ideas beyond the limits of the country of origin. They should be understood as a trajectory and a process leading to the construction of fluid and multiple identities (Groppo, 2003, 21). Their juxtaposition brings forth a blurring of the economic and political categories by which migration movements are generally studied. And dealing with smaller numbers than the labor migrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries, exile as well as expatriation studies often evolve around individual cases whose itineraries escape the broad categories of mass class identities, and the politics of integration and/or assimilation. Even though exiles, refugees and expatriates, like labor migrants, are also pushed or pulled by political or economic forces that sway their destinies, they are usually well endowed with cultural and social capital, which enhances their possibilities of mobility and enterprise.

3 These papers offer vistas on the United States as a place of arrival for European exiles, but also as a place of departure for Americans abroad. This multilateral approach provides new case studies which revise, complement or refine previous analyses on several aspects of American/European relations. In particular, they allow for a view of the United States not just as the land where immigrants were destined to fuse in the legendary melting-pot, but as a stop among others on the transatlantic circuit, a part of the transnational space created by the “multinational flows of people, ideas and goods” (Iriye and Saunier, 2009).

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4 The essays focus on a particular time span, the interwar years and World War II, a period that witnessed vast movements of people across the Atlantic, and they all try to grasp this diasporic experience in its specific historicity, i.e. in a context dominated by multiple struggles between dictatorship and democracy, oppression and liberty. It was also a period during which the United States did not always find it easy to adopt a principled position, as exemplified by its sympathy for the Mussolini régime and its reluctance to welcome the Jews fleeing German Nazism and Italian Fascism.

5 For obvious reasons, the Jewish experience of displacement figures prominently in these essays although the ethno-racial dimension of the Jewish exile was often combined with intellectual and/or political motivations. Concerning the question of American attitudes to the admission of refugees during the Nazi years, the authors are well aware of the historiography on the specific political, economic and administrative conditions which inhibited the United States from fully playing its traditional role as a land of refuge at a time when it would have been most necessary (Wyman 1968; 1984; Breitman and Kraut, 1987; Feingold, 1995). They are also well aware of the vast literature on the significance of the intellectual migration that took place “above the quotas,” allowing the presence of a European elite in the US and thus creating the possibilities of cultural transfers and hybridization (Fleming and Bailyn, 1969; Hughes, 1975; Krohn, 1993; Timms and Hughes, 2003). The papers presented here do not reverse these accepted paradigms but offer new perspectives to apprehend the general panorama. As a counterpoint, two essays in this collection explore the Eastward migration of Americans who had chosen Europe as a place for living or doing business in the 1920’s and 1930’s. During World War II and in its aftermath, on the other hand, American presence or interventions in Europe were crucial for the survival and the reconstruction of Jewish lives. Two papers explore the humanitarian role of American Jewish institutions active in Europe (Poland and France) to bring relief or support to the beleaguered Jewish populations.

6 With this multilateral approach, a more circular picture of transnational relations emerges than is generally perceived. Far from being one-dimensional, it offers multiple places of focus, and highlights the transnational space that was being constructed in the process.

7 In his rich essay on the historiography of exile studies Renato Camurri firmly calls for a re-politicization of the notion of exile. Re-centering the notion on its precise historic and political meaning, Camurri insists on the traumatic experience of exile in the specific context of the 20th century totalitarian regimes. The case of German Jews, intellectuals, and leftist activists, producing the most numerous flow of refugees to the United States, has been the most explored (Jay, 1985; Palmier, 1990; Heilbut, 1997; Krohn, 1993; Traverso, 2004), but comparisons are still necessary with other national contexts. Camurri thus delineates the less known characteristics of the Italian intellectual migration to America. A clear link can be established, he notes, between the enactment of the anti-Semitic racial laws of the Mussolini régime in 1938 and the rise of Italian entries in the United States, thus positing the case of the “racial” emigration of Italian intellectuals to the United States. In order to apprehend the complexity of the refugees’ experience and divided identities, Camurri calls for multi-level analyses which should include the conditions of departure, the role of institutions, the building of political, personal or associative networks, the causes affecting the degree of return or staying in the United States as well as the cultural or scientific legacy of exiles. In his

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attempt at conceptualization, Camurri borrows the vision of exile as essentially a traumatic and fragmented experience of loss, an absolute and irreparable break from which individuals seldom recovered, as expressed by Palestinian-American Edward Saïd (Saïd, 2001, 173-76).

Exile trajectories during the Nazi/fascist years: “Exit, Voice, Loyalty”

8 Yet, ever since the Romans, exile has also been identified with freedom, with a choice of liberty, “the ultimate gesture of independence and opposition” (Isabella, 2006, 495), “the choice to fight oppression from abroad” (Loyer, 2009, 368). It is such an understanding of exile that Jeremy Adelman illustrates in his fine essay on Albert O. Hirschman. By using Hirschman’s own vocabulary, “Exit, Voice, Loyalty,”1 Adelman applies these notions to describe his protagonist’s choices. In itself, Hirschman’s life, in his formative years, epitomized the struggle of a generation of anti-Nazi political activists in Western Europe. “Serially displaced” from Germany, France, Spain, Italy, where he had been politically involved in underground or military action against Nazi and fascist oppressors, Hirschman reached the United States in December 1940 having experienced a multiplicity of forced migrations and commitments because of his German Jewish and leftist identity.2 In Hirschman’s life, “exit”—rather than exile, a more static notion—was a dynamic form of action: he fled to exert “voice” against the fascist régimes and to act for democracy. Adelman strongly underlines that, seen in this light, exile (having to leave one’s country) does not always engender a nostalgic situation of estrangement, “a fundamental rift between self and home,” “a discontinuous state of being” as Edward Saïd has expressed it about his life in the United States (Said, 2001, 175-86).3 Apparently Hirschman in the successive steps of his trajectory did not deplore loss or discontinuity, but took advantage of new opportunities to continue fighting. Never returning to his country of origin, Hirschman, who passed away in December 2012, became an economist of world-wide reputation.4

9 The case of Ana Foa Yona, an Italian Jewish antifascist, studied by Stefano Luconi, also brings light to the history of those who “opted out,” who emigrated to the United States and maintained their fight from abroad. Anna Foa Yona’s visceral hatred of the fascist régime predated the Mussolini 1938 racial laws. These however forced her and her family to emigrate if only because of their impact on their economic situation. With this example Luconi remarks that the line was thin between political and economic emigration. The decision to seek refuge in the US was taken under both political and economic stimuli. And once in the United States, political activity, when possible, had to be combined with the primary necessity to make ends meet for a family—the gender element in this struggle being another obstacle to overcome. For the middle classes, emigration often resulted in downward mobility. Even though surviving became their main concern, Anna managed to “voice” her antifascist belief, in her contributions she fought for the large political perspective of Italian liberation, but also had to counteract the lingering impact of the pro-Mussolini stance among a majority of Italian-Americans as well as the strong anti-Semitic feelings she encountered there. As an example of the transformation of identities occurring in exile conditions, Ana Foa Yona who came

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from a highly assimilated Italian Jewish family, became increasingly aware of her being Jewish during her stay in the United States.

10 Another variation on the theme of exile or expatriation and transnational relationships is presented by Florian Michel with a study on Yves Simon. A disciple of Jacques Maritain, this French Catholic philosopher rarely appears in recollections on French émigrés. Invited by the University of Notre Dame (IN) in 1938, he remained there throughout the war. Later, accepting a position at the University of Chicago, he served as an exponent of Catholic thought among American philosophers. Simon was an expatriate, but not an exile. He certainly did not resemble the majority of the French refugees during the war who longed to return and often manifested a conspicuous arrogance concerning things American (Loyer, 2005). Yves Simon on the contrary felt at home in America. His Tocquevillian democratic belief and anti-liberal tradition were more easily reconciled in the American environment than in the French one. Together with Maritain, and Paul Vignaux,5 Simon was a link in the international exchange between American democratic thought and Catholic doctrinal tenets. The Americanization of his political stance, on the other hand, can be noted in his opposition to De Gaulle and the Free French, a steadfast position of the Roosevelt Administration.

American Expatriates in Europe

11 Nancy Green’s paper breaks new ground in the history of transatlantic migrations. By looking at the Eastward journey of Americans in Paris in the first decades of the 20th century, she studies a migratory trend that is contrary to American immigration history. It is also socially different from the predominantly labor composition of the migratory movements of the period. By bringing to light the community of American businessmen, entrepreneurs and industrialists who lived on the Paris “right bank,” she reveals that there existed a lesser-known but much larger American community than that of the well-known bohemian writers and artists who lived on the “left bank.” Expatriates rather than immigrants, these men’s and women’s presence resulted from a particular form of “exit and voice.” Opening up a new frontier for American capitalism, they chose to develop American commercial opportunities by establishing themselves abroad. This group was a “precocious transnational élite” whose presence has been neglected in both American and French history.

12 Isabelle Richet prolongs this approach on the migration of Americans abroad by focusing on those who lived in Italy during the fascist years. Here again, most of these men and women belonged to the upper class, but a variety of family trajectories, social origins and professional pursuits diversified them while also creating differences in their attitudes to the fascist régime. In this paper Richet establishes a typology of attitudes and reactions to fascism ranging from active pro-fascist to active anti-fascist, with intermediary passive pro and anti categories. The portraits she draws weave together unexpected fragments of American and Italian history while enriching previous visions of the US/Italy diplomatic and commercial relations during the two decades concerned (1923-43). George Nelson Page, for instance, the son of an old Virginia planter family, and of an aristocratic Italian mother, was definitely marked by the conservative features of his origins: as head of the propaganda radio programs of the Mussolini régime he reached the top levels of the Italian power structure. Others

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had a more discreet attitude. Bernard Berenson, the internationally renowned art historian of Jewish origin, was a personal friend and protector of major antifascist activist Gaetano Salvemini, but, at the same time, his professional activity led him to deal with wealthy American art collectors who, like J.P. Morgan, financially supported the régime. Focusing on the transnational circulation of people and ideas, the paper draws attention to the social location of the expatriates, their international networks and connections with Italian society in order to make sense of the position they adopted vis-à-vis the Mussolini dictatorship.

Jewish American transnational organizations in Europe

13 If the United States was the major country of exile for Jewish Europeans from Nazi- dominated countries, at the same time, American Jewish organizations also played a major role in Europe to alleviate the plight of Jewish people. Two examples are given here. Laura Hobson Faure presents an aspect of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s philanthropic interventions in France. The largest of all Jewish American organizations, the Joint’s impact in Europe and especially in France was considerable. And Catherine Collomp presents the case of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), a smaller organization whose scope of action was defined by specific transnational political relations established over time across the Atlantic by a previous generation of refugees.

14 Founded by Jewish immigrants, compelled to leave Tsarist Russia for the United States before World War I, the JLC was based on the political community of interests of Bundists across the Atlantic. The Bund—a political party devoted to the defense of Jewish workers and of an autonomous Yiddish culture - had become a major actor in interwar Polish political life. In the meantime, the Bundist exiles had become the leaders of the “Jewish labor movement” in the United States. The JLC’s interventions were thus motivated by Jewish and political (labor) solidarity across the Atlantic. During World War II, the close contacts the JLC leaders had maintained with Polish Bundists were crucial for the organization of relief for Jewish refugees. And it is because the Bund remained a major political organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, that, at the darkest hour of the war, the JLC from New York was able to support the final insurrection of the ghetto (April 1943) by sending money for survival and weapons.

15 The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or Joint) also acted out of Jewish solidarity for survivors of the Holocaust during and after the War. Its action was more of a philanthropic nature than that of the JLC. Yet in the countries were it operated the Joint did not simply finance the organization of relief and assist local social workers, it also helped toward the creation of new and autonomous institutions. With the example of the Joint’s interventions in France, Laura Hobson Faure analyzes the dynamic, if asymmetrical, nature of the encounter between the most important and professionalized American relief organization with French Jewish institutions working for the reconstruction of Jewish life. The relative degree of Americanization of French social practices that took place, she notes, was not the sign of unilateral authority, but the end result of a negotiated process that allowed for a certain cultural transfer and involved multiple parties, illustrating once more the multilateral process at work in these particular transatlantic exchanges.

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16 Despite their specificities, which make it difficult to find a single unifying perspective, the cases presented here illustrate how exile and expatriation are a process through which cultures come into contact. Multi-level exchanges occur, social and cultural identities are altered and ideological and political positions are refashioned. Approaching the United States from this more global perspective opens up new fruitful areas for research and partakes of the internationalization of American history called for by a number of American historians (Bender, 2002; Thelen, 1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADORNO, Theodor, W., Minima Moralia, Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, trad. Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life, London, Verso, 1978 [1951].

ARENDT, Hannah, “We Refugees” [1943], in Jewish Writings, New York, Schocken Books, 2007,262-274.

BENDER, Thomas, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Berkeley (CA), University of California Press, 2002.

BREITMAN, Richard and Allan KRAUT, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987.

BRIGGS, Laura, McCORMICK, Gladys and J.T. WAY, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly, 60, 3, September 2008, 625-48.

CLAVIN, Patricia, “Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History, 14, 4, 2005, 421-39.

COLLOMP, Catherine and Mario MENENDEZ, eds., Exilés et réfugiés politiques aux États-Unis, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2003.

CONWAY, Martin and José GOTOVITCH, eds., Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain, 1940-1945, New York, Berghahn Books, 2001.

FEINGOLD, Henry L., Bearing Witness, How America and its Jews Responded to the Holocaust, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1995.

FLEMING, Donald and Bernard BAILYN, eds., The Intellectual Migration, Europe and America, 1930-1960, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1969.

GROPPO, Bruno, “Exilés, réfugiés, émigrés, immigrés. Problèmes de definition,” in COLLOMP and MENENDEZ, 2003, 19-30.

HEILBUT, Exiled in Paradise, German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, Los Angeles, University of California, 1997.

HUGHES, H. Stuart, The Sea-Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965, New York, Harper and Row 1975.

IRIYE, Akira and Pierre-Yves SAUNIER, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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ISABELLA, Maurizio, “Exile and Nationalism: the Case of the Italian Risorgimento,” European History Quarterly, 36, 2006, 493-520.

JAY, Martin, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, New York, Columbia University, 1985.

KETTLER, David, The Liquidation of Exile: Studies in the Intellectual Immigration of the 1930s, London and New York, Anthem Press, 2011.

KROHN, Claus Dieter, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research, Amherst, University of Massachusetts, 1993.

LAQA, Daniel, Internationalism Reconsidered. Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2011.

LOYER, Emmanuelle, Paris à New York, Intellectuels et artistes français en exil, 1940-1947, Paris, Grasset, 2005.

---, « Exile », in IRIYE and SAUNIER, 2009, 368-70.

McCARTHY, Mary, “A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés,” in Marc ROBINSON, ed., Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, New York, Harvest Books, 1996.

PALMIER, Jean-Michel, Weimar en Exil, Le destin de l’émigration intellectuelle allemande antinazie en Europe et aux États-Unis, Paris, Payot, 1990.

REAGAN WILSON, Charles, “Expatriates and Exiles”, in Eric FONER, John Arthur GARRATY, eds., The Reader’s Companion to American History, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, 269-72.

SAID, Edward, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000.

STEPHEN, Alexander, ed., Exile and Otherness. New Approaches to the experience of the Nazi Refugees, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2005.

SULEIMAN, Susan Rubin, ed., Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, Durham (NC), Duke University Press, 1998.

THELEN, David, “Of Audiences, Borderlands and Comparisons: Towards the Internazionalization of American History,” Journal of American History, 79, 2, September 1992, 432-62.

---, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History, 86, 3, December 1999, 965-75.

TIMMS, Edward and Jon HUGHES, eds, Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation: Refugees from National Socialism in the English Speaking World, New York, Springer, 2003.

TRAVERSO, Enzo, La pensée dispersée, Figures de l’exil judéo-allemand, Paris, Éditions Léo Scheer, 2004.

WYMAN, David, Paper Walls, America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941, New York, Random House, 1968.

WYMAN, David, The Abandonment of the Jews, America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, New York New Press, 1984

NOTES

1. Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1970) was written long after Hirschman’s war-time commitments and

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movements. In this book, as an economist and political scientist, Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) did not literally describe exilic conditions but exposed the individual or collective choices people have to respond to situations they disagree with as consumers, employees, executives of firms, collectivities or eventually as citizens. 2. During the MacCarthy years, Hirschman was “displaced” again: from the United States to South America. 3. Both Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, contemporary to Albert Hirschman, underlined the « rupture » or the « damage » in their private lives (Arendt « We Refugees » 2007 [1943]; Adorno [1951] , Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life,1978). 4. Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher. The Odyssey of Albert Hirschman, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 2013. 5. Paul Vignaux, a French medieval scholar and prominent member of the French Christian labor movement (CFTC) was also very active in New York during the war to create a rapprochement between the reformist sections of French labor and American trade unions.

AUTHORS

CATHERINE COLLOMP Université Paris Diderot

ISABELLE RICHET Université Paris Diderot

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The Exile Experience Reconsidered: a Comparative Perspective in European Cultural Migration during the Interwar Period

Renato Camurri

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This article is based on the paper “The Question of Exile,” presented at the conference “Perspectives on Exile, Homeland and The New World. The Italian Case,” organized by the Primo Levi Center of New York, April 29th 2010 as part of the Americordo project.

The Century of Exiles

1 Exile is a phenomenon which has concerned all civilizations, ancient and modern. Starting from the Roman civilization, in which exsilium coincided with the voluntary departure from the city (Bettini, 2009, 1-2), one can also mention the experience of the political exile typical of the Renaissance (Shaw, 2000; Ricciardelli, 2007), or the exile of French aristocrats during the Revolution (Degl’Innocenti, 1992, 7-8).

2 Nevertheless none of these experiences could be compared to the phenomenon of exile in the 20th century, particularly the exile provoked by totalitarian regimes during the 1930s. This peculiarity was emphasized for the first time by the great European intellectuals who had escaped from the Nazi-fascist persecutions and emigrated to the United States. Already in 1937, for example, when the exodus toward the Americas was in full flow, Social Research, a journal published by the New School for Social Research in New York—an institution which over the course of a few years became one of the most important welcoming points for European intellectuals escaping persecution (Rutkoff and Scott, 1986; Krohn, 1993)—published a series of interventions by, among others,

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Thomas Mann, Emil Lederer, Franz Boas, Paul Tillich and Hans Speir in which the indissoluble link between the choice of exile and the battle against totalitarian regimes was theorized, and which defined the new responsibilities of intellectuals in exile. Most of them began with a reflection on the meaning of the experience of exile and on the social condition of intellectual refugees (Social Research, 4 September 1937, 265-327).

3 A few years later, some of these reflections found a more systematic re-edition in an important book in which essays by other great European exiles—Henry Peyre, Erwin Panofsky, Wolfgang Köhler, and the already cited Paul Tillich and Franz Neumann— were published. These papers were destined to deeply shape the studies into the emigration of European intellectuals.1 In his article, Franz Neumann, a German political scientist who first reached England in 1934 and then the United States, and who in 1942 was to be the author of the fundamental study, Behemoth, The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1934, underlined that the experience of exile lived during the 1930s, could not be compared to any previous example in the history of modern societies. The reasons for its peculiarity, he suggested, belonged to a series of political, religious, racial and moral elements (Neumann, 1953, 16-17).

4 We must clarify, first, that when we speak of exile we implicitly refer to really different experiences and phenomena: social exile, political exile and the intellectual one. In fact there is often confusion (not only in Italian but also in other languages) about the use of the overlapping terms of “exile,” “refugee” and “emigrant.” Consequently it is necessary to use each of these terms in their right meanings (Groppo, 2003, 19-30). Bertold Brecht already expressed this need in poetic form in 1937:2 I always found the name false which they gave us: Emigrants. That means those who leave their country. But we Did not leave of our free will Choosing another land. Nor did we enter Into a land to stay there, if possible for ever. Merely, we fled. We are driven out, banned. Not a home, but an exile, shall the land be that took us in.

Two classic paradigms

5 The historiography of cultural migration has been through new and important developments in the last twenty years, which have enlarged the field across the borders from within which sector-based studies had developed in the early post war years.

6 The first phase of studies into intellectual exile was strongly conditioned by two interpretative paradigms: the acculturation paradigm and the paradigm regarding the impact European scholars had on American culture.

7 The first one emphasized the exchange (cross-cultural relations) between different cultures and different forms of scientific knowledge resulting from the migration of European intellectuals to the United States. This interpretative model prevailed from the end of the 1930s starting with the first reflections about cultural migration from Europe developed by the protagonists themselves.

8 Many of the works published after 1945 focused on the “refugee scholars,” a concept promoted by the institutions engaged in their rescue (Duggan-Dry, 1948). Works of that period attempted an empirical measurement of the phenomenon. Laura Fermi’s now

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classic Illustrious Immigrants remained for several years one of the few books available on this topic (Fermi, 1968).

9 Laura Fermi, wife of Nobel prize laureate physicist Enrico Fermi (1938) and originally from a Jewish family, attempted a first analysis of the specific phenomenon of the exile of European intellectuals, an attempt which was only partially attained owing to the great difficulty in elaborating the few data at her disposal when she was writing. Her only source of information then was Maurice Davie’s book, Refugees in America. Report of the Commission for the Study of Recent Immigration from Europe, New York, 1947 (which we refer to below).

10 The greatest difficulty appeared to be that of defining clearly the category of exile. To distinguish the phenomenon from Davie’s more generic category of “immigrant,” Fermi referred to “the refugee movement.” She also posed the problem of defining the specific experience of European Jews, among all “émigré scholars” (Fermi, 1968, 13-15).

11 Another study of fundamental importance was the book edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn. In this collection of essays (Fleming and Bailyn, 1969), published in the same years as Fermi’s book, for the first time, the focus was on the main protagonists of cultural migration (Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld, Henry Levin) as well as on some scholars who later produced important research about the culture of refugee migration, in particular from the German and Austrian area, such as Martin Jay and Stuart Hughes.3

12 This book is an important point of reference for the historiography of intellectual exile for several reasons. Firstly, as noticed by the editors in their introduction, the facts were now sufficiently distant to be analyzed with peaceful historical judgement. Secondly, the book is interesting for the editors’ methodological choice of favouring the studied intellectuals’ academic production directly linked with their period of residence in America. And thirdly it is notable for its choice of beginning to analyze this production sector by sector (even if not all are represented). Concerning only the impact of German-speaking scholar exiles, the book was the first in a long and uninterrupted series of studies dedicated to the effect of German culture on the American cultural and intellectual environment.

13 The founding study of this line of interpretation of the experience of exile can be considered to be the Report of The Committee on Recent Emigration from Europe, edited by Maurice R. Davie (London-New York, 1947). The author, essentially using data sources from several governmental institutions and from a questionnaire distributed throughout the country, presented a series of very interesting statistical data to which we will refer later. Except for the study by Malcolm Proudfoot (Proudfoot, 1957), no other scholar has tried to venture into this forest of figures, which is considered to be reliable (Palmier, 2006, 683-87).

14 The limit of the book is that it doesn’t capture the specificity of this migration, putting it on the same level as other population movements so that the existence of a refugee problem is denied.4 Clearly the intention of the author was the appeasement of American public opinion, showing the high level of integration and rapid Americanization of the refugees, an issue that later had various and meaningful developments.

15 What elements do these two paradigms have in common and what are their limits? We can underline that:

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a. They ignore the detachment from the single national realities and their specific cultural and political conditions including the, often traumatic, moment of escape. b. They underestimate the political aspect of the experience of cultural migration: they don’t link the events with the historical scene connected with the breaking of old balances and the political crisis which led to the dissolution of the old Europe and the takeover by totalitarian regimes. c. They ignore the internal dynamics within the exile groups and the kind of relations they maintained with their countries of origin, the trans-national character of this experience. d. They do not analyse the problem of the building of exiles’ social spaces (Bourdieu, 1979, 582), interdependent microcosms which constitute an “other” society, composed of so called “hétérotopies” (Foucault, 1994, 752-62) e. They ignore the importance of the production of some symbolic elements in the experience of migration. f. They do not study the forms of artistic and visual creativity. Above all, in the narration of the personal experience of the exiles, their fortune and their new lives, they over emphasize the inevitable happy ending.

Exile and Cultural Transformation

16 In the last twenty years the treatment of the phenomenon of cultural migration in international historiography has undergone a profound renewal. A first phase started in the mid-1980s with the publication of books by Antony Hielbut,5 Lewis Coser6 and Martin Jay.7 These three studies are still marked by the paradigm of the impact of German political and philosophical culture on American culture and focus on German- speaking refugees. We can find the same topics in Jean Michel Palmier, Weimar en exil. Exil en Europe. Exil en Amérique (Paris, 1987), Hartmut Lehmann-James J. Sheehan eds, An Interrupted Past. German-speaking refugee historians in the United States after 1933 (New York, 1991). In the “latest generation” of studies, this theme appears again, for instance in the books by Mitchell G. Ash and Alfons Söllner,8 Edward Timms and Jon Hughes,9 as well as in the important work of Christian Fleck.10

17 More recent contributions have submitted the canonical interpretation of the German case to a (partial) critical revision (Kettler and Lauer, 2005; Rose, 2005). Greater attention has recently been given to the presence of exiles on the West Coast (exclusively in California and Los Angeles), with innovative studies undertaken by Pol O’Dochartaigh and Alexander Stephan,11 Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick (eds), 12 and Ehrhard Bahr;13 or to the study of migrations within Europe, for example the German intellectual migration to England (Bergman, 1984; Conway, 2001; Snowan, 2002), or from France to England, or the case of “double exile,” from Hungary to Germany and from Germany to the United States (Frank, 2009).

18 Studies into the French case have developed considerably (Jeanpierre, 2009) and are referred to further below. Similarly the story of exiled Spanish intellectuals to Mexico after the end of the Civil War has been reinvigorated (Faber, 2002).

19 What has this more recent historiography demonstrated? The extent of this broadening goes beyond the strictly historical environment, into the fields of philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology. This has led to a series of negative “collateral effects,” which I would like to underline here: a) an excessive generalization of the

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concept of exile, applied to contexts and situations that are very different from one another; b) the loss of historical specificity of this phenomenon: exile has become a kind of metaphor for post-modern life; so a symbolic conception of exile has prevailed, in which the exile’s condition is a trouble that afflicts the whole of mankind.

Ten Issues for a Reconsideration of the Exile Experience

20 A first methodological suggestion is to circumscribe the field of analysis, defining precisely the concept of exile as I shall try to do at the end of this section.

21 The second affirms the necessity to differentiate—as some scholars have done (Kettler, 2009)—any kind of trivialization of the experience of exile through its symbolic and metaphorical use that has sometimes occurred, confirming the necessity of a precise and rigorous historical contextualization of the phenomenon of 20th century exile.

22 The third necessity concerns the transnational character of this experience. As I shall explain by placing the Italian case in a comparative perspective, during the study of the experience of a single person or of a group it is necessary to consider the cultural conditioning stemming from the new environment in which they were welcomed, and of the “contaminations” which percolated through the relations among exiles of different nationalities.

23 The fourth point regards the re-definition of national identity in exiles. This issue has not been studied in detail yet but is of great interest and rich in implications. The condition of exile involves processes of de-nationalization and re-nationalization; these processes are tied to the decision to return to the country of origin. Put in a transnational perspective, the exiles see their primal identity subjected to a process of weakening, to strong transformations tied to the objective conditions of the environment (social and working) in which they happened to be staying.

24 There are also subjective elements, such as the individuals’ cultural resources, the knowledge eventually gained in the new environment, and their relationship with their mother tongue. Regarding this issue we can consider the reflections devoted by Hannah Arendt to the significance of the mother tongue as a surrogate motherland and as a last residual belonging. Similarly, one can recall that it was Theodor Adorno’s affection for the German language that motivated his choice to return to his country in 1965.14 These resources determine oscillations in relations in an exile’s national identity. Accordingly, Laurent Jeanpierre, studying the French case, has identified three types of exiles, which could also be applied to the Italian case, which we talk about in the paragraph below:15 1. the patriot defends his national identity 2. the permanent exile loses his national identity 3. the cosmopolitan lives a decoupling of his identity, acquiring a double national belonging.

25 We can say, generically, that the patriots go back to their countries, the permanent exiles remain in the United States whilst the cosmopolitans choose to live between two worlds.

26 The fifth question regards the issue of return (nostos), another topic in studies into the phenomenon of exile. Concerning the German case, David Kettler has studied the so-

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called “first letters” that exiles exchanged after 1945 with their compatriots who had remained in Germany. According to his interpretation, these letters are a significant source in evaluating the exile’s experience and to understand the dynamics which regulate their return. The latter option seems to be determined by a kind of re- negotiation of the role of the exile and by a revision of their experience (Kettler, 2011).

27 The sixth point concerns the following question: does exile end with the return to the motherland? Regarding this issue I suggest two lines of research that seem to be particularly interesting: a. the first one is tied to what we can define as the legacy of exile. In other words, it would be useful to analyse what the generation of exiles created in the inter-war years and measure the weight of this production in the Cold War years: the course of ideas between America and Europe must be traced. b. the second suggestion concerns the role of exiles in the building of transatlantic networks, through the creation of a series of research institutions in scientific and cultural fields.

28 The seventh question regards the complexity of the experience of exile in the 20th century, due to the intertwining within it of several analytical levels. This phenomenon can be contextualized within a historical background but other levels must also be considered: a) exiles who do not fit into the traditional classification system due to personal histories which are dependent on highly individual factors; b) the fact that research thus far in the Italian situation, and to a lesser extent the French, has often highlighted exiles’ political involvement in the countries where they have been welcomed at the expense of focusing on their intellectual and academic activities whilst in exile.

29 Eight, the institutional/organizational dimension of exile must also be considered, i.e. the role of rescue organizations, American foundations, and universities. The role of the foundations was of fundamental importance bearing in mind that they were able to obtain admission to the United States for academic personalities from the government on a non-quota basis. This role has been studied in recent years, (Gemelli and Mac Leod, 2003) with results that have confirmed both the extent of the funds and the sectors in which support for research and for refugee scholars was mainly concentrated.

30 Nine, to avoid confusing the historical experience of exile, which is essentially connected to the transformations wrought by 20th century totalitarian regimes, with the representation of exile as a postmodern metaphor of life or as a kind of exile of the soul, typical (and necessary) for artistic creativity.

31 Ten, a comparative approach contrasting exile to different cases of cultural migration could highlight some interesting questions regarding national specificities (Green, 2004, 41-56; Haupt and Kocka, 2009).

32 Having developed these considerations, I think that the semantic meaning of the word exile still has to be clarified. Generally the word suggests a form of emigration. Since the beginning of the last century the word has started to suggest a specific form of political emigration and has been used as synonymous to refugee and political immigrant. Nevertheless, in contrast to people who migrate for economic reasons, exiles do not leave their country of their free choice, but to escape from persecution or from the risks derived from their personal political or religious opinions, or due to their belonging to a persecuted ethnic group or minority.

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33 The meaning of exile in the 20th century essentially indicates the experience of fracture, of displacement from the motherland, of alienation lived as a loss, an injury. Adorno sums it up pointedly—in Minima moralia—when he writes that exile is, essentially, “a mutilated life” (Adorno, 1954, 27). Years later, another intellectual, Edward Said, reflected on the condition of exile. In his Reflections on Exiles, he writes: “the achievements of exiles are permanently undermined by the loss of something left beyond forever.” He then adds: Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people (Said, 2003, 47-64).

The Italian case in a comparative perspective

34 Bearing in mind these considerations, what follows is a first, concise overview of the experience of Italian intellectuals exiled to the United States in the interwar period. It uses a methodological approach based on the comparison between different national cases, starting with the German situation, which among those studied is by far the most relevant example of cultural migration.

35 The exile of German Jews between the two wars undoubtedly represented the most significant example of intellectual migration in the entire twentieth century. Between 1933 and 1938, more that 450,000 Jews of German origin left Nazi occupied Central Europe (Strauss, 1987).

36 The archives speak to us of this tragic experience of forced exile. One need only read the letters by Adorno and Walter Benjamin, as well as Hannah Arendt’s correspondence from 1933 when she left Germany for France and then the United States (in 1941), with other Jews in America or Israel or those who stayed behind in Europe (like Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger).

37 These letters not only describe the tragedy being played out on the European stage but more importantly describe the condition of these “men without a world,” out of place, cosmopolitan out of necessity, desperately seeking a chance of being saved or just staying alive. These individuals tell us—just as the great sociologist George Simmel had previously noted—what it means for an exile to be known as a “foreigner” in the land that welcomes them (Simmel, 1998, 580-600). These accounts, furthermore, allow us to understand the various “mutilations” that the exile is submitted to, starting from a linguistic one. It was Adorno who wrote that the language of the exile is an “expropriated language.”

38 The few data we have about the exile of Italian intellectuals underline a clear link between the introduction of the racial laws and the growth of entries in the United States. This doesn’t exclude the presence among the intellectuals in exile of persons who arrived in America before 1938, nor the presence of an element of non-Jews among them (quite a small one in reality).

39 We will try to analyze some features of the experience of Italian exiles in the United States starting from a comparative approach, with the aim of firstly highlighting some significant differences between the various national cases. At the same time we underline another fundamental aspect: the world of the exiles is one in which several experiences co-exist, a world in which a plurality of worlds meet one another. In this

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transnational dimension the very notion of nationality can at the same time be reinforced or weakened.

40 Moving from this perspective we can try to see what happens within these different national microcosms. The elements characterising the experience of the German- speaking exile schematically include the following features: the fundamental role of Jewish rescue organizations in aiding the refugees; the high availability of academic and scientific structures that welcomed them; the strong cohesion and solidarity inside the community group; the weak political commitment of the refugees; the very strong impact, as already underlined, on the American culture, following the interpretative outsider/insider scheme proposed by Peter Gay in a famous article;16 the high willingness to assimilate; the low percentage of return to homeland after 1945; and finally the great number of memories, collections of letters and other writings by the protagonists on the experience of exile, which has permitted a strong sedimentation and revision of the memory of this event (Anderson, 1998).

41 The second case that we examine is the French one, recently studied after years of silence. An interpretative standard tends to consider the French exile as an anomaly among the different national cases of intellectual exile. This is for three reasons: the high percentage of return to the homeland after 1945, the low “impact” on American culture and the substantial isolation from it.

42 The “new” French historiography has partially acknowledged and confirmed this interpretation. But some of the most recent work (see for example Laurent Jeanpierre), tries to overcome this consolidated stereotype, showing the French experience as more dynamic and open to contact with American institutions, with a lower group cohesion and a stronger presence in the cultural debate than previously perceived.

43 We could say, schematically, the French case has some elements in common with the German experience: the high availability of welcoming structures and a strong sense of cohesion, although not without fractures (recall the famous fracture between Maritain and Saint-Exupery in 1942 about the Vichy regime).

44 In contrast, if we want to underline the specific features of the exile of French intellectuals, we could isolate the following elements: a high presence of artists, especially in the New York area; the low impact on American culture (except in the artistic field); the strong political commitment of the exiles; the high number of returnees; the presence of many journalists and the subsequent high number of journals published during the period of exile; a strong commitment to the artistic and scientific fields; the presence of some intellectuals as “experts” in the organizations built after the United States entered the war, such as the Office of Strategic Services and the Office of War Information which, among various propaganda activities, coordinated radio programs for European immigrants (Winkler, 1978); the low production of memories and a low availability for assimilation. Forever French—as the title of one of the first books written on French exiles in the United States recalls (Nettlebeck, 1991)—seems to have been the destiny of French exiles. To sustain this interpretation we can mention two examples which for different reasons seem to confirm both the high level of autonomy (in some cases detachment) of French intellectuals from the country that hosted them and their organizational capacity. We refer primarily to the refusal of French scientists to collaborate with the programs for the realization of the atomic bomb;17 and to the experience, only recently studied, of the Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 1942-1944, where the pattern of

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summer meetings organized from 1910 in the Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny in France was recreated with writers, artists, intellectuals called together for ten days to discuss a predefined subject matter (Benfey and Remmler, 2006).

45 Regarding the Italian case, the comparison with the German and French experience suggests the following elements: the emigration of Italian intellectuals and scientists received little aid from international Jewish organizations. The Delasem, the most important Italian organization in this field, worked only in the European area (Leone, 1983; Antonini, 2000, 2005). As such, their inclusion in American scientific and academic structures was more difficult. If we consider these conditions, observations about the impact and so called “fertilization” of American culture ought to be evaluated in a different light. Lacking more in depth studies in this field, we can affirm that the contributions of Italian refugees appear noteworthy in four disciplines, which correspond to the fields of activity of four Nobel Prizes winners, whose biographies are for various reasons linked to the experience of exile: Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segrè, Salvatore Luria and Franco Modigliani.

46 The role played by Italian scientists (Fermi, Segrè and Rossi18) in the Manhattan Project for the realization of the first atomic bomb is broadly recognized (Bernstein, 1975, 23-69). Their impact on American culture was very important in theoretical physics, with Fermi and the Chicago School19 and with Segrè at Berkeley (Fermi, 1995), in experimental physics with Bruno Rossi (Rossi, 1987) and his school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of Cambridge with several generations of students. At MIT, it is also possible to rebuild the legacy of Salvatore Luria, who created around him an important school in biology.20

47 Another field in which it is possible to track a precise form of fertilization of American culture is that of economics with the influence of Franco Modigliani (Modigliani, 1999; Camurri, 2010), whose ideas spread from MIT to various universities around the world and to several international organizations.

48 Finally, a fourth field in which it is possible to track a precise Italian heritage is that of comparative literature: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese taught in Chicago between 1936 and 1948 and was also active in journalistic and political science;21 Renato Poggioli22 began a still fervent line of studies at Harvard University in 1947 (Della Terza, 2001).

49 Returning to the features of the experience of Italian refugees, in spite of their strong internal divisions, they were characterized by a willingness to assimilate, a high level of political commitment, collaboration with American institutions (confirmed by their presence in governmental and military organizations such as the OSS), a low rate of return to Italy after 1945, and a limited production of memoires, some of which were only published later.

50 At first glance, what appears to differentiate the Italian case from the German and the French experience is the minor role of Jewish rescue organizations in aiding Italian intellectuals. Thus the means and itineraries by which exiles departed from Italy and arrived on the other side of the ocean were more diverse. The most frequent opportunity, within certain limits the most incisive one, was that of direct contacts with those who had left first, before the great wave of emigration started in 1938, and who had by then been introduced into the American academic world.

51 From this point of view Italians had few bridges. Among them there was George La Piana, a historian of religion who taught at Harvard23 and had great prestige at

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Cambridge; Michele Cantarella who taught in one of the most important colleges of North America and was deeply committed to the rescue of European scholars,24 and above all Max Ascoli. This philosopher and professor of law, born into a Jewish family from Ferrara, became dean of the New School for Social Research, and is the key character in understanding the experience of Italian intellectuals exiled in the United States (Camurri, 2010, 644-56).

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RUSSI, R., ed., “Esilio,” in Quaderni di Synapsis, VII, Firenze, 2008.

RUTKOFF, P.M. and W.B. SCOTT, New School. A History of the New School for Social Research, Collier Macmillan, New York, 1986.

SAID, E., “Intellectual Exile. Expatriates and Marginals”, in Representations of the Intellectual, New York, Vintage, 1994, 47-64.

---, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003, 173-77.

SHAW, C., The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

SIMMEL, G., Excursus sullo straniero, in Sociologia, Torino, Edizioni di Comunità, 1998, 580-600.

SNOWAN, D., Hitler’s Emigrés. The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism, Chatoo & Windus, London, 2002.

STEPHAN, A., Refugee and Reality: Feuchtwanger and the European Emigrés in California, New York, Rodopi, 2005.

TIMMS, E. and J. HUGHES, Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation. Refugees from National Socialism in the English-Speaking World, Springer, Vienna, New York, 2003.

WINKLER, A.M., The Politics of Propaganda: the Office of War Information, 1942-1945, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978.

NOTES

1. Among the classic works on this topic see: Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds, The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969; Henry Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change. The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965, Harper & Row, New York, 1975; Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America. Their Impact and Their Experience, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984; Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles. Essays on Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, Columbia University Press, New York, 1985; Dante Della Terza, Da Vienna

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a Baltimora: la diaspora degli intellettuali europei negli Stati Uniti d’America, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1987. 2. B. Brecht, Concerning the Label Emigrant, quoted in J. M. Palmier, Weimar in Exile: the Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, London, Verso, 2006, 1. 3. See S. Hughes, The Sea Change. The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965, New York, Harper & Row, 1975. 4. For a different point of view see John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem. Report of a Survey, London & New York, Oxford University Press, 1939. 5. Exiled in Paradise. German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the present, New York, Viking Press, 1983. 6. Refugee Scholars in America. Their Impact and their Experiences, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984. 7. Permanent Exiles, Essay on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, New York, Columbia Univerity Press, 1985. 8. Forced Migration and Scientific Change. Emigre German- Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. 9. Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation. Refugees from National Socialism in the English- Speaking World, Springer, Vienna-New York, 2003. 10. A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences. Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2011. 11. See Refugee and reality: Feuchtwanger and the European émigrés in California, New York, Rodopi, 2005. 12. Caught by politics: Hitler exiles and American visual culture, New York, 2007. 13. Weimar on the Pacific: German exile culture in Los Angeles and the crisis of modernism, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007. 14. Derrida has criticized the so called idea of “mother tongue” in Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothése de l’origine, Paris, Galilée, 1996. 15. These typologies reproduce a division suggested by F. Neumann, “The Social Sciences,” in W. Rex Crawford, The Cultural Migration. The European Scholar in America, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953, 16-17. 16. Cf. P. Gay, “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider”, in D. Fleming-B. Bailyn, The Intellectual Migration, op. cit., 10-93. 17. On the role of French and European scientists see B. Goldschmidt, Atomics Rivals, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990; D. Dosso, “The Rescue of French Scientists. Respective Roles of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Biochemist Louis Rapkine (1904-1948)", in G. Gemelli, ed., The “Unacceptables”. American Foundations and Refugee Scholars between the Two Wars and after, Bruxelles, 2000, 195-215; Id., “Les scientifiques français réfugiés en Amérique et la France Libre,” in Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 60, October-December 2000, 34-40. 18. Regarding the history of Italian physics see G. Battimeli and M. De Maria, eds, Edoardo Amaldi. Da via Panisperna all’America: i fisici italiani e la seconda guerra mondiale, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1997 ; C. Bernardini, La fisica italiana del Novecento, Bari, Laterza, 2001; R. Maiocchi, Gli scienziati del Duce, Roma, Carocci, 2003, A. Gissi, “L'emigrazione dei ‘maestri’. Gli scienziati italiani negli Stati Uniti tra le due guerre”, in A. Arru, D.L. Cagliati and F. Ramella, eds., Donne e uomini migranti. Storie e geografie tra breve e lunga distanza, Donzelli, Roma, 2008, 152-153. 19. On Fermi’s biography see G. Maltese, Enrico Fermi in America: una autobiografia scientifica, 1938-1954, Bologna, Zanichelli, 2003 and the latest biography by G. Bruzzaniti, Enrico Fermi: il genio obbediente, Torino, Einaudi, 2007. Regarding the reason of his exile see S.M. Di Scala, “Science and Fascism: The Case of Enrico Fermi”, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, n°6, 2005, 199-211, where the author underlines that there is no connection between this choice and an antifascist view.

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20. For more information on Salvatore Luria (1912-1991) see his autobiography A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube: An Autobiography, New York, Harper, 1984; P.G. Abir-Am, “The Rockefeller Foundation and refugee Biologists: European and American Careers of leading Rockefeller Foundation Grants from England, France, Germany and Italy”, in G. Gemelli, ed., The Unacceptable, op. cit., 217-40. 21. Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1882-1952), novelist, journalist, arrived in the United States in 1931. He taught at Berkeley, Smith College, and from 1936 to 1948 at the University of Chicago. 22. Renato Poggioli (1907-1963) was the most important Italian scholar of Slavic and Russian literature. He arrived in the United States in 1938 and began teaching at Smith College. From 1939 until 1946 he was at Brown and after at Harvard. See D. Della Terza, Da Vienna a Baltimora. La diaspora degli intellettuali europei negli Stati Uniti d’America, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 2001, 127-56 and R. Ludovico-L. Pertile and M. Riva, eds., Renato Poggioli: an intellectual biography, Firenze, L.S. Olschiki, Firenze, 2012. 23. George La Piana (1878-1971), arrived in the United States in 1913. Three years later he began teaching at Harvard University. 24. Michele Cantarella (1899-1988) arrived in the United States in 1921, from 1929 until 1964 he taught at Smith College, strongly involved in the rescue of European scholars. See P.I. Rose, ed., The Dispossessed. An Anatomy of Exile, Amherst, 2005.

ABSTRACTS

This paper deals with exile in the 20th century and makes some suggestions for a reconsideration of this experience. The reasons for its peculiarity lie in a series of political, religious, racial and moral elements but when we speak of exile we are implicitly referring to substantially different experiences and phenomena: social exile, political exile and intellectual exile. The historiography of cultural migration has been through new and important developments over the past twenty years, developments that have enlarged the field across the borders of where sector-based studies grew. The first phase of studies into intellectual exile was strongly conditioned by two classic interpretative paradigms: the acculturation paradigm and the paradigm of the impact refugee scholars had on American culture. However, the field of so called “Exile Studies” has widened remarkably in recent years extending to philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology. This has provoked a series of negative effects, such as an excessive generalization of the concept of exile and the loss of the historical specificity of this phenomenon. The author analyzes some features of the experience of Italian exiles in the United States starting from a comparative approach. His aim is to highlight major differences between various national cases (German, French and Italian). He concludes that the meaning of exile in the 20th century essentially indicates an experience of fracture, of displacement from the motherland, of alienation lived as a loss, of injury.

Portant sur l’exil produit par les dictatures fasciste et nazie du XXe siècle, cet article propose des pistes pour reconsidérer le phénomène. Les grandes caractéristiques politiques, religieuses, raciales et morales qui l’ont causé ne sont pas suffisantes pour l’examiner. Le phénomène est multiple : il est nécessaire de distinguer exil social, d’exil politique et/ou intellectuel. L’historiographie de l’émigration culturelle s’est beaucoup développée depuis une vingtaine

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d’années élargissant le domaine des bases nationales ou sectorielles où elle s’était originellement produite. La première phase des études sur l’exil des intellectuels a été fortement conditionnée par deux paradigmes classiques d’interprétation: la question de l’acculturation des chercheurs réfugiés et celle de l’impact de leur présence sur la culture américaine. Mais ce que l’on appelle aujourd’hui “exile studies” s’est considérablement étendu pour devenir une catégorie du langage littéraire, philosophique, sociologique et anthropologique. Ceci s’est traduit par une généralisation excessive du concept d’exil et une disparition de sa spécificité historique. En plus de ces considérations historiographiques, et de manière comparative, nous analysons ici l’expérience des intellectuels italiens dans l’exil, soulignant des différences avec le cas de leurs homologues allemands et français. Les notions de fracture, d’aliénation et de perte de statut demeurent des caractéristiques fondamentales de cet éloignement forcé du pays d’origine.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Exil politique, exil intellectuel, émigration culturelle européenne, « exile studies », perspectives comparatistes, réfugiés italiens Keywords: Political and intellectual exile, European cultural migration, exile studies, comparative perspective, Italian case

AUTHOR

RENATO CAMURRI Université de Ferrare

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Hirschman’s Choice: Exiles and Obligations of an anti-Fascist

Jeremy Adelman

1 Life histories, like lives, are made of disruptions and breaks. In the biographical genre, the most common are those associated with growing up—leaving childhood behind, adult disenchantments, losses and new attachments, and the biggest of all, death. Breaks are such stock that we barely notice them; they are what connect the fragments of a life together in the making of a subject. And yet, the centrality of disruptions is often the source of narrative uncertainty, not to mention downright conflict. What does a biography make of conflicting motives, roads not taken, or ambivalent choices? This tension lies at the heart of any understanding of beleaguered people’s decisions to stay home or leave for exile—especially while others remained. One who explored this was Arthur Koestler, whose third novel plumbed the agonizing choices of a young socialist and militant anti-fascist, Peter Slavek, pinned down in Lisbon in 1941. Should he leave for the New World and join the swelling ranks of European exiles? Or should he return and join the fight? As he goes through a psychoanalytic experience, Peter is forced to grapple with conflicting urges buried under the rubble of a repressive childhood and fascist torture. The novel is less known for its literary features than its effort to uncover the messiness that governed exile in a historic moment of heightened loyalty to a cause. Koestler knew the problem well. He was, after all, an itinerant loyalist—Communist, Zionist, and eventually die-hard anti-Communist. Zeal was not exactly missing from his life story. But Koestler’s novel suggests, and a recent biography of him reinforces the impression, that there was rather more going on beneath the surface of the final decision to flee or fight (Koestler; Scammell).2

2 In the rush to complete the arc and give unity to a life, biographers are often tempted to paper over the cracks of their narrative, cracks that pose basic questions about what we don’t know, what doesn’t make sense, and the fuzzy arithmetic that entered the calculus to leave. In effect, biographers are vulnerable to their subject’s post hoc explanations or their own personal preference for heroic (or demonic) narratives that mask the equivocal and the conflictual.3 Peter Slavek’s choice dealt with guilt, conviction, lust, an amalgam of feelings ranging from self-sacrifice to self-indulgence.

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What enhances the drama is the contrast between the urge to fulfill personal emotional longings and the commitment to a heroic public mission, one which staked its moral authority on universal, selfless appeals of an abstract utopia. What to make of real stories of conflicting motives and confusions at a time when the stakes and uncertainties were so high—committed anti-fascists torn over where to turn as the frontier of despotism spread?

3 Rather than dwell on the methodological questions about sources, myths, and limits of life history, this essay seeks to illuminate some intrinsic ambiguities about exile by looking at one case, the experience of Albert O. Hirschman from the time he left Berlin in April, 1933 to his flight from Lisbon in the final days of 1940. Hirschman was not only serially displaced—from Germany, Spain, Italy, and France (and eventually hounded by McCarthyite purgings of the American civil service)—within two decades. All his decisions about flight were simultaneously choices about the fight; at so many junctures, Hirschman had to decide whether to stay or go, or as he would say in a formulation he made many years later, exercise “voice” or opt for “exit.” Hirschman is therefore of interest not just because exile was a recurring feature of the first half of his life, but because he offers us an analytical vocabulary for coming to terms with the experience and the choices that underlie it. Taking a life-story approach, this essay traces the mind’s eye view of a moment in European history that asked untold numbers of people to resolve their obligations to themselves with commitments to others; it helps us resist ready-made answers or evasions in assessing personal moral judgments in times of distress.

4 Edward Said’s reflections on exile offer one influential portrait of the exilic experience. Influential and yet not altogether unsurprising. For the Palestinian scholar, exile represents an unbearable “rift” between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home, ushering a sadness that can never be surmounted. Behind all the heroism, romance, and romantic poetics of the exile—perhaps none more evocative than in E.H. Carr’s rendering of Alexander Herzen and his banished Russians in The Romantic Exiles—it is the fundamental estrangement that Said wants to draw attention to. At heart, the exile’s condition is living in a discontinuous and forever unresolvable state of being; the exile severed from home, roots, a past, is forced to reassemble “broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or as a restored people.” So, for Said, there is an “indissoluble” tie to the exile’s alternative nationalism, Russian, Zionist, Palestinian. This “essential association” arises because nationalism asserts a belonging to place, people, language, and heritage. His was a sorrow fixated on a place called home defined in the vocabulary of territory and nation. It is perhaps for this reason that Said’s understanding of exile rings familiar where the political community and the loyalties one draws from membership is drawn from an age of nations (Said, 2000).

5 But was this the only way to see the exilic condition? While one can appreciate Said’s melancholy and yearning for home, spun as it was from the yarn of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots (1952), the affiliation of exile with alternative nationalism, the “essential association,” is worth questioning. So too is the vision of exile as an irremediable break. For Hirschman, displacement never led him to yearn for an alternative patrie to replace the one he had lost, or to return to the land from which he had been expelled. Nor did the displacement shatter his sense of belonging to place altogether; in some respects

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each severance was as much an arrival to a new place, offering a new potential bond, as much as it was a departure from a sense of identification with place.

6 This suggests other ways of thinking about obligations. What this paper suggests is that departures, more specifically the decisions to depart, decisions that yield to exile, are caught up with other options in life, including options to stay. Exploring this raises some basic questions about just how much nationalism condensed the spectrum of possibilities, how there were more alternatives than leaving home and reducing the cause to a national one or the healing of a rift between self and home. The story of Albert Hirschman’s choices between the time he was seventeen and fled Berlin in April, 1933, and December 1940, when he left Marseilles for the United States reveal a more complex story of forced separations and yearnings for home. In between was, among other things, the decision to join the French army and fight invading German soldiers, as a German against Germans divided not by country, faith, or language, but over a principle of democracy and love of something more general, like humanity. Hirschman, in this sense, exemplified the limits of exilic patriotism to resemble something more akin to what we might now call cosmopolitanism. As Martha Nussbaum has reminded us, “becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business,” as the exile becomes free from the comforts of local truths and “the warm, nestling feeling of patriotism, from the absorbing drama of pride in oneself and one’s own.” The consolation was to see, in the image of the Stoic philosopher Hierocles, one’s local affiliations as surrounded by concentric circles, from the rings around one’s self to those girdling humanity itself, from whose membership Hirschman never felt shorn (Nussbaum, 1996, 6-9).

7 Once we concede that exile was not a simple—if traumatic—break, we are asked to pay attention to the ways in which the threat or option of uprooting coexisted with other responses to crisis. Just as there were lots of kinds of membership, there were lots of kinds of obligations, to oneself, to one’s country, or to even more remote affiliations, like human dignity or socialism whose commitments might trump the claims of one’s leaders and yield to an obligation to disobey, exercise voice and fight. As Hirschman himself would note decades later about this complex algebra of politics, it is often the very same people who fought (as a form of voice) who would be those who had to flee (a political form of exit). This essay suggests we add “voice” to the Saidian precepts of loyalty and exit, using Hirschman’s own coinages to illuminate his own life as an alternative way of formulating the relationships between personal choices and political obligations that fixates less on the centrality of the nation and the sorrow that accompanies a break with it.

8 To lend coherence to what is both complex and riddled with missing pieces of evidence and gaps in the paper trail, it helps to focus on a few specific choices. Berlin was the stage for the making of Hirschman’s first exile—and reveals how it was embedded in a number of responses to the crisis of the Weimar Republic.

9 Hirschman was the son of well-to-do assimilated Jewish parents, raised in Berlin’s Tiergarten neighborhood and schooled at the German capital’s Collège Français. Perhaps it was the Jewish background, perhaps it was the French education that unmoored him early from attachments from home. But the fact was, his father was a fervent German patriot and Hirschman learned (and learned to love) his Goethe by heart as a boy—and would recite it to his daughters many years later—suggesting that to uproot him at youth means telling the tale from the endpoint to the start, history

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backwards. What is more, as the Weimar Republic began to crumble in the depths of the Great Depression, Hirschman’s loyalty to the secular, tolerant norms to which the constitution was dedicated did not drive him out of the fold, but drew him in. He joined a circle of young Social Democrats (Workers Socialist Youth, Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend or SAJ) disenchanted with the parliamentary leadership of the Party and increasingly vocal about its misguided faith in Chancellor Brüning and fear about the threats from the extremes. “Speaking politics” in small gatherings or mass rallies, as Hirschman later recalled, it was concerned about the fascist menace on one hand and the relationship between the Republic and socialism on the other.4

10 It was socialism that captured his intellectual imagination; he was spellbound by charismatic figures like the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, who delivered a memorable lecture about the “long cycles” of capitalism at the Sportpalast, or the youth leader Erich Schmidt. And it was the SAJ that channeled his political energies. Hirschman plunged into militancy as the political situation deteriorated. Rallies, assemblies, marches, and street brawls were the weekly fare of any self-respecting Socialist. Yet, the heightened tension also afflicted the SPD itself, which began to tear itself apart. The SAJ split off in opposition to the party’s unrelenting support for Chancellor Brüning. Other radical factions opted to stay. Hirschman was decidedly in the “stay” camp, and saw no point in fracturing the movement any further; it was more important, he felt, to meet the challenge than to content oneself with an intellectually pure or politically “sound” position; his pragmatic streak was already showing through the fabric of his radicalism. In this, he was joined by another young militant, Willy Brandt, a member of the same group and of the same age; both insisted that the cause would be better served by disagreeing from within the structure than defecting from it.5 But there were lengths to which the young Hirschman was not willing to go, like following those activists who evolved from campaigning and doctrinal debates to para-military outfits, the Schutzbund, which argued that “force had to be met with force.” The establishment fervently tried to defend civility. Otto Braun refused to fall into the trap set by the extremists: “I have been a democrat for forty years,” he exclaimed to his secretary, “and I am not about to become a guerrilla chief.” (Clark, 2006, 646)

11 The defense of civility did not mean that some meetings did not get rough, or that those who left the meeting halls could ignore the prowling gangs of angry Communists and Nazis. For this reason, it was important to escort women to their homes after assemblies, and Hirschman’s bicycling skills came in handy when he was alone. One evening, Hirschman, his sister Ursula and two friends, Lia and Mark Rein, the children of the Menshevik exile, Rafael Rein (also known as Rafael Abramovich) were at a meeting to convince Communists to bury their grudges and doctrinal purity. The argument degenerated into a fist-fight. Mark, who was looming more and more to Hirschman as the archetype of the engagé idealist, emerged beaten and bruised. The others escaped unscathed. They all withdrew to the safety of home—to ready themselves for another round the next day.6 These were scenes that Hirschman conspicuously preferred not to discuss for the rest of his life and his silences cloud any precise insight we might have into his thinking. But they left indelible marks on everything he wrote.

12 The polarization of Berlin’s political life left few refuges. The university was one of its casualties. It is hard to say how much actual “studying” Hirschman conducted during his sojourn at the University of Berlin. It was brief, affiliated with the Institute for

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Political Science and Statistics under the wing of the School of Law and Political Science, and lasted only one semester, winter of 1932-33. While he applied himself to the study of classical political economy, formal learning was eclipsed by political tutorials of the Sportpalast and meeting halls of the SAJ. It must have been hard to tune out the distraction in the streets and the confusion at the polls as Berliners were called to election after election—each one sinking the Republic ever deeper into an impasse. The University became an ugly theatre. The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) rampaged against signs of “unGerman spirit” and welcomed Nazi speakers to their rallies. It was these students who stormed the University’s magnificent library in May 1933 and proceeded to ignite tens of thousands of volumes at the Opernplatz, in front of the law faculty and around the corner from Hegel’s old office. This was just a sideshow; the main event was the war over control of the government in January. Upon hearing the news of Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship, Hirschman put on his uncle’s old green suit, grabbed his bicycle, and rode into the rainy Berlin night. Desperate to find out what the left wing parties were doing to shore up the Republic, he raced to the main SPD and Communist headquarters. Was there going to be a general strike? Would the Social Democrats abandon the policy of “tolerance?” Ursula caught up with him at the Communist headquarters, the Karl Liebknecht Haus, and remembered the look on his face as he leaned on his bicycle looking up at the brightly lit top floor of the building where the central committee was gathering: “he looked at the imposing building hoping for a sign of what to do next, and I was there, watching him, and now loved him more than any other person in the world. I understood that he suffered and had a more profound perception than I did of the seriousness of the moment.” (Hirschmann, U., 1993, 98)

13 When Hindenburg asked Hitler to form the new government, many thought it would last no more than a year. When Hitler called for new elections for March—the fifth in less than a year—it felt like a repeat of the fleeting governments that had come before. Instead, it broke the cycle, though only hindsight enables the observer to see that the National Socialists were a different breed from the hapless reactionaries who had colluded to share power with them. Nazis dominated the screaming headlines, and their thugs patrolled the streets and broke up rallies, keeping Hirschman’s parents up all night fearing for their children’s safety. On February 27th, the Socialists had called for a mass rally at the Sportpalast. It was to be the largest—and last—such gathering. Albert and Ursula went and watched as the seams of the Socialist movement came apart: wait or confront, let the government implode or bring it down, let the threat pass or resort to armed resistance? The leadership dug in its heels: Hitler was a mere demagogue, it insisted; he was doomed to fail. More radical militants jeered and bellowed from the seats: they must take action! With the rally over, despondent Socialists filed out of the arena to be greeted by columns of police and storm troopers. By then it was evening. As Albert, Ursula and friends made their way home, yelling broke out in the streets, the crowds pushed and yelled. Over Berlin’s rooftops, something lit up the night sky. Albert looked up to see smoke plumes rising against the crimson horizon. Then came the flames, creating dark silhouettes out of the mounted policemen. The Reichstag was burning (Hirschmann, U., 1993, 100).

14 “Things did not change fundamentally,” recalled Hirschman, “until the Reichstag fire, which really marked the beginning of the political horror.” The next day, the Chancellor, alleging a “Red Uprising,” issued emergency decrees abolishing fundamental rights and promising harsh punishments for anyone threatening the

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health of the Reich. 4,000 SA troopers scattered across the city to begin roundups. Eventually, all opposition parties were banned, assemblies forbidden; left-leaning newspapers closed shop. In one night the pretext was laid for abolishing the political culture and institutions in which Hirschman and his mates had immersed themselves. There was a last gasp effort to stop Hitler’s proposed law to allow him to govern for four years without constitutional constraints, which needed a two-third majority from the parliament. Hirschman’s SAJ group set up a clandestine press in the hotel room of an Italian doctoral student, Eugenio Colorni; his hotel room “became a nerve center for anti-fascist activities and publications” in the final weeks of the new regime’s consolidation.7

15 Socialist militants fanned out to the streets, their bags full of leaflets, urging people to rally to the opposition of the new bill. Hirschman joined small cells of activists for safety. They would go to the top of apartment buildings and work their way down floor by floor, leaving leaflets under peoples’ doors and talking to whomever they could. Working from top to bottom made it easier to flee in case they were sighted by the police or brown-shirts. Amidst paranoia about moles and break-ins, Hirschman’s group worked furiously to embolden the Party to resist the legislation, hoping they could spoil Hitler’s gambit. It was a futile struggle. On March 23rd, the parliament met in the Kroll Opera House. Outside, storm troopers surrounded the building, taunting and threatening Socialist Deputies who dared enter. The police intercepted and even arrested some of the Deputies, one was pummeled, and others started packing their bags in preparation to flee. That night, 448 approved of Hitler’s request; only 94 Socialists were able to stand up and have their negative votes counted as storm troopers patrolled the aisles barking at them.8

16 In a matter of weeks, fear replaced confusion. Bristling with their laws, the Nazis ravaged the opposition. Arrest campaigns followed. There were so many detained that the government opened its first concentration camp 35 kilometers north of Berlin at Oranienburg. Nazis seized Bertolt Brecht’s personal address book and used it as a tour guide to expand their net. Hirschman’s rowing-partner, school-mate, and brother to his first amour, Peter Franck, found himself arrested and also had his address book confiscated. One by one, Peter’s friends and associates were rounded up. Everything had now changed.

17 In the midst of this collapse, personal tragedy struck. Hirschman’s father died on March 31st of cancer. The next day, the first wave of government-sanction violence swept Berlin, with assaults and boycotts on Jewish shops and businesses. The following day the elder Hirschman was buried. That evening, Albert emerged from the bedroom to inform the mourners and his mother that he would be leaving very soon for Paris. With all the grief in the room, it was hard to hear this quiet but decisive message. Most, including his sisters, figured it was going to be a short vacation. On April 2nd, he was gone—five days before his eighteenth birthday. These were his final hours in Berlin; he would not return for four decades.9

18 Hirschman had clearly been weighing his options. But we have only a dim sense of the calculus to leave for exile. What do we know? First, his preference for “voice” was clearly getting dangerous. In the days before his father’s death, news of Peter Franck’s arrest had driven him into hiding; by then people were learning that address books were inventories of suspects. There was also the clamping down of whatever professional aspirations he harbored. Rumor was that the government would throw

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Jewish students from the country’s universities; talk became law on April 1st. There were also tales that Jews would be banned from the legal profession; that decree came a week later. Faculties of Law were thus gutted of their Jewish students. It was clear that voice within the system—at least for the time being—was not just futile, it was dangerous and possibly suicidal.10 There was no shortage of push factors to drive Hirschman from Berlin; but how long to leave for? For many who left, departure was only temporary; exit only became exile with time. “Those of us who left at the time,” Hirschman told an American documentary film-maker years later, “left with the hope that this would be a regime that would somehow break its neck very soon, and that somehow there would be some… either action on the part of some section of German society that would prevent this regime from taking root.”11

19 Then of course there was the shocking loss of a father, a pre-exilic separation from home. It is possible that this decision to flee was a way of deflecting other sources of pain. A year after Vati’s funeral, writing from Paris, Hirschman intimated as much to his mother. “The calendar tells me that a year has passed, otherwise I wouldn’t know if it has been a month or three years. I have experienced so much joy and so many new things. On the other hand, everything that we experienced and suffered stands so near, insistent, and physical before my eyes.” The rush to embrace the new somewhere else did not succeed in obliterating the grief of the past. While the young émigré uprooted himself in part to allow the challenge of the present crowd out old sorrows, they did not disappear. “It was the first great pain in my life. I did not have time to think out this pain because after three days the reality of the Paris trip demanded my thoughts. And so it happens that the pain always emerged in the quiet hours.”12 For the rest of his life, the quiet hours of Easter would summon memories of the loss of his father, the first of a series of losses that would sear his memory of Europe and the fight against fascism.

20 A blend of factors shaped the accelerating steps from voice to exit, to exile. How Hirschman weighed them at the time is not clear. But the fact of mixture is undeniable —political repression, personal constriction, and intimate loss all played a role in driving the economics student from home. What did not accompany the departure for Paris was a chronic yearning to return. While Hirschman was a member of the swelling ranks of German exiles in Paris—to join the Russians, Italians, and soon Spaniards, Czechs, Austrians…—and spent his time among the remnant SAJ circles, now reconstituted as the “New Beginning” (Neu Beginnen) movement, he soon drifted away. He found the endless search for new theoretical bearings, Marxist posturing, and poring over the news tiring. Indeed, in short order he was laboring to work the German accent off his French, riding the Metro and sounding out the syllabus to cross over to mingle undetected among the citoyens. With time, he would wear his ability to speak to a gendarme like a native as a badge of honor. To many, exile brought sorrow for a lost home; to Hirschman it was an important stride into a new sense of belonging to the world.

21 A shadow had followed Hirschman. It would not leave him alone because inter-War Paris was the epicenter of a continental crisis—where exiles of various nations and crusades brushed with each other, and sometimes crossed their causes. We have not thought enough about the ways in which specific cities become exilic sites and give meaning to the experience of displacement by weaving the disparate strands of expatriate politics together. London, Paris, New York, Mexico City, much later Miami,

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each city took turns as haven for fleeing peoples. Let us consider how Paris figured in Hirschman’s calculus.

22 Once uprooted from Berlin, Hirschman spent the next several decades shuffling around European cities in a restless pursuit of an unstable balance of career and commitment. Neither one stuck. He studied economics in Paris, London, and finished an expedited doctorate at the University of Trieste in 1938, by which time opportunities to consult for employers, especially for the League of Nations and a Parisian research center, were appearing on the horizon. By this time, in addition, Hirschman had shed his German accent and was beginning the process of applying for French citizenship. This all suggested a meandering path towards settling into a new home, a new national identity, and a profession, with Paris as a new territorialized place for his attachments. There was even a heady romance to seal his attachment to a new place. Whatever turmoil 1933 wrought on Hirschman appeared to be resolved five years later.

23 The problem was, leaving Germany did not put the specter of fascism or the hope of revolution behind him. If anything, Paris plunged him into the thick of the continent’s exilic intrigues. There were the Russians, White, Menshevik, Bolshevik sympathizers. Stalin’s NKVD prowled left-wing hubs searching for traitors. To some extent, Hirschman got caught up, especially as he drew closer to Mark and Lia Rein and their Menshevik father, Rafael Abramovich, who had decamped from Berlin for Paris weeks before Hirschman had. Meanwhile, German expatriates whiled away the hours plotting to return to pick up where they left off. They preyed on rumors and embellished tales of Hitler’s imminent demise. But it soon became clear that Hitler’s regime was not fleeting; indeed, the diagnosis of the Neu Beginnen, that National Socialism was more than the last gasp of a desperate and crumbling bourgeoisie, was a prophetic one— which did not prevent some from nursing their fantasies of heroic redemption. Though Hirschman was growing less fond of German Left-wing politics, the dry-eyed realism of the Neu Beginnen movement had its allure. Abramovich, having lived through the revolutionary collusions of 1917, looked over the shoulders of these younger men and women and reminded them that totalitarian regimes, once ensconced, were not easily defeated. With time, the endless debates over the correct theoretical analysis and the constant feuding between socialists and communists bored Hirschman. Any idea of “return,” indissociable from Said’s notion of exile, had less and less appeal.

24 So it was that leaving Berlin did not resolve any inner tensions between personal and political aspirations in favor of one or the other, between emerging ideas of himself as a man of letters and a man of action. Far from it. Exile, in this sense, brought it to new heights. But it was not the lingering hope for redemption at home that escalated it. If anything, the German partisanship turned him off one form of exilic politics but Paris cued him to another. The French capital was the stage for Italians to launch acts of sabotage and clandestine operations into Mussolini’s domain. Mussolini’s OVRA secret police monitored dissident activity; both sides exchanged assassinations. Italian exile organizations and leadership, however, were altogether less doctrinaire than the ones governing German circles, where the influence of the Communist party was both stronger and the Teutonic brand more rigid and dogmatic. Hirschman, in part following the trails of his sister, who had fallen in love with an Italian socialist in Trieste, Eugenio Colorni, found himself swept up by the Justice and Liberty cause, and came increasingly under the sway of the action-oriented exiles under Carlo Rosselli. By 1935, Rosselli was more captivating as a proselytizer than as a planner. As the 1930s

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unfolded, Justice and Liberty had moved progressively to the left, partly in response to the integration of more socialists, and partly in response to Mussolini’s Ethiopian “adventure.” Not unlike the diagnostics of the Neu Beginnen, some members of Justice and Liberty were inclined to see Italian fascism as a type of regime—in this case only sustainable through imperialist expansion, and thus, at some stage, vulnerable. Prolonged exile left Rosselli chomping at the bit for a direct assault on Mussolini. Less interested in theoretical purity or partisan fidelities, the movement looked for opportunities where it could find them in the folds of Paris’s swelling refugee neighborhoods.13

25 With the election of a Popular Front government in France, exilic politics went on high alert. Shortly thereafter, Hirschman returned from his year at the London School of Economics; his fellowship money had finally run out. He had some research ideas but was not particularly well connected or credentialed to find a position in Paris to make use of his training. He once referred to the hiatus after his LSE studies as very “personally difficult times.” “Psychologically, I was quite inconsistent and disquieted.” He wrote to his old mentor, Heinrich Ehrmann, who had also taken refuge in Paris and was active in the Neu Beginnen movement that he wanted to participate in something. But what?14

26 The air crackled with tension and possibility. The question of what to do next was posed for Hirschman, as for many, in the summer of 1936. In the middle of July, Rosselli announced that a new front had finally opened up in the European struggle against fascism. It was Spain. There, the Popular Front government, heeding trade union and peasant pressures, quickly began to accelerate its reforms to break the hold of the Church and landlords—until the feared reaction. The military rose up against the Republican government on July 17th. It failed; many in the army refused to join the rebels. The uprising might have fizzled there. But the decision on the part of Hitler and Mussolini to send weapons, reinforcements, and above all airplanes, enabling Generalísimo Francisco Franco, Caudillo de España por la Gracia de Dios, to airlift supplies from the Moroccan colony to the mainland and slowly push the Nationalist frontier forward. The precipitous internationalization of the Spanish conflict drew the world’s media attention, and by mid-July, it was splashed all over newspaper headlines. This coincided with Hirschman’s return to Paris, where the debate about how to help the Loyalists was breaking open, especially given the dithering stance of the Blum government. Indeed, there was not a minor fear that the civil war would spread to France itself, with the extreme Right rattling its sabres by forming a “blackguard front,” while Communists could not resist the temptation to proclaim the need to form self-defense units of its own. The line in Spain had become the symbolic front line in a pan-European conflict. Finally, there was a “main theatre” for the fight against fascism. 15 Hirschman rushed to see Mark Rein, who told him that he was thinking of going to Spain to join the Loyalists. Mark had a list of contacts of Neu Beginnen sympathizers who were planning to go to Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War provided an important immediate cause for German socialists, and Hitler’s backing for Franco made Spain an opportunity to resist fascism on another front. For Germans in particular, the sense was: no repeat of 1933 defeatism. Neu Beginnen chapters in Prague, Amsterdam, and Paris came back to life to enlist volunteers; finally there was an opportunity to redeem despairing radicals. For similar reasons, Italian exiles also joined the crusade. “Today in Spain, tomorrow Italy,” intoned Carlo Rosselli. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War several months after Mussolini’s victory in Africa gave Rosselli his crusade. Echoing

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Machiavelli, he declared that the “prophets are no longer disarmed.” Scarcely days after Franco assumed command of the Moors and Legionnaires of Spanish Morocco and launched his attempted coup d’état, Rosselli rallied the giellisti16 to form a volunteer brigade for Spain. Not everyone was convinced this was a good idea. But they could not stand in his way. Arriving in Barcelona in early August, he struck a deal with local anarchists and trade unionists to create the Ascaso Column (named after the anarchist Francisco Ascaso who died in the first day of fighting in Barcelona against the rebels) comprised of giellisti and Italian anarchists. Spain was where the line against totalitarianism would be drawn; it was here that a “motorized revolutionary force” could also cut its teeth in preparation for an assault on Mussolini. Rosselli waxed about the nature of the uniforms that soldiers would wear for this war: “The intellectual who dons the overalls for the first time feels an ineffable sentiment of joy. Here, I slough off my past, my bourgeois habits and wants, to consecrate myself to the cause of the workers. I enter the revolution with only blood and soul. We will be brothers, comrades in overalls.” (Pugliese, 202-03).

27 This was the environment in which Hirschman enlisted; his main issue was which group to join. In the end, the decision was made by who was fastest to mobilize for the front: the Italian giellisti. So it was that exile led to a return to a partisan cause. We do not know exactly which day, but we know that he took the train to Barcelona with the very first German and Italian volunteers. By the time I pressed Hirschman for details, they had long-since slipped from his memory. But what was not hard for him to remember was the reflex. Simply put: “when I heard that there was even a possibility to do something, I went.”

28 He spent almost three months in Catalonia, from July to the end of October, 1936, among the vanguard of the first wave of volunteers. This is important to underscore because the initial fight against Franco was not so much mounted by the Republican government, which was too weak to pose a real counter-threat to the military, but the trade unions and peasant leagues which had responded to the coup with general strikes and a rush to form spontaneous militias. Indeed, by the time that Hirschman’s train pulled into Barcelona, the city was in the hands of the workers. Socialist and anarchist talk dominated the atmosphere. Until late October, when the USSR began to ship arms and its envoys began to seize control and reorganize the militias into “brigades,” a fervor of revolution for and by the commoner prevailed in Catalonia; one must imagine a 22-year old German socialist walking the streets of Barcelona where tipping was banned because it was considered demeaning. The words “Don” and “Señor” were outlawed in favor of “comrade,” where cathedrals, deemed citadels of Reaction, were desecrated or burned, and where giant red and black banners announced which factory was now owned by which trade union. For a brief moment, here was the socialist revolution that Germans had failed to mount to save Weimar.

29 This is not the place to rehearse the traumas and disenchantments of the Spanish Civil War. Suffice it to say that whatever was heroic about the struggle waned when the Communists muscled onto the scene in the autumn. Until then, the Italian and German émigré battalions, including Rosselli’s Ascaso Column, aligned under the general umbrella of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), and were marched off after a peremptory rifle training to the front. There, Hirschman would be wounded in early combat. While he was recovering in Barcelona, the feuding between Communists, socialists and anarchists broke open. They were a reminder of what he had so disliked

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about the sterilizing squabbles of the Left when faced with the rise of Hitler in Germany, and the endless, paralytic theoretical debates in Paris. Then, when he heard that his mates were being reorganized into international brigades, and that he would be dispatched under new, Comintern, command, he shuddered. When Hirschman got word from Italian friends that cells were opening up in Northern Italian cities to extend the struggle there, he packed his bags and took the train to Trieste. To the disenchantment with the Catalonian scene and hopes for uprisings behind Mussolini’s lines there were mixed in strong personal motives: he missed his sister and brother-in- law. Eugenio also held out the opportunity of finding a research position for him among friends working at the University of Trieste. Hirschman would parlay this into a doctorate, hoping to secure the professionalizing credential he lacked when he returned from London in June 1936. Two years later, he would re-emerge with a PhD and a handful of publications in French and Italian on the nature of Italy’s political economy.17

30 Once more, decisions about departure from Paris to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to Trieste, raveled together a variety of self-regarding and other-regarding, push and pull, motives, a complex amalgamation that raises questions about involuntary departure from home as the dominant exilic experience, at least for those for whom the fight against despots of all kinds was a kind of loyalty that transcended borders, that made “home” a less compelling focal point for action and thought than a more general, universal cause. In this sense, we might think of the place that Paris assumed in the making of a “volunteer” esprit within its exile circles, intensifying the complex reinforcing and antagonistic pressures between exit and voice. It was perhaps for this reason that it was so difficult for Hirschman to take apart the precise reasons governing his choices. One must also blend in the bad memories and bitter disappointments of Spain’s lost cause. But while we may acknowledge the difficulty getting the exact balance of inner forces governing his decision-making, one must also concede that our uncertainties are the result of pains and disappointment that became obscured by the working of memory and personal silence. His wife Sarah found him reticent on the topic of Catalonia. Sensing his unease, she didn’t press him for details. Once, when they went to a film together about the Spanish Civil War, as they left the theatre Sarah turned to Albert and asked him: “was it like that?” He replied evasively, “yeah, that was a pretty good film.” When I asked Sarah about this reserve—on both their parts, his to speak, hers to press—she was somewhat philosophical: “you know, I’ve always felt through these long years perhaps, that that’s my secret: how I could stick with one person for that long [and not know]. I think everybody has a right to their own memories.” Tightly guarded recollections were part of a pattern when it came to bad memories, which Hirschman preferred to keep to himself, unvoiced: “I felt this kind of reticence [sometimes] in Albert,” she confessed. “He’s had quite a few areas like that. I never tried to force him [to talk].” Still, the scars on his neck and leg made it impossible for her to forget. One is tempted to note that the sorrow of lost causes, unlike Said’s lost homes, can yield to enduring silences and absences that do not traduce to some alternative form of nationalism—and that one must, at the very least, be cautious about big claims concerning the elective affinities of exile politics.18

31 The autumn of 1938 sent Hirschman back to Paris, this time from Trieste. The reasons were similar to those that drove him from Berlin over five years earlier. In September, Mussolini paid his first visit to the Adriatic city to announce a series of anti-Semitic decrees following the consolidated alliance with Hitler. It was getting more and more

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dangerous for Hirschman, a German and a Jew by decree, to hide behind a student visa. His friends and associates in Trieste went into hiding. Eugenio was arrested for his “activities hostile to the Fascist State,” interrogated by OVRA agents, and transferred to a prison in Milan. The University could not continue to shelter Albert. Before being carted away, Eugenio had urged him to move back to Paris to assist the cause from there. Besides, there were also professional opportunities opening in Paris thanks to his research and publications for the Société d’Études et d’Informations Économiques on the true performance of the Italian economy behind the façade of Il Duce’s official statistics. Charles Rist and Robert Marjolin, editors of a quarterly economic bulletin of the Rockefeller Foundation-backed Institut de Recherches Économiques et Sociales of the Sorbonne, saw his talents and brought him into their stable. Despite his affections for Italy and his family in Trieste, Paris was the city “where I had always maintained my residence. I was… and considered myself when I was in Italy sort of as on leave from France.” The question now was how to make of his residence a home.19

32 Rather than an “exile,” it is perhaps more accurate to describe Hirschman’s condition from 1938 to the fall of France in the summer of 1940 as suspended in a “median state”—a term borrowed from Edward Said that more effectively captures his half- attachments and half-detachments on the way to becoming French. It was something of a paradox that he found a comfortable room in a small hotel in the rue de Turenne, in the middle of the Marais, a crowded medieval neighborhood in the fourth arrondissement populated above all by Jews. Living in the Marais gave him his first opportunity to live cheek-to-jowl with Jews, something he had never yet experienced. It did nothing to kindle a Jewish identity, but seemed to him altogether consistent with taking his assimilative steps into French nationality. Of course, his timing could not have been worse—for no sooner did he begin to expedite his citizenship than France began to mobilize for war. But what this meant was that Hirschman hovered between a world he’d left behind and the prospect of naming a new place “home”; the trouble was, this home, like any in Europe, was an uncertain place. This was impossible to ignore (Said, 1994, 48-52).

33 Being in a median state, therefore, was not a straightforwardly transitional moment from one home to the next. It was a more precarious condition. To start with, there were romantic entanglements that drew him closer to a new home. “As regards my mood,” he wrote to Ursula, “I am still in a state of completely unexpected rupture from what I might call my first love.”20 Then suddenly the affective ties were severed when “Françoise” left Hirschman for another man. Here the clues to his thoughts, as so often happens in the case of Hirschman who preferred to wax about his enthusiasms more than bemoan his disappointments, run out. Did the broken romance break the ties to Paris or embolden his resolve? We simply do not know. Whatever doubts he harbored about his personal fortunes were eclipsed by professional and then political ones. While France was his nation of preference, he knew by then that it would be best to draft up some fallback plans. He considered going to Brazil to work for a French bank. Buenos Aires also seemed like a good option. Distant relatives in New York sent overtures to have him brought to the United States, and an old acquaintance of Eugenio’s at the New School did the same. Hirschman began to warehouse escape options lest France would not work out.

34 As war neared, of course, many began to pack their bags. Many wanted to leave. Many were urged to leave by friends and relatives abroad. Exit would have been the most

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logical, and given the increasing opportunities, tempting option. But exit was tightly coiled with voice; the two were in some sense bound to each other by that which threatened Hirschman’s sense of personal freedom and more, his sense of obligation to others’. So, instead of going into exile once more, the twists of his median state had him take what on the surface appears to be a counter-intuitive decision. With so little to lose by leaving, he chose to stay—and not just stay, but volunteer to fight. France went on alert. On April 12, an act decreed that foreign men between 18 and 40 who had resided in France for over two months were allowed to join French army, as opposed to just the Foreign Legion. The same promulgation subjected “stateless” foreign men from 20 to 48 to the same duties as Frenchmen—a two year term of service. Alarmed at German bellicosity, Hirschman enlisted in the French army now that foreigners were not restricted to the Legion. He was a soldier in training when German and Russian armies invaded Poland in September, and France and Britain declared war on the Reich on September 3rd.21

35 He readied for his second war. Again, we are confronted with an inscrutable—if unambiguously decisive—choice. Hirschman wrote to no one about his decision to serve in the French army. With Eugenio in prison and Ursula’s mail being opened by Mussolini’s spies, it would be a while before he would send letters to Italy, and when they were penned, he wrote elliptically—and mainly of his readings of Stendahl and Montaigne, whose Essais would accompany him through his final, nail-biting months in Europe. Why he did not write to his other sister and mother in London is not clear. Perhaps he did not want to make his slightly hysterical mother worry. By the time he did write her, the War had broken out. On September 18th, he wrote chirpily to say that “all is well with me from a physical and moral point of view. The training is moving forward to make us into verifiable soldiers.” Hirschman found himself stationed east of Paris, dispatched to a platoon of German and Italian émigrés, where “I am making some new friends” he wrote to Mutti. Her son closed his note to his mother telling her that they will be celebrating Yom Kippur. “I feel just as I used to in the good days of the Collège Français!”22 But what was really going on in his mind is anyone’s guess. More likely, the decision to join the French army was not unlike the decision to join the loyalists in Spain. This was a common cause. But what makes this one poignant, especially in light of Said’s inference that exile implies longing to return to a homeland of one’s peoples, for Hirschman, exile poised him to join another country’s army to pick up arms against fellow Germans.

36 Once again, space does not allow us to go into detail about what happened as the French army imploded. Hirschman and his copains in platoon had to scramble when it did. His commanding officer helped rig some false demobilization papers and Hirschman somehow got his hands on a bicycle, which allowed him to ride south, to the Vichy zone. If he could not get his French citizenship through the normal process, this one would do—even if it meant giving up his real name. Meanwhile, Radio Vichy spewed a bilious campaign against Jews and “traitors” over the airwaves. By September 1940, there were 31 detention camps in the southern zone. Then came Article 19 of the Armistice agreement—a mockery of Pétain’s rhetoric about French sovereignty—which required Vichy to “surrender on demand” all Germans named by the Reich to its officers. The Nazis sent the Kundt Commission to scour the detention camps hunting for their enemies. Hirschman was one of them, pedaling southwards with his bogus papers and identities (Marrus and Paxton).

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37 By the time he reached Marseilles, he’d been apprised of the imminent arrival of an American from Spain at the Gare St. Charles on August 14th. His name was Varian Fry. Fry was supposed to arrive with visas. When he stepped onto the platform of the train station, Fry was greeted by a smiling young, French translator with a pseudonym of Albert Hermant who volunteered to escort him to the Hotel Splendide. They settled into Fry’s room and swapped their stories. Fry liked his companion immediately, and nicknamed him Beamish—for his irrepressible grin. Together, Fry and Beamish would create an operation that would rescue several thousand refugees who flocked to Marseilles to get out of Europe. So it was that Albert Hirschman was transformed from wandering exile to a fake Frenchman rescuing refugees from other nations including what was once his own. Indeed, among Beamish’s trove of language and monetary skills was of course fluency in German; he was posted to interview and screen his former comrades from the Neu Beginnen movement who were desperate to escape the clutches of the Gestapo. (Hirschman 2000; Marino, 1999, 120-21)

38 The operation, thanks to several recent studies, is fairly well known. With Beamish screening the German socialists, working the underground passport falsifiers, laundering money with Marseilles’ mobsters, he made himself indispensable. Time, however, was not on the rescuers’ side. Beamish had to contrive ways to get some of the Neu Beginnen militants out of the camps before they were discovered. He had a list, procured from Karl Frank, alias Paul Hagen, who worked closely with the Jewish Labor Committee in New York to help the Emergency Rescue Committee usher out socialists and labor leaders. One day Beamish called a meeting with two American volunteers, Miriam Davenport and Mary Jayne Gold, at “Basso’s”, Beamish’s favorite bar. There were four Neu Beginnen members, Franz Boegler, Siegfried Pfeffer, Hans Tittle, Fritz Lamm, who could not pick up their American visas because they were imprisoned in the Le Vernet camp and were about to be “surrendered.” Hagen had cabled Marseilles to plead for their rescue. Beamish went into unusually indiscrete detail about their cases and the situation at Le Vernet. When Gold asked him “why are you telling me all this?” he replied “because we want you to go up to Le Vernet and persuade the commandant to allow them to come to Marseilles.” The idea was that once in the port they could slip their guards and fetch their US visas and escape to Spain. What Beamish wanted her to do was go to the camp and explain that she was a friend of their wives and that they merely wanted an overnight together. Mary Jayne Gold protested, “why me?” Beamish leaned forward and looked her straight in the eye, “because with that face anybody will believe anything you tell them… Mary Jayne, you have the most innocent face I have ever seen. Anybody will believe anything you tell them.” Still, she protested. “You’re our best bet,” Beamish insisted, “ils jouent leurs têtes (their heads are at stake).” “Well, okay, Hermant. I’ll try.” The scheme worked (Gold, 1980, 209-11).

39 If getting the refugees out of camps and equipped with papers was a challenge, so too was keeping open the route across the Pyrenees. Spanish authorities routinely shut down crossing points or threw up obstacles. Beamish had to shuffle back and forth to the border zone to work with agents, especially Lisa and Hans Fittko, to keep the escape hatch open. As the route became more congested—and better known—its dangers increased. There was great fear that authorities would discover it and crack down on the operation. Pétain was determined to demonstrate Vichy’s sovereignty with the one force with which he was familiar—the police. Since Marseilles was such a sore point, he announced his decision to visit the port with much fanfare, and instructed the Sûreté

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Nationale to scrub the south clean. Beamish left for Toulouse to explore alternative routes over the Pyrenees. When his train pulled into the station in one small border town, he saw a guard demanding papers from descending passengers. Beamish hung back, hoping he would move on. Instead, as the last one, he found himself trapped with the guard. His papers were fine, his French so flawless that the guard suggested they walk together into town together for a libation. Hermant mustered his charm to chat him up. His tactic was too effective, for the guard soon found Hermant easy game for his jokes about week-kneed Italian soldiers. He insisted that Beamish join him in a bar with some of his fellow guards. With no choice, Albert accompanied his new friend for a round of drinks. By the time he got away from the louche companions, he had long- since missed his meeting with the Committee contact at the border. The trip to Toulouse was a waste, as no doubt many of the clandestine probes were. The next morning, Albert boarded the train back to Marseilles, and headed straight to Fry’s hotel where he found an anxious American. Fry breathed a sigh of relief, quickly took Beamish to a safe location, and explained that while he was gone French gendarmes had appeared at the office asking for “un nommé Hermant.” Fry told them that he had fired Hermant, and asked why they were interested. They explained that he faced serious charges, “probably a dirty Gaullist!” It was clear to both of them that it was time for Beamish to leave before Pétain’s arrival in Marseilles.23

40 Just as it appeared that Beamish would join the ranks of refugees he’d helped escape, an opportunity materialized that allowed him to depart under a different aegis, once more to exit without feeling like an exile. Behind the scenes, his former employers, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, arranged to have Hirschman brought to the United States on a fellowship—putatively to do some course work in economics as well as some research at the University of California at Berkeley. Hirschman had no idea this was in the works. And the State Department had no idea how to locate a so-called “Otto Albert Hirschmann” from among the legions of fleeing Germans. It was one of those strokes of luck that punctuate Albert Hirschman’s life that a fleeting conversation between Albert Hermant, aka Beamish, with the American Vice Consul, Hiram Bingham, led him to fessing up his true identity. Bingham had asked Hermant to help him locate this “Hirschmann” because he had a special visa for him. When Hirschman confessed, the shrewd and observant diplomat was not surprised. But even with the visa and ticket from France, Hirschman did not depart immediately. He stayed on in Marseilles until it was too dangerous, for his capture might blow the whole operation, and only then did he make the crossing over the Pyrenees—armed with spare socks and his copy of Montaigne’s Essais. And so it was that opportunism and commitment once more shaped the decisions to depart, this time from Europe altogether.

41 Still, this was no straightforward choice. As Hirschman turned his back on Europe to open up a new chapter of his median state, he also took stock of what had transpired over the previous year. He was about to get out—but not without a feeling of bitterness. “I didn’t want to leave,” he later told Lisa Fittko, “I wasn’t interested in going into exile, I wanted to win.”24 At the same time, a whole welter of more confusing personal feelings got knotted inside. Writing to his mother and sister from the ship that bore him from Lisbon, he brought them up to date in a few pages. “My ‘story’ is of course endless,” he explained. Some day he promised to relay the whole unexpurgated account. But for now, he joked, “I must say that I have had until now an amazing amount of good luck—but psst, I am seriously beginning to be superstitious as a result of it.” From his joining the French army, avoiding the detention camps for Germans, he

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told his story of bicycling southward, he confessed that he liked the name Albert Hermant (“much better than my real one!”). He summarized the work with Fry and his labors “for the common cause.” But he also shared some unusual disclosures, acknowledging the strains. “I felt terribly lonely during the whole period despite my multiple activities and the stream of people—often interesting and fascinating whom I saw.” Near the end of the letter he revealed inner turmoil that was less visible to those who were struck by his good humor: “As someone who is drowning I saw one person at least representative of every single period of my life.” If Lisbon afforded a moment to look back on a turbulent and trying year, it also promised him a new, but uncertain, future. “You know how reluctant I always was with regard to the States—I loved Europe and was afraid of America. But I realized soon that there was practically no choice, especially if I had any intention to write our family again one day.”25

42 Three decades later, Hirschman authored his famous Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which has done so much to enrich the conceptual vocabulary of the social sciences and efforts to account for peoples’ decisions faced with deteriorating circumstances. One of the themes of this paper is the difficulty explaining exile with any coordinates that present people under duress facing clear-cut choices, even if the choice was between certain survival and possible, if not probable, death. A look at a few of Hirschman’s choices suggests that separation and sorrow were only part of a larger amalgam of feelings, impulses and motivations. This was especially so in an era of heightened ideological, and even universal, identification, whose degrees of self-sacrifice are not so easy for us to fathom these days. Hirschman’s complex trilogy illuminates how un-automatic, how contextual, and how contingent the decision-making can be. Reconstructing these thorny processes—and here we have done so through biographic, empathetic reenactment—is plagued with conceptual and evidentiary challenges that we might as well confess from the outset, and which suggest that the study of exile can be about much more than separation from and yearning for home. It is also worth reminding ourselves that it can also be precisely that. After all, Hirschman’s companion to exit and voice was its oft-forgotten third, essential, leg: loyalty.

43 Loyalty. Hirschman himself never gave his own concept much thought. Indeed, one might not be so surprised by this in a man who, by all reckonings, showed little difficulty relocating himself across Europe’s increasingly shattered political landscape. But it is also quite possible that he could have thought a bit about Said’s notion of sorrow, or longing for membership as one of the pinions of obligations. Sometimes “humanity” is just too general a purpose. Certainly, there is evidence later in his life that Hirschman began to recognize his own problem, his own oversight, that he was not immune to blind spots. Even when they connect the deeply personal with the academic and conceptual. When he sat down to write Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, it never occurred to him that there was anything more than his observations of the world in the late 1960s at play. It was only when a German publisher asked him to add a special preference for its translation that a memory of his own exit in 1933 was triggered. Summoning the plight of Jews before the Third Reich, he recalled the response of “young and vigorous ones” to the rise of Hitler—by fleeing. The “community” of Jews left behind was gravely weakened by his and others’ decisions. His point was “I was not aware of those deeper moral stirrings when I wrote the book.” Exit, Voice, and Loyalty had thus benefited as a result of this forgetting; it was more balanced with respect to the relative merits of exit and voice, more general, and more “scientifically persuasive.” Hirschman’s lesson: “one, perhaps peculiarly effective way for social

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scientists to bring moral concerns into their work is to do so unconsciously!” This was an odd argument and an odder example, not least because Hirschman never belonged to the Jewish “community.” It should remind us once more how difficult it is to track the emotional passage of early experiences, for if he felt guilty for having left his family and home it was a very deeply buried sentiment. It so happened that Hirschman sent a draft of the German prologue to an old friend, a fellow militant from the Neu Beginnen movement, “Henry” (once Heinrich) Ehrmann. When Ehrmann read the essay, he wrote to his old mate about the “guilt feelings” associated with the traumas of almost a half- century earlier. “I suddenly remembered,” he wrote, “that when ‘the Hirschmanns’ [meaning Albert and Ursula] left, I felt they shouldn’t have, convinced as I was that the inaudible whisper in which we were engaged, i.e. the ‘underground’ was a duty.”26 By the time they were reunited in Paris, “the feelings had already evaporated”—not least because whatever was dutiful about Left-wing clandestinity had been systematically crushed. It was the destruction of the space for voice that conditioned the option for exit; but then exit did not automatically put an end to the fight. Exit and exile created new settings and bearings for Hirschman’s obligations and commitments.

44 One senses that there was still something lingering in Hirschman’s choices that did not easily collapse into his own categories of action, exit and voice. I have suggested here, at the end, that a sense of loyalty to what he had left behind, home and its people, gnawed away at him in the years thereafter. Maybe Edward Said was on to something when he referred to indissoluble attachments and the significance of broken bonds in the exilic experience? Perhaps there were—and remain—limits to the cosmopolitan ideal of concentric circles of belonging, and that one might, as Hirschman thought he was doing, elevate the struggle to a more universal one, for humanity’s sake? Diminishing the costs of the loss of loyalty certainly took the sting out of the sorrow that might have accompanied uprooting and detachment. It may well be that the silences, missing pieces, and the inscrutable elements of his decision-making were part of Hirschman’s efforts to obscure this price. In prospect and retrospect the repeated decisions to exit and fashion his own exile had their calculus. But one cannot help but take away an impression that Hirschman labored to do it on his own terms—or cast them in his own terms. Decades later, the balance of factors that shaped his decisions governing exile remained shrouded in as much uncertainty, doubt, and even guilt, as sorrow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CLARK, Christopher, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2006.

FRY, Varian, Surrender on Demand, Boulder (CO), Johnson Books, 1997.

GOLD, Mary Jayne, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940, Garden City, Doubleday, 1980.

HIRSCHMAN, Albert O., Crossing Boundaries: Selected Writings, London, Zone Press, 1998.

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---, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to decline in Firms, Organizations and States, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1970.

---, “Albert O. Hirschman, Albert Herman, Beamish,” Colloque Varian Fry, 1999, Marseille, Hotel du Département, Actes Sud 2000, 12-16.

HIRSCHMANN, Ursula, Noi Senzapatria, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1993.

KOESTLER, Arthur, Arrival and Departure, New York, Macmillan, 1943.

LEE, Hermione, Virginia Wolf, New York, Vintage, 1999.

MAGA, Timothy P., “Closing the Door: The French Government and Refugee Policy, 1933-1939,” French Historical Studies, 12:3, Spring, 1982.

MARINO, Andy, A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry, New York, St Martin’s, 1999.

MARRUS, Michael R. and Robert O. PAXTON, Vichy France and the Jews, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1981.

NUSSBAUM, Martha, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Boston, Beacon Press, 1996.

PUGLIESE, Stanislao, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1999.

ROSSELLI, Carlo, Liberal Socialism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994.

SAID, Edward, Representations of the Intellectual, New York, Vintage, 1994.

---, “Reflections on Exile” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2000, 173-86.

SCAMMELL, Michael, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, New York, Random House, 2009.

NOTES

2. Scammell’s impressive biography curiously accents Koestler’s skepticism—not a word one first associates with the Hungarian-born enthusiast. 3. For an example see Lee, Virginia Wolf. 4. Interview by H.J. Hempel with Albert O. Hirschman (hereafter Hempel Interview), Princeton 1984, in Hirschman Personal Papers, copies in author’s possession (hereafter PP), 9. 5. Interview with Carmine Donzelli, Marta Petrusewicz and Claudia Rusconi in Hirschman, 1998, 51. 6. Katia Salomon to Jeremy Adelman, 16 December, 2003. 7. Interview Jeremy Adelman with Albert O. Hirschman, Princeton, 20 May, 2002. 8. Interview Jeremy Adelman with Sarah Hirschman, Princeton, 11 October, 2007. 9. Interview Jeremy Adelman with Eva Monteforte, Rome, 14 November, 2007. 10. Interview JA-Albert O. Hirschman, 15 May, 2002. 11. Albert O. Hirschman Interview, “The Exiles” Project, Yale University Archives, VC-59, October 22, 1985, 2. 12. Hirschman-H. Heine, 28 March, 1934, PP. 13. Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, see Nadia Urbaniti’s helpful introduction. 14. Hempel Interview, 23. 15. Hempel Interview, 23.

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16. Members of Giustizia e Libertà. 17. Interview Emmanuel Douzat - Albert O. Hirschman, n.d., PP, 22. 18. Interview Jeremy Adelman with Sarah Hirschman, 16 March, 2006. 19. Albert O. Hirschman Interview, “The Exiles” Project, VC-59/8. 20. Albert O. Hirschman - Ursula Hirschmann, 21 February, 1940, PP. 21. Interview Jeremy Adelman with Albert O. Hirschman, 28 May, 2002; see also Maga, 140. 22. Hirschman - Heine, 18 Sept, 1939, PP. 23. Albert O. Hirschman, Interview, “The Exiles” Project, VHS-5/2; Fry, 150. 24. Cited in www.varianfry.org/fittko_en.htm. 25. Hirschman - Heine, 8 February 1941, PP. 26. Quentin Skinner - Albert O. Hirschman, n.d.; Henry Ehrmann - Albert O. Hirschman, 20 December, 1980, Albert O. Hirschman Papers, Princeton University Archives, Seely Mudd Library, Princeton University, Box 8, f. 6. 1. Editor’s note: After the successive displacements he had to face during the war, which are the object of this essay, Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) became an influential economist and political scientist in the United States.

ABSTRACTS

This essay uses the life history of Albert O. Hirschman,1 especially the years of his active political engagements that preceded his intellectual career, to explore the “micro-history” of choices about whether to stay and fight or back and flee. It also considers some of Hirschman’s own thinking about action—and the choices between exercising voice, loyalty, or defection, the bases of his influential book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Finally, it explores the ever-complicated connections between personal experience and theoretical reflection.

Basé sur des éléments biographiques de la vie d’Albert O. Hirschman, en particulier les années de son engagement politique précédant sa carrière intellectuelle, cet essai explore la « micro- histoire » des choix qu’il fit : rester et combattre ou se retirer et fuir. L’essai étudie aussi la pensée de Hirschman sur l’action, c’est-à-dire le choix entre exercer le droit à la parole, la loyauté, ou se taire, alternatives explorées dans son ouvrage influent Exit, Voice and Loyalty. L’étude analyse enfin les relations infiniment compliquées entre expérience personnelle et réflexion théorique.

INDEX

Keywords: democracy, exile, exit, fascism, Hitler, loyalty, memory, Mussolini, obligation, political commitment, refugee, socialism, social democracy, Spanish Civil War, struggle, voice, Weimar Republic Mots-clés: démocratie, exil, exit, fascisme, Hitler, loyauté, mémoire, Mussolini, obligation, engagement politique, réfugié, socialisme, social-démocratie, Guerre civile espagnole, lutte, voix, République de Weimar

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AUTHOR

JEREMY ADELMAN Princeton University

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“Our Life Was Divided in Many Facets”1: Anna Foa Yona, an Anti-Fascist Jewish Refugee in Wartime United States

Stefano Luconi

Introduction

1 Migration studies have dismissed the somewhat uncritical and romantic celebration of the heroic saga of the political expatriates as professional revolutionaries who traveled the world to spread the “Idea” and allegedly lived adventurously on the run. This vision used to draw in part upon the theoretical distinction between political exile and economic migration. Yet scholarship now emphasizes how thin the line between these two categories is (Témine, 1991, 57-72).2 Not only do lack of freedom and police repression, on one side, and shrinking means of subsistence, on the other, quite often intertwine in causing people to depart from their motherlands. Refugees for political reasons also have to make a living abroad. For example, in the recollections of his own son, after seeking sanctuary in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Michele Salerno – a Communist Jew from Calabria (Paparazzo, 2004, 38-40) – “sweated for more than eight hours per day, toiling at a burning machinery of the Cleaning and Dyeing Company” (Salerno, 2001, 26).

2 As for the fluxes from the Italian peninsula in the interwar years, many Italian anti- Fascists ran away from both Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship and the forced unemployment that usually resulted from open criticism of the regime. Indeed, dismissals and transfers to low-paying jobs were among the standard instruments to which the Duce resorted in order to punish opponents and dissenters (Audenino and Tirabassi, 2008, 107-8). The double burden of political and economic hardships affected

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especially – though not exclusively – the anti-Fascist Jews who escaped from their native country in the wake of the 1938 Fascist anti-Semitic legislation. These measures drew upon the idea that the Jews were not part of the Italian people. As a result, despite several and confusing exceptions, Mussolini’s racial laws expelled the Jews from the Fascist party, the army, public schools and universities, excluded them from holding jobs with the state and local administrations, and prohibited them from working in banks as well as for insurance companies. These provisions further restricted economic, commercial and professional activities to the effect that the Jews were not entitled to possess real estate that exceeded a certain assessed value nor could they own or manage companies involved in military production or plants that employed more than one hundred workers. Such Jewish-owned properties were expropriated by the State (Sarfatti, 1994).

3 As making a living became quite difficult in the wake of the enactment of these measures, almost 6,000 Jews – namely about 12.6 percent of the country’s total Jewish population – fled Italy by late October 1941 (Zevi, 1984; Toscano, 2003, 185; Avagliano and Palmieri, 2011, XXXII-XXXIV). They left the country not only for their political ideas, but also because they had become the target of unrestrained economic discrimination and social hostility following Mussolini’s racial legislation (Levi, 1972, 85-86, 103 ; De Felice, 1993, 334-35, 436-38). Indeed, as Michele Sarfatti has pointed out, the ultimate, though undeclared, purpose of Fascist anti-Semitism was to force all Italian and foreign Jews to depart from the country for good (Sarfatti, 2000, 176-77). Roman history scholar Arnaldo Momigliano’s experience was a case in point. His attempt at securing an immigration visa for the United States – albeit unsuccessful – resulted both from his dismissal from a full professorship of Ancient history at the university of Turin and from the fact that he was the only breadwinner in a family of six people that included, besides him, his wife, their daughter, his parents and a sister of his (Capristo, 2006). After all, before eventually moving to England following the enactment of the 1938 racial legislation, Momigliano had not refrained from swearing his own loyalty to the Fascist regime in 1931 in order to retain his academic position. As Carlo Dionisotti has put it, facing unemployment Momigliano chose to “eat the soup” of Mussolini until the implementation of the anti-Jewish measures in Italian universities caused the demise of this opportunity (Dionisotti, 1989, 18). Likewise, Max Ascoli an early anti-fascist exile who landed in the United States with a fellowship of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1931, fled Italy not only because he had been briefly arrested and harassed by Mussolini’s police for his alleged contacts with the underground anti-Fascist group Giovane Italia (Grippa, 2009, 73-74).3 He also left the country for economic reasons. On the one hand, he was unable to secure tenure at the University of Catania, where he had initially hoped to launch his academic career. On the other, the bankruptcy of his father’s commercial firm had put his own affluence at risk (Taiuti, 2007, 148; Grippa, 2009, 81, 83).

4 Between 600 and 2,000 Jewish migrants, according to different assessments, followed in Ascoli’s footsteps and made their way to the United States (Prezzolini, 2002, 246). Their number would have been higher if the U.S. nativist quota legislation of the 1920s had not significantly restricted fluxes from eastern- and southern-European countries, such as Italy, without making any distinction between “immigrants” and “refugees” (Daniels, 2002, 282-83). Some of these Jewish exiles – primarily intellectuals and scientists – benefited from the policy of brain gain that a few U.S. universities, other academic institutions such as the New School for Social Research, and organizations

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like the Rockefeller Foundation had already established within larger programs to assist scholars whom Nazi political repression and anti-Semitism had forced to leave Germany since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power (Ascoli, 1936; Kent, 1953; Krohn, 1993; Gemelli, 2012). For instance, the Aid Program for Displaced Scholars of the Rockefeller Foundation helped 191 German, thirty Austrian, and twelve Italian refugees (Fermi, 1971, spec. 117, 120-23; Capristo, 2005, 93-94 ; Gissi, 2008 ; Camurri, 2009, 57-62). In particular, key to the expatriates from Italy were the connections that Max Ascoli had developed with the State Department in Washington and exploited to accommodate additional refugees (Tosiello, 2000, 107-29 ; Audenino and Bechelloni, 2009, 362 ; Grippa, 2009, 85-86 ; Lagi, 2012). Ascoli thought that the United States was the ideal sanctuary for the exiles because “we cannot serve our democracy better than by living democracy as much as possible in the countries where democracy is still alive” (Ascoli, 1931, 211).

5 Other Italian Jews relied on family and personal networks to emigrate to the United States (Ginzburg Migliorino, 2004). They included Anna Foa Yona, her husband Davide Yona, as well as their daughters Eva and Manuela. The four were a bourgeois and assimilated household of Sephardic Jews from Turin and arrived in the United States in May 1940 after securing their immigration visas thanks to an affidavit from Anna’s cousins – the Fubini Ghirons – who had already settled overseas the previous year (Jona and Foa, 1997, 198). Anna Foa Yona’s experience offers an enlightening case study for the overlapping of the political and economic dimension of migration that this article intends to investigate, besides offering some insights into the transformation of Jewish identity on exile.

Anti-Fascism at Home and the Impact of the 1938 Anti-Semitic Decrees

6 Some Italian Jews who became anti-Fascist following the enforcement of the 1938 anti- Semitic legislation had stuck to Mussolini almost until the passing of the racial laws. For instance, as late as 1937, the future Nobel laureate in economics Franco Modigliani, took part in the littoriali – a cultural competition for the best and the brightest Italian minds under the Fascist regime – and won the first prize in the section of economic corporativism with an essay on the stabilization of prices (Modigliani, 1999, 13-14 ; Camurri, 2010, XVII-XVIII). A few other Jews, as in the case of the Turin circle that published the pro-Fascist magazine La Nostra Bandiera, continued to support the Duce even at the time of the passing of the 1938 laws, in the fruitless hope that their loyalty would be rewarded with a lenient enforcement of the anti-Semitic provisions (Ventura, 2002).

7 Conversely, Anna Foa Yona’s opposition to Mussolini emerged a few years before the Duce’s racial turn, unrelated to Fascist anti-Semitism, had political motivations, and resulted from the liberal tradition of her own family. Anna’s older brother, Vittorio, was a member of the anti-Fascist but non-Communist organization Giustizia e Libertà, which aimed at overthrowing Mussolini and establishing a social democracy under a republican regime.4 Specifically, Vittorio wrote articles for the underground mouthpiece of this group. He was sentenced to fifteen years in jail on subversion charges in 1935 because of his political activities in Turin, where Jews had been a target of Mussolini’s police since the previous year because they were disproportionately represented in the membership of Giustizia e Libertà (Blatt, 1995). Her younger

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brother, Giuseppe, was also arrested by the Fascist police along with Vittorio, but remained in jail only for six months. Her father, too, spent a week in prison (Jona and Foa, 1997, 177-79, 184-85, 187 ; Foa, 1991, 37-45).

8 While Vittorio and his primarily Jewish comrades in Giustizia e Libertà were serving their jail terms, Anna’s initial anti-fascism was confined mainly to symbolic gestures. Her response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 offered an example. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Italian women donated their gold wedding rings to the Fascist government in order to support Mussolini’s war machinery financially and to challenge the economic sanctions that the League of Nations had passed against the regime for the latter’s unprovoked attack on the African country. The iron surrogates that replaced the gold rings became a visual demonstration of allegiance to fascism (De Grazia, 1992, 77-78). Yet, Anna not only kept her gold ring, but also made a point of wearing it in public, to the astonishment of her friends who thought that “she was crazy and would be arrested” (Stille, 1991, 137; Negri, 2006). She later began to collect funds for the volunteers who were fighting in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the legitimate Republican government against Francisco Franco’s Fascist insurgents (Foa Yona, 1978, 111).

9 Although Anna’s anti-fascism foreran the 1938 racial legislation, these provisions obviously strengthened her resentment toward Mussolini’s regime. The Jewish dimension of her political opposition is suggested by the fact that, even before 1938, her memoirs usually recollect incidents involving anti-Fascist activities by placing them against the backdrop of apparently irrelevant events that were somehow related to her religion, as if Anna wanted to construct her narratives retrospectively so as to stress the contrast between fascism and Jewishness. She, for instance, contends that her own father and uncle learned of the 1934 mass roundup of the Turin members of Giustizia e Libertà while they were reading the Passover Haggadah, the book of texts for the Seder service (Jona and Foa, 1997, 173). One could reasonably suggest that Anna’s harsh stigmatization of La Nostra Bandiera occurred in hindsight, too. In her memoirs she called the editorial staff “a group of half morons” and added that “we were shocked by the publication of that paper” (Jona and Foa, 1997, 191). Yet, as Alexander Stille has maintained, “the idea of a Jewish-Fascist magazine may sound like an oxymoron to contemporary ears, but was hardly so in the context of the Italy of the late 1930s” (Stille, 2003, 317).

10 Anna’s hatred of nazi-fascism for its persecution of Jews was literally visceral. Remarkably, she reported feeling sick to her stomach while passing by the German pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris (Jona and Foa, 1997, 191). However, the impact of Mussolini’s anti-Semitism on Anna’s life was primarily economic. Her husband was dismissed from his job as an architect for Turin’s municipal administration and had to find a temporary alternative occupation as an employee in the metallurgical plant of one of his brothers, Raffaele. The firm, in which Davide Yona had invested all his savings, continued to operate under the formal ownership of a gentile partner who had legally taken it over from its former Jewish associates for a nominal disbursement. This, however, was only a short-lived solution. The purchase had been intended to be fictitious with the only purpose of placing the ownership in the name of the non-Jewish partner and, thereby, dodging Italy’s racial measures that, as the regime put it, aimed to “arianize Jewish firms” (“Per l’arianizzazione delle ditte ebraiche,” 1938, as quoted in Sarfatti, 2002, 54). Yet the gentile owner soon betrayed the trust and turned his back

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on the Yona brothers. He fired them and kept the company for himself (Stille, 1991, 146 ; Jona and Foa, 1997, 193). Actually, both the Yonas’ strategy to cope with the Fascist anti-Semitic legislation and its unfortunate outcome were quite frequent among Jewish entrepreneurs in Italy (Levi, 1998, 84-85)

11 At that time, Anna and her husband had two young children to provide for. Davide was unemployed. Anna had received no formal professional education except for a course in nursing, but she was unable to get a job as a nurse because she was Jewish and did not hold membership in the Fascist Party (Jona and Foa, 1997, 195). Historian Ilaria Pavan has remarked that, in the aftermath of the 1938 legislation, for many Italian Jews “unemployment was the first step towards a personal catastrophe” (Pavan, 2007, 173). Indeed, Anna Yona hardly managed to make ends meet by weaving cloths at home and selling them to acquaintances (Jona and Foa, 1997, 196). As she put it, “the government took away our livelihood and the only thing was to emigrate” (Jona and Foa, 1997, 193). From his prison cell in Rome, Vittorio Foa, too, encouraged the couple to move abroad, notwithstanding the problems they were likely to face in a foreign country. “I’d rather know that you are living on an empty stomach,” he wrote to his sister on November 17, 1938, “than fearing that you are subjected to pogroms” (Foa, 1998, 517).

12 Anna and her husband initially thought of moving to France. But World War II broke out before they could manage to reach this country. The United States, therefore, became their second choice. However, leaving Italy was no simple matter and, as in the case of other prospective Jewish refugees,5 the U.S. immigration procedures posed bureaucratic obstacles. The couple had to bribe a police officer to obtain the passports for the United States and, then, made its way to Zurich, in Switzerland, to find a U.S. consul who accepted to issues the visas after his counterpart in Naples had refused (Foa Yona, 1978, 114; Jona and Foa, 1997, 198-201; Parussa, 2005). The Yonas, therefore, eventually succeeded in dodging a common bureaucratic practice that usually turned into an insurmountable barrier for Italian prospective expatriates: U.S. consuls granted visas only if Italian passports were already valid to travel to the United States, while the Italian Ministry of the Interior did not extend the validity of passports for the United States unless they already bore a U.S. visa (Segrè, 1995, 168).

Exile and Emigrant

13 The Yonas’ initial stay in the United States was not easy. In America the members of Anna’s family had to adapt to a much lower standard of living than that they had been used to even after the enforcement of the racial legislation. As in the case of many middle-class anti-Fascist exiles who underwent a process of proletarization abroad and took jobs below their qualifications (Audenino and Bechelloni, 2009, 355 ; Avagliano and Palmieri, 2011, 123-24), surviving was the main – if not the exclusive – concern. To save on the rent, in New York City the couple and their two daughters had to squeeze in a single room in the apartment of Anna’s brother in law. Davide went to a poultry training camp in New Jersey where a Jewish benevolent association struggled to turn refugees from Europe into farmers to get them work. He was subsequently hired as a metal sorter in a junkyard. Anna sold the furniture and the lingerie she had carried on purpose from Italy, as Jews were not allowed to bring money or jewels out of the country. Then she resumed working as a weaver at home for a department store and

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did other odd jobs because her faulty knowledge of the English language excluded her from most employment opportunities (Jona and Foa, 1997, 204-10 ; Foa, 1991, 21).

14 The language barrier may have also contributed to Anna’s sense of social isolation and helped strengthen her Jewish identity. Indeed, it seems that, at least during her early months in New York City, she mixed primarily with Italian Jewish expatriates such as journalist Tullia Zevi, theater reviewer Paolo Milano, and law scholar Paolo Contini, who routinely met on Sundays at a restaurant that was operated by an Irish woman on the 72nd Street (Zevi and Zevi, 2007, 41). Later on, when she first met Gaetano Salvemini, the prominent Italian anti-Fascist made an “unpleasant” impression on her because, as she subsequently observed, he “started to talk about the priests, the ministers and the rabbis of the world and he put all of three categories in the same platform. All three were corrupted, false and almost criminal in his point of view because they brainwashed the people who blindly believed in them” (Anna Yona as quoted in Cerqueti, 2007, 45).6

15 Anna’s political commitment was strong to the point of intransigence. While the United States was still neutral in World War II, she took issue with friends who preferred a quick end of the military conflict, regardless of the winner, to the defeat of nazi- fascism (Jona and Foa, 1997, 204). Moreover, she refused to have contacts with the Communist refugees who, in her eyes, shared the responsibility for the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact that had enabled the Nazi regime to start World War II. This was an attitude she shared with Italian anarchists in the United States (Tresca, 1941, 1). She patched it up with Stalin’s supporters only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, when – so to speak – the foes of her enemies became her own allies. Following her family liberal tradition, she remained an anti-Communist at heart, but she could not accept the idea of a defeat of the Soviet Union at the hands of Nazi Germany (Jona and Foa, 1997, 213, 220).

16 Nevertheless economic constraints affected Anna’s political militancy and initially limited her contributions to the struggle against nazi-fascism. Although she wished she could have done more, she had to confine herself to donating blood and the little money she managed to save for the relief of the Russian people (Jona and Foa, 1997, 213).

17 Anna’s separation from her parents, who had refused to leave Italy while Vittorio was still in prison (Foa, 1991, 21-22), and the difficulties of communicating with them were a continuous source of anxiety that added to her unfortunate plight (Jona and Foa, 1997, 218-19). Discrimination further increased Anna’s hardships.

18 On the one hand, she faced unexpected anti-Jewish feelings in the United States. Indeed, anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews in employment and higher education paradoxically underwent a significant increase at wartime (Shapiro, 1990, 68-69). Opinion polls also revealed that the share of Americans who thought that Jews wielded excessive power in the country rose from 43 percent in April 1940 to 56 percent in May 1944 (Collomp, 2011, 431). Anti-Semitic sentiments surfaced even within the universities that hosted Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (Lamberti, 2006, 159). The Yonas were not unaffected by such feelings. For instance, when Anna moved to Cambridge with her children in 1942 to join her husband, who had found a new job as a draftsman in Boston, she had trouble in renting an apartment because several owners she had initially contacted did not want Jewish tenants (Jona and Foa, 1997, 217). Actually, the Boston area was a stronghold of anti-Semitism. In the

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1930s Catholic priest Charles E. Coughlin fueled the flames of anti-Jewish feelings among numerous Irish Americans and Italian Americans by means of his anti-Semitic radio broadcasts and the circulation of his weekly mouthpiece Social Justice (Warren, 1996, 129-60; Cremonesi, 1998). This newspaper had a broad readership in Boston’s Little Italy in the prewar years and Coughlin’s presidential candidate, William Lemke of the Union Party, polled 12.4 percent of the Italian-American vote there, as opposed to the less than 2 percent he received nationwide (Betty, 1992, 450; Trout, 1977, 292.). Furthermore, the local Italian-language press usually indulged in anti-Jewish slurs (Stack, 1979, 150). As late as 1944, a prominent leader of the community, Luigi Criscuolo (Flamma, 1936, 101), contended that Max Ascoli “is not an Italian at all but a Jew who happens to have been born in Italy” (Criscuolo, 1944). Anna recalled that relations between Jews and Italian Americans were strained in the Boston neighborhood where both groups lived side by side: “the North End at that time was half Italian and half Jewish. The Italians were against the Jews and the Jews were against the Italians” (Foa Yona, 1978, 115).

19 On the other hand, since she was an Italian citizen, Anna also had to endure restrictions in everyday life, resulting from the designation of the unnaturalized immigrants from Italy as enemy aliens between Italy’s declaration of war on the United States on December 11, 1941 and the repeal of this provision in October 1942 (Blum, 1976, 151-54; Tintori, 2004; Puleo, 2007, 209-12). She and her husband even feared that they would be placed in an internment camp, as happened to most Japanese Americans but very few Italians (Jona and Foa, 1997, 211).

20 On the other hand, notwithstanding a few forms of prejudice and discrimination, in Anna’s eyes, the United States was not Italy. In the latter, as she argued, “it was not possible to express our feelings and opinions about the world’s events.” On the contrary, to Anna the United States meant “a sense of fresh air, a feeling of freedom never felt before” (as quoted in Cerqueti, 2007, 46). The epitome of such liberty and the means of expressing it became La Controcorrente, an anti-Fascist monthly that an anarchist of Italian origin, Aldino Felicani (Confortini, 2005), had published in Boston under the editorship of Anita Paolini since 1938 (Townsend et al., 1943 ; Dadà, 1984, 354-55 ; Calandri, 1984, 379-80 ; Tasca, 1987, III, 53 ; Durante, 2005, 514 ; Cerqueti, 2007).

21 Anna met Felicani, “a revered presence on the non-Stalinist left” (Hentoff, 2001, 85), at the house of Enzo Tagliacozzo (Iaccio, 1992, 214), a mutual friend in Boston’s anti- fascist circles who had similarly fled Italy in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic legislation (Jona and Foa, 1997, 212). Once they got acquainted, she began to write short articles for La Controcorrente, to which her husband also became a regular contributor (see, e.g., Jona, 1942). Until then Anna’s anti-fascism had hardly gone beyond the sphere of her private behavior. It can be easily suggested that wearing her gold wedding ring during the Italo-Ethiopian War had an impact almost exclusively on her friends and acquaintances. But Feliciani offered Anna an opportunity to go public and to reach a much larger group of people. At that time, women were usually denied visible political role in the Little Italies because patriarchal attitudes were widespread among Italian immigrants. As historian Stephen Puleo has remarked, in Boston’s community “the Italian husband and father was the ‘political’ head of the household” (Puleo, 2007, 71). Yet, a consolidated tradition of female activism and militancy within Italian-American radical circles (Ventresca and Jacovetta, 2002; Guglielmo, 2010), especially among the anarchists to whom Feliciani belonged, can reasonably account

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for his willingness to give Anna a chance. However, the fact that, unlike her husband who spelled his last name in the byline, she signed her articles for La Controcorrente with either “A.” or “Anna” may indicate some difficulties in having her political status acknowledged in full (Jona and Foa, 1997, 219).

22 La Controcorrente aimed at promoting the union of all anti-Fascist forces in the struggle against Mussolini’s regime both in Italy and in the United States. It also advocated the restoration of Italy’s full sovereignty and its transformation into a republic after the end of World War II. Besides countering nazi-fascism in Europe, La Controcorrente made a point of denouncing those former followers of Mussolini who were still active in the public life of Boston’s Italian-American community and revealed some surviving pro- Fascist leaning because they also wished that the government of postwar Italy would be entrusted to the monarchy and conservative forces (Thomson, 1942 ; Cato, 1942 ; Dadà, 1984, 357-59, 364-66).

23 This stand was the dimension that appealed most to Anna, as anti-Jewish feelings were indeed the backbone of the lingering Fascist sentiments within the local Little Italy. Furthermore, since 1938 La Controcorrente had launched a campaign against Coughlin and his followers that undoubtedly pleased Anna because the hatred of the Jews was still alive in the Boston area even at wartime (Cerqueti, 2007, 50-56). In particular, anti- Semitism was so strong among Mussolini’s former supporters within the city’s Italian- American community that an anonymous letter went so far as to call La Controcorrente a “den of Jews” as late as the Summer of 1945 (“Lettera senza firma,” 1945). However, as Anna recalled, Felicani and La Controcorrente gave her and Davide “a reason for living. To fight for equality and justice” (as quoted in Cerqueti, 2007, 46).

24 Following the republican stand of La Controcorrente, in her articles Anna stigmatized the remarks of Prince Umberto of Savoy, the heir to the Italian throne, who had argued that the United States had the moral duty to reconstruct Italy, as if the Italian government, with the consent of the Italian monarch, had not declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (A., 1944b). She, therefore, implied that the prospective successor to King Victor Emmanuel III and the whole House of Savoy were unfit to rule the country. She also harshly criticized such former Fascist leaders as Alfredo De Marsico – Italy’s last minister of Justice before the fall of the Fascist regime – who tended to separate their own responsibilities from those of Mussolini and to blame only the Duce for the war (A., 1944a). She contrasted them with anti-Fascists such as Leone Ginzburg and Giacomo Matteotti, who had sacrificed their lives to free the Italian people from the yoke of the dictatorship (A., 1944c; (A., 1944d).7 Furthermore, Anna stigmatized the delay in the enactment of a much welcome purge of former Fascists and other “traitors” from public offices after the liberation of Italy by the Allies (A., 1945).

25 Yet, she did not advocate a punitive peace for her mother country that would bar Italy from the international community and thwart the Italian people’s aspirations to reshape their own institutions after the fall of the Duce’s dictatorship. Rather she hoped that Italy would be admitted into the United Nations in recognition of its contribution to the fight against Fascism and Nazism after the overthrow of Mussolini’s regime (Anna, 1945). In particular, she took issue with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who opposed the recognition of Italy as an ally, as if all the Italians had been responsible for fascism notwithstanding the activities of Mussolini’s opponents since the Duce’s rise to power in 1922 and the partisans’ more recent contribution to the

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Allies’ military operations in the peninsula since the Summer of 1943 (Anna, 1944). Like her husband (Jona, 1944), she also accused Churchill of appeasing the House of Savoy. In her view, Churchill endeavored to prevent the Italian people from choosing their own government after the end of the war in order to preserve the monarchic regime as a bulwark against significant social changes in Italy (Anna, 1944). Anna, therefore, reiterated the criticism of Churchill’s lenient attitude toward the Italian dynasty that characterized the editorial policy of La Controcorrente (“Il discorso di Churchill,” 1944).

26 In addition to the pieces Anna published in La Controcorrente, she took her anti-fascism to the airwaves. After moving to the Boston area, she wove models for a local department store and worked as a shop assistant in the North End because she could speak the native language of the local Italian-American customers (Foa Yona, 1978, 115). However, her fluency in Italian soon provided new employment opportunities. She got a job with WCOP, a Boston-based radio station that had Italian-language broadcasts. With the seventh largest Italian-American audience in the United States and thirteen hours and forty-five minutes of programs in Italian a week, WCOP had long operated as a mouthpiece for Mussolini’s regime before the outbreak of World War II (Brumer and Sayre, 1941, 641; U.S. House of Representatives, 1943, 2682). For instance, Ubaldo Guidi, a Fascist activist, spoke on WCOP three times per day during working days and once on Saturdays (Salvemini, 1977, 95). But, at wartime, after finding itself under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the management of the Italian programs wanted to demonstrate its loyalty to the United States and selected its own staff among those anti-Fascists who, as in the case of the contributors to La Controcorrente, had criticized the previous Fascist alignment of WCOP (“Continuano le proteste contro gli agenti fascisti,” 1938).8 The FCC itself encouraged radio stations broadcasting German-language and Italian-language programs to hire anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist refugees (Horten, 2002, 80).

27 Anna had come to master enough English by then.9 Her initial task was to translate news from the United Press International and Associated Press services. At the beginning it was a hard and often unrewarding toil with a workweek of forty-four to fifty hours. But, when the host of the Italian-language program, Livio Stecchini, was enlisted in the army in early 1943, Anna was offered his position as the commentator on current affairs (Jona and Foa, 1997, 216, 220). However, as in the case of many American women who – in the wake of the manpower shortage at wartime – managed to do jobs that they had never performed before (Kennedy, 1999, 779), Anna had trouble to win her male coworkers’ trust. While translating off the air usually became a woman’s traditional role, going on the airwaves for political commentaries did not. As she later recalled in her memoirs, her colleagues “were all young men, who were maybe a little suspicious of me” (Jona and Foa, 1997, 221).

28 After replacing Stecchini, Anna used her broadcasts to spread democratic values and ideals within Boston’s Little Italy, thereby antagonizing the widespread pro-Fascist feelings that many Italian Americans had revealed before the outbreak of World War II. Her criticism of Mussolini’s prewar Italian-American fellow travelers on the radio was so vitriolic that she received hate mail and threatening messages within a broader campaign targeting other vocal anti-Fascists such as Tagliacozzo (Jona and Foa, 1997, 221; Sereno 1943). A 1944 letter to the Gazzetta del Massachusetts, the most authoritative Italian-language newspaper in the Boston area, outspokenly called Anna “a renegade, a mercenary woman paid by the enemies of Italy, who spits out all the venom and

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rubbish dishonoring Italians’ reputation from her fetid mouth every morning on the radio” (Miceli, 1944).10 Some threatening pieces of correspondence Anna received also contained “the most revolting obscene drawings” (Jona and Foa, 1997, 221). The sexually explicit contents of such letters, namely the attacks on her as a woman, were likely to suggest that her unusual position as a public voice about politics and the ensuing violation of traditional gender roles within the Italian-American community were blamed, too.

29 Although the few die-hard Fascist sympathizers in Boston’s community perceived Anna as a menace and sought to intimidate her, since she was a woman she received little credit for her political activities among Mussolini’s Italian-American opponents. The day after the Duce’s fall on July 25, 1943, she was invited to make a speech in New York City. She accepted with enthusiasm. Yet she soon realized that she had been asked to participate in the event not as the WCOP radio host who had fought the Duce on Boston’s airwaves but because she was Vittorio Foa’s sister (Jona and Foa, 1997, 222). Contrary to Feliciani, other Italian-American anti-Fascists were not yet ready to acknowledge women’s political standing and militancy. Remarkably enough, a recent study has listed Anna among the “wives of political refugees,” as if she were not an anti-Fascist in her own right (Serra, 2007, 116).

Conclusion

30 Anna Foa Yona’s experience offers an illuminating example of how the decision to expatriate was taken under the dual stimuli of political and economic motivations. Moreover, it demonstrates that these two dimensions continued to overlap because, after the exiles had settled in their adoptive land, anti-Fascist militancy had to coexist with the necessity to provide for themselves and their own families. As Anna would later admit, “it was not only a principle, it was a challenge to be antifascist” (Jona and Foa, 1997, 172). The trial was not only ideological and political, but it also involved everyday life. Likewise, Anna Yona’s emigration was both a political exile and a personal displacement.

31 The latter affected her identity, too. Confronted by anti-Semitism in her adoptive society, she strengthened her Jewish sense of affiliation out of reaction to the hostility she and her close relatives had to endure in their new milieu, notwithstanding the official image of the United States as the defender of the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way” and the “freedom from fear” resulting from wartime propaganda such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 state of the Union address (Roosevelt, 1941, 672). Anna, for instance, came to feel that “as Jews we had more duties than others who were not Jewish. […] we had to be better in intellectual and moral standards maybe just as a defense against possible anti-Semitism” (Jona and Foa, 1997, 220). The intensification of her Jewish self-concept of belonging did not fade away after the end of World War II. For instance, when she became a teacher of Italian at the Center for Adult Education in Cambridge in the postwar years, she made a point of including Primo Levi’s memoirs – Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) and La tregua (The Reawakening) – in the required readings for her students (Feldman, 1989, 207). Remarkably, her focus on Levi preceded the writer’s emergence as a towering figure into the U.S. public discourse on the Shoah, which would occur as late as the mid 1980s (Rothberg and Druker, 2009). For the elaboration of Anna’s syllabus and canon of Italian

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literature, the fact that Levi was a cousin of hers (Thomson, 2004, 155) was of less importance than the fact that he was a Jewish writer and an Auschwitz survivor who had denounced the depravity of Nazi anti-Semitism in his works. Therefore, Anna’s Jewish attachment gained momentum as she and her family resettled from Italy to the United States, contributing to show that exile is a process through which identities are also transformed.

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TOWNSEND, Elizabeth et al., “Highlights in the Italian-Language Press : Report no. 18 (August 13 to August 28, 1943),” Philleo Nash Papers, box 17, folder “Italian Language Press, September 1943,” Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.

TRESCA, Carlo, “Molotoff [sic] e la partita a quattro,” Il Martello, 14 August 1941, 1.

TROUT, Charles H., Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, New York, Oxford UP, 1977.

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Study and Investigation of the Federal Communications Commission, 78th Cong., 1st sess., 1943.

VENTRESCA, Robert and Franca IACOVETTA, “Virgilia D’Andrea: The Politics of Protest and the Poetry of Exile,” Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, Toronto, U of Toronto P, 2002, 299-325.

VENTURA, Luca, Ebrei con il duce : “La Nostra Bandiera”, Turin, Zamorani, 2002.

WARREN, Donald, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio, New York, Free P, 1996.

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ZEVI, Tullia, “L’emigrazione razziale,” L’antifascismo italiano negli Stati Uniti durante la seconda guerra mondiale, ed. Antonio Varsori, Rome, Archivio Trimestrale, 1984, 75-82.

---, and Nathania ZEVI, Ti racconto la mia storia : Dialogo tra nonna e nipote sull’ebraismo, Milan, Rizzoli, 2007.

NOTES

1. Jona and Foa, 1997, 218. While referring to this volume, the English-language quotations from Anna Yona’s recollections throughout the text of this article draw upon the unpublished English- language original typescript: “The Memoirs of Anna Yona,” Anna (Foa) Yona Papers, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. Anna spelt her husband’s last name “Jona” in Italian-language writings and “Yona” in English-language works as she changed her last name into “Yona” after settling in the United States (Belpoliti, 1997, 1381). This article uses the latter spelling. 2. Studies have acknowledged such fuzziness not only in contemporary but in modern history as well (Jackson and Moch, 1989). For the specific case of Italian emigration, see Degl’Innocenti, 1992, 16-17 ; Sanfilippo, 2002, 111-20 ; Corti, 2001. 3. For the Giovane Italia, see Sedita, 2006. 4. For Giustizia e Libertà, see Giovana, 2005. 5. See, e.g., the experience of the Russian-born Italian-American journalist Mikhail Kamenetzky, alias Ugo Stille, as reconstructed by his son (Stille, 2013, 157-63, 178, 182-83). 6. For Salvemini’s anti-Fascist activities in the United States, see Killinger, 2002, 267-99. 7. It was Ginzburg who persuaded Vittorio Foa to join Giustizia e Libertà. See Foa, 1991, 37. 8. For the echo of the denunciations by La Controcorrente, see U.S. House of Representatives, 1943, 2753, 2998. 9. In 1946 Anna translated a sample chapter of Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) into English for Boston’s publisher Little, Brown, which eventually declined to publish the book (Thomson, 2004, 155). 10. For the Gazzetta del Massachusetts and its owner, James V. Donnaruma, see Deschamps and Luconi, 2002.

ABSTRACTS

This article reconstructs the plight of Anna Foa Yona, a Jewish expatriate who escaped from Italy, along with her family, in the wake of the Fascist 1938 anti-Semitic measures. She had opposed Benito Mussolini’s regime before fleeing the country and, notwithstanding the hardships of making a living in her adoptive society, continued to get engaged in anti-Fascist activities after moving to the United States. The article uses her experience as a case study for the intertwinement between political exile and economic migration, in addition to shedding light on Jewish identity in exile.

Cet article présente l’histoire d’Anna Foa Yona, italienne juive, réfugiée aux Etats-Unis avec sa famille qui avait quitté son pays après les lois antisémites du gouvernement de Mussolini en 1938.

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Militante antifasciste avant son départ, elle poursuit cet engagement aux Etats-Unis malgré la difficulté de gagner sa vie dans ce pays d’adoption. A propos de ce cas l’article explore l’imbrication entre exil politique et migration économique, de plus il met en lumière l’identité des Juifs en exil.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Antisémitisme, fascisme, immigration juive, Italiens-Américains, Boston Keywords: Anti-Semitism, fascism, Jewish immigration, Italian Americans, Boston

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L’américanisation d’un intellectuel français : le cas d’Yves Simon (1903-1961)

Florian Michel

« To those who are, by personal experience, aware of the astounding fecundity of Thomism, it seems that the endeavor to build up a Thomistic interpretation of democracy may well open a new era in the development of political thought » (Simon, 1942b, 271).

1 Yves Simon est un intellectuel peu connu en France. Il est un indice qui ne trompe pas : il n’a pas même eu droit à sa notice dans le Dictionnaire des intellectuels français (Seuil, 1996). L’objet de cette contribution n’est pas cependant de réparer l’injustice, mais, pour partie du moins, de chercher à en rendre raison. Yves Simon fut un philosophe chrétien, un « intellectuel catholique » pourrait-on dire en reprenant le cadre d’analyse proposé pour les années 1920 par Claude Langlois, qui en pointait « la naissance tardive » et en soulignait les caractéristiques principales : l’intellectuel catholique, dont le parangon serait Jacques Maritain « par élimination successive » des autres figures concurrentes, serait ancré dans le renouveau de la philosophie de Thomas d’Aquin, adoubé par Rome, reconnu à l’extérieur pour sa légitimité scientifique, et serait marqué par une capacité d’autonomie et de distanciation critique à l’égard de l’Église à laquelle il appartient (Langlois, 1997). Yves Simon, qui entre aisément dans le portrait ainsi dessiné1, est né en 1903, à Cherbourg, dans une famille de la bonne bourgeoisie industrielle. Il est décédé en 1961 à South Bend, dans l’Indiana, alors qu’il était professeur de philosophie à l’université de Chicago. L’itinéraire de Simon, qui le conduit de sa Normandie natale jusque dans le Midwest, explique son absence dans le paysage intellectuel français et offre un nouvel angle de vue sur cette problématique de l’exil, de l’immigration et du brain drain aux États-Unis2.

2 Au seuil des années 1920, Yves Simon commence à Paris des études, qui sont éclectiques, et même un peu chaotiques et dilettantes3 : il suit d’abord les cours en

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khâgne au Lycée Louis-le-Grand, où il a pour amis Pierre-Henri Simon, le futur académicien, et Vladimir Jankélévitch. À la fois pour des questions de santé et de médiocrité en thème grec et latin4, Simon abandonne sa khâgne en 1921. Il s’inscrit alors en licence à la Sorbonne5 en même temps qu’à l’Institut catholique de Paris, où il suit les cours de Jacques Maritain, rencontré pour la première fois en janvier 1922. Il entame ensuite des études de sociologie et d’histoire politique, sur le socialisme français, sous la direction de Célestin Bouglé6, puis, se lance dans des études médicales. Ses années de jeunesse sont également marquées par une forte militance dans les réseaux démocrates-chrétiens de la « Jeune-République » sous la direction de Marc Sangnier : c’est là que le jeune Simon, à vingt-et-un ans tout juste, publie ses premiers articles7. Après avoir travaillé pendant presque deux ans comme secrétaire au Musée Guimet sous la direction de René Grousset, Simon, renonçant à passer l’agrégation, décide, en 1927, d’entamer une thèse de philosophie sous la direction de Maritain, qui débouche en 1934 sur la publication de ses deux premiers ouvrages de métaphysique (Simon, 1934a, 1934b). Les années 1930 — le tableau est brossé à gros traits — sont caractérisées par un enseignement aux facultés de philosophie des instituts catholiques de Lille et Paris, et par sa participation, dans le sillage des Maritain, Mauriac, Fumet, à un certain nombre de manifestes8. Cette période-là de la vie d’Yves Simon est riche sur le plan intellectuel (Fourcade, 2003).

3 La période qui suit aura un autre cours. Au printemps 1938, Yves Simon reçoit une invitation pour un an de l’université de Notre Dame, dans l’Indiana. Il accepte l’offre et se rend aux États-Unis en août 1938. C’est le point de départ d’un processus d’américanisation, qui revêt une singulière importance. Yves Simon offre d’abord l’exemple d’un Français qui choisit l’expatriation sans être contraint à l’exil pour des raisons économiques ou par des faits de guerre. On a là également le cas d’un intellectuel catholique original, qui permet l’acclimatation de la pensée de Thomas d’Aquin dans le contexte américain, qui se situe à la fois dans la tradition révolutionnaire française et dans la filiation d’une pensée intransigeante et anti- libérale : l’expérience américaine aura comme effet chez lui, pour ainsi dire, de réconcilier ces deux éléments qui, en France, jouaient en opposition. Et enfin, sur le plan d’une histoire plus générale, Simon est du petit nombre des penseurs qui contribuent à rénover en milieu catholique la pensée démocratique. À l’horizon, il y a le fameux message de Pie XII de Noël 1944 sur la « saine démocratie », qui perd, pour le magistère catholique, son statut de « régime possible », le sien jusqu’alors, pour acquérir celui de « régime préférable »9.

4 Pour caractériser l’américanisation d’Yves Simon, américanisé jusque dans son nom puisqu’aux États-Unis son nom de plume devient « Yves R. Simon », on peut distinguer six éléments. L’américanisation peut s’entendre en un sens linguistique (1). Elle peut aussi recouvrir un sens familial (2), un sens professionnel et universitaire (3), un sens civique, puisque Simon acquiert la nationalité américaine (4), un sens politique (5), et enfin, le plus crucial certainement, un sens philosophique (6), puisque, selon le dire même de Simon, « l’expérience de la démocratie américaine fournit une perspective féconde en découvertes »10.

5 Dans la mesure où cette étude repose pour l’essentiel sur la correspondance échangée entre Jacques Maritain et Yves Simon, il n’est pas inopportun de présenter ce corpus documentaire : constituée de plus de 800 lettres échangées entre 1927 et 1961, cette correspondance, unique en son abondance, aux tonalités à la fois intimes, familiales,

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professionnelles, politiques et intellectuelles, a été publiée en deux volumes (Michel, 2008 et 2012) ; elle permet de mesurer très finement le processus d’américanisation, ainsi que les éléments de résistance à ce processus.

La question linguistique

6 Avant d’arriver aux États-Unis, l’anglais de Simon est très fragile. Comme maints étudiants français d’alors, et comme Maritain lui-même, Simon est davantage tourné vers le monde germanique, dont il connaît bien la langue au point de publier des traductions de l’allemand vers le français11. Simon avait passé une année, en 1929-1930, pour enseigner le français dans un collège catholique de Haute Silésie : là-bas, « l’esprit de Locarno et la paix romaine ne sont pas des vains mots », commentait alors Simon (Michel, 2008, 40-41). À l’été 1938, Simon est obligé de travailler d’arrache-pied pour combler ses lacunes en anglais : « Je lis de l’anglais du matin au soir, écrit-il à Maritain ; je comprends assez bien cette langue mais ma prononciation est épouvantable et mon discours comprend 80% d’allemand. Trois mois de travail acharné me permettront-ils d’honorables débuts ? Je veux le croire » (Michel, 2008, 326-27).

7 Les premiers cours semblent se passer honorablement. On a quelques témoignages personnels : « Je me tire d’affaire en anglais. Gurian, MacMahon et Ward ont dit que les étudiants me comprendraient bien » (Michel, 2008, 338-39) ; « J’ai l’impression que mon enseignement réussit : mes gradués ont pour moi des manières affectueuses qu’on réserve ordinairement aux professeurs non rasants. J’étudie le déterminisme et la langue anglaise : je fais de la grammaire supérieure et je dépouille le dictionnaire d’Oxford comme si c’était du Jean de Saint-Thomas » (Michel, 2008, 345-46). « Mon anglais s’améliore lentement ; je suis encore très irrégulier ; tantôt capable d’éloquence dans l’improvisation, tantôt très gauche » (Michel, 2008, 359). Les premières publications en anglais nécessitent la révision et la réécriture soigneuse par un secrétaire, octroyé par l’université. Simon est obligé, dit-il, de « postuler » qu’il puisse écrire l’anglais (Michel, 2012, 24).

8 Assez vite cependant, à force de volonté et de travail, Simon domine la question linguistique. On a ainsi un témoignage d’Auguste Viatte et Charles De Koninck, tous les deux professeurs à l’Université Laval de Québec : « Soirée chez les De Koninck, rapporte Auguste Viatte dans son journal en février 1940. […] De Koninck est en correspondance avec Yves Simon, dont il sait qu’il s’est vite américanisé, au point de lui écrire en anglais : sa lettre me donnait cette impression fâcheuse » (Viatte, 2004, 53). Sur le plan de la linguistique intime, pour ainsi dire, on comprend que Simon a basculé vers la langue anglaise, au point de parler très vite à ses enfants en anglais et d’écrire son propre journal dans cette langue, ce qui en soi est assez surprenant et signale le volontarisme soutenu de Simon dans la pratique linguistique, comme si les amarres, y compris de la langue, étaient rompues12.

L’américanisation du Way of Life

9 L’américanisation de Simon concerne également, en un sens large, la sociologie familiale. Simon arrive avec quatre enfants en bas âge aux États-Unis ; deux autres naîtront à South Bend13. Ces derniers ne tardent pas à s’intégrer pleinement dans le cadre américain : « l’anglais a un son parfaitement angélique quand il est parlé par

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Antoine (non Angli, sed Angeli) » (Michel, 2008, 450). La correspondance de leur père décrit les progrès réalisés en ce domaine par les enfants, qui se mettent à parler anglais, et même l’argot américain, ce dont le père est très fier. Les enfants commettent des erreurs de français : dans la correspondance cela devient un objet de plaisanterie (Michel, 2012)14. Parents et enfants échangent entre eux en anglais, signe fort d’un éloignement de la culture maternelle (Michel, 2012, 154). Les années passent : les « enfants » partent étudier dans les pensionnats et universités américaines, à Marquette, à Chicago, à Saint John’s. Ils ont beaucoup de peine dans les multiples institutions scolaires fréquentées. Un garçon, Pascal, sert dans les Marines (Michel, 2012, 451-53) ; un autre « date » la fille du sénateur du Minnesota (Michel, 2012, 482-84) ; un autre fugue pendant une semaine — c’est l’époque du Catcher in the Rye de Salinger ; un autre encore s’engage dans l’armée, « moyen sûr, commente le père, de s’extraire d’une bande de gamins qui ont un talent spécial pour attirer l’attention de la police de South Bend » (Michel, 2012, 454-57). Les jeunes adultes se fiancent, se marient, ou vivent en concubinage au grand dam de leur père. La question du pluralisme religieux, de l’agnosticisme pratique, de l’assiduité sacramentelle tourmente le père. Un fils, Pascal, veut épouser une jeune fille juive, ce qui nourrit les inquiétudes des Simon quant à la religion des petits enfants (Michel, 2012, 442), autant que celles des futurs beaux-parents qui s’opposent un moment à la conversion au catholicisme de leur fille (Michel, 2012, 449) ; un autre, Dominique, a lui « la joie » d’épouser une jeune anglaise catholique (Michel, 2012, 428). La question de l’assiduité de la pratique religieuse des enfants, devenus adolescents, est un souci récurrent. Quelques uns manquent parfois la messe, ce qui est source de vives angoisses : « Catherine m’a affirmé que Pascal n’allait pas à la messe le dimanche. (Je ne saurai jamais la vérité, mais il semble qu’il ait, en fait, manqué la messe quelques fois.) Il m’a fallu un peu de recul pour me dire qu’un enfant peut faire sans pécher mortellement bien des choses classées comme péchés mortels. Il a fallu passer une nuit sur cette révélation. Quelle nuit atroce ! » (Michel, 2012, 346-47). En 1953, la famille Simon achète un ranch au Nouveau-Mexique, non loin d’Albuquerque, ce qui occasionne de grandes traversées continentales en voiture depuis l’Indiana.

10 Cette « américanisation », à la fois culturelle, sentimentale, géographique, de la vie familiale des Simon ne va pas cependant sans crise de conscience parfois : le choix paternel de l’expatriation et de renonciation à la France peut-il valoir pour l’épouse et les enfants ? Faut-il faire prêter, comme Simon l’écrit, un « serment d’Hannibal », à qui Hamilcar avait fait jurer d’à jamais rester fidèle à sa patrie ? Bonnes nouvelles de la famille. Hier, la nouvelle que Dominique avait pêché deux gros poissons a été pour moi un rayon de consolation toute la journée. J’aime tant que mes garçons s’intéressent à la campagne, au sport, au travail manuel ! Ce sont de beaux petits Yankees, using a lot of slang expressions, boxeurs violents, entreprenants, audacieux, réalisateurs, pleins de “fun”, serviables, et jamais si contents que quand ils peuvent faire un cadeau à leur maman. Je crois bien que ce sont de parfaits émigrés : puisque Dieu a voulu qu’ils fussent à l’abri des bombes, nous n’avons pas voulu qu’ils souffrissent de la guerre, même moralement. On verra plus tard, s’il y a lieu à leur faire prononcer un serment d’Hannibal (Michel, 2008, 424).

11 Cette américanisation n’est pas non plus synonyme d’aisance : même si Yves Simon occupe la position confortable de professeur d’université, l’argent n’abonde guère15. Les enfants semblent également connaître quelques troubles liés à leur condition d’immigrés de première génération. À tort ou à raison, un psychologue consulté relie

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l’ensemble des événements familiaux au statut d’étrangers des Simon : « La fugue de Pascal aura servi à nous avertir. […] Les psychologues insistent beaucoup sur notre origine étrangère (dans le cas de Catherine aussi) ; il paraît que dans les familles étrangères la proportion d’enfants difficiles, anormaux, délinquants, est énorme » (Michel, 2012, 350).

L’intégration de Simon au sein des universités américaines

12 Il s’agit là d’un aspect institutionnel de l’américanisation de Simon qui permet de préciser un élément fondamental de la réception de la philosophie de Thomas d’Aquin aux États-Unis. La première institution où Simon enseigne est l’université de Notre Dame, dans l’Indiana. Dans la volonté de suivre l’invite pontificale qui proposait de s’en retourner à Thomas d’Aquin (Aeterni Patris, 1879), on y cherchait en 1938 un spécialiste de la métaphysique thomiste pour développer et internationaliser la faculté de philosophie (Michel, 2010, chapitre 5). Le « réseau Maritain » et « l’internationale catholique » jouent à plein. Avec la recommandation de Waldemar Gurian et le soutien de Maritain, Simon obtient le poste. Il est titularisé l’année suivante. Pendant la guerre, au contraire de nombreux exilés français, Simon est professeur titulaire aux États- Unis : à ce titre, il peut écrire quelques lettres de recommandation auprès de la Rockefeller Fondation et il peut accueillir Paul Vignaux à Notre Dame par exemple (Michel, 2012, 26).

13 Simon reste pendant dix ans à l’université de Notre Dame. En 1948, il est recruté par la prestigieuse université de Chicago pour y enseigner la philosophie au sein du « Committee on Social Thought », où il a pour collègues Mircea Eliade, Friedrich von Hayek, etc. (Michel, 2003). Cette mutation de Simon s’accompagne d’une forme de scrupule : recruté par Notre Dame, son départ, explique-t-il à Maritain, va décapiter l’école doctorale en philosophie. Maritain balaie ces inquiétudes : Je suis ravi que vous alliez à Chicago. Vous verrez bien ce que sera cette expérience. En tous cas, il fallait la faire. Nous sommes des évangélistes (ce n’est pas le style de Gilson ni du cher Dr Phelan). Va, va, va pauvre thomiste, va nous dit l’ange qui nous conduit et nous protège. Ce sont des appels irrésistibles. À Chicago, vous serez au centre du combat d’esprit (Michel, 2012, 301).

14 Cette translation institutionnelle, qui doit peu cette fois à la « Catholic Connection », témoigne de la bonne réception de la pensée catholique dans les milieux qui a priori pouvaient lui paraître assez fermés, voire hostiles. Il existait alors, dans les universités séculières américaines comme Chicago, Harvard ou Princeton, une réaction assez forte contre la philosophie pragmatiste de « l’École de Chicago », et contre John Dewey en particulier : cette réaction s’accompagnait d’une réélaboration de la pédagogie et d’une redéfinition des finalités universitaires, et s’appuyait entre autres sur des administrateurs comme Robert Hutchins et Harold Dodds, sur des professeurs comme John Nef et Mortimer Adler, ainsi que sur des auteurs comme Maritain et Simon (Michel, 2010, chapitre 4). Avant le milieu des années 1960, la réception de la « pensée catholique » dépasse le cadre strictement catholique et vient nourrir d’autres secteurs de l’opinion et de l’intelligence américaine, non sans susciter naturellement des débats et des critiques, mais sans plus être frappée de cette forme d’ostracisme instinctif dont témoignaient encore les années 192016. Sans cela, on ne peut pas comprendre les

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raisons pour lesquelles Jacques Maritain enseigne à Princeton et y réside pendant 12 ans, de 1948 à 1960, ni pourquoi Yves Simon enseigne à l’université de Chicago entre 1948 et 1961. Il y a là une trajectoire institutionnelle « extra Ecclesiam » qui, sans être une déconfessionnalisation de la pensée de Simon, vient définir un autre aspect de son américanisation et montrer du même coup, sur la scène américaine, cet affaiblissement de l’altérité catholique (James McCartin, 2003).

L’obtention de la citoyenneté américaine

15 L’américanisation, pour Simon, passe aussi par l’obtention de la citoyenneté américaine en 1946. Cela ne va pas sans poser parfois des questions délicates dans l’intime de la famille. Dès la fin 1944, on trouve quelques témoignages venant d’amis français, comme Edmond Michelet et le secrétaire de son cabinet, Maurice Coblentz, que Simon connaissait depuis les années 1930, ainsi que de membres de la famille : tous espèrent un retour des Simon en France avec la fin de la guerre. Cet espoir est nourri par le retour des intellectuels français, qui, exilés à New York, rentrent pour la plupart en 1945. L’argument est répété à l’envi ; les amis et les proches disent que l’on a besoin de Simon dans la France libérée : « Il y a enfin une dernière question, évoquée par notre ami Speaight avec lequel j’ai dîné ici. À son avis vous auriez tort de prendre la nationalité américaine, cela en raison d’une circonstance toute particulière : le rôle que vous avez joué dans la résistance gaulliste et le prestige que cela vous a donné dans l’opinion française » (Michel, 2012, 267-68). Ce dont doute fortement Simon17. Maritain a une conversation avec Michelet à Rome, dont il rend compte dans une lettre à Simon le 10 août 1946 : L’objet particulier de cette lettre, que je griffonne en hâte, concerne une conversation que j’ai eue hier à votre sujet avec Michelet et Coblence. Michelet voudrait que vous veniez en mission faire des conférences en France pendant l’été. Je me réjouirais de tout mon cœur de ce projet si je ne me rappelais ce que vous m’avez dit un jour — que vous craignez d’avoir le cœur brisé en retrouvant vos amis et en devant les quitter de nouveau. […] Coblence a une autre idée, à laquelle il tient mordicus, c’est de vous faire revenir définitivement en France. Il m’a dit qu’il vous a écrit à ce sujet, il a été alerté par l’abbé Rhodain qui lui a dépeint votre vie en Amérique sous le jour le plus noir ; pour lui la tournée de conférences souhaitée par Michelet ne serait que la première étape de ce retour définitif. Je vous écris cela parce que je crains atrocement les étourdis de bonne volonté et les amis irresponsables qui gâtent allègrement la vie de leur prochain et les dispositions de la Providence. À mes yeux Coblence risque tout simplement de ruiner votre existence et votre vocation. Une réadaptation à la vie universitaire française vous coûterait beaucoup d’énergie, vous seriez dans des conditions matérielles beaucoup plus mauvaises et beaucoup plus précaires qu’à Notre Dame pour élever votre famille ; votre travail créateur risquerait d’être stérilisé, et la mission providentielle que vous avez reçue en Amérique (pour l’Amérique et pour la France tout ensemble) serait détruite et gâchée (Michel, 2012, 267)

16 Les conseils de Maritain correspondaient aux désirs de Simon. Non seulement ce dernier refuse de rentrer en France, même pour des conférences ou des vacances — entre 1938 et sa mort en 1961 il n’a jamais refranchi l’Atlantique —, mais il décide de demander la nationalité américaine, ce qui est pour lui une décision irrévocable : « Je me suis établi aux États-Unis, comme M. Carnegie et M. Einstein, c’est tout, et c’est fini » (Michel, 2012, 269). Cela s’accompagne d’une vraie crise conjugale. Ainsi, d’une lettre à Maritain, de mai 1946 :

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Pensez à moi, je suis dans l’épreuve. Mes first papers étant sur le point d’expirer, j’ai fait il y a quelques jours ma demande de naturalization ; ma femme a refusé de faire la sienne, entendant conserver sa nationalité plutôt que d’accompagner son mari et ses enfants. On en a profité pour sombrer dans le drame.

17 Ou d’une autre lettre de fin novembre 1946, après l’obtention de la nationalité : Rien de bien nouveau à vous raconter. Je suis citoyen américain depuis mercredi dernier, drame de famille de première envergure. Une heure avant le serment, ma femme, qui ne faisait plus entendre que de gros soupirs depuis quelques jours, m’adjurait encore de ne pas faire ça !

18 Au contraire de son mari et de ses enfants, Paule Simon ne prit jamais la nationalité américaine. Les tensions familiales sont parfois ravivées par des projets de voyage en France : Je suis désolé que vous et Paule soyez dans le chagrin à cause du voyage projeté de Paule et d’Antoine en France. Mais, Yves, on “n’endoctrine” pas un enfant en deux mois de vacances ! La solution idéale serait que Paule demande sa naturalisation et que de votre côté vous fassiez un effort avec elle pour que vos enfants, tout en étant citoyens américains, connaissent, comprennent et aiment la France. L’Amérique est justement le seul pays où on peut être Américain 100% et garder sa nationalité, quant au cœur. Si Paule sentait ces dispositions en vous à l’égard des enfants, cela l’aiderait peut-être à accepter pour elle l’idée de naturalisation (Michel, 2012, 394).

L’américanisation politique : la question gaulliste

19 Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la figure du Général de Gaulle est reçue de manière très variable aux États-Unis. L’administration Roosevelt, plus que sceptique sur la nature politique de la France Libre, ne cache pas le mépris que lui inspire le général baroudeur. L’opinion publique américaine est en revanche plutôt favorable au Général de Gaulle dans les années 1940-1944. Les intellectuels français en exil à New York sont, quant à eux, pour le moins divisés : Paul Vignaux qualifie de Gaulle de « Prince-Président », quand le poète Saint-John Perse, l’ancien secrétaire général du Quai d’Orsay, ne se prive pas de dénoncer l’absence de légitimité démocratique du chef de la France Libre. Dans ce débat, la position évolutive d’Yves Simon est symptomatique : très proche du mouvement gaulliste à l’été 1940, il s’éloigne insensiblement tout au long de la guerre, finissant par plaider dans les lettres échangées avec Maritain en faveur de quelques arguments du Président Roosevelt. Il ne faut pas forcer le trait : on ne peut pas parler de retournement politique sous ce point de vue, mais on peut néanmoins conclure à une bonne acceptation de l’argumentation rooseveltienne18.

20 Dès le 25 juin 1940, soit une semaine après le fameux Appel du 18 Juin, Simon envoie ainsi un télégramme à Maritain : « Do you think we can do anything concerning the de Gaulle Committee ? » (Michel, 2012, 415). Dans la lettre de Simon du 26 juin 1940, on apprend que Waldemar Gurian, le fondateur de la Review of Politics, est immédiatement favorable au mouvement gaulliste : « Dimanche soir, Gurian me conseillait très vivement de télégraphier à l’ambassadeur pour l’exhorter à se rallier à de Gaulle. » Yves Simon pose cependant aussitôt la bonne question : « On n’en sait pas assez sur ce comité pour prendre aucune décision. […] Qui est ce de Gaulle, qui sont les hommes de son entourage ? Je suis très porté à penser que si ces hommes sont dignes de confiance, nous devons les soutenir à fond. » Le 1er juillet 1940, Simon envoie une lettre au Général. C’est une lettre d’allégeance et de proposition de service :

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Mon Général, […] Le Comité que nous vous sommes reconnaissants d’avoir fondé représente pour nous la dernière espérance. J’ai le plus ardent désir de vous apporter ma collaboration, puisqu’aussi bien il y a beaucoup de travail à faire ici pour une cause qui n’est pas moins celle des États-Unis que celle de la France, de la Grande-Bretagne et de tous les peuples (Michel, 2012, 418).

21 Cette lettre est du plus grand intérêt pour comprendre la position politique de Simon : ce dernier explique qu’il n’a jamais été « mêlé à la politique des partis » ; refusant l’héritage d’un certain nationalisme catholique français qu’on lui a transmis enfant dans les milieux de la bonne bourgeoisie provinciale19, il appelle à la « collaboration sans relâche » des patriotes français et américains ; lui-même se définit comme un « patriote » français et veut alerter le Général des besoins de l’opinion publique américaine. Simon, passeur culturel, a alors l’intention de fonder un « groupe de Français luttant pour la liberté » derrière le Général de Gaulle : Maritain, qui est d’accord avec Simon sur le fait que « la ligne de l’espoir passe par de Gaulle » (Michel, 2008, 407), dissuade cependant son ami de fonder un tel groupement politique, qui serait condamné à l’impuissance puisque les États-Unis ont reconnu diplomatiquement le régime de Pétain (Michel, 2008, 404-08).

22 Au fur et à mesure que la guerre se prolonge, Maritain et Simon évoluent au gré des informations dont ils disposent. Maritain rencontre ainsi, au mois de mai 1941, l’Amiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, un religieux carme qui a repris du service militaire et qui est très proche du Général de Gaulle. Il écrit alors à Simon que les gaullistes « veulent rester uniquement des soldats, l’aspect civil de la question est une nécessité sans doute mais qui ne les intéresse pas par elle-même et à laquelle ils s’attachent le moins possible. C’est un cas très pur de chevalerie militaire » (Michel, 2012, 52). La suite des événements infirme cette appréciation trop dépendante de la qualité morale d’un homme comme Thierry d’Argenlieu. En 1942, l’enthousiasme de Simon et Maritain pour le mouvement gaulliste — du moins tel qu’il existe aux Etats-Unis — commence à prendre l’eau : Votre livre, celui de Simon, montre si bien ce que le mouvement de Gaulle aurait pu et dû être. Et hélas, toutes les nouvelles montrent une pagaille si lamentable, et semblent confirmer, et au-delà, les craintes de Vignaux. Au lieu d’une croyance héroïque, c’est une lutte d’appétits et d’ambitions. Peut-être une espèce de boulangisme. Faut-il croire que même là l’espoir de la France est trahi ?20

23 Maritain résume également pour Simon les lettres qu’il a envoyées au Général de Gaulle : J’insistais surtout sur le fait qu’à mon avis le mouvement doit avoir une inspiration politique (une mystique politique) mais ne pas tomber dans la politique politique et la recherche du pouvoir. Donc pas de préparation à l’étranger d’un futur gouvernement provisoire. Et pas de revendication de reconnaissance politique par les États-Unis (Michel, 2012, 109).

24 Dans la lettre du 13 avril 1943, Maritain dénonce encore « le nationalisme chauvin », ainsi que « l’anti-britannisme et l’anti-américanisme absurdes » des mouvements gaullistes. Pour un lecteur américain, de tels propos sembleront sans doute des lieux communs. Pour Maritain, en correspondance avec de Gaulle, de telles formules n’allaient pas de soi, puisque, encore une fois, en 1940, Maritain et Simon espéraient, au sens fort du terme, au sens de Charles Péguy, que le salut de la France passerait par la « ligne de Gaulle ». Yves Simon lui aussi finit par prendre ses distances intellectuelles avec le mouvement de Gaulle et par adopter le point de vue rooseveltien, non pas sur la reconnaissance diplomatique de Vichy, que les deux amis tiennent pour « le pire » de la

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diplomatie américaine (Michel, 2012, 49-50), mais sur la place de la France dans l’Europe d’après-guerre et dans ce que l’on n’appelle pas encore la Guerre Froide. En témoigne ainsi cette lettre de Simon écrite en octobre 1944 : Les affaires franco-américaines vont mal. Mais cette fois, je me sens sûr d’avoir compris les raisons profondes du Président Roosevelt. En deux mots : comme personne ne croit à une Société des Nations de type égalitaire, l’organisation du monde sera l’affaire des grands pouvoirs. Qui dit organisation dit unité ; l’idéal serait donc qu’il n’y eût qu’un grand pouvoir, les USA. Il y en a trois ; on ne peut pas les réduire à l’unité : rien à faire pour absorber la Russie. Mais à défaut d’unité, on peut les réduire à deux : bloc anglo-saxon, Russie, sphères d’influence. L’impossibilité d’incorporer la Russie ne fait que rendre plus indispensable l’unité anglo-saxonne, pierre angulaire de l’édifice de sécurité de F. D. Roosevelt. […] Que la France redevienne puissante, et la Grande-Bretagne est tentée, en permanence, de se détacher des USA. Tout le plan tombe par terre. Roosevelt veut empêcher cela. Il a raison. D’où l’importance des Giraud, Peyrouton, Noguès, etc., gens qui pour une raison ou une autre auraient fait ce qu’on leur aurait dit de faire. D’où la défiance à l’égard de De Gaulle. D’où la mauvaise humeur de ce dernier. C’est clair comme l’A B C. (Michel, 2012, 166).

25 À lire cette lettre, on sent combien Yves Simon est désormais entré dans les vues de la diplomatie américaine.

Américanisation philosophique

26 L’américanisation philosophique de Simon est sans doute l’aboutissement le plus intéressant de son processus d’américanisation. Le point de départ intellectuel de Simon est une position originale, à la fois démocrate sur le plan politique et antilibérale sur le plan moral et économique21. Cette position, qui puise aux sources de la démocratie chrétienne et du socialisme proudhonien, est ensuite refondue au feu du thomisme. Ainsi d’une lettre à Maritain : « En vous écrivant ces lignes, je regarde au nord : un portrait de saint Thomas. Au nord-est : un portrait de Proudhon. À l’est : votre portrait. Oui, j’ai eu de la chance » (Michel, 2012, 311). Simon vient de l’aile démocrate et socialisante du catholicisme français, celle qui n’a pas le vent en poupe après la Première Guerre mondiale, et s’appuie en même temps sur le philosophe de l’aile monarchiste et nationaliste du catholicisme français, puisque l’Action française de Charles Maurras revendiquait comme sien, non sans de lourdes équivoques, l’héritage de la philosophie scolastique. La position est à la fois « rare »22, paradoxale, inconfortable et parfaitement assumée : Simon, que ses camarades moquent dans les années 192023, se définit comme le seul thomiste « sans-culotte »24, ce qui ne l’empêche pas dès 1929 de dénoncer en privé la faiblesse philosophique des positions du Sillon25.

27 À cette matrice, le philosophe intègre peu à peu des éléments de la culture philosophique américaine qui vont permettre la création d’une nouvelle synthèse que Simon désigne parfois sous l’appellation, assez vague il faut bien le dire, de « thomisme américain » (Michel, 2012, 273, 274, 285). Au moins trois domaines de sa pensée pourraient permettre d’étudier cette américanisation : la philosophie du bonheur, que Simon resitue sous le patronage de la formule de Jefferson the pursuit of happiness ; la philosophie des sciences et des mathématiques, où l’on note un vrai effort de lecture et d’assimilation des auteurs anglo-saxons ; et enfin la philosophie politique et notamment la pensée de la démocratie, qui aboutit à la publication en 1951, aux presses de l’Université de Chicago, de Philosophy of Democratic Governement, appelé à devenir un

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vrai manuel de philosophie politique tout au long des années 1950. L’américanisation de la philosophie politique de Simon ne doit pas être entendue au sens d’une mutation philosophique ; ce serait plutôt une forme d’approfondissement de ses positions antérieures, grâce à l’expérience démocratique américaine et grâce à la découverte de nouveaux auteurs. Cette américanisation n’est pas non plus une acceptation de tous les principes américains : Simon consacre maints essais à dénoncer les méfaits du libéralisme26.

28 Dès son arrivée aux États-Unis, Simon est en quelque sorte séduit par le climat politique américain. D’une lettre à Maritain d’avril 1939 : « Je suis très frappé, en même temps, de l’effort qui est fait ici pour raviver et tendre ce que j’appellerai parallèlement le sentiment des mœurs américaines, résumé en deux mots bien propres à faire rigoler nos cyniques : religion, democracy. Je sens croître en moi l’attachement à l’Amérique : c’est mon seul refuge temporel contre le désespoir. » Le moment de la guerre mondiale est le temps d’une nouvelle élaboration démocratique pour Simon et Maritain, qui publie en 1943 son fameux opuscule Christianisme et démocratie. Le mouvement s’accompagne d’une très vive conscience de l’insuffisance de la pensée politique catholique en ce domaine. Ainsi d’une lettre de Simon de décembre 1941 : Même en France, je serais hostile à tout groupement catholique de caractère politique, a fortiori aux US. 2 e : le journal People and Freedom [de Luigi Sturzo] me donne la même impression de lavasse idéologique et d’ignorance que la petite littérature buchézienne de 1848 ou la Jeune-République [de Marc Sangnier]. Que la démocratie catholique soit condamnée à ne produire que des navets, voilà qui me paraît établi par l’histoire. Mieux vaut travailler dans le cadre de la democracy tout court. Là au moins nous avons des faits dynamiques et normatifs : la Révolution Française, la Révolution Américaine, l’indépendance italienne, etc. ; ces faits sont généralement d’un catholicisme douteux : tel est le problème qu’il nous est demandé de surmonter.

29 Ou d’une lettre de juillet 1941 : Comme vous me le disiez, il faut être pratique, car nous sommes en guerre : or ce qu’il y a de pratique aujourd’hui, c’est l’esprit des Révolutions anglaise, américaine et française. On ne sauvera pas un Juif du camp de concentration en citant l’auteur antisémite de la lettre à la Duchesse de Brabant27. S’il faut être pratique, ce qui est important, c’est « Vivre libre, ou mourir », c’est « l’option sinistre », comme disait Victor Hugo, « ou la mort ! », ajoutée à la « sainte devise » (cf. le même) Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Waldemar Gurian aime à dire que si saint Thomas vivait aujourd’hui il serait pour Franco, pour Tizo, pour Pétain : c’est l’évidence. Saint Thomas, c’est Garrigou. Faire pratique en 1941 avec saint Thomas, en politique, c’est une plaisanterie.

30 De cela, l’auteur prie son interlocuteur de ne pas conclure qu’il cesse d’être thomiste ; il souligne au contraire les efforts à réaliser pour parvenir à extraire de Thomas d’Aquin les principes de ce qu’il appelle une vraie démocratie, qui surmonterait l’écueil, selon lui, du libéralisme et qui tiendrait compte de « l’autorité » nécessaire dans l’exercice du pouvoir, comme la décadence de la IIIe République en montrait la cruelle nécessité. Cette critique des insuffisances de la pensée politique de Thomas d’Aquin s’appuie sur un recours de plus en plus fréquent à l’expérience politique américaine. On trouve de nombreux exemples dans les ouvrages et articles publiés par Simon entre 1940 et 1945, qui sont comme autant d’essais préparatoires à la grande synthèse de 1951. Son ouvrage Nature and Functions of Authority (1940a) se concluait ainsi non seulement par une réhabilitation de l’autorité, complémentaire, et non contraire, de la liberté — « the progress of liberty does not imply the decay of authority » —, mais aussi par une critique du

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rêve de Rousseau, matérialisé selon Simon dans les États totalitaires, ainsi que par une longue citation de Jefferson, qui offrait l’image d’un « bonheur social », défini à la fois par une autorité constituée, située à bonne distance et « décentralisée »28, existant sans intervenir dans le détail de la vie locale et conservant à la fois l’autonomie et un sens de la hiérarchie29. En 1941, Simon donne à Columbia une conférence intitulée « Thomism and Democracy », dont le titre est en lui-même un emblème. Le papier de Simon est alors assez fin : il consiste à rappeler, encore, que sans autorité il n’est pas de démocratie possible, et à montrer que la philosophie politique de Thomas d’Aquin n’est pas tant à chercher dans ses ouvrages politiques, trop peu développés30, mais plutôt dans ses œuvres métaphysiques, d’où l’on peut extraire des principes généraux qui viendront fonder un corpus conceptuel démocratique, à commencer par la notion de liberté, d’égalité31, de bien commun, de peuple, d’autonomie, d’autorité etc. En même temps, on trouve de claires allusions aux principes de la pensée politique américaine. Ainsi cette définition de l’essence de la démocratie, « as a governement for the people », « comme un gouvernement pour le peuple, pour la totalité du peuple, pour le bien commun du peuple » (Simon, 1942b, 260), derrière laquelle il est aisé de lire la réécriture de la fameuse formule de Lincoln. Dans cet article, on trouve encore une citation de Jefferson — « le bon gouvernement est celui qui gouverne le moins », ce qui, explique Simon, doit être entendu, non en un sens libéral, mais au sens où le bon gouvernement est celui qui laisse la plus grande liberté aux corps intermédiaires, « en parfaite consonance avec la conception thomiste de l’autonomie » (Simon, 1942b, 264).

Conclusions

31 Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, qui a rencontré Simon aux États-Unis au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le décrivait comme « une synthèse vivante entre deux formes de la civilisation occidentale »32. En suivant le témoignage de Paul Vignaux, il semble que l’on puisse pousser plus loin l’analyse de cette « synthèse vivante ». Paul Vignaux, qui connaît Simon depuis leurs études au début des années 1920 et le retrouve en 1941 à Notre Dame, résumait ainsi son parcours : J’ai retrouvé et à quelque degré compris le sentiment, éprouvé en 1941-1942, de la remarquable unité personnelle d’un professeur français devenant Américain, métaphysicien et moraliste, à la fois maître en thomisme et en civisme : celui-ci évidemment nourri d’un “enthousiasme démocratique” inspiré de l’idéologie des États-Unis et de leur expérience, du New Deal à l’intervention ; un civisme cependant dont l’aspect moral ne procédait pas simplement d’un sentiment, équilibré par le thomisme, de la misère de l’homme, mais aussi de la recherche d’une éthique dans la tradition républicaine et socialiste française (Vignaux, 1972, 238).

32 Yves Simon, avec d’autres, et avec Maritain et Vignaux au premier chef33, est, pour le petit monde catholique, une navette culturelle entre les deux continents, permettant à la fois l’acclimatation du thomisme et de la pensée médiévale aux États-Unis, ainsi qu’un affinement de la pensée de la démocratie dans la tradition catholique par l’intégration des éléments de la culture politique américaine.

33 On a là enfin l’exemple, relativement rare, d’un intellectuel français qui parvient à s’intégrer pleinement dans le cadre américain. Pourquoi cette intégration et cette inculturation que Simon désirait au plus haut point ? La raison profonde tient à la fois à l’idéologie et à la psychologie du « bonhomme Simon ». L’intellectuel catholique se

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perçoit souvent comme un missionnaire de l’intelligence. Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon se définissent souvent sous ces traits. S’il y a un lieu commun dans la littérature missionnaire, c’est bien celui du missionnaire qui meurt dans sa mission — si le grain ne meurt… C’est sans doute ce modèle qu’en un sens Simon a voulu réaliser et reproduire.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

CALVEZ, Jean-Yves, et Henri TINCQ, L’Église pour la démocratie, Paris, Le Centurion, 1992.

DURAND, Jean-Dominique, L’Europe de la démocratie chrétienne, Paris, Complexe, 1995.

FOURCADE, Michel, « Yves Simon entre saint Thomas et Proudhon », Cahiers Jacques Maritain 47, 2003, 4-22.

HELLMAN, John, « The Anti-Democratic Impulse in Catholicism : Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon and Charles de Gaulle during World War II », Journal of Church and State 33, 1991, 453-72.

JEANPIERRE, Laurent, « Paul Vignaux ; inspirateur de la “Deuxième gauche” : récits d’un exil français aux États-Unis pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale », Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, Les États-Unis et les réfugiés politiques européens : des années 1930 aux années 1950, 2000, 48-56.

LACOMBE, Olivier, « Yves Simon », Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 42, janvier 1972.

LANGLOIS, Claude, « La naissance de l’intellectuel catholique », dans Pierre Colin, dir., Intellectuels chrétiens et Esprit des années 20, Cerf, 1997.

MARITAIN, Jacques, Réflexions sur l’Amérique, Paris, Fayard, 1958.

McCARTIN, James, « The Waning of the “Catholic Other” and Catholicism in American Life after 1965 », Revue Française d’Études Américaines, février 2003, 7-29.

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SIMON, Yves, « À propos du VIe centenaire de la canonisation de saint Thomas d’Aquin », La Démocratie, 25 décembre 1923, 273-74.

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---, La Campagne d’Éthiopie et la pensée politique française, Paris, DDB, 1936.

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---, La Grande Crise de la République française. Observations sur la vie politique des Français de 1918 à 1938, Montréal, Éditions de l’Arbre, 1941.

---, La Marche à la délivrance, New York, Éditions de la Maison française, « Collection Civilisation », 1942a.

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---, « Beyond the Crisis of Liberalism », dans Mélanges Brennan, New York, Sheed and Ward, 1942c, 263-86.

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---, Philosophy for Democratic Governement, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951.

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VIGNAUX, Paul, « Yves Simon. Par delà l’expérience du désespoir », Revue philosophique de Louvain, mai 1972.

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NOTES

1. L’allégeance de Simon envers la philosophie de Thomas d’Aquin ne laisse guère de doute. La reconnaissance romaine ne tarde pas : en 1946, Simon est nommé membre de l’Académie romaine de saint Thomas. La reconnaissance en dehors des cercles catholiques, à l’université de Chicago notamment, est notoire. La capacité de remise en cause de l’institution est aussi aisée à illustrer — à propos des « responsabilités catholiques » au commencement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il faut ainsi lire la lettre de Simon à Maritain, 18 mai 1939 : « Avez-vous remarqué que jusqu’ici Hitler a toujours trouvé en face de lui un bon catholique pour lui livrer le pays convoité ? L’Allemagne a été livrée par von Papen ; l’Autriche par von Papen et Seyss-Inquart, la Tchécoslovaquie, c’est un luxe, a été livrée par un prêtre et un prélat ; il n’y a que Henlein, apostat, qui fasse exception à la règle » (Michel, 2008, 371-72). On pourrait prolonger cela par l’analyse du traitement de la ségrégation raciale, que Simon découvre aux États-Unis et contre laquelle il se bat notamment dans Par delà l’expérience du désespoir (Montréal, 1945, voir notamment le chapitre 2). Sur ce point, voir lettre de Simon à Maritain, 9 janvier 1945 : « Fidèle à la promesse contenue dans la conclusion de mon étude sur le racisme, j’ai sommé mon évêque de faire savoir si une nouvelle école — très nécessaire — qu’il se propose de construire à South Bend serait ouverte aux enfants noirs (ce qui n’est pas le cas de notre école paroissiale). Que croyez- vous qu’il a répondu ? Qu’il était certain qu’il n’y aurait aucune discrimination dans cette nouvelle école. Voilà une lettre que je garderai avec soin... et ressortirai quand le moment sera venu » (Michel, 2012, 176).

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2. Sur le plan bibliographique, Antony Simon a publié un inventaire complet des œuvres et articles publiés par son père : voir Acquaintance with the Absolute. The Philosophy of Yves R. Simon. Essays and Bibliography, New York, Fordham University Press, 1998. Sur le plan archivistique, toutes les archives de Simon sont situées sur le campus de l’université de Notre Dame, Indiana, au sein des Archives of the Maritain Center [AMC] : on y trouve notamment l’immense correspondance avec Jacques Maritain ; on trouve également son « journal » inédit, rédigé entre 1945 et 1949, ainsi que maints éléments de correspondance personnelle, les brouillons de ses conférences et toutes les notes et dossiers de cours. 3. L’adjectif est employé dans une lettre de René Grousset à Y. Simon, 24 mai 1928, AMC : « Vous avez tout ce qu’il faut pour devenir le philosophe que nous attendons, non plus le dilettante de la philosophie qui muse un peu sur sa thèse, sur sa légendaire thèse, mais le disciple et le continuateur de vos maîtres. Vous avez toute l’étoffe nécessaire. Je suis, comprenez-le bien, profondément de cœur avec vous dans la peine qui vous atteint. Mais vous valez mieux qu’une carrière. Et il vaut mieux être quelqu’un que quelque chose. » 4. Voir lettre de Simon à Maritain, 28 août 1932 : « Quel bonheur donc que j’aie été 38e sur 38 en thème latin au lycée Louis le Grand, 35e en version latine, 37e en version grecque ! Quand je pense que j’aurais pu être premier ! Je serais entré à l’École Normale, je serais devenu agrégé des lettres, et aujourd’hui j’achèverais sans doute une thèse sur les influences exotiques dans la deuxième génération symboliste ! » (Michel, 2008, 110.) 5. Il obtient sa licence de philosophie en mai 1923. Nous remercions Tony Simon de nous avoir donné copie des diplômes de son père. 6. Simon soutient un mémoire de Diplôme d’Études Supérieures de philosophie sur les idées sociales de l’économiste libéral Charles Dunoyer en 1923, sous la direction de Célestin Bouglé, qui est alors le directeur de l’École normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm. 7. Voir par exemple Yves Simon, « À propos du VIe centenaire de la canonisation de saint Thomas d’Aquin », La Démocratie, journal fondé et dirigé par Marc Sangnier, 25 décembre 1923, 273-74 ; voir aussi les balbutiements de Simon en philosophie politique : « Libéralisme et démocratie », La Démocratie, 25 février 1924, 429-33. 8. Il s’agit notamment du manifeste Pour le Bien Commun (1934) et celui sur la médiation espagnole en 1937-1938. Simon intervient aussi par la publication de l’unique livre contemporain qui dénonçait les aventures italiennes en Éthiopie : La Campagne d’Éthiopie et la pensée politique française, Paris, DDB, 1936 ; l’ouvrage a été traduit en anglais, University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. 9. Il n’est pas de notre propos de détailler ici le cheminement complexe de l’acceptation des principes démocratiques par le magistère catholique. On se contentera de citer Pie XI, à propos de la nouvelle république espagnole : « Universellement connu est le fait que l’Église catholique n’est jamais liée à une forme de gouvernement plus qu’à une autre, pourvu que les droits de Dieu des consciences chrétiennes sont saufs. Elle ne trouve aucune difficulté à s’adapter aux diverses institutions civiles, qu’elles soient monarchiques ou républicaines, aristocratiques ou démocratiques » (Encyclique Dilectissima Nobis, 1933). Le radio-message de Pie XII, à Noël 1944, sur « la vraie et saine démocratie », est bien connu. La Seconde Guerre mondiale, l’apport américain en un sens large et l’influence de Maritain sont souvent évoqués pour rendre compte de cette inflexion majeure, qui permet, aux lendemains de la guerre, le développement massif des partis chrétiens démocrates. Voir par exemple Jean-Dominique Durand, L’Europe de la démocratie chrétienne, Complexe, 1995. Voir aussi Jean-Yves Calvez, Henri Tincq, L’Église pour la Démocratie, Paris, Le Centurion, 1992, 34-35 : « Par Maritain, l’Amérique influe une première fois de façon décisive sur la doctrine de l’Église en matière politique. » Avec Maritain, et parfois devant lui, Yves Simon entre dans cette économie de l’échange entre le Nouveau Monde, la philosophie de la démocratie et le magistère catholique.

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10. Citation extraite de l’introduction de la conférence de Simon à l’Alliance française de Toronto en octobre 1945 sur « Socialisme et démocratie en France », AMC. À mettre en lien avec une formule analogue de Maritain : « Habiter dans ce pays et observer avec un intérêt soutenu la vie quotidienne de son peuple aussi bien que le fonctionnement de ses institutions constitue une grande, profondément éclairante et inoubliable leçon de philosophie politique », Réflexions sur l’Amérique, 1958, Œuvres Complètes, vol. X., 891. 11. Goetz Briefs, Le prolétariat industriel, Paris, DDB, 1936. 12. Ce journal (1945-1949) est composé de 57 pages manuscrites, AMC. 13. Catherine Simon est née en 1931 à Lille ; Dominique en 1932, à Besançon ; Pascal en 1934, à Paris ; Antoine [Antony ou Tony] en 1936, à Cherbourg ; Vincent en 1939 et Michael en 1941 à South Bend. 14. Voir Correspondance Maritain-Simon. Les années américaines, 2012, Tours, CLD : lettre de Simon à Maritain, 24 mars 1949 ; réponse de Maritain du 26 mars 1949 ; lettre de Maritain du 7 juillet 1956. La plaisanterie concerne l’usage différentiel du « très » en français et du « very » anglais. L’un des enfants demande de « très embrasser » Véra, la sœur de Raïssa. 15. Lettre de Simon à Maritain, op. cit., 2012, p. 270, en date du 29 août 1946 : « Entre nous : mon salaire, cette année (inclus semestre d’été) sera de $ 6 200, plus $ 1 500 à l’université de Chicago. Je crois que plus d’un professeur au Collège de France gagnerait au change. La vérité est tout simplement que j’ai accepté l’honneur d’être père de six enfants, honneur dont beaucoup de professeurs au Collège de France se passent fort bien, et que j’entends, modeste professeur, faire pour eux ce que mon père qui était industriel, a fait pour nous. D’où pénurie de frick. C.Q.F.D. » 16. Voir par exemple les contributions de John Dewey, George Santayana, et Ralph Barton Perry, dans l’ouvrage de J. S. Zybura, Present Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism, New York, Herder Book, 1926. 17. Lettre de Simon à Maritain, 29 août 1946, op. cit., 2012, p. 268-270 : « Il n’est pas vrai que j’ai acquis, par mes écrits, de l’autorité dans la Résistance ; mes écrits n’ont pas été lus en France ; jamais je n’ai vu citer mon nom dans un journal de l’Underground et quand le Général de Gaulle a fait, à Alger, un discours sur la pensée française en France libre, il a nommé Jules Romains, mais pas moi ; d’ailleurs : les gens de la résistance n’ont aucune raison d’attribuer, à aucun degré, le rôle de leader à un type qui pendant les années d’épreuves, de fusillades et de tortures, à tort ou à raison, a continué son métier de professeur de philosophie dans un endroit fort tranquille. » Simon pourrait bien ici sous-estimer son propre rôle. Cf. l’article du South Bend Tribune, collé dans son journal personnel, en date du 13 janvier 1945 et intitulé « Notre Dame Professor praised for aid to Frenchmen ». Cet article mentionne « a leaflet », jeté par avion sur la France avant la Libération, où Simon était remercié « pour avoir gardé allumée la lumière de la cause française aux États-Unis. » 18. Pour l’arrière-plan de la question, lire John Hellman, « The Anti-Democratic Impulse in Catholicism : Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon and Charles de Gaulle during World War II », Journal of Church and State, 1991, 33, 453-72. 19. Voir par exemple la lettre de Simon à Maritain, 20 décembre 1940 : « On nous a fait chanter dans notre enfance : “Catholique et Français, toujours” ! » (Michel, 2008, 422). On retrouve la même allusion dans la lettre de Simon du 11 février 1941 (Michel, 2012, 36.) 20. Lettre de Maritain à Simon, 16 juin 1942, op. cit, 2012, 102. Le boulangisme est le produit politique dérivé du Général Boulanger, suspecté d’avoir voulu renverser, par sa gloire militaire et son populisme, la Troisième République dans les années 1880. Par un jeu d’analogie historique, de Gaulle est souvent comparé au Général Boulanger jusqu’à ce qu’il lève au printemps 1942 l’ambiguïté quant à la nature démocratique de son mouvement. 21. Yves Simon, « Libéralisme et démocratie », La Démocratie, 25 février 1924, 429-33. Ces quelques pages précisent la position initiale de Simon, qui y établit une forte distinction entre la « démocratie » et la « démocratie libérale » : « Mais me dira-t-on la démocratie n’est-elle pas

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nécessairement libérale ? Pas nécessairement, répondrais-je. Alors, poursuivra notre adversaire, si vous n’êtes pas des libéraux, pourquoi donc nous parlez-vous sans cesse de liberté ? Parce que la liberté, telle que nous la concevons, n’est pas la liberté dont parlent les libéraux. » Simon cite un mot de Lacordaire, « ce grand ami de la liberté », qui montre bien les limites du libéralisme dans le domaine social : « Entre le fort et le faible, c’est la liberté qui tue et c’est la loi qui délivre. » Yves Simon conclut par une « forte parole de Proudhon, que nous faisons intégralement nôtre : “La plénitude de la liberté coïncide avec la plénitude du droit et du savoir, et la plus profonde servitude avec l’extrême ignorance et corruption.” » Simon n’a de cesse de dénoncer le libéralisme économique et moral, et de défendre une juste conception de la notion de l’autorité à l’intérieur du cadre démocratique, justement pour que la démocratie ne cède pas devant les « régimes autoritaires ». Voir sur ce point, Simon, « Liberty and Authority », Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Washington DC, 1940, 86-114 : l’étude se concluait par un appel à promouvoir « une vraie philosophie de l’autorité ». Voir aussi Simon, Par delà l’expérience du désespoir, Montréal, 1945, 45 : « Le parti pris de traiter toute autorité en mal nécessaire qu’il s’agit de réduire à un minimum […] est une disposition simplement néfaste, bien faite pour préparer les voies au despotisme en rendant la pratique de l’arbitraire familière aux esprits. » 22. Le mot est employé par Paul Vignaux, « Yves Simon. Par delà l’expérience du désespoir », Revue philosophique de Louvain, mai 1972, 238 : « Dans les années précédant les mesures ecclésiastiques contre l’Action française, j’avais en effet connu un Yves Simon, thomiste et démocrate — alliance fort rare —, et de plus intéressé par l’enseignement de Célestin Bouglé, l’un de mes maîtres. » 23. Lettre de Simon à Maritain, op. cit., 2008, 16 août 1939, 390-91 : « Vers 1922-23, quand j’ai commencé de m’attacher au thomisme, j’étais membre de la J. R. [“Jeune-République”, de Sangnier], […]. Je vois encore le distingué Ch. H. Puech m’accueillant, dans le hall de l’École normale, accompagné de mon ami Lassus : “Voilà la Néo-Jeune-République, avec S. Thomas comme fondement métaphysique !” » 24. Voir la lettre de Simon à Maritain, 3 septembre 1941, op. cit., 2012, 70. Olivier Lacombe insiste aussi sur les sympathies révolutionnaires de Simon : « Il manifestait certes la plus grande sévérité à l’égard des fondements philosophiques adoptés par les doctrinaires de la Révolution. Mais il avait pour l’évènement humain que constituait celle-ci une révérence admirative et généreuse » (Lacombe, 1972). 25. Lettre de Simon à Maritain, 1er octobre 1929, op. cit., 2008, 40-41 : « Depuis lors j’ai souvent regretté la collaboration accordée à cette extrême gauche démocratique dont je me suis bientôt séparé en concluant que la démocratie française était irrémédiablement infectée d’idéologie libérale et humanitaire. » 26. Qu’on relise ainsi son essai de 1945, « Economic Organization in a Democracy », Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Washington D.C., 1945, qui commençait par une dénonciation de l’optimisme du libéralisme économique : la « main invisible » d’Adam Smith — « a principle of order which, strangely enough, dwells inside chance » — est pour Simon apparentée à la « chance » du parieur, qui le rend sourd aux avertissements et aux calculs des probabilités. Voir aussi l’essai « Beyond the Crisis of Liberalism », Mélanges Brennan, New York, Sheed and Ward, 1942, 263-86. 27. L’auteur de cette lettre est Thomas d’Aquin, qui invitait, comme saint Louis et d’autres souverains du Moyen Âge, à distinguer par le vêtement les juifs présents dans son duché. 28. Tel est l’un des principes que Simon retient de Jefferson — voir Simon, 1945a, 93. 29. Simon, 1940a, 48: “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed, for the good and prosperity of all.”

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30. Voir sur ce point Yves Simon, art. cit., 1942b, 271: “I would emphasize the fact that political philosophy is by far the least developed part of the philosophy of saint Thomas”. Voir aussi la lettre de Mortimer Adler à Yves Simon, 8 septembre 1941, AMC: “I agreed with your paper entirely—and especially with the way in which you made the points clear. I liked particularly your discussion of the despotic and the political regimes in relation to the dominion of freedom and the dominion of servitude. And I am glad to see that you don’t use the term democracy in a way that associates it along with monarchy and aristocracy and oligarchy etc. Also I was pleased with your point about the lack of a well-developed political philosophy in saint Thomas. I wish most Thomists knew this.” 31. À titre d’exemple de la logique de Simon, on peut développer ce point — art. cit., 1942b, 270, tr. : « Si l’on considère l’essence de l’homme, le thomisme est la philosophie la plus égalitaire qui n’est jamais été conçue. » Pour saint Thomas, tous les hommes sont de la même espèce, et de la même essence, par conséquent : « L’idée de supériorité raciale […] apparaît à un thomiste comme une monstruosité absurde — une absurdité que saint Thomas n’a jamais réfutée explicitement puisqu’elle ne lui est jamais venue à l’esprit. » 32. Lettre de Jean-Baptiste Duroselle à Paule Simon, 27 septembre 1961, AMC. 33. Sur ces points, voir Laurent Jeanpierre, « Paul Vignaux ; inspirateur de la “Deuxième gauche” : récits d'un exil français aux États-Unis pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale », Matériaux pour l'histoire de notre temps, Les États-Unis et les réfugiés politiques européens : des années 1930 aux années 1950, 2000, n° 60, 48-56.

RÉSUMÉS

En 1938, Yves Simon, professeur de philosophie aux instituts catholiques de Lille et Paris, reçoit une invitation pour enseigner à l’Université de Notre Dame dans l’Indiana. Tel est le point de départ d’un processus d’américanisation, qui concerne non seulement la sociologie familiale et professionnelle, mais également l’histoire religieuse et l’histoire intellectuelle. Yves Simon s’intègre dans la société américaine au point de prendre la citoyenneté états-unienne en 1946 et de jouer le rôle de passeur intellectuel entre les deux mondes.

In 1938, Yves Simon, who taught philosophy at the Paris and Lille Catholic Institutes, received an invitation to teach at Notre Dame University in Indiana. From then on, a process of americanization developed involving his family and professional connections, whose consequences transformed both religious and intellectual history. Well integrated into the American society, Yves Simon became a US citizen in 1946 and actively participated in intellectual exchanges between the two cultures.

INDEX

Mots-clés : immigration française, histoire intellectuelle, histoire religieuse, catholicisme, américanisation Keywords : migration, intellectual history, religious history, Americanization

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AUTEUR

FLORIAN MICHEL Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

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(Neither) Expatriates (n)or Immigrants? The American Colony in Paris, 1880-1940

Nancy L. Green

AUTHOR'S NOTE

An earlier version of this article was published as: “Une immigration d’élite. Les Américains de la Rive droite (1880-1940),” in Paris et Ile-de-France, Mémoires, tome 61, 2010, 117-28.

1 Writers and artists, the American expatriates in Paris of the 1920s have captured the American and French imagination for decades, thanks to their writings, their acquaintances, and the exciting lives they lived on the Left Bank. But there is another group of Americans in Paris less well known yet vastly more numerous and arguably more important for the “American Century” in all that it represents about spreading the “American way” abroad. While the Left Bank Americans escaped from America often in order to criticize it—Malcolm Cowley called them exiles (Cowley, 1934)—the many more Americans of the Right Bank had left the United States largely in order to sell it and to promote its goods overseas. The Right Bank bankers and businessmen went abroad for years if not a lifetime. They were hardly refugees (tax refugees for some? exiles from Prohibition for others?), but the term immigrant is rarely applied to them either. These elite migrants take us to the heart of the problems of categorization. They were largely well-to-do; they were hardly forced to go to France; they went there by choice. Of the different reasons for leaving, there is one we too often forget: to make money. We can therefore ask an Albert Hirschman a question: to what extent did the businessmen have their own particular brand of “exit,” expressed through a distinctive “voice” (such as the bulletins of the American Chamber of Commerce) and reflecting “loyalty” rather than its opposite (Hirschman, 1970)? The Right Bank Americans in Paris do not quite fit the usual history of immigration, but in

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studying their case, they make us think more generally about the larger categories.1 Rather than provide a detailed case study here, this article seeks to raise questions about the contours of migration history in order to suggest both the importance of a new view of “Americans in Paris” and to widen the scope of the field to include elite migration.2

2 Can Americans abroad be “immigrants”? The question implies another: what do we mean by the word “immigrant”? There are two problems in calling American residents overseas “immigrants” because of two notions that are implicit in the term: social class and length of stay. The definitional implication is that “immigrants” are poor and that they settle forever in their new home. Yet, Americans are rich (or supposed to be), and they are particularly mobile. We can look at each of these factors in analyzing Americans in Paris during the first half of the twentieth century and questioning these categories as a basis for identifying “immigrants.” At their high point, there were some 40,000 Americans living in Paris in the mid-1920s.3 They included not only the better- known but ultimately small number of writers and artists, but also the much more abundant industrialists and entrepreneurs, along with society women, and even some down-and-out Americans.

Social Class and Length of Stay

3 Not all Americans were rich, even those who could afford the trans-Atlantic voyage. There have always been impoverished students and artists abroad, and, after the First World War, there was also a large number of former soldiers who had to turn to the veterans’ association, the American Legion Post, or the American Aid Society for help, most often in order to pay their way home. In spite of wanting to settle in, many saw their resources evaporate and, without money and unable to find work, they had to return to the United States. Others managed to stay on, finding modest jobs as car repairmen (fixing jeeps during the war was undoubtedly good experience) or doing other middling jobs. There was also a large number of journalists who just made ends meet, not to mention scores of language or music teachers.

4 But most Americans who were part of what they themselves called the “American colony” were businessmen, industrialists, or rentiers, living in the posh parts of Paris on the Right Bank. They inhabited sumptuous villas, and the business avant-garde among them came to set up branch companies and subsidiaries of American firms. They negotiated license agreements, bought French goods for American department stores or, more often, sold American goods overseas, all giving lie to the notion that the United States was isolationist in the 1920s. The Americans of the Right Bank were part of an elite migration, a business migration that has been little studied historically. Thus, while the term “immigrant” is practically a derogatory term in French, linking a notion of the dangerous lower classes with that of foreign origins, what happens when those with foreign origins are rich rather than poor? The case of the “American colony” can help us re-think the boundaries of the meaning of immigration itself.

5 Furthermore, do Americans stay long enough to qualify as immigrants-who-settle-in? The other factor implicit in the very concept of “immigration” makes a distinction between those who settle down and those who come and go, such as seasonal workers or tourists. In fact, the “Americans in Paris” who are most well-known often stayed only one or two years, and popular books on the theme often start with the well-known

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diplomats who, by definition, went home when their time of duty was over: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc. A century later, Henry James is often included in the list of Americans in Paris although he only stayed one year. Edith Wharton, on the other hand, stayed thirty years and is buried in France. For the interwar period—the key years of the Americans-in-France image—the best known Americans, from Hemingway to Calder to Fitzgerald, also stayed but a few years. Only Gertrude Stein continued, like Wharton, to live all her life in Paris and is buried in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery.

6 Members of the American colony themselves debated the meaning of residence and the question of how long it took to make someone part of the “stable” American population as opposed to its “floating” population. As early as 1877, the traveler John Russell Young had noted the difference between the two (Young, 1879, 1:136). A decade later, journalist Albert Sutliffe tried to delineate the American population by publishing The Americans in Paris, a sort of “Who’s Who” which included a list of names, addresses, and visiting days. It was aimed at “the lady of fashion as well as to the general reader,” and Sutliffe declared that five years were sufficient in order “to naturalize a good American as a citizen of the American Colony of Paris” (Sutliffe, 1887, 62). The fact of drawing up such lists of names in itself both reflected the growth of the colony and the possibility of defining it. And Sutliffe’s Americans in Paris participated in the construction of the community by the very act of publication.

7 Some forty years later, during the interwar period, the American Chamber of Commerce in France, an organization that lobbied on behalf of American businesses abroad, continued the who’s who tradition, publishing a series of registries that also helped consolidate the community beyond just the business community itself. The volumes, entitled Americans in France: A Directory, were comprised of long lists of businesses along with a voluminous Residential List that included thousands of names, from the Havilands to the American head of International Harvester to the more modest singing teachers, journalists, writers and artists (Americans in France, 1925-1940).4 We see Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) redefining himself over the years, from an initial entry under the letter “R,” where he is still listed as a painter even after his first (unsuccessful) art exhibit of 1921. By 1928-29, however, as his secondary activity grew in importance, he added “photographer” to his listing, and by 1929, he was sufficiently well known that an entry under “M” was necessary to direct the reader to the letter “R.” By 1936, the entry under “R” was abandoned altogether, and he had resolutely reversed both his names and categories; he was now “Man Ray, Photographer, painter.” Individuals sent in their information year after year, including where they had taken degrees, what clubs they belonged to, and, albeit much less frequently than in Sutliffe’s day, which days they received visitors. After the Stock Market Crash, we lose track of many who undoubtedly went home, but a good half of the lists stayed on for a good three years or more, and many stayed from the First World War to the Second.

8 The Americans of the Right Bank seem to have come together symbolically in the directories while advertising their wares and their whereabouts. But they also constructed their identity in another way, in opposition to two other groups of Americans in Paris. The Right Bank Americans often disdained both the Bohemian types on the Left Bank and the ubiquitous summer tourists. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Sure, I knew them, but they were not part of my world,” wrote Thérèse

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Bonney, famous American photographer of French art and architecture in the interwar period: “I lived in a world where everyone worked for a living” (Kolosek, 2002, 89). The permanent residents also wanted to keep at arms’ length from the short-term visitors, those terrible tourists. According to one historian, it was “snobbery verging on contempt with which [the permanent residents] regarded the average American tourist” (Allan, 1977, 10).

9 Thus, in spite of (or due to) their social status, and in spite of a great propensity for constantly being on the move—frequently returning to the United States, often spending long months on the Riviera, or simply migrating between Paris and their summer homes or châteaux in the country—the Right Bank Americans nonetheless created a community, particularly if we define an immigrant community by its neighborhoods, its organizations, its economic niche, its newspapers and its sense of identity. Like other immigrants, the Americans had their neighborhoods in the French capital, and they were over-represented in certain activities. Over one-half (54.8%) of the Americans in the Americans in France Residential List in 1926 lived in either: the 16th (31.5%), the 8th (15.4%), or the 17 th (7.9%) arrondissements (districts). The other two districts most chosen by the resident Americans were on the Left Bank: the 7th (12.6%) and the 6th arrondissements (8.1%) (Americans in France, 1926). If there was an American “ghetto,” it was certainly a gilded ghetto. Businessmen, lawyers, and industrial sales executives gathered in their own churches and their own clubs. They certainly need to be counted among the panorama of foreigners populating Paris in the twentieth century.

10 There is, however, perhaps a final but important difficulty in terms of categorization. Americans abroad never consider themselves “immigrants.” They themselves question the category. Americans in general may see themselves as immigrants or more likely as descendants of immigrants in the United States. But Americans, even those abroad, rarely think of themselves as emigrants, those who have left their home country (the United States) in order to become immigrants elsewhere. Nor did most of the interwar Americans of the Right Bank consider themselves “expatriates.” They took umbrage at the very term, considering it to be a derogatory epithet and writing in to the Paris Herald to say so (Laney, 1947, 144). It was hardly considered to be a proper term to describe the business going on on the other side of the Seine. For the most part, the Americans in Paris thus simply called themselves a “colony” from the nineteenth century on until that term, frequently used until the 1950s to refer to groups of foreigners in major cities, was generally abandoned, a side effect of decolonization. Since the 1960s, a new term, “expat,” is often used.

11 For the most part neither “expatriates” nor “immigrants” was used by the community itself. The former, as one American in Paris complained more recently, sounds too much like ex-patriot, the opposite of the way most of the Right Bank Americans identified. The latter is class-bound and also often implies a permanence not always fulfilled. By using “colony” then and simply “Americans overseas” today, the Americans themselves have implied a critique of the categories and prefer to refer substantively to home and only adjectively to place (Green et al, 2008; Green, 2009; Groppo, 2003).

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A Little-known Population, Invisible Behind a Well- known Group

12 The best known of the Americans in Paris were thus the least numerous, although the “Lost Generation” expatriate writers and artists have left an abundant and beloved trace of their activities. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald form the core of “Americans in Paris” in the American imagination, although probably the most well-known of Americans in France in the interwar years— as seen by the French—was Josephine Baker, symbolizing the United States or Africa, or the image that the French had of both (Jules-Rosette, 2007). But there were other Americans, perhaps less well known today, such as the Princesse de Polignac, born Winnaretta Singer, who reigned over an important avant-garde musical salon on the Right Bank for a good half century. Rich legatee of sewing machine magnate Isaac Merritt Singer, she founded the Fondation Singer-Polignac which continues her work to this day (De Cossart, 1979). Life in Paris incarnated liberty for many Americans: sexual freedom away from a more Puritan America, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual; freedom to experiment with the language, as did Stein and James Joyce; freedom, too, for some African-Americans, far away from racial segregation in the United States.5 The writings and activities of the interwar writers have remained a vibrant testimony to the Roaring Twenties à la parisienne.

13 The problem however is that the flamboyant writers and artists, spending their time in cafés and workshops, have masked the other nine-tenths of Americans in Paris, those who wrote contracts rather than novels. Industrious industrialists, buying but above all selling, acting as sales representatives for American companies soon-to-be multinationals—they too perhaps chose Paris because it was Paris, in a France that they had maybe first encountered while fighting in the war. But above all they chose Paris as an entrée to business on the Continent, a new frontier for American capitalism. For some of them France was also the country of more prosaic freedoms: the right to drink, fleeing Prohibition (1919-1933), or to avoid income tax after the first income tax law was voted in the United States in 1913. The latter “motives” were in any case those that caught the attention of Americans at home who were often critical of their errant overseas counterparts. Nonetheless, while the writers found in Paris a perfect spot for criticizing the frenetic commercialism of American life, others, far more numerous, were expatriates of another sort, living in Paris in order to engage in commercial trade and “spread the American Dream” (Rosenberg, 1982; De Grazia, 2005).

14 According to different estimates, there were some 30-40,000 Americans living in Paris during the interwar period, testimony to the steady attraction of the French capital and the large increase since some 5,000 Americans lived there at the time of the Commune (Katz, 1998, 26). The growth in business dealings, especially after the First World War, increased the importance of Paris as the primary Continental business center, as a place for investment, and as a site for settling in to do business. The year 1926, the last census before the Depression sent many businessmen like the writers home, appears as the high point of this United States presence in pre-World War II Paris. But the official statistics throughout the period are varied and, as for most official counts, undoubtedly under-estimate all foreigners. According to the 1926 French census, there were 17,966 Americans in France, of which 9,363 were in the Seine Department that included Paris. Five years later, the official count was only 9,714 for all of France.6 However, we know

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that throughout the entire period there were probably tens of thousands of undocumented Americans—American “sans papiers.” In 1931, we even have a rather precise count since that year 11,878 Americans had French residence cards although the American State Department counted 19,466 Americans in the Hexagon.7 More than 7,500 were thus without French papers, not counting those who escaped the State Department’s vigilance as well (Torpey, 2000; Robertson, 2010). At the same time, the American newspapers in Paris and even the Paris City Hall gave much higher estimates. An article in the European Edition of the Chicago Tribune of November 16, 1923, reported that the Paris Municipal Council believed that there were 32,000 Americans living in Paris alone. This represented 6.7% of the 478,000 foreigners in the city, the Americans thus being the sixth largest group there, after Belgians (85,000), Italians (81,000), Russians (42,000), Swiss (42,000), and the British (38,000)8. The American newspapers gave even more generous estimates, of up to 40,000 Americans in Paris, a figure which has been taken up by historians and which led Warren Susman to consider that the writers and artists thus comprised only a small one-tenth of the total.9 The vast nine-tenths, less visible and surely a diverse lot, were nonetheless largely composed of “trade missionaries,” to use Malcolm Cowley’s phrase (Cowley, 1934, 62).

The Diversity of Americans in Paris

15 Two important sources allow these “other” Americans in Paris to come into closer view: the archives of a law firm and those of the U.S. Consulate in Paris. Both allow us to write the history of a foreign community in Paris and to explore, from the ground up, important facets of the already globalizing early-twentieth business world (Green, 2014). The lawyers dealt with financial and tax issues along with the personal affairs, from marriage contracts to divorce settlements, of their mostly wealthy clients. The consulate, an understudied hub for citizens abroad, is the place to which Americans turned in order literally to exercise their citizenship rights, calling upon their home state especially in times of trouble.10

16 These sources thus reveal a population that was largely one of means but that was varied in its demographic composition, its lifestyles and in its occupations and preoccupations. Each of the sources in fact has somewhat of a class bias. The wealthier Americans turned more quickly to their lawyers for business or personal matters, whereas the less well-off turned to the consulate in time of need. American men and American women in interwar Paris also had somewhat different social profiles, and there were two very different types of mixed marriages. “Mixed marriages” is in itself a diverse category, joining American women with French men and American men with French women in very different circumstances. In the first case, there were the much- decried rich American legatees who married cash-poor French aristocrats. They came under public scrutiny when their fancy weddings and then many of their just as public divorces were reported in the newspapers’ society pages. Anna Gould, for one, who first married that Paris man about town, Comte Boniface (“Boni”) de Castellane in 1895, subsequently divorced him and married his cousin, the Duc de Talleyrand/Prince de Sagan. Boni’s recently republished memoirs recount, with passion and a bitterness tempered by humor, how he spent his wife’s money (notably in building le Palais Rose on the avenue Foch) but also how their temperamental, national, and lifestyle differences led to a falling out that led Boni back to his own financial woes, or, as the

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title of his book exclaims: L’Art d’être pauvre, the art of being poor (De Castellane, 1925). The American press shed not a tear for Boni, but it was worried that American legatees were squandering good American money on no-good European aristocrats.

17 At a more modest level on the social scale, the other Franco-American marriages more frequently brought American men together with French women. Many former soldiers had stayed in France or had returned there after the First World War to marry their French sweethearts whom they had met in hospital tents or in town during the war (Meigs, 1997). That is undoubtedly how Stephen Perry Jocelyn, Jr., who earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1916 and belonged to the American Legion, ended up as a poultry farmer in the north of France, undoubtedly staying on for the love of Yvonne Dugas, his wife, if we interpret their listing in the Americans in France Residential List correctly.

18 Not everyone was married, and there were in fact a notable number of women on their own, sometimes teaching music or voice. Other women settled in with their daughters in order to give their girls a Paris education. There were in fact more American women than men officially registered in the French capital most years; 56 to 59% of all Americans in Paris in the French census were women in 1901, 1911, 1926, and 1931; only in 1921 and in 1936 were the women just less than half of the Americans in the city.11 A certain democratization along with a feminization of travel had occurred since the late nineteenth century. The Americans in Paris were no longer just an elite of rentiers or their sons on a Grand Tour. The First World War helped broaden the social class of Americans in Paris while ultimately bringing more women and more businessmen of all sorts to the French capital.

19 Among the diverse American population in Paris, those who are the most important for a history of Franco-American economic relations in the twentieth century are indeed the businessmen and lawyers. Some came only for months at a time, but many others settled in for years. They represented all sorts of American manufacturing firms, and they sold everything from agricultural machines and airplanes to soap and Shredded Wheat. They often first came to export, but they soon began to manufacture directly overseas, through licensing agreements and eventually by buying local French companies or setting up their own plants or sales outfits. From large industrial companies like Singer, Westinghouse, International Harvester, or United Aircraft to those who dealt in smaller consumer goods, such as Sun Maid Raisins or Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, the introduction of many American products in France came first thanks to the presence of those Americans who set up there. Certainly, overseas investment can be done without a designated American living abroad. Many companies simply hired French representatives to work for them. But, as sociologist Alain Tarrius has commented, “to know how to be mobile is always a prerequisite for knowing how to sell” (Tarrius, 2000, 253).12 These post-World War I Americans in Paris would at times be described as a second “American invasion” (Susman, 1957, 178, 187) a peaceful one, but a determined one, on the battlefield of trade.

Creating a “Colony”

20 Finally, no overview of this community is possible without looking at the organizations it created. Not surprisingly, the first formal act of mutual self-help and socializing of Americans in Paris began with religion. Setting up their own church groups was

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undoubtedly all the more necessary for Protestants living in a Catholic country. The two major and imposing American churches still active in Paris today thus owe their origins to the early community of Americans in Paris in the nineteenth century. The very first Protestant services took place in 1814, and a first church was established on the rue de Berri in 1857; it became the American Church now located on the quai d’Orsay (the current building having been built in 1931). Episcopalians began holding separate services as early as 1847, and they would create the Holy Trinity parish in 1859 that ultimately erected the American Cathedral on the avenue Alma (today avenue Georges V) in 1886. A series of social and economic institutions followed to service the community as well as establish a specifically American presence abroad. The American Chamber of Commerce in Paris was founded in 1894, later renamed the American Chamber of Commerce in France, and the American Hospital was created in 1906. Both institutions, studied by Nicole Fouché (Fouché 1991, 1994, 1999), like the churches, are still alive and well and have remained among the most important American organizations in town. The Americans also published their own newspapers in Paris, notably the American Register (1868-1915) and two European editions of American dailies, the New York Herald, starting in 1887, and the Chicago Tribune European Edition, beginning in 1917, until it merged with the Herald in the mid-1930s. Well-known bookstores and libraries also attempted to prevent Americans from becoming “lost in translation.” There was Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co. on the Left Bank, of course, but also Brentano’s bookstore on the Right Bank. And the American Library in Paris, like the American Hospital and the Chicago Tribune, was the direct result of the war: its first collection came from donations sent by the American Library Association for troops stationed in France during the war. Other clubs and associations, some for men —the American Legion Post; alumnae clubs of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.—and others for women—the American Women’s Club of Paris, two separate chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution—were also active in the city. Last but hardly least, there were important trade organizations whose explicit purpose was the promotion of American goods and techniques overseas: the American Dental Club, the Automotive Club of Paris, the National Aeronautic Association of the USA (Americans in France, 1925-1940).

At the Intersection of American and French History

21 The terminology itself is testimony to the difficulties of incorporating a well-heeled elite into the migration paradigm. This is aggravated by the French use of the terms, in which “immigrés” are perhaps even more resolutely down-trodden (as in “travailleurs immigrés”) than the corresponding term, “immigrants,” in American English; “immigré” is arguably more of a bad word in France than in the United States. Just as “race” has a different salience in each country, so does the immigration question, although reciprocal visions have also led to borrowings of terms (Keaton et al, 2012; Green, 1999).

22 The rich Americans, living in the wealthy western neighborhoods of Paris, laboring in their own economic niche of high-end sales, and creating their own religious and community organizations in which to socialize, can be described as an immigrant community if the definition of “immigrant” is based on neighborhood, concentration in certain economic sectors, and the creation of their own institutions. Certainly,

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however, the Americans’ social position means that, if they may be considered immigrants, they were immigrants of another sort. The Americans were elite migrants who had the means to build long-lasting organizations with imposing edifices and to indulge in lavish banquets of their own making. It is perhaps our definition of “immigrant” that needs to expand in order to encompass all social classes and in order to contemplate how the difference of means makes a difference in experience, perceptions, and integration.

23 At the same time, these Americans of the Right Bank are important for both American and French history of the twentieth century in that they show first of all that the United States was much less isolationist during the interwar period than it was for a long time imagined.13 Indeed, the former soldiers who stayed in France would be among the first to call upon the United States to continue its “good fight” and enter the fray in defense of France in the Second World War (Ragner, 1939). However, this early American presence from the late nineteenth century and its growth after the First World War raises the question of the origins of a precocious Americanization in France. Certainly, numerous Americans were in France for the love of France—or of a specific French (wo)man. Yet they brought with them their own customs and practices, goods and technology which many of them came explicitly to sell. Thus, well before the American expansion of the post-World War II period, the beginnings of American influence was a source of concern in France and in good part due to the actual presence of Americans in the country. I will show elsewhere the uncertainties and difficulties that Americans had in their self-anointed task of spreading the American dream (Green, 2014). But what is important to stress here is how these early Americans of the Right Bank created the conditions that would facilitate the post-World War II expansion. By creating community institutions and organizing various forms of social and business self-help organizations, this precocious transnational elite formed part of the first period of contemporary globalization and set the stage for the expansion of the latter part of the twentieth century. It was a globalization still full of trial and error, with negotiations on both sides and resistance from the locals. The Americans of the Right Bank are a window onto a more inclusive history of immigration that contemplates the rich along with the poor. They also stand as a bellwether in the history of Franco-American relations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALLAN, Tony, Americans in Paris, Chicago, Contemporary Books, Inc., 1977.

Americans in France: A Directory, Paris, American Chamber of Commerce in France, yearly serial, 1925-1940.

BLOWER, Brooke, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011.

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COSTIGLIOLA, Frank, Awkward Dominion, American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984.

COWLEY, Malcolm, Exile’s Return, A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1934.

DE CASTELLANE, Boniface, L’Art d’être pauvre, Paris, Tallandier, 2009 [1925].

DE COSSART, Michael, Une Américaine à Paris: La Princesse Edmond de Polignac et son salon, 1865-1943, Paris, Plon, 1979.

DE GRAZIA, Victoria, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005.

FABRE, Michel, From Harlem to Paris, Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1991.

FLANNER, Janet, Paris Was Yesterday, London, Virago, 2003.

FOUCHÉ, Nicole, “L’American Chamber of Commerce of Paris (1894-1919), est-elle aussi une institution ethnique?” in Bulletin du CENA-EHESS n°5, February 1999, 51-78.

---, “Introduction–La présence américaine en France (XIXe-XXe siècles) à la recherche d’une problématique,” in Revue française d’études américaines, n°59, February 1994, 7-10.

---, Le Mouvement perpétuel, Histoire de l’Hôpital Américain de Paris des origines à nos jours, Toulouse, Érès, 1991.

GREEN, Nancy L. et al., “Colonies d’ailleurs, colonies d’ici,” Hommes et migrations, n°1276, Novembre-Décembre 2008, 134-46.

---, “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats, The American Transformation of a Concept,” American Historical Review vol. 114, n°2, April 2009, 307-28.

---, “‘Le Melting-Pot’: Made in America, Produced in France,” The Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 3, December 1999, 1188-208.

---, The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1881-1941, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014; Paris, Belin, 2014.

GROPPO, Bruno, “Exilés, réfugiés, émigrés, immigrés. Problèmes de définition,” in Catherine Collomp and Mario Menéndez, eds., Exilés et réfugiés politiques aux Etats-Unis, 1789-2000, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2003, 19-30.

HIRSCHMAN, Albert O., Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970.

JULES-ROSETTE, Bennetta, Josephine Baker in Art and Life, The Icon and the Image, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2007.

KATZ, Philip, From Appomattox to Montmartre, Americans and the Paris Commune, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998.

KEATON, Trica Danielle, SHARPLEY-WHITING, T. Denean and Tyler STOVALL, eds., Black France/ France noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, Durham, Duke University Press, 2012.

KOLOSEK, Lisa Schlansker, L’Invention du Chic: Thérèse Bonney et le Paris moderne, Paris, Norma Editions, 2002.

LAFEBER, Walter, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998 [1963].

LANEY, Al, Paris “Herald”: The Incredible Newspaper, New York, Appleton-Century, 1947.

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LEVENSTEIN, Harvey, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998.

---, We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since 1930, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.

MEIGS, Mark, Optimism at Armageddon, Voices of American Participants in the First World War, Houndmills, Macmillan, 1997.

RAGNER, Bernhard, “The Permanent A.E.F.,” Saturday Evening Post, November 11, 1939, 28-40.

ROBERTSON, Craig, The Passport in America: The History of a Document, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010.

ROSENBERG, Emily, Spreading the American Dream, American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945, New York, Hill and Wang, 1982.

STOVALL, Tyler, Paris Noir, African Americans in the City of Light, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

SUSMAN, Warren Irving, “Pilgrimage to Paris, The Backgrounds of American Expatriation, 1920-1934,” doctoral thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1957.

SUTLIFFE, Albert, The Americans in Paris, Paris, Printed for the author and editor, 1887.

TARRIUS, Alain, with Lamia Missaoui, Les nouveaux cosmopolitains, mobilités, identités, territoires, La Tour-d’Aigues, Éd. de l’Aube, 2000.

TORPEY, John, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

YOUNG, John Russell, Around the World with General Grant, 2 vols., New York, The American News Company, 1879, vol. 1, 136.

NOTES

1. There have been few studies of the American colony per se, but the unpublished dissertation of Warren Irving Susman (Susman, 1957). See also the numerous writings of Nicole Fouché, and the recent political/cultural studies approach by Brooke Blower (Blower, 2011). Although the focus here is on residents, Harvey Levenstein’s two volumes on American tourists in Paris are also very useful (Levenstein, 1998 and 2004). 2. For an in-depth study of this group, see Green, 2014. 3. For a discussion of the statistical estimates, see below. 4. These volumes became a “bestseller” of the American Chamber of Commerce. 5. Emigration to escape from racism would become more explicit after the Second World War (Fabre, 1991; Stovall, 1996). 6. Résultats statistiques du recensement général de la population, 1926, t. 1, 5 e partie, 39; and ibid., 1946, vol. II, 348. 7. Appendix to the letter of the American Consul in Paris to the Secretary of State, February 19, 1934, 349.111, General Records of the Department of State, Decimal Files, Record Group 59, 1930-1939, National Archives at College Park, Maryland. The letter concerns all Americans (military personnel as well as civilians, heads of household as well as dependants) who had received French residence cards during the year 1933. 8. Chicago Tribune European Edition, November 16, 1923, 2. The census gives much smaller figures. Direction de la Statistique générale, Les naturalisations en France (1870-1940) [Études

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démographiques n°3], Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1942, 77; Résultats statistiques du recensement général de la population, 1901, t. 1, 311, and t. 2, 2; 1931, t. 2, 1; 1936, t. 2, 1. 9. Susman, 1957, 165, 205, 180, uses the 40,000 figure, citing the Chicago Tribune European Edition. See also Costigliola, 173. A journalist of the period, Al Laney, was skeptical: “It was startling to discover that so few Americans could act like so many” (Laney, 1947, 143). Another report estimated that there were still 30,000 Americans in Paris after the Depression, but the journalist Janet Flanner was doubtful; she thought that there were only 14,000 Americans still in Paris in 1938 (Flanner, 2003, 233). 10. Archives of the Law Offices of S.G. Archibald, now closed. Thanks to the generosity of the lawyers and the archivists, I was able to have access to the Archibald archives. However, Archibald’s lucrative business of counseling mergers and acquisitions ultimately presaged the law firm’s own fate. Archibald merged with the well-known auditing firm Arthur Anderson in 1992 just a few years before the worldwide demise of Anderson due to the Enron scandal in the United States. In spite of my earlier attempt to encourage the Archibald-Anderson team to deposit the archives with the Archives nationals, the Archibald archives were ultimately destroyed since no one wanted to continue to pay for their storage. Nonetheless, my notes and abundant photocopies remain. The archives of the American consulate in Paris are located in the U.S. State Department archives, held in the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) facility in College Park, Maryland. 11. Résultats statistiques du recensement général de la population, 1901, t. 1, 311, and t. 2, 2; 1911, t. 1, 2e partie, 141, and t. 2, 2; 1921, t. 2, 1-2; 1931, t. 2, 1; 1936, t. 2, 1. 12. “savoir se déplacer a toujours été le préalable à savoir commercer.” 13. However, the isolationist vision of America has been criticized at least since Susman (1957) and LaFeber (1963).

ABSTRACTS

The Left Bank American expatriates in Paris of the 1920s have captured the American and French imagination for decades. But there was another group of Americans in Paris less well known yet ten times more numerous and arguably more important for the “American Century.” The Americans of the Right Bank included bankers and businessmen who went abroad for years if not a lifetime. They were implicit and often explicit “Americanizers,” bringing American goods and methods overseas. These “elite migrants” take us to the heart of the problems of defining migration. They were largely well-to-do; they went to France by choice. We can ask an Albert Hirschman question: to what extent did the businessmen have their own particular brand of “exit,” expressed through a distinctive “voice” (such as the bulletins of the American Chamber of Commerce) and reflecting “loyalty” rather than its opposite (Hirschman, 1970)? Far from the Bohemians of the Left Bank, the Right Bank Americans in Paris do not quite fit the usual history of immigration, but they show that specific forms of mobility and globalization existed well before the late 20th century.

Les écrivains et artistes américains qui habitaient la Rive Gauche de la Seine dans les années 1920 sont bien connus, mais un groupe d’Américains dix fois plus nombreux s’installait sur la Rive Droite à la même époque. Ces hommes d’affaires et banquiers, emblématiques du « siècle américain », apportaient avec eux leurs biens et méthodes américaines. Ces « migrants d’élite »

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posent la question suivante : comment définit-on l’immigration ? Ni « travailleurs immigrés », ni réfugiés, ils étaient aisés pour la plupart, et ils venaient en France par choix. Dans quelle mesure combinaient-ils les options posées par Albert Hirschman en effectuant une « exit », une sortie choisie, exprimant leur « voix » distincte, plutôt loyale que critique. Les Américains de la Rive droite étaient loin des rebelles bohèmes de la Rive Gauche et n’entrent pas dans les catégories habituelles de l’histoire de l’immigration. Mais, ils montrent comment une mobilité d’élite et une forme de globalisation/Américanisation a commencé dès la première moitié du vingtième siècle.

INDEX

Keywords: Americans in Paris, immigration, Americanization, social class, France, United States, expatriates, mobility Mots-clés: Américains à Paris, immigration, américanisation, classe sociale, France, États-Unis, expatriés, mobilité

AUTHOR

NANCY L. GREEN EHESS

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The “Irresponsibility of the Outsider”? American Expatriates and Italian Fascism

Isabelle Richet

Introduction

1 “American expatriates” sounds almost like an oxymoron given the historical identification of the United States as a refuge for millions of immigrants, exiles and expatriates from around the world. Yet, since the early nineteenth century, there has been a continuing, although more limited, flow of people out of the United States, as millions of Americans have chosen to leave their country and settle abroad, temporarily or permanently, for a diversity of motives, be they private, political, economic or cultural (Wilson, 1991, 269-372; Dulles, 1966, 11-20; Dulles, 1964). Their experience has so far not been the object of any serious study apart from the rather limited group of lost generation literary expatriates who haunted Montparnasse and Montmartre in the nineteen twenties (Benstock, 1987; Cowley, 1951; Monk, 2008; Pizer, 1998). They are, however, representative of the transnational movements of people that have recently drawn the attention of historians and their expatriate experience can shed an interesting light on the formation and transformation of American identity in contact with other cultures (Irye and Saunier, 2009).

2 According to Warren I. Susman, expatriation “involves at least two separate but related acts: the rejection of the homeland and the embracing of another country” (Susman, 1971, 171). Yet, for the literary expatriates of the 1920s who, until recently, seemed to epitomize the expatriation experience, abandoning their homeland was often a necessary step to rediscovering it, and expatriation was for them essentially a process of self-discovery as Americans (McCarthy, 1974, 11-13). There is no clear evidence either of their “embracing of another country” as they rarely if ever engaged with the broader society of their host country and its problems. Indeed, according to Eugene Bagger, “the exiled American enjoy[ed] the special privileges of an outsider,” and “the

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irresponsibility that goes with the status of outsider constitutes, no doubt, one of the subtlest charms of exile” (Bagger, 1929, 480, 483). Can the experience of the several million Americans who have chosen to leave their country and settle abroad since the creation of the United States be subsumed in the story of this rather small group of writers and artists? If not, how did it differ? They too decided to leave the United States, but what were their reasons for doing so? Having settled in another country did they all embrace and enjoy the “irresponsibility of the outsider”? As a first, partial attempt to answer these questions, I propose to focus on American expatriates who lived in Italy during the twenty years of the Fascist dictatorship. Not only were they quite numerous but they also represented a broader social spectrum, and their motivations for leaving the United States as well as their mode of engagement with Italian society were extremely diverse. So were their attitudes toward the fascist dictatorship.

3 In what follows, I will combine a biographical and typological approach to identify the various stances adopted by American expatriates and their motivations. The biographical approach seems particularly appropriate to offer a concrete illustration of the personal, cultural and political dynamics that drove the expatriate experience and shaped attitudes toward the Fascist dictatorship. In so doing, I am following the recommendations of a number of historians of the Resistance in France and Italy who have suggested paying more attention to the complex articulation between the individual and the surrounding world, in order “to reconstruct the real experiences” that eventually led people to become politically active in risky circumstances (Belot 1998; Belot, 2007, 57; Piketty, 1998; Piketty, 2007; De Luna, 1995). The biographical approach is also justified by the nature of the sources available, essentially personal diaries, memoires, private letters and individual police files. As for the typology, it was constructed from the many studies dedicated to the attitude of Italians during the Fascist dictatorship. Indeed, despite Mussolini’s rather successful efforts to “manufacture consent,” support for his régime was never unanimous and varied over time (Cannistraro, 1975; Thompson, 1991; Grandi 2001; Bosworth, 2005; Duggan, 2012). Likewise, opposition to the dictatorship took many shades. While it led to open resistance only for a small minority of activists, historians have identified numerous instances of what some have called “existential” antifascism that expressed itself in the family, the community and friendly networks (Delzell, 1961; De Luna, 1995; Rapone, 1997; Gabrielli 2009). In line with those studies, the typology therefore tries to encompass the possible postures towards the regime: active pro-fascist; passive pro- fascist; passive anti-fascist; active anti-fascist.

4 As many historians have demonstrated, official and popular support for the fascist regime was quite widespread in the United States at least until the Abyssinian war (Alpers, 2003; Diggins, 1966; Diggins, 1972; Schmitz 1988). Like their fellow citizens at home, most expatriates followed the evolution of the situation in Italy through the American press which, for the most part, provided a very favorable coverage of the Italian dictatorship until well into the thirties (Mariano, 2000). Expatriates were also directly or indirectly influenced by the attitudes of American diplomats in Italy. While not all of them became Mussolini enthusiasts like Richard Washburn Child who went so far as to ghost-write the Duce’s autobiography in English, all of them saw in the Fascist régime a serious bulwark against bolshevism and recommended strong support by the U.S government and financiers (Child, 1925; Mussolini, 1928; Jones, 1981). Of course, none of those who praised Mussolini suggested that his regime would be suitable for

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the United States, but most saw his iron rule as good for business and good for those rebellious Italians who needed to be taught discipline and hard work. To what extent was this “view from America” shared by those Americans who lived directly under the strictures of the dictatorship? In answering this question, it is essential to remember that expatriation is a process through which identities and values are reinforced or transformed. It is therefore important to study how the intertwining of values imbued at home, ideological leanings, personal connections and political influences from within and without the expatriate milieu shaped the attitudes of American expatriates in Italy toward the Fascist dictatorship.

George Nelson Page: An American in Black Shirt

5 George Nelson Page best represents the “active pro-fascist” stance. He was “the most fascist of fascists” according to Richard Massock who, as the Rome Associated Press correspondent at the beginning of World War II, had to submit the text of his dispatches for approval to Page then in charge of controlling radio broadcasts abroad at the Ministry of Popular Culture (the “MinCulPop”), Mussolini’s propaganda ministry (Massock, 1943, 156-57).

6 George Nelson Page descended from one of Virginia’s oldest planter families. His family belonged to the large group of Southern expatriates who could not envisage living in the post-slavery South and chose to settle in Latin America and Europe after the defeat of the Confederacy (Moore Page, 2009, 81-82).1 His grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Page played a crucial role in the defense of the Confederate States during the Civil War, but after the defeat of the South he settled with his family in Rome and invested in the Italian banking system. His son, George Blunt Page built a successful career in Italy, becoming the first foreign director of the Banca Commerciale Italiana. He married an Italian woman born in Argentina, but they registered their son George, born in 1902, as an American citizen at the United States Embassy in Rome (Page, 1950, 18-19). Young Page was raised in a privileged aristocratic milieu, whose conservatism was rooted both in the Southern tradition of his American family and the Italian conservative aristocracy. His family also had strong links with the “black” nobility close to the Catholic Church, the future Pope Benedicte XV being a close friend of his father (Page, 1951, 19-22, 41-56). What is more, in 1913, his great-uncle, Thomas Nelson Page, close friend of Woodrow Wilson and eulogist of the Old South, was appointed United States ambassador to Italy, a position he occupied until 1919 (Page, 1923). From an early age, George Nelson Page was used to moving with ease within the privileged circles of the wealthy American expatriates who, for years, had been buying the splendid palaces of historic Rome and various nobility titles for their daughters, the salons of the Italian aristocracy and the circles of secular and religious power (Page, 1950, 19-41, 74-75; Amfitheatrof, 1980, 88-110). Suffice it to say that Pope Benedicte XV blessed his First communion and nicknamed him “l’Americano di Roma”—the title Page chose for his autobiography—and that during President Wilson’s triumphant visit to Rome in 1919 prior to the Versailles Peace Conference, he rode in the U.S. Ambassador’s car just behind that of the President whom he met personally in the numerous receptions organized in his honor (Amphiteatrof, 1980, 74-75).

7 Page first came into contact with fascism at his high school—the Liceo Visconti—during the bienno rosso, the two years of intense social struggles that followed the war. In the

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Page family, as was the case in many American expatriate circles, the strikes and factory occupations foreshadowed “the end of the world” (Page, 1950, 97; Ampfitheatrof, 1980, 120-30; Vance, 1989, 313-14), and George had no hesitation in joining the fascist student group in his school, proudly wearing the black shirt. When his student fascist group mobilized him to participate in the March on Rome in October 1922, he informed his father who made no secret of his sympathy for Mussolini while voicing his concerns about the illegal dimension of the fascist movement. Young Page took part in the March on Rome and when he returned home, the King having asked Mussolini to form the new government, father and son were reconciled in their support for the new regime which, they were convinced, would restore order at home and the prestige of Italy abroad (Page, 1950, 123-31).

8 While at university, he developed a taste for hard drinking and relentless gambling in the fashionable haunts of the Via Veneto. However, these years of “dolce vita” were not entirely wasted. He used them to consolidate his network of influential acquaintances, among them young count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s future son-in-law and high- ranking official of the fascist regime (Page, 1950, 159). For several years, Page hesitated about the choice of a career, dabbling in journalism, making a first disappointing visit to the United States, apparently torn between his American citizenship and his Italian education. As he entered adulthood, he faced the choice every expatriate has to make at one point or another. Should he go back to the United States? It was the country of his ancestors, but was it truly his homeland? Should he settle for an easy life in the American colony in Rome without paying attention to what was happening in the real Italy? Should he become Italian and participate fully in a political experiment he admired? If he opted for the last solution, it was not without conflict as he was aware that his choice implied an inexorable estrangement from the land of his ancestors (Page, 1950, 280-93, 388-419).

9 Always alert to a good propaganda opportunity, the Duce immediately saw how he could take advantage of the “conversion” of a relative of a former U.S. ambassador who belonged to one of America’s most prestigious families. He suggested he became a kind of ambassador at large of fascist Italy that he would promote through cycles of conferences in the United States. However, Page’s first visit to New York after his decision to become Italian became public in 1933 was a total fiasco. Used to seeing millions of Europeans becoming Americans, the U.S. press launched a violent attack against what it saw as an act of treason. In addition to his choice of becoming Italian, the press stressed Page’s embrace of the Mussolini regime which he proclaimed in many incendiary remarks praising the order and discipline imposed by fascism and deriding the liberalism and freedom of the press that existed in the United States.2

10 Needless to say, this disastrous visit put an end to Mussolini’s plan for George Nelson Page in the United States, but not to his career in the fascist propaganda machine. When he returned to Rome, Galeazzo Ciano, head of the Duce’s press office presented him with an ambitious scheme: “Shortly, I will create an organization that will become the most important in Italy,” Ciano explained. An organization that would control every piece of news and would promote Italy around the world... “We will use the radio, the theatre, the cinema. And of course we will use the press” (Page, 1950, 437; Guerri, 1979, 91-92). The plan corresponded to Mussolini’s desire to present a positive image of his regime abroad in order to win the support of international public opinion. Apart from controlling what the many foreign correspondents present in Rome could write,

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Mussolini also intended to use short-wave radio transmissions to have a direct control over what foreign audiences—and the millions of Italian immigrants abroad—could hear about the “new” Italy. All these services were regrouped in September 1934 within the Ministry of Popular Culture, the famous MinCulPop. George Nelson Page became the head of the Radio section that monitored the overseas program (Cannistraro, 1975, 198-99; Garzarelli, 2004, 31-58; Luconi and Tintori, 2004).3 In this new capacity, he met regularly with Goebbels, his alter ego in Berlin, and he travelled to the United States to sign various broadcast agreements with the main American networks. After the humiliation of his 1933 trip, Page seems to have particularly appreciated his first visit to the United States “as an Italian citizen and what’s more as an official representative of the government” (Page, 1950, 472, 550-56). Indeed, this must have tasted as sweet revenge against the homeland he had rejected, and that had rejected him in return. “One night in Rome, he [Page] poured out to me his bitterness against America for treating him so badly,” recalled the famed American European correspondent William L. Shirer (Shirer, 1943, 401).

11 With the Second World War approaching, the activities of the MinCulPop escalated. In addition to the control of Italian foreign broadcasts, Nelson Page was now in charge of the monitoring of all the radio dispatches sent by foreign correspondents from Rome, and he is a haunting presence in the Memoires of American journalists who reluctantly submitted to official censorship, all the more so as the censor was an American wearing a black shirt (Massock, 1943; 177-79, Packard, 1975; Rolo, 1942, 133-40). Nelson Page was also closely associated with the pro-fascist, anti-American and anti-Semitic war broadcasts of American poet Ezra Pound, himself a convinced fascist who had settled in Italy in 1925 (Redman, 1991; Corrigan, 1972, 767-81). According to Philip Cannistraro, the foreign propaganda division headed by Nelson Page was not only entrusted with the explanation of Italy’s role in the war but also had to contribute to the propaganda of the Axis (Cannistraro, 1975, 260). It accomplished this task in total agreement with the Germans who, after January 1942, gradually took over the running of the Italian government. As for Nelson Page, he continued to travel to Berlin in order to coordinate his activity with Goebbels who was in charge of Nazi war propaganda (Massock, 1943, 288; Page, 1950, 653-54).4

12 In view of the above, it should come as no surprise that George Nelson Page was arrested by the agents of the Counter-Intelligence Corps after the entry of the Allied troops in Rome in June 1944. But unlike Ezra Pound, later arrested by Italian partisans and transferred to the United States to be tried for treason, Page was sent to the Padula internment camp with other Italian fascists (Page, 1950, 737-51; Page 1956; Shirer, 1943, 397-404).5

Iris Cutting Origo: A fascination for “the most constructive aspects of fascism”

13 The figure representing the passive pro-fascist stance is Iris Cutting Origo, well-known for her numerous biographies and her celebrated war diary, War in Val d’Orcia. Ignoring her own recipe for a good biography—“do not suppress anything”—, she kept a rather embarrassed silence on the twenty years of the fascist regime in her autobiography. She only noted as an aside that together with her husband, with whom she managed a 7 000 acre estate in the Province of Sienna, she had been “brought into contact with

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one of the most constructive aspects of Fascism and with some of its most sincere adherents” (Origo, 2001, 25; Origo, 2002, 8).

14 Iris Cutting belonged to another important group of American expatriates, the members of the “leisure class”: heirs to old and new fortunes, rich collectors and aesthetes, who for decades had bought the Renaissance villas on the hills of Fiesole and considered Florence as “a theme park of the past” (Acton, 1948, 9; Black, 2003, 7). Although born in England in 1902, Iris Cutting was an American citizen. Her father, Bayard Cutting was the heir of a wealthy family from the merchant aristocracy of New York and her mother, Sybil, was the heiress of an Anglo-Irish landowning aristocratic family. Of a cosmopolitan mind, her parents travelled extensively, often visiting Italy where, for a while, her father was American vice-consul in Milan (Barolini, 2006, 257-58; Moorhead, 2000, 4-12; Origo, 2002, 8, 77-80). Bayard Cutting died prematurely in 1910, and in one of his last letters to his wife he recommended she brought up their daughter in a “completely foreign country” so that she would be “free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy […]. Somewhere where she doesn’t belong […]. So that she can be really cosmopolitan, deep down.” Sybil Cutting settled with her daughter in the splendid Villa Medici in Fiesole near Florence (Origo, 2002, 88; Campbell, 2009, 139-45). Iris Cutting spent her childhood and adolescence in a sheltered environment, a sort of early gated community where the Anglo-American expatriates lived their privileged existence without any contact with Italian society except through their cooks and gardeners (Dunn, 2001, 41-45). Even the First World War did not disturb the artistic concerns and the social and personal intrigues of this “paradise of exiles” (Origo, 2002, 135).6

15 Such was not the case, however, for the social agitation of the post-war years. As was the case for the Page family in Rome, the bienno rosso in Italy echoed the “red scare” at home and was perceived as a direct threat for the interests of the leisure class expatriates who welcomed the October 1922 March on Rome with immense relief. The Florence & Italian Mail, a new weekly published jointly in Florence by the British and American Chambers of Commerce, heartily cheered the crushing of the worker’s movement and the return of social stability thanks to the iron grip of Mussolini and the bludgeons of his militias.7 As for the privileged expatriates on the hills of Fiesole, they too saluted the regimenting of the “Reds” and did not conceal their admiration for the man who had put the country back to work and guaranteed that the trains arrived on time (Hibbert, 2004, 288; Acton, 1948, 234; Waterfield, 1961, 196). Iris Cutting herself wrote to a friend in England in the aftermath of the March on Rome: “We’ve had an exciting and amusing autumn with the fascisti […]. It has been interesting watching an opera buffo revolution being transformed into a serious government, and Mussolini is a very remarkable man to have been able to do it and more remarkable still if he can make it last” (Moorhead, 104). Admiration for Mussolini seemed to have been widespread at the Villa Medici as Bernard Berenson, from the neighboring Villa I Tatti, informed his wife, deploring that Sybil Cutting, Iris’s mother, “had gone native” and expressed her wholehearted support for the regime, even after the murder of the Socialist Member of Parliament Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924.8

16 Instead of choosing a life partner among her Anglo-American transatlantic milieu and living the cosmopolitan existence her father had wished for her, in 1924 Iris Cutting married Marquis Antonio Origo, a good-looking but penniless Italian aristocrat with strong nationalist leanings. As a second generation expatriate, she seemed to suffer

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from the rootlessness imposed on her by her parents’ choice and her desire to belong led her to establish solid bonds with her adopted country through marriage and the acquisition of a vast land estate. However, she retained her American nationality as the recently passed Married Women’s Act of 1922 allowed her to do (Moorhead, 2000, 91; Cott, 1998, 1464-65). Thanks to her inheritance, the Origos bought 7,000 acres of farming land in the Val d’Orcia near Sienna, which they exploited under the sharecropping system (the “mezzadria”), a semi-feudal and paternalistic arrangement that Iris would always paint with nostalgia (Barolini, 2006, 246-49; Origo, 2002, 246-47; Fresta, 2003; Generali and De Simonis, 2003).

17 It is in their capacity as landowners of the La Foce estate that Iris and her husband came into contact with what she called “one of the most constructive aspects of fascism,” namely the policy of land reclamation (the “bonifica”) launched by Mussolini in order to strengthen rural Italy and stop the population drift toward the cities. If land reclamation did have some positive aspects, it worked mostly to the advantage of the large landowners who received the bulk of the public subsidies to improve their estate. Indeed, there was little land redistribution and when the government abandoned the policy in 1940 the income of the sharecroppers had actually declined (Origo, 2002, 221-23; Sereni, 1971, 311-37; Gasparri, 1976, 14-16; Neville, 2004, 78-79).

18 As Iris Cutting-Origo insisted in her autobiographical writings after the war, it is possible that Marquis Origo was essentially interested in the management of his estate, choosing to ignore the less palatable aspects of the regime and to collaborate with the policies he considered to be positive. Yet, Iris Origo’s authorized biographer Caroline Moorehead, mentions a “distinct taint of Fascist complicity” that Antonio “was never, for the rest of his life, entirely able to escape.” From the available evidence, it appears that Antonio Origo, like the other large landowners of the area, was in close and constant contact with the local fascist administration and the ministry of Agriculture in Rome as Vice-President of the Consorzio di Bonifica della Val D’Orcia, and he often had the visit of high-ranking Fascist officials who praised his estate as a model to follow. On such occasions, with Iris at his side, Origo—and his young son—donned the black shirt, the fascist uniform, yet it is impossible to establish with any certainty whether he was a member of the National Fascist Party, the archives of the party for the province of Sienna having been lost (Moorhead, 200, 145-49; Antonio Origo, 1937).

19 It is also possible as she wrote in her autobiography, that Iris Cutting-Origo had little interest for politics in general. This much comes out of the more than two thousand letters she and her lover, Colin Mackenzie, exchanged in the second half of the 1920s. They mention Emily Dickinson, Leopardi, Dante, music, paintings, but not a word about Mussolini, which led her biographer to conclude that “given the times they were living in, this is sometimes hard to understand” (Moorhead, 2000, 143). What comes out of the rest of her correspondence and her diaries is also her very active social life within the circles of Roman and Florentine high society that brought her into regular contact with the top echelons of the regime. Her godfather, William Phillips, was appointed American ambassador to Rome in 1936 and she attended many of the numerous dinners he organized for the dignitaries of the regime (Vance, 1989, 351). She also met Mussolini on several occasions and never concealed her great admiration for the man and the leader. On such an occasion, in Florence at the beginning of the thirties, she attended an opera performance in honor of the Duce. She wrote to a friend that beyond Mussolini’s caricature of himself, “something very fine remained—firmness and a

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reality which I had somehow not expected—and a sense of complete remoteness and loneliness… there was someone on a larger scale than most people, something that made all the histrionics and the noise, which he himself utilizes, seem quiet irrelevant and unimportant.” A few days later, Iris and Antonio met again with the Duce. They had separate private conversations with him, and she once more “was very much impressed by him—he gives one a real feeling of greatness, as well as tragic isolation.” But when she mentioned the few antifascists that she occasionally met at the Berenson’s or in Rome, she dismissed them into insignificance: “One feels, yes, these are enlightened, high-principled courageous people, but they are not, as yet, of any importance” (Moorhead, 2000, 152-54; Origo, 2002, 232).

20 She also appears to have been totally engulfed in the patriotic effervescence that accompanied Mussolini’s war on Abyssinia. After a visit from Iris in London, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on January 10, 1936, “Origo rather contorted; says Italy is blind red hot devoted patriotic. Has thrown her wedding ring in the cauldron too” (Woolf, 1984, vol. 5, 6). Iris, who had chosen to retain her American nationality, participated in the highly patriotic ceremonial whereby Italians were asked to exchange their gold wedding rings for ordinary iron rings in order to finance Mussolini’s imperial adventure in Abyssinia (Moorhead, 2000, 200-1).

21 In addition to her personal desire to belong that led her to identify with her country of adoption, class and professional interests together with political and social conformity appear to have guided Iris Origo’s attitude toward Mussolini: a passive approval that was never militant, but imposed blinkers and prevented her from acknowledging the true nature of the regime until well into the war. In late August 1939, surrounded by the rumors of impending conflict, she and her husband crossed the border back to Italy from Switzerland and she recalled laconically in her autobiography: “The pole of the barrier swung slowly back behind us. I realized that I had made my choice.” The choice to embrace her adopted country’s fate even when it eventually meant being at war with both her countries of origin—Great Britain in June 1940 and the United States in December 1941. This situation that could have led to potential divided loyalties is only very briefly alluded to in her Memoires (Origo, 2002, 230, 234).

22 After July 1943 and in the following months that witnessed the fall of Mussolini and his restoration at Salo’, the formation of the post-fascist Badoglio government, the occupation of Italy by the German Army, the development of the resistance and the landing of the Allies, Iris and Antonio Origo rapidly adapted to what was to say the least an extremely chaotic situation. Their estate in the Val d’Orcia found itself for many months at the crossroads of different front lines, and they were caught up in many confrontations, some tragic, some comical. Soldiers of all the various camps passed at one point or another by La Foce, often at the same time. This made for a fascinating human story that Iris has brilliantly told in her celebrated war diary, describing with vivid details the political confusion of the time and the peasants’ resourcefulness, the hopes and fears, the remarkable solidarity in front of hardship and danger, her own and her husband’s dedication and generosity (Origo, 1984). The historians of the war and resistance in the province of Sienna confirm much of her tale, but they add a political dimension that is missing in War in Val d’Orcia. They show how the large landowners tread a careful path in this uncertain situation as local power shifted between the representatives of the Badoglio government and those attempting to establish the authority of the Republic of Salo’—who sometimes were actually the same

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people (Gasparri, 1976, 41; Orlandini, 1994). They also stress the landowners’ concern to ensure continuity through a smooth transition that would preserve their political and economic supremacy, and Antonio Origo is often mentioned as quite instrumental in this process (Gasparri, 1976, 40-43, 68-69, 233-37).

23 Once again, Iris Origo chose to ignore—or to suppress—these developments, preferring to stress the “one good thing that this period brought about […], a closer relationship with our tenants and our neighbors […]. At last, the old barriers of tradition and class were broken down, and we were held together by the same difficulties, fears, expectations and hopes.” She must have known she was deluding herself. A few pages later she was forced to acknowledge the “swift end to the temporary mutual solidarity and union produced by times of crisis” and to admit that, at La Foce, “ill-feeling ran so high for several years that, if we met two or three of our contadini [peasants] together, they would refuse even to great us” (Origo, 2002, 240-41, 246-47).

Bernard Berenson: An aesthete’s love of Italy and hatred of Mussolini

24 The passive anti-Fascist category is represented by the art expert Bernard Berenson who spent nearly 70 years of his life in Florence where he died. Among American expatriates, Berenson was a transition figure from the leisure class of wealthy dilettantes to the professionals, in his case the experts connected to the international art market. He drew his considerable income from the wealthy American collectors and museums whom he advised for their acquisitions of Italian art, thanks to his expertise built on his intimate knowledge of Italian Renaissance paintings and of the local market. Permanent residence in Italy was therefore a requisite and, despite his immediate and thorough rejection of fascism, it would dictate his pragmatic attitude toward the Mussolini regime.

25 Born in 1865 in Lithuania to a Jewish family that immigrated to Boston in 1875, Berenson studied at Harvard where he specialized in art history and thoroughly absorbed the liberal ethos of the university. A brilliant but impoverished student, he attracted the attention of wealthy benefactors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner who financed his first year in Europe where he intended to pursue his artistic education (Secrest, 1980, 54-71). Arriving in Italy in 1887, he immediately felt a tremendous aesthetic attraction to the peninsula and decided that he would spend the rest of his life admiring and studying its natural and artistic beauties and dedicate his life to “connoisseurship” (Kiel, 1962, 36; Berenson, 1949, 60). Applying the analytical method of scholarship devised by Giovanni Morelli, which consisted in scrutinizing minor details of a painting in order to identify the “hand” of the artist, he started compiling systematic lists of the authentic works of Renaissance painters. His lists gradually acquired what Kenneth Clark has called a sort of “magical” authority. They seriously alarmed collectors and dealers alike who feared that the value of some of their Old Masters might be questioned (Fernie, 1995, 103-15; Anderson, 1987, 49-55; Clark, 1960, 381-86). Benefitting from the desire for the authentication of existing collections and the growth of potential collectors during the Gilded Age of fast fortunes, Berenson made it his business to sell certificates of authenticity—and some say his soul when he accepted to work for a retainer with the international art merchant Joseph Duveen. Material success followed rapidly and by 1900, he was able to rent then acquire the

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Villa I Tatti on the hills of Settignano near Florence, where he was a neighbor of Iris Cutting Origo and her mother (Samuels, 1979, 283; Clark, 1974, 137-40; Brown, 1979).

26 His wife Mary Smith Costelloe whom he met in London in 1890 strongly encouraged and aptly seconded him in his lucrative career as an art expert. Born in Philadelphia in a Quaker family, Mary studied at Smith College and Radcliff in Boston where she met her first husband Frank Costelloe, an Irish Catholic. They married in 1885 and moved to England. From their Quaker background Mary and her sister Alys, who married the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, inherited a strong belief in the equality of the sexes and were dedicated supporters of the suffrage movement. The Costelloes also embraced Henry George’s single-tax movement and Bellamy’s utopian socialism and moved in the left-liberal circles associated with the Fabian movement of Sydney and Beatrice Webb who were close friends (Secrest, 1980, 95-110; Samuels, 1979, 115, 197-200; Strachey, 1982, 110-22). Although he preferred the “religion of culture” to the “religion of socialism,” Berenson found a convivial milieu in the Smith-Costelloe household and eventually seduced Mary who abandoned her husband and their two daughters to join him in his aesthetic quest in Italy (Secrest, 1980, 109). They married in 1900 after Costelloe’s death and established their personal, social, and professional base at Villa I Tatti which soon became an important hub of the international art world (Weaver, 1997).

27 Unlike the expatriates of the leisure class, Bernard Berenson did not stand aloof from Italian society. His main connection to his country of adoption was of course through its artistic treasures and he travelled extensively around the peninsula to compose his famous lists. In doing so, he established strong intellectual relationships with a number of Italians associated with art history and the art market. He also developed a close friendship with two Florentine intellectuals, Carlo Placci and Gaetano Salvemini, who were not directly connected to the art world but would play a crucial role in his apprehension of political developments in Italy during and after the First World War. Carlo Placci was a wealthy cosmopolitan dilettante writer who had studied at Oxford and frequented all the intellectual circles of Europe. He immediately took to Berenson and introduced him to all his acquaintances, in Italy and abroad. It was through Placci that he met Gaetano Salvemini, freshly arrived from Puglia to study history at the University of Florence and who would become Italy’s most renowned historian and a major political figure of the pre and post war period. He became intimate with both Bernard and Mary Berenson who appreciated his volcanic personality and brilliant mind (Colby, 2003, 98; Gunn, 1964, 149-53; Tosi, 1984, 147-91; Berenson, 1952, 23-24; Berenson, 1964, 278; Killinger, 2002).

28 According to his secretary-companion Nicky Mariano, Berenson did not show any particular interest for politics prior to World War I. He eventually grew increasingly critical of the vociferous nationalism demonstrated by a sector of Italian society and echoed by his friend Carlo Placci, who called for Italian intervention into the war as a means of achieving territorial expansion. When the U.S. joined the conflict in April 1917, Berenson felt it his duty to contribute to the war effort and he went to work as an advisor and translator for the American Embassy in Paris. There, he met again with a number of his old Harvard friends and made new acquaintances. One of those was Walter Lippmann with whom he struck a lasting friendship which was buttressed, after the war, by their common opposition to fascism (Mariano, 1966, 26, 36, 106, 111; Berenson, 1983, 236; Steel, 1998, 154-58, 178-79).

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29 While Berenson resumed his activities on the international art market after the war, the rise of the Fascist movement, the March on Rome, and the rapid instauration of the dictatorship strained his relationships in Italy. The Fascist squads were particularly violent in Tuscany and Florence witnessed several episodes of bloody confrontations, which forced people to take a stand (Snowden, 1989, 139-45; Marcolini, 1993, 15-19). Political clashes with his friend Placci, whose virulent nationalism aligned him with the new regime, were frequent and their relationship became quite stormy. At the same time, Berenson grew closer to Gaetano Salvemini who has often been presented as the first Italian anti-Fascist.9 Nicky Mariano recalled that Berenson stopped “seeing any staunch upholders of the regime who were probably equally anxious to avoid him,” and as a consequence the Berensons’ circle of Italian acquaintances was more and more reduced (Mariano 1966, 111). They realized, during a visit to Rome in the fall of 1924 after the assassination of the opposition MP Giacomo Matteotti, that the doors of Roman society and diplomatic circles were closed to them, BB—as Bernard Berenson was known—“being at that time already too much considered an outspoken anti-Fascist to make contacts with him desirable.” But he made a point of visiting major anti-Fascist figures, such as Giovanni Amendola, the leader of the Aventino opposition in Parliament who some months later would die of wounds received at the hands of Fascist bullies (Mariano, 1966, 111-12). This, in turn, increased the tensions with some of his Florentine acquaintances and the Villa I Tatti, having become a haven for the opponents of the regime, also became the target of intense surveillance by the Fascist police. “There is in Florence a clique that meets each week to elaborate schemes detrimental to fascism and to Italy, plotting and diffusing the most hostile propaganda abroad,” an agent wrote to the Secretariat of the Duce in 1925. “They are in permanent contact with the United States, England, Belgium and France. Their meeting place is almost always the villa Berenson.” 10

30 As editor of the first anti-Fascist underground magazine, Non Mollare [Do not Yield], Salvemini was arrested in June and tried in July 1925. After the case against him was dismissed on a technicality, the Fascists were infuriated and put pressure on all those who had expressed support for Salvemini. This was the case for the Berensons who helped Salvemini when, that summer, he decided to leave the country for England. They supported him financially during his first months in exile, and Mary’s sister, Alys Russell, offered him a home when he arrived in London. Well aware of the situation, the Fascist authorities expressed their irritation and asked the American Consul in Florence to convey their warnings to the residents of Villa I Tatti. They threatened not to allow them to return to Italy the next time they left the country (Marcolini, 1993, 54-60; Delzell, 1961, 30-32; Killinger, 2002, 192-204; Salvemini, 2002, 44).11

31 Bernard and Mary Berenson faced a dilemma. Out of personal taste and professional interest, permanent residence in Italy was essential; but the open expression of their strongly felt anti-Fascist opinions endangered their status as foreign residents. However reluctantly, they decided to “privatize” their anti-Fascism. “For us silence is best” Mary wrote to Lipmann in early 1926, advising him not to visit them for a while, the presence of one of the few American editorialists who published sharp critiques of Mussolini being likely to strengthen the hostility of the Italian authorities towards the Berensons. Such was also the case for Alys Russell who would not visit I Tatti for several years so as not to arise suspicion on its permanent residents (Berenson, 1983, 260-64; Samuels, 1987, 330-52; Steel, 1998, 251-52).

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32 Mary’s letters to Walter Lippmann stating that they had “ceased to be in opposition” referred to their public stance. Indeed, in private, the “anti-Fascist diatribes” were part of the daily fare at I Tatti as recalled by the British art historian Kenneth Clark, who worked as an assistant to Berenson in 1926-1927 (Clark, 1974, 153). The Berensons continued to spend time in summer with Salvemini in England, and wherever he travelled in Italy BB was “sure of meeting kindred spirits” among a close private network of anti-Fascist intellectuals (Mariano, 1966, 118).12 On the other hand, most of his business-related foreign visitors were totally enthralled by the Duce and his “anti- Bolshevik” regime. “They seem to think wrong in all public questions,” wrote Mary Berenson, but it was pointless to try to convince them otherwise.13 When Thomas Lamont came to Italy on behalf of the J.P. Morgan bank to negotiate a loan that would contribute to stabilizing and legitimizing the fascist government, Berenson tried to inform him of the true nature of the regime by having him meet anti-Fascist intellectuals. But to no avail, for he was already “too indoctrinated” according to Nicky Mariano (Mariano, 1966, 112).

33 His public silence allowed Berenson to weather the years of the Fascist regime in Italy while pursuing his business transactions abroad. To a certain extent, his international fame and his many influential connections in Great Britain and the United States protected him. Despite fears to the contrary, he was not seriously affected by the passage of the racial laws in 1938 or Italy’s entry into the war against the United States in December 1941, apart from a further restriction of his circle of Italian acquaintances (Berenson, 1983, 302-04; Samuels, 1987, 462-64; Mariano, 1966, 244-52). Only after the occupation of Italy by the Nazis, in September 1943, was he forced to hide in the villa of the Ambassador of San Marino to the Holy See outside Florence, where he remained until the end of the war.

34 “Just a month ago war was declared between the country and people I most love on earth and the people to whom I owe whole-souled allegiance” Berenson wrote in January 1942 (Berenson, 1942, 80). His attitude toward fascism can only be explained in terms of this dilemma: the liberal values absorbed in the United States sustained his unmitigated opposition to the Mussolini dictatorship, while his love of Italy convinced him to keep this opposition private.

Robert Winston Wiley: A Midwest radical in the underground antifascist opposition

35 As an example of the active anti-Fascist stance, Robert Winston Wiley is certainly less well-known than the three previous figures, but he is the only American citizen who has an exceptionally thick personal file in the archives of the Fascist political police in Rome. A radical activist from the Mid-West, he appeared on the radars of the Fascist police in the spring of 1937 after the publication of nine articles—under the assumed name George Burnett—in the anti-Fascist weekly Giustizia e Libertà published in exile in Paris by Carlo Rosselli (Giovana, 2005; Pugliese, 1999). The articles described episodes of spontaneous popular resistance to the regime in Italy and revealed an intimate knowledge of different social milieus. They unleashed a frantic search on the part of the Fascist police, which eventually unraveled a long story of political engagement on the part of Wiley in Florence, and led to the arrest of the opposition group he had assembled in that city.14

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36 From the scarce biographical data gathered by the police, we can ascertain that he was born Robert Winston Wiley in 1908, in a small town in Minnesota, that he obtained a passport in Washington D.C. in 1932—renewed in 1936 by the American Consulate in London—, and that he spent six years abroad, mostly in Italy, while also travelling freely in Europe.15 According to the radical New York magazine Common Sense, for which he worked as a free-lance European correspondent, he graduated from the University of California before moving to Europe, although his field of studies is not clear.16 Journalism? French and Italian Studies? He was fluent in both languages, and he intended to make a living writing about these two countries.17 In that sense, he belonged to the group of young intellectual expatriates who flocked to Europe in the inter-war period, hoping to live cheaply and to write in a rich cultural environment. Unlike most of his compatriots, however, he chose Italy rather than France and seemed more interested in politics than literature and art.

37 His articles and his activities in Italy testify to the radical opinions that he brought with him from the United States. He grew up in a radical state of the Mid-West that saw the emergence of a left-leaning Farmer-Labor Party, and he was a student at the beginning of a radical decade, the 1930s that witnessed a strong polarization to the left of the political spectrum on the part of those who opposed what they considered the salvaging of American capitalism by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (Pells, 1973, 61-140; Valelly, 1989; McCoy, 1958, 1-60). Common Sense, the outlet for his articles on Europe was created in 1932 by Alfred Bingham to promote a sui generis form of American socialist alternative in the United States (Rawick, 1974, vol. 2, 450-56; Miller, 1979, 3-87).18

38 What Wiley also brought from the United States was a pragmatic approach to political action, which Carlo Rosselli found “refreshing” because it was free of the “excessive ideological superstructures” that burdened European anti-Fascism and, therefore, could facilitate the contact with popular elements in Italy (Garosci, 1973, vol. 2, 339-40). Wiley did show a lot of pragmatism in his attempts to penetrate various milieus— intellectuals, artisans, workers. When he first arrived in Florence in spring 1933, he had not had any previous contact with the several anti-Fascist organizations in exile in Paris. It was a dire period for the opposition whose various components—Communist, Socialist, Giustizia e Libertà—had all but been crushed by the Fascist police, and there was scarcely any organized activity left inside Italy (Delzell, 1974, 85-130; Franzinelli, 2000, 91-124; Thompson, 1991, 28-66). Yet, as many historians have observed, “the story of parties and organized groups is not the whole story of anti-fascism […], for it does not take into account those forms of spontaneous rebellion, of passive resistance, of mute and unorganized aversion for the regime that were quite frequent among the lower classes” (Spini and Casali, 1986, 133-34). Other historians have described the small informal antifascist networks that survived in Florence among workers and artisans in the popular neighborhood of San Frediano and some artistic and intellectual circles (Cantagalli, 1981, 125-26; Timpanaro, 1975, 16-17; Gabrielli, 2006, 35).

39 When he arrived in Florence, Wiley settled in San Frediano, first in a pension on Piazza Santo Spirito, then in an apartment in Borgo San Jacopo that he shared with his girlfriend Elvira Rapaccini, a convinced anti-fascist. Later, in 1935, they moved to an apartment in Via delle Farine, another artisan neighborhood beyond the Piazza della Signoria. Through the American art students milieu in Florence he came into contact with a number of local artists, intellectuals and journalists interested in things

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American, such as the writers Antonio Sorelli and Eliseo Tealdi, the painters Renato Paresce and Giovanni Baldwin.19 He became quite close to Baldwin, an American artist born in Ohio who had moved to Florence with his widowed mother in 1901 at the age of 12. Baldwin introduced Wiley to the group of people who worked at Il Conventino, an old convent in San Frediano that had been transformed to offer workshops and studios to artisans and artists. In this bohemian milieu, opposition to the regime was widespread although it rarely led to openly militant action. A number of the residents had read and distributed the first underground magazine Non Mollare in 1925. In the more somber 1930s, they led intense private discussions around the literary and philosophical books banned by the regime or participated to political debates with the former Socialist MP Gaetano Pieracini. During his years in Florence, Wiley became a regular visitor and brought political material from Paris that was discussed at Il Conventino and disseminated in other circles (Miniati, 1978, 14-26, 58, 146; Francovich, 1980, 584-91, Spini and Casali, 1986, vol. 2, 134).

40 Wiley struck a close friendship with Bruno Sardelli, a young worker who wanted to become a tourist guide and frequented Il Conventino to learn more about art history (Miniati, 1978, 146). Sardelli also participated in the political discussions and appeared ready to adopt a more militant stance against the regime. He introduced Wiley to a number of his acquaintances, mostly young workers or artisans from San Frediano, who shared their ideas and started meeting regularly at the flat Wiley shared with Elvira Rapaccini, officially for English tuition classes. One or two had had contacts in the past with either the Socialist or Communist Parties, but most expressed a spontaneous opposition to the regime which, given the circumstances, had not until then found any political outlet. As they regrouped around Wiley, their activity became more regular and determined but remained quite modest in scope. In addition to his own, the American acquired a second typewriter, and after discussing antifascist articles from Paris, they reproduced them and distributed them among their acquaintances. With the beginning of the Abyssinian war in October 1935, they decided to publish a weekly information bulletin. They also collected money that they forwarded to political prisoners and their families.20

41 Until early 1936, they did not seem to have had any formal contact with the exiled opposition. This changed after a trip Wiley made to Paris where he met Carlo Rosselli. The leader of Giustizia e Libertà had always stressed the priority of acting inside Italy, hence his interest for anyone who could travel freely around the peninsula and had connections with groups of people opposed to the regime (Giovanna, 2005, 351-79, 403-27; Pugliese, 1999, 138-39, 172-73; Garosci, 1973, vol. 2, 339-40). Upon returning to Italy after Easter 1936, Wiley started receiving material from Giustizia e Libertà, and worked to convince some of his Florentine friends to be regular distributors of the journal and leaflets in their area. He also travelled to Milan and Venice to try to re- establish contacts with sympathizers of the movement who would accept to receive propaganda material from Paris.21 On behalf of Giustizia e Libertà, Wiley also introduced a duplicator in Italy that was hidden at Il Conventino. Working with Carlo Rosselli’s organization, Wiley demonstrated once more his pragmatic approach for, according to the various testimonies of his Florentine friends, he seemed to have professed Communist or Trotskyist ideas rather than the Liberal Socialism of Giustizia e Libertà. However, he believed that anti-Fascist activists should put aside their ideological differences and focus on their common opposition to the dictatorship.22

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42 While the contact with Giustizia e Libertà gave some cohesion to the small group that met in Wiley’s and Rapaccini’s flat in Florence, it was also the cause of its undoing. Indeed, the Italian Embassy closely monitored the anti-Fascist press published in Paris and the various exiled organizations were bristling with Fascist agents of the ill-famed OVRA. The OVRA agents in Paris were immediately mobilized after the publication of Wiley’s articles in Giustizia e Libertà, and it took them a couple of months to identify the person hiding behind the alias Burnett. In the meantime, having returned to Italy, Wiley continued to try to organize a network of Giustizia e Libertà sympathizers. 23 Yet, during his next trip to Paris, in May 1937, he noticed that his mail was being monitored, and realizing he had been identified—by OVRA agents infiltrated in the G&L organization—he did not return to Italy. Working with Aldo Garosci, Rosselli’s lieutenant in G&L, he tried to maintain contacts with the group in Florence through Elvira Rapaccini. Unfortunately, their emissary turned out to be an OVRA agent who led to the arrest of 17 people at the end of July 1937, 5 of whom were sent to the prison islands for five years and three for two years.24

43 In many ways Robert Wiley’s experience in Fascist Italy was paradoxical. His American- grown radicalism led to his determined engagement against the dictatorship which, in turn, led to his estrangement from his host country and the destruction of his small Florentine network. No “irresponsibility of the outsider” in this case, quite the contrary. Yet the dire consequences of his engagement did not flow from his antifascist stance, but rather from the totalitarian context that strove to crush even the most timid acts of opposition, as his Italian companions well understood.25

Conclusion

44 The fascist dictatorship was a revealing test for values absorbed at home that were either reinforced or altered in the process. In the case of Page, Southern aristocratic conservatism morphed quite easily into fascist nationalism. Confronted with the “sincere adherents of fascism” Irigo’s aristocratic aloofness gave way to blind conformity to the tenets of the regime. Berenson who had never been political before the war understood very early on how fascism threatened the liberal ethos that provided him with a solid compass to choose his side. As for Robert W. Wiley, his radicalism aligned him naturally with the victims of the dictatorship. The diversity of the American expatriates’ attitudes toward the Fascist dictatorship in Italy indicates that no sweeping generalizations, such as those proposed by the studies of the inter- war literary self-exiles, can encompass the expatriate experience. The notion of “outsider,” in particular, obscures more than it reveals and cannot explain the nature of the expatriates’ engagement with their host society. Adopting a transnational approach that focuses on the circulation of peoples and ideas, this paper has paid particular attention to “the social space they inhabited, the networks they formed and the ideas they exchanged” (Clavin, 2005, 422), thereby illustrating the complex articulation between several determinants: personal and family trajectories, social background, values imbued in the United States, professional and economic interests, contacts with the host country, the dialectical tension between rootlessness and belonging, nationalism and transnationalism.

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SPINI, Giorgio, Antonio CASALI, “L’antifascismo popolare,” in Giorgio Spini and Antonio Casali, Firenze, vol. 2, Bari, Laterza, 133-63.

STEEL, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, London, Transaction Publishers, 1998.

STRACHEY, Barbara, Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Women, New York, Universe Books, 1982.

SUSMAN, Warren I., “A Second Country: The Expatriate Image,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 3, 2, 1961, 171-83.

THOMPSON, Doug, State Control in Fascist Italy, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1991.

TIMPANARO, Maria Augusta and Sebastiano, “Introduzione” in Gino and Emirene Varlecchi, Potente, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1975, 4-40.

TOSI, Marie-Jose Cambieri, Carlo Placci. Maestro di cosmopoli nella Firenze tra otto e novecento, Florence, Vallecchi, 1984.

VALELLY, Richard M., Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy, Chicago, the University of Chicago Press, 1989.

VANCE, William L., America’s Rome, vol. 2, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 1989.

WANROOIJ, Bruno B.F., ed., Otherness: Anglo-American Women in 19th and 20th Century Florence, Florence, Cadmo, 2001.

WATERFIELD, Lina, Castle in Italy, London, J. Murray, 1961.

WEAVER, William, A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of Villa I Tatti, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1997.

WILSON, Charles Reagan, “Expatriates and Exiles,” in Eric Foner and John Arthur Garraty, eds., The Reader’s Companion to American History, Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1991, 269-372.

WOOLF, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1936-41, Anne Olivier Bell, ed., vol. 5, London, Penguin, 1984.

NOTES

1. More than 40,000 Southerners chose to leave the United States after the victory of the Union, making up the largest group of American expatriates in the nineteenth century (Harter, 2000; Guterl, 2008, 80-92).

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2. “George N. Page To Join Fascists,” Washington Post, September 19, 1933, 2; “G.N. Page To Drop Citizenship Here,” New York Times, September 19, 1933, 23; “Page Scion Converted To Fascism,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1933, 3. 3. « Relazione sull’attività dell’Ufficio Radio », October 1935, Min. Cul. Pop., b. 95, fasc. 14 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. 4. For an official report on his last trip to Berlin in October 1942, see Min Cul Pop b. 87, fasc. 1, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. 5. “Allies Seize Former Yank, Rome Radio Aid,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 16, 1944; “Allies Arrest Radio-casters of Fascist Era,” Christian Science Monitor, July 17, 1944; “Allies in Italy Hold George Nelson Page,” New York Times, July 16, 1944, 17; “Allies in Rome Seize Former U.S. Citizen,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1944; “8 Americans on Axis Radio Indicted Here For Treason,” Washington Post, July 27, 1943. Page benefited from the generous Togliatti amnesty of former fascists and participated until his death in numerous extreme-right groups and subversive activities in Italy generally sponsored by the C.I.A. 6. This often-used expression in reference to Italy is borrowed from Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation,” http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html, l.57 (last accessed on 08/04/2013). 7. The Florence and Italian Mail was published from December 1922 to September 1932. 8. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Mary Berenson, December 23, 1924, Berenson Archives, I Tatti. 9. Mary Berenson diaries, Wednesday 25 October, 192, Tuesday 7 November, 1922, Berenson Archives, I Tatti. Mary Berenson’s diaries show that Salvemini visited I Tatti several times a week in the early 1920s before his forced exile. 10. Segretario particolare del Duce, ins. Ugo Ojetti, November 2, 1925, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. 11. Letters from Mary Berenson to Walter Lippmann, February 18, 1926 and April 19, 1926 in Berenson, 1983, 259-60. 12. Mary Berenson’s diaries, 1927, 1930, 1931, Berenson Archives, I Tatti. 13. Letter of Mary Berenson to Mrs. Berenson, April 30, 1928, in Berenson, 1983, 271-22. 14. The nine articles were published under the title “Viaggio in Italia” in Giustizia e Libertà, February 9, 12, 19, 26, March 5, 12, 19, April 30 and May 7, 1937. 15. Polizia Politica, fasc. personali, b. 1461, fasc. Wiley, Winston Robert, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. 16. Introduction to R.W. Wiley, “The Opposition to Mussolini,” Common Sense, January 1937. 17. Letter from Wiley to Elvira Rapaccini, May 22, 1937, Polizia Politica, b. 1461, fasc. Wiley. 18. “What Does our Platform Means?”, Common Sense, December 29, 1932. 19. Final Report, August 11, 1937, Polizia Politica, Wiley. Eliseo Tealdi worked as a translator; Antonio Sorelli was a journalist and essayist who published a book on the United States, Questa è l’America (Milan, 1945); Renato Paresce was a well-known painter associated with the Italians of Paris—De Chirico, Severini, Modigliani—who also wrote a book after a long visit to the United States in 1935, L’Altra America (Troïs, De Rosa, 2004). 20. Final report, August 8, 1937, Polizia Politica, Wiley; George Burnett [R.W. Wiley], “Viaggio in Italia – La lotta contro il fascismo”, Giustizia e Libertà, March 19, 1937, 4. 21. Letter from Police Inspector D’Andrea to the Chief of the Political Police in Rome, May 5, 1937, Polizia Politica, Wiley. 22. George Burnett [R.W. Wiley], “Viaggio in Italia – Firenze”, Giustizia e Libertà, February 12, 1937, 2; George Burnett [R.W. Wiley], “Viaggio in Italia – la lotta contro il Fascismo” Giustizia e Libertà, March 19, 1937, 4; R.W. Wiley, “The Opposition to Mussolini”, Common Sense, January 1937. 23. Letter from Paris, April, 19, 1937; letter from the Chief of Police to Inspectors in Milan, Bologna and Roma, May 11, 1937, Polizia Politica, Wiley.

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24. Final Report, August 11, 1937, Polizia Politica, Wiley. 25. Letter in English from Florence, dated July 9, 1937, no signature but probably from Sardelli, telling Wiley he had been right to publish the articles in Giustizia e Libertà, Polizia Politica, Wiley.

ABSTRACTS

The article looks at expatriation as one of the many borderlands where Americans have been brought into contact with other cultures and social realities. In trying to make sense of the relationship expatriates have established with their chosen country, it questions the notion of an “outsider status” often claimed by the self-exiled writers of the 1920s. It looks instead at the contradictory personal and social dynamics that have determined the nature of the expatriates’ engagement with their host society. It focuses on expatriates in Italy during the twenty years of the fascist regime and combines a typological and biographical approach. It analyzes four possible stands toward the dictatorship —active pro-fascist, passive pro-fascist, passive anti- fascist, active anti-fascist—through the experience of four expatriates: George Nelson Page, scion of the famous Virginia planter family; Iris Cutting Origo, raised among the wealthy Anglo- American colony of Florence; the art critique Bernard Berenson and Robert Winston Wiley, a young radical from the Mid-West who contributed articles to the magazine Common Sense. This approach highlights the complex articulation of a number of personal, social and political determinants that fashioned the attitude these expatriates adopted toward the dictatorship. It also indicates that the expatriate experience does not lend itself to sweeping generalizations but needs to be carefully contextualized and historicized.

Cet article considère l’expatriation comme une des nombreuses frontières où les Américains sont entrés en contact avec d’autres cultures et réalités sociales. En essayant de saisir la nature des relations entre les expatriés et leur pays d’accueil, il remet en question la notion d’un statut d’« outsider » souvent revendiqué par les écrivains exilés volontaires des années 1920, pour prendre en compte les dynamiques personnelles et sociales contradictoires qui ont façonné les rapports entre les expatriés et la société où ils se trouvaient. Il s’intéresse au cas des expatriés américains en Italie durant les vingt années de la dictature fasciste en combinant une approche typologique et biographique. Il analyse quatre attitudes possibles face à la dictature — profasciste actif, profasciste passif, antifasciste passif et antifasciste actif — à travers l’expérience de quatre expatriés : George Nelson Page, descendant de la grande famille de planteurs virginiens, Iris Cutting Origo, élevée au sein de la riche colonie anglo-américaine de Florence, le critique d’art Bernard Berenson et Robert Winston Wiley, un jeune militant radical du Mid-West qui écrivait pour la revue Common Sense. Cette approche souligne l’articulation complexe d’un certain nombre de déterminants personnels, sociaux et politiques qui ont influencé l’attitude de ces expatriés face à la dictature. Il démontre aussi que l’expérience des expatriés ne se prête pas facilement à des généralisations hâtives et demande à être précisément contextualisée et historicisée.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Expatriation, fascism, antifascism, propagande, réseaux transnationaux Keywords: expatriation, fascism, antifascism, propaganda, transnational networks

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AUTHOR

ISABELLE RICHET Université Paris Diderot

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“Relief is a political gesture:” The Jewish Labor Committee’s interventions in war-torn Poland, 1939-1945

Catherine Collomp

1

Introduction

2 The Jewish Labor Committee was founded in New York in February 1934 as a movement to combat Nazism and Fascism in Europe as well as their possible influence in the United States. Situated at the crossroads of organized Labor and American Jewry it assembled the American working class forces of the non-communist Jewish left mostly represented by the garment trades unions (International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, ILGWU, and Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, ACWA) and by the fraternal order of the Workmen’s Circle and other socialist and secular Jewish organizations (Left Poale Zion, Jewish Socialist Verband, the Jewish Daily Forward association). Together these organizations represented half a million persons, which only constituted a fragment of the US labor movement, and a fraction of the total Jewish-American population. Yet the JLC stood at the vanguard of American labor’s position in the fight against Nazism and Fascism. The JLC’s self-ascribed mission was multiple as subsumed in its title as defending both Jewish and labor interests. As expressed in its constitution, the JLC had come into existence to “give aid to Jewish and non Jewish labor institutions overseas; to assist the democratic labor movement in Europe; provide succor to victims of oppression and persecution and to combat anti- Semitism and racial and religious intolerance abroad and in the United States”.1 This multiple vision came from the Bundist history of the JLC’s founders. Nearly all of them (certainly the initial leaders B.C. Vladeck, Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky), before they emigrated to the United States, had been actively engaged in the struggle for the

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defense of the Jewish working class in the Zone of settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, founded in 1897, had made it its mission to defend Jewish workers as workers but also as Jews, to fight for their political and economic rights, defend their language (Yiddish) and secular culture against the tsarist repression.

3 In the interwar years, in independent Poland, the Bund, a non-communist but socialist workers’ party, had maintained these objectives of cultural autonomy and defense of the Jewish proletariat. Since 1930 its affiliation with the Labor and Socialist International connected it to the whole European non-communist left.

4 Because of their background as former political refugees themselves, the JLC leaders who had had to seek refuge in the United States, were acutely sensitive to the two- pronged aspects of the Nazi persecution exerted against Jews and the labor movements in the countries under German domination. In that sense their movement diverged from mainstream American labor organizations whose tradition of political neutrality isolated them from European labor institutions. In addition the JLC also diverged from the major Jewish organizations in America, most of which represented more middle class and Zionist interests.2 Often cooperating with them against anti-Semitic prejudice and Nazi propaganda, the JLC nevertheless stressed that the struggle against anti- Semitism should not be fought only as a Jewish concern but should be part of a larger combat borne by the solidarity of international labor forces.

5 This paper explores the relationship between the humanitarian and the political motivations underlying the JLC’s operations. In other words it represents an attempt to probe the relationship between its Jewish and Labor motivations. In the course of their action, the JLC officers emphasized one or the other dimension of their struggle. The first phase of the JLC’s operations, clearly political, has already been explored in previous publications (Collomp, 2003, 2004, 2005; Jacobs; Malmgreen). These highlight how the JLC was able to save prominent anti-Nazi and antifascist leaders and political activists from certain arrest by the Gestapo in the advance of the German army in Poland and in France. On the whole, some 1500 European labor and socialist leaders, whether Jewish or not, and family members, were thus brought to a safe haven in the United States or to other countries in the western hemisphere in 1940 and 1941. This operation, which saved cadres of the European socialist and social-democratic labor movements, however, was drawing to a close during the last months of 1941 and had ended by the time the United States entered the war. After this first and political phase of its interventions, as the Nazi onslaught against Jews became massive, systematically destructive, and final, the JLC’s commitment to save Jewish lives became predominant. At the same time, the JLC gave political support to the underground labor and social- democratic organizations in Nazi-dominated countries. Concerning the combatants in the Jewish ghettos of Poland, no distinction contrasting Labor to Jewish concerns would make sense. In the JLC’s own administrative language the distinction was often posited as between “rescue” (of political leaders) and “relief” (of the Jewish masses) or between the support of “underground labor” and “ aid to the ghettos”.3 Yet in the tragic and extreme situation of Polish Jews during World War II, both the humanitarian support of the ghettos and the financing of their resistance against the German forces were necessary.

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The JLC as a relief organization?

6 After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, understanding that the war had placed the 3.5 million Polish Jews “in a virtual hell,” the JLC wondered whether it should not transform itself into another relief institution. The situation was appalling. By 1940, Polish Jews had been turned into refugees in the region of the General Government controlled by the Germans as well as in the East under Soviet rule. By November, all major cities had Jewish ghettos; 400,000 persons were crammed in the Warsaw ghetto, an area formerly designed to house 150,000 people. Jews were deprived of their property, means of livelihood, and forced into slave labor. Poverty was extreme, disease widespread. In the spring of 1941, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or Joint) recognized that it could hardly alleviate the hardship of half of the 1.8 million Jews in the part of Poland controlled by the Germans. Another 1.3 million Jews were unreachable in the Russian controlled area (Bauer, 94-103; Engel, 1987). If the Joint could not alleviate such misery, independent JLC funding would have been even less adequate. Collaboration with the Joint and with the United Jewish Appeal, rather, was advocated and endorsed. Yet, the JLC did not simply become a branch of the JDC, it maintained its particular political goals as an independent organization. “The funds we raise are not only for relief, but also for labor aid, for underground work, and for defense work in America,” JLC executive director Isiah Minkoff asserted.4

7 The JLC position concerning relief had been reinforced by the appeal made to it by the delegation of the Polish Bund in the United States. Three of its members had reached New York in 1938-1939: former secretary of the Party’s Central Committee Emanuel Nowogrodzki, as well as Jacob Pat, and Benjamin Tabachinsky, both formerly engaged in the Party’s social work. The latter two were to play a central role in the development of the JLC’s relief activity. Upon their reports on the conditions in Poland in September 1939, the Bund representatives and JLC executive leaders decided to combine their relief activities under the aegis of the JLC in order to maximize their resources. Jacob Pat was appointed general secretary of the JLC and Tabachinsky responsible for fund- raising in American cities.5 According to these delegates, “relief [in Poland] as practiced by the Joint will not save the 3.5 million Jews. We cannot permit that the political, economic and cultural activities of the Jewish masses should stop. We must organize our relief work in America so that these activities should be strengthened and even broadened.”6 Such words meant that the JLC would develop its cooperation with the Joint, but would direct it in view of saving the political and cultural institutions created by the Bund. Under this interpretation, relief would not come only in the form of material aid but was also to be aimed at the political and intellectual institutions of the movement. As expressed by members of the Executive Committee, “the JLC assumes responsibility for the labor movement of Poland and for the emigration of labor people.”7 In the latter part of this sentence “emigration” referred to the rescue operation which was to take place in 1940-41. It must be recalled here that the JLC supported Bundist leaders and scholars who had found refuge in Lithuania, and again in July 1940 when they were trapped in this country now annexed by the Soviet Union, it financed the rescue of about 100 of them. The JLC provided money, affidavits and visas for their perilous escape through the USSR, Japan (before Pearl Harbor) and across the Pacific, and welcomed them when they reached the American West Coast in

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the first months of 1941.When the rescue operations from France and Lithuania came to an end, the JLC devoted its energy and resources to direct relief and support of the Jewish population in occupied Poland.

8 Evidence from the first years of the war is fragmentary and conjectural. Information from the provinces under German control only came from underground sources. Even less information leaked from the zone under Soviet domination. But from July 1941, when the German-Soviet Pact ended, the question of JLC aid to Jewish Polish refugees under Soviet control was put in renewed political and geographic terms. With the Soviet Union now part of the Allied forces, overt cooperation and direct action was possible. The JLC, in its historic opposition to Communism, however, had not done relief work in the USSR so far. This position prevented its leaders from sending relief to Jewish people fleeing the advance of the German army eastward. Yet not cooperating would have isolated the JLC from the anti-fascist “united front” with Communist organizations that was forming in the USA to combat Hitlerism. Had the JLC remained out of that front, it would have shirked its responsibility toward Jewish masses. Raphael Abramovitch (former head of the Russian Workers’ Social Democratic [Menshevik] Party), who had been rescued from France by the JLC in the fall of 1940), in spite of his ardent opposition to the Soviets, was of the opinion that the JLC must be part of a “united front” with Communist forces. “Every relief work is political work,” Benjamin Tabachinsky said when other JLC members argued that, contrary to the Joint, the JLC was not a relief organization or feared negative reactions to their fund-raising activity if they cooperated with Communist organizations. Isaiah Minkoff summed up the Committee’s discussion affirming that “the JLC is really a political organization,” and as such “we must be part of the relief organizations which will be organized. Only the Communists [so far] and the Joint are now able to work in Russia,” he said, enjoining the JLC to be part of that effort.8

9 Upon this recommendation, the JLC stepped up its campaign to collect clothing, tents, medicine and food for “Russian relief.” In agreement with the Russian consulate, the transportation of these parcels was to be shipped from Los Angeles to Vladivostock on Soviet ships. Between October 1941 and March 1942, the JLC sent 22 transports of clothing, an expense of $ 10,645. By the end of 1942, it had spent 104,347 dollars in its relief for Russia.9 In September 1944, the JLC collaborated with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), asserting that since 1941 it had collected clothing delivered to the Polish relief organizations for distribution among refugees in Russia. Clothing certainly was within the province of garment workers who thus donated a part of their labor for relief purposes, which came in addition to their financial contributions. By 1945 JLC president Adolph Held recapitulated that since 1941 the JLC had donated millions of pounds of clothing to Soviet Russia, amounting to $ 1,500,000.10 Communication with the Polish Embassy in Kuybishev (USSR) made information about humanitarian needs and the transfer of goods possible. Such contacts also allowed the tracing of hundreds of individuals to whom the JLC had sent remittances and food packages.11 This did not mean, however, that Polish Jews (let alone known Bundists) by then forced to become Soviet citizens, were always protected by the Soviet authorities.12 In March 1943, the release of the news of the assassination on Stalin’s order of the two internationally known leaders of the Polish Bund, Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter, did nothing to alleviate the JLC’s fears concerning other Bundist refugees and the Jewish civilian population in the USSR.13 In addition, Soviet- Polish relations continued to deteriorate over the Katyn affair in 1943.14 In this context

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of doubts and opposite forces shaping public opinion,15 the JLC pursued its policy of privileging its own sources of information and political choices for the distribution of its support.

Money and weapons for the Warsaw ghetto

10 The JLC’s support of Jewish organizations in the Polish ghettos went beyond strictly humanitarian concerns. In the extreme context of violence, want and terror in which the Jews were placed in the ghettos, the little support exterior organizations could provide was utterly and tragically inadequate. The complete isolation of the ghettos destroyed the channels through which philanthropic organizations, such as the Joint, transmitted funds. The ghettos were abandoned to the savagery of Nazi cruelty. Yet if the JLC’s action cannot be measured by what would have been even minimally necessary, the JLC leaders never forsook their “sacred sense of duty” as they learnt step by step the reality of final destruction. The question in this context was not only to direct help for survival, but to help the survivors fight in their insurrection against the final assaults of the occupant.

11 Their sources of information and transmission certainly belonged to political networks.

12 The incredulity with which the Allied powers learnt about the destruction of European Jewry and their absence of specific response to it has long been established (Lacqueur; Wyman, 42-58; Breitman and Kraut, 146-66). The following paragraphs only intend to point out that the Jewish Labor Committee never doubted the reality of the information coming from Poland and acted accordingly either on its own or in conjunction with other Jewish organizations. Through its contacts with the underground organization of the Bund resisting in the Warsaw ghetto, the JLC was among the very first American organizations to be informed of the systematic destruction of Jews in Poland. The Bund was the first political party to reorganize itself in the ghetto and it remained the most influential one (Blatman, 74, Edelman, 1946, 1). The active members of its Central Committee transmitted news to Szmul Zygielbojm who since April 1942 represented the Bund in the Polish government in exile in London, and who forwarded them to the Bund delegation in New York. Directly involved in the reception of couriers and messages from underground Jewish organizations in Poland, Zygielbojm became the source of information for the Western world on the fate of the Jewish population in Poland.16 The responsibility on his shoulders was also tragic for him. When the Warsaw ghetto uprising ended, its people having been massacred or deported, to protest against the Allied nations’ lack of response to the systematic annihilation of the Jews, on May 12 1943 Zygielbojm committed suicide.

13 Information on extermination started reaching Zygielbojm in the spring of 1942; it came from Leon Feiner, a member of the Central Committee of the Bund who was also in contact with the Polish Socialist Party underground. Able to work in and outside of the ghetto, Feiner became the agent of the Bund’s contacts with the exterior world. Leon Feiner’s first letter in May 1942 stated that over 700,000 Jews had been assassinated. It reported on the massacres in Vilno and Lvov, the deportations from Lublin, the gassing in sealed trucks at Chelmno, and the April 17 attack in Warsaw which had decimated the ranks of Bundist resistance.17 Indignant that the Polish government in London downplayed the news, and that the American press hardly mentioned it, the JLC joined the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish

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organizations in a petition to obtain a declaration by the President of the United States: “We respectfully request you, Mr. President to again raise the voice of America and its Allies in the defense of the most defenseless people in Europe.”18 In August of the same year the JLC’s Executive Committee was informed of the beginning of the German “action” aimed at eliminating the whole Jewish population from the Warsaw ghetto and received the news of the suicide of the president of the Judenrat Adam Czerniakow in July. With members of the Bund delegation, they held an evening of commemoration and mourning and now understood that protest was not enough. They perceived that Adam Czerniakow’s suicide was “a call for combat and resistance, and that the fight for a new world would be led with the Polish underground labor movement.”19 By the end of September, according to their sources, 256,000 Jews had been deported from Warsaw to Treblinka. On September 24, the JLC Executive Meeting met to share the news which had reached the Bund Representation in New York, from “underground movements in Poland” which raised the hope that “the walls of the ghetto [had] been unable to separate the Jewish and Polish underground movements in the preparation for armed resistance together.”20 Acting upon the underground movements’ demand that “knowledge about the Nazi massacres of the Jewish population in Poland, and the heroic resistance of the Jewish socialist movement be transmitted to American public opinion and especially to the organized working class”, the JLC held a special informative session during the American Federation of Labor’s Convention in October 1942. A long report prepared by the JLC was therefore read to the convention in which not only the latest information about the massacres in Poland was given but also facts and figures about deportations from France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.21 Recognizing that the cause for the Jews of Poland was linked to that of their brethren in the other occupied countries, the JLC internationalized its vision of resistance against Nazi tyranny. In late November 1942, the JLC received the contents of Leon Feiner’s second letter (written in August 1942) to Zygielbojm which further confirmed the massive deportation from the Warsaw ghetto: “300,000 Jews were slaughtered in Warsaw between July 22 and October 2 [1942]. No more than a handful of our family [the Bund] remained alive. Medem sanatorium demolished. […] We are helpless and unless immediate relief is forthcoming we shall all perish. Deposit money with Polish Government which will forward it to us.”22 Simultaneously, JLC leaders received news of Jan Karski’s report to Zygielbojm in London. A courier for the underground Polish government and for the underground Army (Armia Krayova), Karski reported verbatim his encounter with two Jewish leaders in Warsaw - one of whom was Leon Feiner - and of his clandestine visit to the Belzec extermination camp. Unable, like the other Jewish American organizations with which it appealed to President Roosevelt, to move the US Administration and the Allied Powers beyond their strategic goals, the JLC did not harbor illusions about the fate of the few surviving Jews resisting in Warsaw, as well as in other ghettos.23 The words transmitted by Karski had been unequivocal: “The ghetto is going to go up in flames. We are not going to die in slow torment, but fighting. We will declare war on Germany, the most hopeless declaration of war that was ever made” (Karski, 356). The JLC pursued its own course of action, committing itself to the transmission of money, not only for survival, but also for the support of armed resistance.

14 To some extent, the JLC’s channels of action defied American wartime legislation. It had been able to circumvent the US Trading with the Enemy Act which forbade the sending of relief in cash or kind to territories controlled by the enemy. Since 1942 with the US

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entry in the war, the Joint had thus been unable to pursue its activity in support of Polish Jews in the region of the General Government. And the destruction of its Warsaw agency had put an end to its official presence there. It was finally by aligning itself with the Jewish Labor Committee’s method of transmission of funds through Zygielbojm and the Polish government in London that the Joint was able to resume its relief activities in 1943 (Bauer, 332).

15 Indeed since 1941, the JLC had regularly sent money in increasing amounts to the organizations of the Warsaw ghetto, via the London government which parachuted these sums to Poland.24 Its records contain the list of checks sent to London, month after month from 1941 to 1944.25 These sums added up to 18,455 dollars in 1941; $ 28,393 in 1942; $ 113,000 in 1943; $ 182,000 in 1944. In addition, the JLC stated having transmitted $ 500,000 for the Joint in 1943-1944. Sometimes, the JLC could directly deliver the money when a visitor from the Polish government in exile came to the United States. Such was the case in September 1943, when $ 33,000 were given to the Finance Minister of Poland on a visit in New York, “for aid to the Jewish People in Poland and for the Jewish underground anti-Nazi labor movement.”26 The JLC generally received news that its money had been received. In 1944, Jacob Pat asserted that “the Jewish underground movement in Poland confirms the receipt of $ 81,000 remitted for rescue and relief.”27 Mail between Jacob Pat and various Polish representatives reveals that money was generally sent in monthly installments ($ 5000, $ 7000 or $ 10,000 sums) via London, and specifically destined to certain political groups, such as Bund, Polish Socialist Party, Left Poale Zion, Zionist Youth Organization, Polish Labor Underground. In July 1944, Jacob Pat sent a check of $ 40,000 for the Polish Underground movement.28 In a 1944 memo recapitulating financial assistance to Poland, Jacob Pat stressed that this aid had served both humanitarian and political objectives, and supported several Jewish groups:

16 The largest amount of money collected by the Jewish Labor Committee was shipped to help the Jews in the ghettos, for Jewish rescue, and to give assistance to the underground movement in the occupied countries in general. As an illustration, we merely wish to cite the expenditures of the JLC in 1944. Out of an income of half a million dollars, the JLC appropriated $ 360,241 for this purpose. One quarter of a million dollars of this money went to the Jews in the ghettos. The general Jewish budget in Poland in 1943 and 1944, was covered by the Jewish Labor Committee to the extent of 50%. I emphasize “general Jewish budget”. That means for all Jewish needs, such as hiding, as well as rescuing Jews, and providing them with food, etc. In the city of Warsaw alone, the JLC was instrumental in giving sustenance to 10,000 Jews. One half of the resources for this purpose was provided by the JLC, and the remainder by other Jewish funds. It is a lie to say that the Jewish Labor Committee gave support to only ONE group in Poland. As pointed out above, the JLC covered 50% of the general Jewish budget, for general relief purposes. In addition, it gave assistance to the underground groups of the Bund, Right and Left Poale Zion and Hashomer Hatzoir [sic]. The Youth of the Hashomer Hatzoir played an important role in the fight of the ghettos.29

17 The contents of Pat’s letter confirm that the JLC provided relief to surviving Polish Jews in or out of the ghetto on an equal basis with the Joint. Secondly the letter highlights Pat’s distinction between the “general Jewish budget” for relief and the JLC’s support of Jewish political organizations for their preparation for the defense of the ghetto.

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18 In the fall of 1942, the survivors in the ghetto organized themselves for combat. They formed the Jewish Fighting Organization representing every Jewish ideological group in the ghetto.30 Among them members of the youth organizations - Tsukunft (Bundist) and Hashomer Hatzair (Left Poale Zion) - were predominant. Young Marek Edelman represented the Bund in this coalition (Goldstein, Edelman, 1946, 1993). The whole ghetto turned towards preparing for battle. The problem of obtaining weapons was crucial. They hoped for the support of the underground Polish parties to help them in this crucial mission. “We bought stolen arms from guards at army dumps, from German soldiers, from Poles who worked in arm factories. With restless hysteria, we explored every avenue, tracked down every lead, knowing that the end was close and that we must be ready”(Goldstein, 174). Obvious sources were the official underground Polish Army (Armia Kryova), and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). In its hope that Jewish and Polish militants would fight for their common liberation, and out of political solidarity with the PPS, the JLC from its end contributed to financing the Polish Socialist organizations through their New York representatives as well as in Poland.31 It had consistently contributed to Poland Fights, a publication launched by the Polish Labor Group in New York. It offered to support the underground Polish socialist party, especially when it sensed that unity could be reached on the two sides of the wall. Jacob Pat specified to Wladyslaw Malinowski (the PPS representative in New York) that “the Jewish Labor Committee’s assignments for aid to Poland were made on the basis of the appeal from the Jewish underground movement in Poland through the Representation of the Bund in America. We had reasons to believe that the Jewish underground movement in Poland gives certain sums to the Polish underground movement when necessary for their purposes.”32 Exchange between the Jewish and Polish underground organizations went both ways. In early 1943, when four groups of fighters in the ghetto had been able to stop a new SS raid on January 18, and killed some 20 German soldiers in the action, the Polish Army (AK) in recognition of such efficiency, sent a number of rifles, hand grenades, plastic charges, and one machine gun to the ghetto combatants (Krakowski, 176; Edelman 1946, 31).

19 The desired unity between the Jewish and the Polish resistance did not materialize. At least not in combat. When SS battalions attacked the ghetto on April 19 1943 with armored cars, machine guns, and tanks, the “remnants” of the Jewish population found themselves alone. They were able to resist longer than the time forecast by the German army which had planned a three-day operation to liquidate the ghetto. With what military armament the Jewish fighters had been able to gather, their determination and desperate use of every strategic point and bunker enabled them to resist for four weeks and allowed some of them time to escape to the Aryan side.

20 When only rubble and smoke remained from the burning ghetto, the struggle continued for surviving Jews hiding among Aryans. Vladka Meed, a young woman who worked with Leon Feiner and served as a courier for the Jewish Coordinating Committee and the Jewish Fighting Organization has given evidence that JLC money was received and provided material help for survival: Funds eventually began to reach us through the same underground channels. First mainly from the Jewish Labor Committee in the United States. Subsequently from other Jewish organizations and to some extent from the Polish government in exile as well. The money reached the Coordinating Committee in American dollars which were exchanged for zlotys on the black market.

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The primary objectives of the Coordinating Committee were to supply material aid for Jews hidden in the Aryan sector, provide them with the necessary documents, finding hiding places, aid for the children, establish contacts with inmates of slave labor camps, with Jewish partisans and with friends abroad. And to keep constant touch with the Polish underground. In Warsaw alone and nearby areas we ministered to some 12,000 persons. (Meed, 182; see also Edelman 1993, 96; Goldstein, 251).

21 Reporting its activity for 1944, the JLC stated that it had sent “large sums of money to the ghettos. This money was distributed for relief and rescue, for aid in the labor and concentration camps, for the underground movement and for the necessary preparations for resistance”.33

22 From the winter of 1943, the JLC enlarged the scope of its action in the United States and made it more public. First it started publishing a monthly magazine, Voice of the Unconquered, which regularly reported on events concerning Jewish people, the resistance movements in European countries, and finally on the progress of liberation. The organ’s coverage of the Jewish question to some extent filled the void left by the main commercial press which often “ignored” news on the subject or relegated it to back pages (Lipstadt, 218-240). Every month the pages were filled with news from Poland; very often they reported on the situation in France, and also on Holland, Belgium and Norway. In 1945, the JLC organized the first exhibition on ”Martyrs and Heroes of the Ghetto”; its opening on April 19 commemorated the beginning of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto two years before. The JLC cooperated with the War Refugee Board from its inception in 1944, and contributed to the rescue of a number of Hungarians by offering channels of evacuation for them and providing visas for admission in the United States or in another country. In April 1945, JLC president Adolph Held participated in the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco where he presented “a 13 point program on reconstruction of Jewish life in Europe”. The world labor leaders in attendance pledged their full backing and support of the JLC document.34 When the war was over in Europe, the JLC collaborated with the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) for the resettlement of Displaced Persons. And from 1946 it was active in funding reconstruction programs for the surviving Jews of Poland and in France (Pâris de Bollardière, 2012, 2013). In the winter of 1946, Jacob Pat made a journey to his native Poland. From town to town, where he had once organized relief networks and the system of Yiddish schools, Pat learnt about the tragedy in each community. In collaboration with the Central Jewish Committee, which spoke for the approximately 80,000 survivors, he defined the most urgent needs, and how they could be met. Upon his return in the United States, Pat proposed a $ 250,000 budget (for 1946) for the support of workers’ cooperatives, housing, cultural institutions, immediate relief (food and clothing), the preservation of historic archives. That sum was part of a 1 million dollars budget to cover all such expenses in Europe.35

23 °°°

24 An enormous gap remained between what help was provided to the forsaken ghetto fighters and what would have been necessary to save more lives. The subject has become an intense subject of deploration by American historians and by the Western World. In these few lines, by looking at the JLC’s work on behalf of Polish Jews, I have tried to impart the notion that the Jewish Labor Committee never abandoned its Jewish brothers in their tragic destiny. Although its leaders were well aware of the insufficient

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amount of the support they could offer, they never tired of organizing campaigns to collect money among their constituency of American workers, Jewish or not, who belonged to the sectors of organized labor from which they sprang. The political links historically existing between the JLC in the United States and the (non-communist) left- wing Jewish organizations in pre- war Poland and then among survivors in the ghetto defined the axis of their support, which served both humanitarian and political causes. And if one looks back a few decades earlier in time, it is because these JLC leaders had been Bundist militants in their youth in the Russian empire fighting against a tyrannical power, or had cooperated with the interwar Polish Bund, that they were politically, culturally and linguistically connected to the Jewish parties and organizations which ordained life in the ghetto. Neither immigration to the United States nor the Americanizing effect of their prominent leadership in the US labor movement had diluted the political dimension of their involvement. As demonstrated by the case of their support of Polish Jews, they were able to become the interlocutors of a Government in exile, and of underground political parties and labor movements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival sources:

Records of the Jewish Labor Committee, Holocaust Era, Part I, 1934-1947, Robert Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, New York.

Bibliography/ Works cited

BAUER, Yehuda, American Jewry and the Holocaust, The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945, Detroit, Wayne State Univ. Press, 1981.

BLATMAN, Daniel, Notre Liberté et la vôtre, Le mouvement ouvrier juif Bund en Pologne, 1939-49, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 2002.

BREITMAN, Richard, and KRAUT, Allen, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987.

COLLOMP, Catherine, “ Le Jewish Labor Committee: Deux générations de réfugiés politiques”, in Catherine Collomp et Mario Menéndez, dirs., Exilés et réfugiés politiques aux Etats-Unis, 1789-2000, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2003.

COLLOMP, Catherine, “I nostri compagni d’America: The Jewish Labor Committee and the Rescue of Italian Antifascists, 1934-41”, Altreitalie, 28, gennaio-giugno 2004, 66-83.

COLLOMP, Catherine, “The Jewish Labor Committee, American Labor, and the Rescue of European Socialists, 1934-1941”, International Labor and Working Class History, Fall 2005, 112-133.

EDELMAN, Marek, The Ghetto Fights, New York American Representation of the General Jewish Workers Union in Poland, New York, 1946.

EDELMAN, Marek, Mémoires du ghetto de Varsovie, Un dirigeant de l’insurrection raconte, Paris, Liana Levi, 1993.

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ENGEL, David, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, The Polish Government in Exile and the Jews, 1939-42, Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press,1987.

ENGEL, David, Facing a Holocaust, The Polish Government in Exile, 1943-45, Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993.

FEINGOLD, Henry L., The Jewish People in America, A Time for Searching, 1920-1945, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

GOLDSTEIN, Bernard, The Stars Bear Witness, New York, Viking Press, 1949.

JACOBS, Jack, “A Friend in Need: The Jewish Labor Committee and Refugees from the German Speaking Lands, 1933-1945”, Yivo Annual, 23, 1996, 391-417.

KARSKI, Jan, Story of a Secret State, My Report to the World, (1944), Penguin Books, 2012.

KRAKOWSKI, Shmuel, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-44, London, Homes and Meier, 1984.

LAQUEUR, Walter, The Terrible Secret, An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler’s “Final Solution”, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980.

LEBOWITZ, Arieh and MALMGREEN, Gail, eds., Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York Univesity: The Papers of the Jewish Labor Committee, vol. 14 of Archives of the Holocaust, ed. by Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, New York, Garland Publishing, 1993.

LIPSTADT, Deborah, Beyond Belief, The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, New York, Free Press, 1986.

MALMGREEN, Gail, “Labor and the Holocaust, The Jewish Labor Committee and the Anti-Nazi Struggle, Labor's Heritage, 3, Oct. 1991, 20-35.

MEED, Vladka, On Both Sides of the Wall, (1948), Washington D.C., US Memorial Museum, 1999.

PARIS de BOLLARDIERE, Constance, « Mutualité, fraternité et travail social chez les bundistes de France (1944-47) », Archives Juives, 45/1, 2012, p. 47-43.

PARIS de BOLLARDIERE, “The Jewish Labor Committee’s Bundist Relief Network in France, 1945-1948”, Jewish History Quarterly, , 246/2, 2013, 293-301.

PAT, Jacob, Ashes and Fire, New York, International Universities Press, 1947.

WALTZER, Kenneth, “American Jewish Labor and Aid to Polish Jews During the Holocaust”, unpublished paper presented at the 17th Annual Conference on the Holocaust and the Church struggle, march 1987, United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

WYMAN, David, The Abandonment of the Jews, America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, New York, New Press, 1984.

NOTES

1. “Jewish Labor Committee Constitution”, Records of the Jewish Labor Committee Holocaust Era, 1934-1947, R1, Box 1, Folder 1, Robert Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, (hereafter cited as JLC, followed by microfilm Reel, Box and Folder numbers). 2. With the exception of the American Jewish Committee and the JLC, the major Jewish organizations in America were Zionist. 3. 3 « JLC Report for 1944 », JLC R2, B1, F18.

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4. Meeting of the Office Committee, Dec. 26, 1940, JLC R1, B1, F6. By “defense work in America”, Minkoff indicated the fight against anti-Semitism in the United States. 5. JLC Executive Committee, Nov. 8 1939, JLC R1, B1, F3; Blatman, 163-65. 6. “Situation in Poland”, JLC Executive Committee, Sept. 7 1939, JLC R1, B1, F3. 7. Executive Committee, November 8, 1939, JLC R1, B1, F3. 8. July 8 1941, Office Committee, JLC R1, B1, F6. 9. May 14 1942, Executive Committee, JLC R1, B1, F7; R130, B44, F7. 10. Jacob Pat, to UNRRA, sept. 6. 1944, JLC R130, B44, F12; Jacob Pat stated that a total of $ 170,807 had been spent on help to Soviet Russia between 1942 and 1944, this figure did not include the sending of clothing, JLC R2, B1, F17; A. Held, J. Pat and B. Tabaschinsky, “Memorandum”, 1945, JLC R2, B1, F19. 11. Correspondence between Jacob Pat and Sylwin Strakacz, Minister plenipotentiary and Consul General for Poland (New York), 1943-44, JLC R 40, B17, F9; Embassy of Poland, correspondence with Lazar Epstein, JLC R40, B17, F10. 12. All Polish citizens on Russian territory were declared Soviet citizens by November 1939. But in July 1941, Soviet authorities restored Polish citizenship to all except minorities: Ukrainian Lithuanians, White Russians, and Jews (all “non Poles”) who remained Soviet citizens. 13. In fact Erlich committed suicide in his cell in March 1942 and Alter was executed on February 17 1943. The information on their death was released at the favorable moment for USSR in international public opinion, that is after the Stalingrad victory. In New York, the JLC and representatives of the Bund led protest demonstrations on March 30 1943 (Engel, 1993, 55-62; Blatman, 101-24). 14. The discovery by German military forces, in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, of mass graves of executed Polish officers. The Soviets, whose responsibility was only officially recognized in the 1990’s, had denied their role in the massacre attributing it to the German invaders. 15. David Engel suggests that it was doubtful whether there was a unity of interests between the Jewish and the Polish communities in the government in exile and remarks that in spite of the Katyn affair, world Jewish opinion remained favorable to the USSR, Facing a Holocaust, 72-74. 16. Zygielbojm shared this responsibility with Zionist leader Ignacy Schwarzbart who also represented Jewish interests in the Polish government in exile. 17. Leon Feiner’s letter is mentioned in Blatman, p. 185-86. 18. President Roosevelt’s response, July 17, 1942, expressed « sympathy with all victims of Nazi crimes, but will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come » JLCR40, B17, F1. 19. Refusing to apply the Gestapo’s order of providing 10,000 victims everyday, including children, for the deportations, Czerniakow took his own life. Minutes of the Executive Committee, August 26 1942 JLCR 1 B1 F3 (I thank Erez Levy for his translation from the Yiddish). It is also in August 1942 that Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress, Gerhart Riegner, sent a message informing the State Department of the massive extermination of Jews. The State Department however only allowed President of the World Jewish Congress Stephen Wise to divulge the contents of this message on November 24. 20. Minutes of the Sept. 24 1942 Executive Committee meeting, JLCR1, B1, F3 (transl. from the Yiddish). 21. JLC R1, B1, F3. American Federation of Labor, Proceedings of the 1942 Convention, October 5-14, Washington DC, p. 637-43. 22. Received from the Polish Embassy, JLC R40, B17, F7. 23. The JLC along with the American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis and the American Jewish Committee obtained an interview with President Roosevelt on December 8 1942, JLC R2, B1, F17. Their demand contributed to the December 17 1942 joint

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declaration by the Allied Nations who condemned Hitler’s « bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination ». 24. Marek Edelman, one rare survivor of the Ghetto combatants recalled “these parachuted dollars with which we were able to buy weapons” (Mémoire du ghetto, 152, 171); Waltzer. 25. JLC R 40, B17, F6; these sums are corroborated by Blatman’s sources, 208-09; see also Waltzer; Bauer, 329-34. 26. Adolph Held, Sept. 1943, to Jan Kwapinski, Vice Premier of the Polish Government, London, JLC R40, B17, F7. 27. Jacob Pat to Louis Berman head of the Left Poale Zion in Warsaw, New York, April 6 1944, JLC R130, B44, F12; the JLC donated $ 115,000 for 1943 and stated that $ 50,000 had been transferred to Poland in the first six weeks of 1944, Voice of the Unconquered (the JLC organ), June 1944 p. 6, JLC R159; memo on JLC sums sent to Poland, JLC R40, B17, F6. 28. Jacob Pat to Polish Embassy in Washington, JLC R 40, B17, F10. 29. JLC R2, B1, F17, see also Lebowitz and Malmgreen, 310. 30. Zhidowska Organizatzia Boyova (ZOB). 31. Malinowski to Jacob Pat, August 23 1943 ; Dec. 13 1943 ; February 9 1944, JLC R40, B17, F6. 32. Pat to Malinowski, June 23 1943, JLCR40, B17, F6. 33. “From Gas Chambers to a New Life”, JLC Report, 1944, JLC R2, B1, F8. 34. Voice of Unconquered June-July 1945, p. 1. 35. Pat, Ashes and Fire; Voice of the Unconquered, May-June 1946,1, 5. In addition to the approximate number of 80,000 Jewish survivors in Poland, some 150,000 Polish Jews were to return from Russia.

ABSTRACTS

This paper describes the role of an American organization, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), in the support of Jewish people in Poland during World War II. In the context of the division and occupation of Poland by the USSR and by Nazi Germany, the JLC’s help materialized in two ways: relief (generally in kind) was sent to Jewish refugees in Russia; money was sent for relief and for weapons to Jews in the General Government region under German rule. In the latter situation, the JLC contributed to support the preparations for the insurrection of the Warsaw ghetto. The channels of information and transmission by which the JLC acted are described in both cases. The common Bundist political culture shared by both the leaders of the JLC in New York (former political refugees themselves) and the most influential political organizations in the ghetto explains the JLC’s ability to come into contact with leaders of the ghetto and to react immediately to the news of the systematic destruction of the Jewish population. In this extreme case, the nature of the JLC’s interventions, a bridge between two worlds, is defined as being political as well as humanitarian.

Cet article décrit l’aide apportée aux Juifs de Pologne par une organisation américaine fondée à New York, le Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans la situation de la division et occupation de la Pologne par l’URSS et par l’Allemagne nazie l’aide matérielle du JLC se concrétisa de deux manières : aide humanitaire (généralement en nature) pour les réfugiés en URSS, et envoi d’argent pour la survie alimentaire mais aussi pour l’achat d’armes dans la région du Gouvernement général sous contrôle nazi. Dans ce dernier cas, le JLC

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contribua au soutien de l’insurrection du ghetto de Varsovie. Les voies de l’information et de la transmission de biens sont analysées dans les deux cas. La culture politique bundiste, partagée par les dirigeants du JLC à New York (anciens réfugiés politiques eux-mêmes) et par les dirigeants les plus influents du ghetto explique la capacité du JLC à entrer en contact avec la direction du ghetto et à réagir immédiatement dès que les nouvelles de la destruction systématique de la population lui parvinrent. Dans ce contexte extrême, la nature de l’aide apportée par le JLC fut à la fois humanitaire et politique.

INDEX

Keywords: Jewish Labor Committee, Bundism, Poland, Warsaw Ghetto, World War II Mots-clés: Jewish Labor Committee, bundisme, Pologne, Ghetto de Varsovie, Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

AUTHOR

CATHERINE COLLOMP Université Paris-Diderot, France

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American Jewish Mobilization in France after World War II: Crossing the Narratives

Laura Hobson Faure

Introduction

1 Before, during and after World War II, American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to assist Jews in Europe who were suffering from Nazi persecution and its aftermath. Mobilizations occurred in various arenas of American Jewish life, under multiple organizational auspices, showing the class, ideological and even ethnic diversity of American Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s. Some organized boycotts of German products on the grassroots level, some worked to raise funds for rescue, while others sought to pressure the Roosevelt administration to respond more aggressively to Nazi persecution and reform US immigration laws (Gottleib, 1982 ; Gurock, 1998 ; Zuroff, 2000). The Jewish Labor Committee, for example, played an important role in the emigration of threatened labor activists and political leaders from wartime Europe, demonstrating the distinct response of one sub-group of American Jewry (Collomp, 2000, 23-30 ; Collomp and Groppo, 2001, 211-46 ; Collomp, 2005, 112-33).1 In spite of such documented efforts, the historiography has at times portrayed American Jews as indifferent to the plight of European Jews or incapable, due to internal divisions, to successfully pressure the Roosevelt administration (Feingold, 1983 ; 1992, 225-265 ; 1995 ; Peck, 1980 ; Penkower, 1980, 122-39 ; Wyman, 1984). Historian David Wyman, for example, opens his study on the United States and the Shoah with the following statement : “America, land of refuge, offered little succor. American Christians forgot about the Good Samaritan. Even American Jews lacked the unquenchable sense of urgency the crisis demanded. The Nazis were the murderers, but we were the all too passive accomplices. (xiii)”.

2 My research on American Jewish efforts to reconstruct Jewish life in Europe in the period immediately following World War II has sought to question the

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historiographical discourses on both the American Jewish response to the Shoah and American presence in postwar France.2 By analyzing what was later called the “Jewish Marshall Plan” in France (Goldman, 1998, 68), this article will ask to what extent American Jewish organizations and individuals were able to influence the reconstruction of European Jewish life. After an overview of the “Jewish Marshall Plan,” this article will focus specifically on the accomplishments of the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the American Jewish organization that ran the most extensive program in France after World War II. Two personal accounts will help elucidate how individuals perceived their respective partner in reconstruction.

3 By looking at the interactions among American and European individuals and organizations, linked by their shared desire to reconstruct Jewish life, we can approach this period from the “bottom up,” on the scale of a community, and nuance the portrait of American dominance and expansionism in the post World War II period.3 This methodological orientation is part of the histoire croisée method, theorized by Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, which argues that : […] the entities, persons, practices or objects that are intertwined with, or affected by, the crossing process do not necessarily remain intact and identical in form. Their transformations are tied to the active as well as inactive nature of their coming into contact. Such transformations are usually based on reciprocity (both elements are affected by their coming into contact), but also may derive from asymmetry (the elements are not affected in the same manner). (2006, 38).4

4 With its emphasis on the dynamic nature of encounters between groups, and an awareness of the unequal power dynamics that can characterize their interaction, this method is particularly useful for thinking about the American Jewish presence in postwar Europe, as it allows us to avoid the oversimplified assumption that American funding led to a linear process of “Americanization.” By “crossing” French and American sources from organizations and individuals, it becomes clear that even when “Americanization” did in fact take place, it was the outcome of a process in which Americans and local individuals participated. Let us turn to the example of the “Jewish Marshall Plan” in order to explore this process.

The “Jewish Marshall Plan”

5 American Jews contributed over 194 million dollars to the reconstruction of European Jewish life from 1945 through 1948 (Bauer, 1989, xviii). While American Jewish aid was distributed throughout Europe, France stands out as a particularly important site in the “Jewish Marshall Plan.” From 1944 through 1954, 26.9 million dollars were channeled to the Jews of France by one American Jewish organization alone.5 The importance of France to European Jewish reconstruction can be explained by demographic, geographic and structural factors : three quarters of the Jews of France had survived the war, meaning France had one of the highest Jewish survival rates in Western Europe.6 At liberation, with its Jewish population of 180,000 to 200,000 individuals, France was the home to the largest Jewish community in Western continental Europe.7 France’s ports provided access to the Americas and to Palestine, turning it into an important crossroads for postwar European Jewish migrations. As a result of such migrations, France was one of the rare places in Europe where the Jewish population was actually growing- by 1960, France had recovered its pre-war Jewish population figures (Grynberg, 1998, 267). While liberation marked the beginning of a difficult

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period in which Jews emerged from hiding and waited- often in vain- for the return of loved ones, most did not suffer in isolation. A diverse network of French Jewish welfare organizations had survived the war, which helped Jews as they sought to recover shattered lives and communities. These organizations provided a solid infrastructure into which American Jewish aid could be infused. Finally, as the first Western European country with a considerable Jewish population to be liberated, France was the first place American Jews began sending their aid. As a result of this fact and the above factors, Paris became a “hub” for American Jewish reconstruction work.8

The American Jewish Presence : A Diverse Group

6 Jewish members of the American Armed Forces were the first to assist European Jewish survivors. As they liberated France, such soldiers and chaplains sought out local Jews as they emerged from hiding and provided them with basic necessities, moral support and at times even military clout to help them reclaim their stolen property (Grobman, 1993 ; Hobson Faure, 2013, 74-89). This aid, significant yet difficult to quantify, co- existed, especially after December 1944, with the more formal efforts of American Jewish organizations.

7 The largest and most significant organizational response came from the American Joint Distribution Committee (known as the JDC or the Joint). This welfare organization was established in the United States at the outbreak of World War I to aid Jews affected by the conflict, and quickly became the official philanthropic representative of the American Jewish community overseas. In the interwar period, the JDC was especially active in the former Soviet Union and Poland, and played only a minor role in France until 1933. After this date, however, the JDC moved its European Headquarters from Berlin to Paris, where its intervention in France intensified in light of the Central European Jewish refugee crisis. It remained active in France throughout the war- even after the rupture of diplomatic ties between Vichy and Washington- and was able to contribute to an estimated 60 percent of the cost of the French Jewish resistance (Lazare, 1987, 282).9 In December of 1944, the JDC managed to send its first postwar American representative to France and began responding to the needs of Jewish orphans and refugees by funding a network of welfare organizations of diverse ideological affiliations within the French Jewish community.10

8 The JDC was not the only American Jewish organization to establish a program in postwar France. The Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS, also known as HICEM), established in New York at the end of the 19th century, was also active in France in the period leading up to World War II and during the war years, helping Jews emigrate from Europe. In the postwar period, this organization reestablished offices throughout France to help those who planned on leaving Europe. The American Jewish Committee, founded in the United States in 1906 to protect Jewish civil rights in the United States and abroad, established an office in Paris in 1947, where it sought to monitor anti-Semitism, facilitate the restitution of Jewish property, and, fitting with the period, fight Communism in French society. The National Council of Jewish Women, founded in 1893, established a home for young Jewish women in Paris and organized a scholarship program for European Jewish women to study social work and related subjects in American universities. Other American Jewish organizations, such as the Jewish Labor Committee, worked closely through their ideological counterparts in

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France, directing their aid to assist the members of their cause (Pâris de Bollardière, 2012). Still other organizations, such as the World Jewish Congress, or the World Union for Progressive Judaism, were not technically “American” organizations, yet deserve note because the majority of their funding, as well as the drive behind their French programs, came primarily from the United States.

9 This nebulous group, which I call the “American Jewish presence,” generated various levels of conflict due to the overlapping missions and limited funding of those involved. Yet infighting co-existed with collaborative efforts, and the JDC remained in a dominant position, due primarily to its funding from the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). The latter, established in the United States in 1939, unified all fundraising among American Jews for Palestine, Europe and domestic welfare needs into one national campaign. Its creation was significant, as it reduced competition among organizations, which thereafter coordinated their fundraising campaigns under UJA auspices and then collectively negotiated the distribution of the funds according to the most urgent needs. Since the inception of the UJA, the JDC annually received more than half of what was raised by the UJA, which financed its rescue and reconstruction work in Europe.11 The JDC thus had the most extensive funding and, as a UJA beneficiary, the official mandate of American Jewry.

The Joint Distribution Committee

10 The JDC was arguably the American Jewish organization that was the most involved in European Jewish reconstruction. In France, it covered 72 % of the expenses of Jewish welfare organizations in 1946, 54.5 % of these costs in 1949, and 40 % of them in 1952.12 It is estimated that the JDC aided 50,000 individuals in France in 1945 alone, which represents between 25 and 28 % of the estimated Jewish population at this time.13 Historian Maud Mandel has also studied the role of the JDC in postwar France and has demonstrated that its influence in France extended beyond a purely financial role (Mandel, 2002, 53-94).14 Indeed, the influence of the JDC was compounded by the fact that it did not simply write a check to the organizations it assisted. Influenced by American principles of philanthropy and self-help, the JDC philosophy of aid stressed the importance of building autonomous, self-sufficient Jewish communities (Goldman, 1998, 72). In order to achieve this goal, the JDC played a hands-on role in the daily operations of the French Jewish organizations it subsidized and actively sought to change practices that it judged out-of-date or inefficient. This placed the JDC in a paradoxical role- advocating autonomy, but exercising authority.

11 The efforts of the JDC to reform French Jewish welfare practices according to an American model intensified as the postwar emergency situation stabilized. In 1946, a new country director for France, Laura Margolis, was named and the JDC policy for France shifted its objectives to create institutions that (it hoped) would ensure the long-term survival of the French Jewish community. While the JDC continued to support local Jewish organizations and agencies with diverse religious and political backgrounds (from Communist to ultra-orthodox), the most significant importation of American welfare concepts and structures occurred during Margolis’ tenure, from 1946-53. For example, the JDC established two professional schools in 1948 and 1949 to train nurses and social workers for European Jewish communal institutions, using both American faculty and methods. Its social work school, the Paul Baerwald School of

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Social Work, brought in experts from the New York School of Social Work to teach a one-year training program based on the American social work curriculum. Operating in Versailles from 1949 to 1953, this school influenced both the practices in French Jewish welfare organizations and wider European social work circles by helping to import the casework method to Europe (Hobson Faure, 2012). Perhaps more importantly, in the fall of 1947, the JDC began working with leaders from French Jewish institutions to create a centralized fundraising body modeled after the American “United Jewish Appeal.” After multiple conflicts, the JDC and a group of French Jewish leaders succeeded in this task, establishing the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU) in 1949. Jewish community centers, modeled on a structure that was popular in the postwar period among American Jews, were also introduced to France by the JDC in the early 1950s. By the end of 1957, Paris, Lens, Belfort, Rouen and Lyon all had this type of structure.15 The Fonds social juif unifié and the Jewish community centers still operate in France today, indicating that this American influence left a lasting mark on French Jewry. We can thus see that the JDC enabled a cultural transfer, allowing for the importation of American welfare methods and structures.

Shifting the Gaze to Individuals

12 If institutional reports and intra-organizational correspondence allow us to draw the conclusion that the JDC greatly influenced and “Americanized” the structure of French Jewish life in the postwar and contemporary period, what do personal accounts- letters, personal writings, interviews – say about this encounter ? Two sources from the postwar period help us better understand the atmosphere that reigned in the JDC offices immediately after the war, allowing us to better discern the individual perceptions and difficulties faced by American and European aid workers in this key institution. Taken in isolation, hasty conclusions should not be drawn from these two personal accounts. They are subjective in nature and represent a fleeting moment in an encounter that lasted over a decade. Nevertheless, they provide clues to the deeper issues affecting American Jewish philanthropic efforts in France.

13 The first source stems from the personal papers of Cecilia Razovsky Davidson, an American Jewish social worker with over four decades of experience working with Jewish immigrants in the United States and Latin America.16 Officially an employee of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Razovsky Davidson was assigned to the JDC in Paris, where she worked closely with the American director of the JDC, Arthur Greenleigh. The second source is a comic sketch, written by one of the local European staff members of the JDC, an individual who worked under Razovsky Davidson. These sources provide two distinct points of view : that of the American management and that of the local European staff. Interestingly, both documents address the same problem : the difficulty of getting work done in the JDC offices after the war.

14 As seen above, after December 1944, American management had returned to the JDC in Paris, which also hired local staff for administrative positions. Cecilia Razovsky Davidson had been hired by UNRRA in September of 1944 as a displaced persons specialist for the European mission.17 She arrived in February 1945 and stayed until June 1945, thus participating in the implementation of the JDC’s postwar program. Soon after her return to the United States, she gave several lectures on her experiences in

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Europe, most likely to a group of UNRRA recruits, in which she described her experiences with the JDC.18 Her observations show us what posed a problem for Americans, and how they approached their work in Paris.

15 First, of course, were the material problems, as the JDC offices, once pristine, lacked basic necessities. According to Razovsky Davidson, “the Nazis had taken away everything and torn down every electric wire in the place and had broken up the elevators. The fireplaces were ripped open and the heating apparatus broken. […].”19 Yet in addition to the problem of reestablishing a proper workspace, JDC management was struck by the inefficiency of their local employees. They soon discovered the reason : their employees, weary and malnourished after years of persecution, still lacked food. Razovsky Davidson notes : We were beginning to set up an office but could not get typewriters, clips, erasers, etc. Also, we would give dictation in the morning and suddenly would remember at the end of the day we had not seen it finished. I asked about a cable one afternoon and with much crying and excitement, the typist admitted she had not done it. When we pressed them to work hard and fast we found them fainting on our hands and then we learned that they did not ever get enough to eat. So we set up a canteen for our own office force (we had to buy the food on the black market) and then we got results, a half-day’s work a day, anyhow. The relief expert was sitting in a staff meeting one day and fainted away. He was in the hospital unconscious for two days and we found it was all due to malnutrition. He had lived on potatoes for eleven months ; no butter, no milk, no bread. (The French are great bread eaters). One girl worked for us who had been in hiding for four years, during that time her husband had been deported and her baby was born. She had crossed the Pyranees [sic] with her baby in her arms to get away from the Germans. She had to hide for several years, never had enough to eat in hiding. Now she had found a place to board the baby but most of her salary at JDC was spent on board for the baby, and even if she had some money she would have to go to black markets to buy anything […].20

16 Razovsky Davidson’s observations represent the account of an American Jewish woman’s first-hand discovery of the living conditions of Jews in postwar France (and indirectly, the depth of their suffering during the Occupation). Yet they are also those of a trained social worker. Avoiding emotion, she simply states the facts and explains why work was not getting done, and how this was corrected. Finally, Razovsky Davidson’s observations point out the fine line between the European Jews who were hired to provide aid and the populations they assisted. Both groups, in fact, were in need of help.

17 On an altogether different register, a comic sketch given to Razovsky Davidson on the occasion of her departure in June of 1945, provides a different perspective on why it was difficult to get work done at the JDC. The sketch, nine pages long and signed by “Liselotte,” a secretary in the JDC Paris office, was titled “Scherzo Capriccioso in AJDC Major.”21 The humorous nature of the sketch does not limit our ability to exploit this document for historical purposes. Indeed, it describes the busy offices of the organization through the perspective of Liselotte and serves as a particularly rich example of how European JDC staff perceived their American employers. The sketch describes the comings and goings of JDC employees and the incessant ringing of the telephone from the point of view of Liselotte, who cannot manage to start typing, and then reports the ensuing rampage of “Arthur” [most likely Arthur Greenleigh, JDC director]. The author then mocks the American director of the JDC, portraying him as a

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time-obsessed taskmaster. Far from the image of the passive secretary, she handles her superior’s uproar with irony.

18 Later in the play, Liselotte writes of her confrontation with “Cecilia” [most likely Razovsky Davidson] who is also wondering about the status of her dictations : Cecilia : Where are my letters ? Liselotte : I’am [sic] afraid, none of them are ready as yet. Cecilia : I can’t beliefe [sic] that. Liselotte : I realize it must be hard to believe it. (…a nearby American employee, Dora, makes a phone call loudly) Cecilia : (to Liselotte) but what did you do all morning ? Liselotte : I am just wondering. Dora : Liselotte, I am telephoning ! Cecilia : But all the letters I gave you are rush cases and have ab-so-lute priority over everything else. Arthur will… Liselotte : Oh, he did already. Dora : Liselotte, I am telephoning. Cecilia : (whispering) do these calls prevent you from working ? Liselotte : Yes, certainly, I don’t know, perhaps (crying) I don’t know whether it is the incomings or the outgoings or the arguments or the numbers or the messages or the overseas cables or the visitors. And these drafts, these drafts ! Cecilia : I see, have a peppermint, it will clear your throat. Now look, dear. You should’nt [sic] give way to your emotions like this. You should’nt [sic] care about all these… Liselotte : Superiors Cecilia : Right. You should absolutely concentrate on your typing. Work behind a symbolic screen, build up a barbed wire fence. Will you just try ? Liselotte : I will try to try. They shake hands. Cecilia walks out. Liselotte : catches a deep breath, then proceeds to the left hand door, locks it, goes to the right hand door, locks it, goes to the door behind her, locks it, puts the three keys on her desk […].22

19 Raising the same problem Razovsky Davidson discussed in her lecture, Liselotte’s account also describes Europeans crying on the job and Razsovsky Davidson’s professional distance (she asks Liselotte to avoid “giving way to her emotions” and to “build up a barbed wire fence”).23 The author here is clearly exaggerating, keeping with the humorous tone of this sketch. Nonetheless, we can still point out an important difference between the two accounts : Liselotte does not mention a lack of food as an explanation for idleness. On the contrary, she attributes the problem to incessant interruptions, often caused by Americans. By making fun (of herself and others), by not mentioning a lack of food and recent hardships, Liselotte places herself firmly outside of the victim category.

Conclusions

20 The American Jewish presence in postwar France influenced the lives of Europeans by providing funds for their welfare organizations, immigration assistance for those who chose to leave the continent, housing and cultural programming, and political advice to those who would listen. These organizations left a deep mark on French Jewish life- traces of their action, especially the work of the JDC, can still be seen in France today. It is clear that a certain number of structural changes in the postwar period rendered French Jewish life more “American.” Yet before assuming that these changes were

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imposed by American organizations in exchange for funding, it behooves us to explore how Europeans responded to this presence, and what they thought of the proposed changes.

21 Here we saw two accounts on the banal problem of getting work done in the postwar JDC offices, in which Americans and Europeans emphasized different reasons for inefficiency and demonstrated different attitudes toward their work environment. Cecilia Razovsky Davidson explained with considerable distance the inefficiency of JDC workers due to the hardship of their lives as Jews in Occupied France. Her account shows that the JDC’s American management was forced to engage with this complex reality, treating its European staff as workers, yet also as European Jews who had survived the occupation.24 Fittingly, the JDC helped establish a professional association for local Jewish welfare workers in the immediate postwar period, l’Association des travailleurs sociaux juifs. The JDC provided its members with food at preferential prices, medical care in JDC-sponsored clinics, and, for the first three years of its existence, subsidized summer vacations (Kahn, 1954). The above-mentioned Paul Baerwald School of Social Work can also be seen as another way in which the JDC sought to retrain Jewish welfare workers, providing those who had entered the field of Jewish welfare during the Occupation with a means of professionalization.

22 Yet American aid efforts towards European Jews were not always received with gratitude, ambiguous feelings abounded. Local Jewish welfare workers had lived through the Occupation, whereas the Americans had not. This fact furthered the legitimacy of French Jews in matters involving postwar Jewish communal life. Paradoxically, while victimhood granted added legitimacy, French Jewish individuals often presented themselves to their American benefactors as partners in the reconstruction process, not as victims.25 Fitting with this attitude, Liselotte’s account does not evoke the hardships of the Occupation or her own hunger. Instead, her humorous piece blames her American colleagues and the busy JDC offices for her inability to type. Emphasizing her own agency, she presents a world in which employees respond to management. Liselotte, the presumed author of the play, had no qualms giving a copy to Razovsky Davidson, a superior and close colleague of her boss, Arthur Greenleigh. Liselotte’s example of “talking back” suggests that the reconstruction of French Jewish life is best understood as a European-American dialogue, rather than an American monologue.

23 Taken together, the two accounts allude to the complexities of the “Jewish Marshall Plan” in France, in which American Jewish organizations sought to assist Jews as they rebuilt their lives after the Shoah. The end result of “Americanization” should be seen as the outcome of a negotiated process involving multiple parties, not just one unilateral benefactor. Indeed, at the end of her sketch, Liselotte, the European secretary, finally orders her American officemate to keep silent and get to work.26

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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CLAFIN, Kyri W., “Agent of Friendship : Anne Morgan and Private Philanthropy 1944-1947,” in Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, François Cochet, et Hélène Trocmé (dir.), Les Américains et La France (1917-1947) Engagements et représentations : Colloque International, Reims, 22-23 Mai 1997, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1999, 109-23.

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NOTES

1. The Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) was established in New York City in 1934 by Jewish individuals who were closely involved in the American Labor movement, as well as political leaders, direct descendants of the Eastern European Bundist movement. On the JLC see the article by Catherine Collomp in this Transatlantica issue. 2. These themes are explored in greater detail in my book (Hobson Faure, 2013). 3. On the American presence in postwar France, see, among others, Wall, 1991 ; Kuisel, 1993 ; Tournès, 1999, 2011 ; Pottier, 2003 ; Endy, 2004. 4. More generally, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, 2004. 5. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Report by Loeb and Troper, October 1914 through December 31, 1973. This can be compared with the aid provided by other American organizations in France, such as the Comité Americain des Secours Civils and its American affiliate, American Friends of France, which channeled 2.2 million dollars and 4 million dollars to France in 1944-1945, and 1945-46, respectively, yet after 1948 were unable to raise sufficient funds in the United States (Claflin, 1999, 118). 6. Serge Klarsfeld estimates the total number of Jewish victims of the Final Solution in France at 80,000 (Klarsfeld, 1985, 180). For a discussion of this survival rate, see Renée Poznanski, 1997, 579-83 ; more generally, see Susan Zuccotti, 1993. 7. Doris Bensimon and Sergio Della Pergola estimate the population at 180,000 at the end of 1944 (Bensimon and Della Pergola, 1984, 35). Annette Wieviorka estimates the Jewish population of France at just under 200,000 in the summer of 1944 (Wieviorka, 1995, 5-6). 8. The strong American Jewish support of Jewish life in France, compared to other European countries, can be seen clearly in a 1948 report of the American Joint Distribution Committee. In 1948, this organization was financing twelve reception centers for immigrants in France, while it funded two each in Portugal and Yugoslavia, and one each in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Holland. Likewise, at the same moment, the JDC was funding fifty-four children’s homes in France, compared to thirty-six in Romania, thirty-one in Hungary, fifteen in Poland, ten in Germany, eight each in Belgium and Italy, four in Czechoslovakia, and one each in Austria, Greece, Holland, and Yugoslavia ; Archives départementales de Seine Saint Denis, Fonds David Diamant, 335J/115, JDC, Budget and Research Department Report no. 59, JDC Assistees in Europe and North Africa, 10 November, 1948.

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9. In June of 1940, the JDC transferred its activities from Paris to Marseilles, where it provided aid to individuals in the French internment camps. When diplomatic ties between Vichy and the United States were ruptured in November 1942, the JDC was obliged to withdraw all of its American employees from France. However, it did not cease its activities in France during the second half of the war : two French citizens continued to represent the organization, and funds from the JDC were channeled into France via Switzerland and through other diverse means (Hobson Faure, 2011, 293-311). 10. The JDC offices had been used during the occupation by the Union générale des Israélites de France (UGIF). Maurice Brener, one of the French representatives of the JDC, took over the offices after the liberation of Paris. In the spring of 1945, the JDC re-opened its European headquarters in Paris, which where then moved to Geneva in 1958. 11. On the UJA, see Karp, 1981 and Raphael, 1982. 12. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives-Israel (JDC-I), Laura Margolis Jarblum collection (non-catalogued), Statistical Report, France, Country Directors Conference, October 1952. 13. JDC Primer, 1945, page France-8 ; percentages based on a Jewish population of 180-200,000 individuals. 14. Pointing out the changes that the JDC inspired in French Jewish life, Mandel characterizes the organization as a vector of American cultural imperialism. My book nuances these findings by analyzing the intense negotiations among French and American Jews to rebuild French Jewish life. My book argues, instead, that the French responses to American Jewish aid strongly influenced the transfer of American structures and practices. See, for example, Hobson Faure (2013, 139-76). 15. JDC-New York, France 1945/54, 151, Executive Committee minutes, 29 January 1957. 16. On Razovsky Davidson’s activism during WWII, see Zucker, 2008. 17. American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), Cecilia Razovsky Papers, P-290, Box 6, folder 1, Telegram from CH Cramer of UNRRA to Razovsky, September 6, 1944 ; Letter from Director of UNRRA to Razovsky, January 18, 1945. 18. I make this assumption based on her use of expressions such as “An UNRRA worker will have to” American Jewish Historical Society, Cecilia Razovsky Papers, P-290, Box 6, folder 1, Collected Notes on Lecture #3, Cecelia [sic] Razivsky Davidson, 26 July, 1945. 19. Ibid. In light of the fact that the JDC offices were used by the UGIF during the war, it is possible that this damage occurred during the liberation of Paris (Poznanski, 1997, 547 ; Adler, 1989, 221). 20. Idem. 21. The sketch was found in the personal papers of Razovsky Davidson. On its title page was written, in longhand, “Bon voyage ! Liselotte, June 28 1945.” Liselotte is thus most likely the author of the piece, yet it is unclear if the sketch was performed publicly or simply written down. The names of the individuals in the play correspond with the employees of the JDC at that time, allowing us to assume that the author did not attempt to fictionalize the characters. AJHS, Cecilia Razovsky Papers, P-290, Box 6, folder 1, “Scherzo Capriccioso in AJDC Major,” signed “Bon Voyage, Liselotte,” June 28, 1945. 22. Idem. 23. Idem. 24. Most employees of the JDC in postwar period were Jewish. Individuals were recruited from Jewish social networks, and Yiddish was often necessary for assisting Jews from Eastern Europe who sought JDC assistance. 25. This can be seen in other instances, such as in Reims in the immediate postwar period, where French Jews, in dire need of basic necessities, granted hospitality to American Jewish soldiers. As

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the former emphasize in oral history interviews, French Jews exercised distinction ; hospitality was not granted to all (Hobson Faure, 2013, 90-97). 26. Idem.

ABSTRACTS

This paper offers a study of American Jewish philanthropy in France after World War II according to the histoire croisée method. To what extent did Jewish American organizations and individuals influence the reconstruction of Jewish life in France after the Holocaust ? After describing what was later called a “Jewish Marshall Plan,” this article studies the role of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or Joint) which was the most important American Jewish organization in France after the war. Narratives from one American woman, and from a European one will help us elucidate how individuals from each side of the Atlantic perceived each other during this encounter.

Cet article propose une analyse de la philanthropie juive américaine en France après la Seconde Guerre mondiale selon la méthode de l’histoire croisée. Dans quelle mesure les organisations et les individus juifs américains influencent-ils la reconstruction de la vie juive française après la Shoah ? Après une analyse descriptive de ce que l’on nomma le « Plan Marshall juif », cet article se penchera sur l’American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (le JDC ou le Joint), l’organisation juive américaine la plus importante dans la France d’après-guerre. Deux récits, l’un d’une femme américaine, l’autre d’une femme européenne, nous aideront à élucider comment les individus européens et américains se sont perçus lors de cette rencontre.

INDEX

Keywords: Jewish American Philanthropy, international organizations, Holocaust/Shoah, World War II, French Jews, American Jews Mots-clés: Philanthropie juive américaine, organisations internationales, Shoah, Seconde Guerre mondiale, Juifs français, Juifs américains

AUTHOR

LAURA HOBSON FAURE Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, Sorbonne Paris Cité

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Reconnaissances

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An Interview with Ron Rash

Frédérique Spill

1 Ron Rash (born in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953) is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and four collections of poems. He is currently completing his sixth novel, Above the Waterfall. He probably owes the international attention he now enjoys to the publication of Serena (the novel was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist), whose plot retraces the fate of a Lady Macbeth-like figure at the head of a timber industry in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina at the beginning of the 1930s. But when Serena was published in 2008, Rash had been writing for most of his life. He has been translated into fourteen languages: most of his novels are now available in their French translations, and so will soon be some of his short stories. Rash lives in the North Carolina Mountains. He is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC.

2 We met in Paris, rue Delambre in the 14th arrondissement in the afternoon of June 6, 2014. A guest at the Saint-Malo Festival des Étonnants Voyageurs, he had flown into Paris the very same morning. Before we started the interview he showed me the old, much read yet new-looking edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! that he had started rereading on the plane. We had a look at the map of Yoknapatawpha County that is included at the end of that volume and I marveled at his unlikely reading choice for travelling. For about an hour, we talked about his tastes, literature, cinema, the South, the mountains and their people, but mostly about his approach to writing and the tensions that underlie his work. A spoiler alert might be necessary for those who have not read the books evoked in our conversation. Frédérique Spill: Do you know what you’ll be doing and whom you’ll be meeting at the Festival des Étonnants Voyageurs in Saint-Malo? Ron Rash: I will meet several writers whom I already know. Colum McCann is a friend of mine. I’m acquainted with Chris Womersley from Australia and Alan Hollinghurst, but it’s mainly going to be writers I haven’t met. I’m glad it’s so international. I think I’m the only American this year.

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FS: I would like to start this interview by submitting you to a few selected (and adapted) items from the Proust questionnaire. Would you agree to start that way? RR: Yes.

FS: Your favorite color? RR: Blue.

FS: Your favorite flower? RR: Let’s see… There’s a very rare flower called the Oconee Bell; it’s a very beautiful white flower and the only place in the world where it’s found is in the South Carolina and North Carolina Mountains.

FS: Your favorite flavor? RR: Chocolate.

FS: Your chief characteristic? RR: Driven.

FS: Your idea of happiness? RR: … Probably when the writing’s going well.

FS: Your idea of misery? RR: When the writing is not going well.

FS: Your favorite prose authors? RR: Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Melville, Hardy, Giono.

FS: Your favorite heroes in fiction? RR: Ishmael in Moby-Dick; Faulkner’s Caddy1 in The Sound and the Fury; Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment; the Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

FS: What is the book you re-read most frequently? RR: Probably Macbeth. I dip into Moby-Dick often.

FS: What’s the best book that you have read recently? RR: I read a book by Giono I had never read, Joy of Man’s Desiring (Que ma joie demeure). I think that’s a remarkable novel.

FS: You come to France quite regularly and obviously enjoy a much deserved visibility and success that keep increasing thanks to the excellent translations of your novels by Les Éditions du Masque and Le Seuil. How is your work received in other countries? RR: It’s been doing very well; it’s been translated in fourteen languages now. It’s done particularly well in Ireland, England, Denmark, Netherlands, China, and Australia. Translations are just coming out in Italy and Brazil.

FS: Will there be French translations of your collections of poems and short stories? RR: There will be a translation of my short stories in December or January—a book called Burning Bright2.

FS: Do you have any clue how they will translate that title? It’s a beautiful title, but a tough one. RR: No; actually my translator was saying it was a tough title to translate in French.

FS: What about your place in American literature in the US? RR: Well, that’s hard to know. Sometimes there is a sensibility in the United States that Southern writers are apart from the rest of the country’s literature, which I find

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absurd. But I’ve done fairly well. I’ve published in The New Yorker and won or have been a finalist for some major awards and prizes.

FS: Is the label “Southern literature” still much in use? RR: It’s still used a lot. I’m very proud of this tradition. I think an inordinate number of the best American writers have come out of the South; the best music too, for that matter. But sometimes I fear that the term is used in a limiting sense: he’s just a Southern writer. But I think Serena is as American a novel as any. She’s an American character, not even a Southerner at that.

FS: You live in the Appalachian Mountains, the territory that feeds your writing. Could you imagine living anywhere else? RR: I’ve thought about it and I may some time. The way things are going in the United States politically, I sometimes want to leave because I’m so frustrated. But to get back where I live it’s pretty isolated so I’m pretty much left alone. I don’t know. Some of my region’s writers have had the feeling that they had to leave the South: Carson McCullers felt she had to leave, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams. But Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner—they felt they had to stay and I think I’m one of those that feel they have to stay in touch with their landscape.

FS: It seems that your titles’ inscription in the topography of Appalachia is more and more obvious (I’m thinking of The Cove3 and of the novel that we’re looking forward to reading— Above the Waterfall). Is this deliberate? RR: Yes, it is. One thing I want to do is for landscape and my characters to be inextricably bound together. I believe the landscape people live in has to affect their psychology.

FS: Likewise, I have the feeling that the tone of your writing is becoming graver and graver, or somberer and somberer (it seems to me that the constant darkness of The Cove is emblematic of this evolution)—is this just a personal impression or does it make sense to you? RR: I think it’s true. Part of it is, especially with Serena and The Cove, caused by the political situation in the United States. Often the best way to talk about the present is through the past. This is not a good time for my country. But actually this new novel4 is a book more about wonder, about how nature might sustain us. I wanted to look at the world a little more hopefully.

FS: I was actually amazed to discover that the list of your published books starts with an instance of comedy with The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth (1994). Some of the situations you created in that collection are just hilarious. Could you imagine returning to comedy? RR: I may; I like comic writing. The writers I admire most are able to be both tragic and comic: Shakespeare, Melville, Faulkner—Faulkner can be hilarious—, O’Connor. To see both the tragic and the comic is to hold a mirror up to life. Usually in my short story collections I have at least one story that is comic. Burning Bright has one about the guitar player5 that is supposed to be funny. It’s sad in a way, but it’s funny too.

FS: How do you come up with the titles of your books? RR: They usually emerge when I’m deep into the book, sometimes toward the end. I had a really tough time with The Cove, I just could not find a title that gave me what I wanted. I wanted to call it Shadowland but that title had been used for a couple of books. But I think The Cove works.

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FS: You often evoked how the idea for a plot first came to you in the form of an image. Would it be correct to assume that it first comes to you in the form of a poem, likely to develop into a short story that, if the initial image is haunting enough, may transform into a novel? RR: That’s pretty much it. It’s a scary way to work because I don’t outline. I just have faith that the image is enough. When I wrote Serena all I had was an image of her on horseback.

FS: You are fulltime poet, short story writer and novelist. Or shall I formulate things in a different order? RR: No, I hope I’ve done worthwhile work in all three. When I started writing I first wrote a few short stories and a few poems, then I pretty much just wrote poetry for six or seven years. Then I wrote short stories for a couple of years. Yes, it is kind of a movement toward the novel.

FS: What happened to your creative mind between the short story entitled “Pemberton’s Bride” (published in Chemistry and Other Stories in 2007) and Serena (2008)? The genitive form in the title of the short story somehow presents Serena as her husband’s better half (but only a half), while in the novel she obviously takes precedence over him. How come? RR: I think Serena simply became more and more interesting to me, particularly because in American fiction I don’t think we have women quite like her. We have female characters who have power within a family, but to have a woman, particularly in 1928-1929, that has that kind of will to go out and have control over hundreds of men goes beyond that. She was so strong she somehow pushed me aside as well and put herself at the center of this world. That was a strange experience writing that book. I went into a deep, dark place and I’ve never been that consumed by a book before or since. People said they could tell a difference after I finished it, even physically.

FS: Why did you decide to alleviate the denouement of Rachel’s story in the novel’s version of it (in the short story, she is sacrificed; in the novel, she manages to escape)? RR: I believe Serena changes some during the novel, more so than most readers seem to recognize. But I thought I needed a character who made a larger transformation. And I also felt I had to be true to the world. There are always Serenas out there, but there are always people who will fight them and people who will find their power from love instead of the desire for power.

FS: So, paradoxically, you somehow became more hopeful with the novel and your decision to save Rachel, showing she could fight? RR: Yes. One thing I did very deliberately: in the opening scene of Serena, I wanted the novel to open more like a play than a novel. All the main characters are on the train station’s wooden platform. And Rachel does not move; in that whole scene, she doesn’t move. Then, from being completely immobile, she evolves into a woman who is strong enough to triumph over Galloway and Serena.

FS: Now comes a fishy question: what about the overwhelming presence of trout in Southern writing? Trout have a strong symbolical dimension in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (in Quentin’s monologue); the same can be said of the finale of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where the appearance of trout in the river seems to suggest the plausible return of life. In your work, trout reoccur whatever form of writing you pick up as, it seems to me, a metaphor of resilience. RR: Trout have to live in a pure environment unlike human beings; they can’t live in filth! And so I think there is a kind of wonder; to me, they’re incredibly beautiful

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creatures. I can remember being only four or five and staring for long periods at them, just watching them swimming in the water. But also, like Faulkner in “The Bear,” the idea that when such creatures disappear, we have lost something that cannot be brought back. And I think this is what McCarthy is getting at, at the end of The Road. They mean many things: beauty, wonder, and fragility, in the sense that they can be easily destroyed. In The World Made Straight6 I felt that Travis’s response to the trout showed his maturity: first he’s just catching them without even caring about killing them, but then he has that moment when he is in the field and sees the beauty of them and he never has before. To me, that’s a sign of maturation and wisdom on his part.

FS: I believe you are an amazing choreographer of scenes of drowning. Would it be too personal to ask you where your fascination with drowning comes from? RR: No, it wouldn’t be. I have always been fascinated by water, that’s one thing. And I think part of that was probably my religious upbringing. I was brought up in the Baptist Church and in the Baptist Church they totally immerse you. That is an experience that you don’t forget because it’s somewhat terrifying. I have always been attracted to water. Concerning drowning, I guess it is that whole idea of water being able to destroy and to give life—that paradox. Part of my ancestry is Welsh and in Welsh folklore water is seen as a conduit between the living and the dead. In Saints at the River7 I hoped to evoke that idea. But it’s a strange obsession and not something I tend to do consciously. People started pointing it out in my work and, yes, it is there, it is all over the place.

FS: Your admirers have been impatiently looking forward to the release of the film adaptation of Serena next fall? What’s your perception of Susan Bier’s adaptation? Of the cast? Is Jennifer Lawrence’s acting the part of Serena somehow faithful to your first idea of your character? RR: Well, I don’t know. I haven’t seen the movie or read the script; I have deliberately stayed out of the process. So I don’t know much about the film except that I do like Susanne Bier’s movies. Have you seen any?

FS: I saw Brothers8 and I liked it a lot. RR: I think she is a serious director and Jennifer Lawrence is a very good actress. Her performance in Winter’s Bone9 was extraordinary.

FS: What about the coming release of the movie adaptation of The World Made Straight (2006)? The film is David Burris’s first film as a director. The attention you get from the movies is quite remarkable, isn’t it? RR: It’s been surprising. It’s something I never expected.

FS: What happens in the mind of a writer whose most successful novels are adapted into movies? RR: It’s a bit unsettling, but it brings people to the books who might normally not read them. There’s some money that comes into it, which is nice.

FS: I know it took time, but it seems you’re getting a great deal of attention all of a sudden. RR: Yes, but I believe it was good that I had to wait a long time. If the recognition had happened earlier, it might not have been a good thing for me. I’ve been able to concentrate solely on the writing most of my career. Being ignored can be a blessing for a young writer.

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FS: Are you still teaching? RR: Yes, I am.

FS: Most of your writings are characterized by a rather sharp contrast between the restriction, distance and suggestiveness (I’m still looking for the word that may encompass such impressions—maybe: delicacy?...) of your writing style and the extreme violence of some of the scenes you describe. Could this be considered one of the main tenets of your aesthetics as a writer? RR: I think very often that’s what makes particularly tragic writing bearable to us. That’s why we can respond to Shakespeare. If the language were not so beautiful and sublime, particularly in a play such as King Lear, the experience would be unbearable. What I’m trying for in my work—it’s up to the reader to decide if I do—is the sublime. I want my work to take the reader to that place. And I think you can do that with that juxtaposition of language and violence. Violence allows revelation of character; that’s what O’Connor believed and I think she’s right. You don’t use it to titillate; you use it to get to the essence of who a character is.

FS: In the writing process is the plausible cathartic dimension of your work foremost in your mind? RR: I’m very conscious that I’m often taking the reader into a deep place, sometimes a very dark place. By entering that place, I hope the reader might find something cathartic.

FS: I’m probably not the first person that tells you that: the denouement of The World Made Straight is particularly heart-rending. Did Leonard really have to die? RR: I hated for him to die; I really did. Writing that scene was hard emotionally for me, particularly as he was thinking of his child as he was dying. But I think that he had to die because there was this historical balance with the Civil War killings. For his sacrifice to matter in an ultimate way, Leonard had to offer up his life. Interestingly, I actually wrote a short story where Travis was going to be killed; I felt so bad about killing a teenager that I revived him; but then I ended up killing Leonard. But I have had a lot of complaints about his death from readers, which I take as a compliment. It means that I succeeded in creating a character that they cared deeply about.

FS: Another common feature of your writing is the reappearance of maimed or mutilated characters, either literally (for instance Galloway, his mother, Dr. Cheney in Serena; Hank in The Cove) or symbolically (Laurel or Walter in The Cove, but it seems to me there are many more). Aren’t they somehow all avatars or variations of the figure of Tiresias, the blind seer whose very blindness qualifies him as a seer? RR: Yes, I’m very fond of mythology, as is obvious in The Cove where I evoke the Orpheus myth, and in Serena Galloway’s mother is definitely a seer in the sense you describe. I think I tend to use maimed characters with the idea that the world they inhabit is wounded. In One Foot in Eden, I wanted Billy to evoke the Fisher King in Grail mythology; he is wounded and the land is dying. Yes, I love to integrate those aspects into my work; I don’t want it to be heavy-handed, but I want it to be there.

FS: Would it make sense to say that the characters I mentioned are somehow part of the gallery of grotesques started by O’Connor? RR: Yes, you could certainly date it back to Poe. I don’t know, there’s something about the South: maybe it’s partly our heritage, partly the region’s Christian sensibility: Original sin argues we are flawed/grotesque from birth. O’Connor, a devout

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Christian, certainly believed that. Her character’s physical flaws are indicative of spiritual flaws.

FS: Would it be exaggerated to consider the return of figures of loss in your work as rewritings of the South’s failure? RR: I think there is something to that. The South has always been the part of the United States that’s the poorest, the least educated. The part of the upper South I focus on has certainly had its share of hardship, of a failure to achieve the prosperity of the rest of America, though that failure is in large part due to the fact that more has been taken from the region, from coal and timber to soldiers for our wars, than given back. But this hardship has also produced an incredible outpouring of art—jazz, bluegrass, country music, blues, rock and roll, as well as a huge number of exceptional writers. There’s a great quote in Carol Reed’s movie The Third Man—a character says the Swiss have had four hundred years of peace and prosperity and all they’ve giving us is the cuckoo clock. Art seems so often to come out of turmoil.

FS: I believe that one of the main forces of your short story collections is the undecidability of their timeframe as, from one story to the next, you take your readers back and forth in time. In that way, in your last three collections—Chemistry, Burning Bright, Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013)—, the Civil War is likely to cohabit with the Great Depression or with Modern America, while it is for your readers to pick up clues in order to determine when events are occurring. My impression is that there are at least two very divergent ways in which this changelessness can be interpreted: while such seclusion from the wider world is likely to appear as frightening, at the same time it is very reassuring to observe that some things, in keeping with the land you describe, may resist change and remain true to themselves. RR: I believe so. I think there is something reassuring in that belief and also that other people have also endured challenges, because there never was an edenic time. In a sense, I’m writing a current that runs through time in those stories. And, also, paradoxically time is a kind of geography as well: it is also a way of showing people in much different cultural mindsets, even within a specific culture, and thus another way to probe for the universal within a specific cultural landscape. Faulkner does this obviously, as does Seamus Heaney in his poetry. In the story collections, I want the reader to be, at times, uncertain of the era. That uncertainty creates an effect that I want.

FS: You obviously do quite a lot of research before you write. Was the idea of Doctor Candler’s ledgers in The World Made Straight directly inspired by your research on the Shelton Laurel Massacre? RR: It was. I actually had a relative at that time who was a doctor in the area. I didn’t have access to his ledgers. But my family had very deep roots in that region and from what I’ve been able to find out I’m pretty sure I had relatives on both sides of that massacre. So I just thought it would be interesting to have this man who had saved this boy’s life to be there at the massacre. What would this mean to Leonard? What is our responsibility to the past? I did a lot of research on nineteenth-century medicine; so everything in the journal is what a doctor would have done. I enjoy research.

FS: I am forever trying to put words on the forcefulness of your writing and I would like to suggest that, though they could not be more different, Saints at the River and Serena are very representative of what you are doing when you write: my assumption is that a great part of the force of your writing essentially rests on its subtlety. You manage to picture characters and situations that are often extreme because they are either particularly polemical (as when you expose the conflict opposing the mourners in search of the lost corpse of their daughter and the environmentalists in Saints) or tragically violent (indeed,

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nothing can stop Serena’s ambition) without passing judgment. Yet I do not want to suggest that you are stuck in the grey zone of “either…or” or “neither… nor…” because this is absolutely not true. You locate your narrative stance right in the middle of the crisis and I think you are particularly good at exposing the complexities of a situation. RR: That’s my hope.

FS: The effect this has on your readers is that they’re encouraged to think before they flare up. Does this make sense to you? RR: Exactly, that’s what I want. Black and white is for politicians; they give the easy answers, the simplifications. For me, this is a matter of respecting the reader—that the reader doesn’t have to be preached to or told how to feel. To me, that’s insulting the reader’s intelligence. I believe that a novel is an act of communion between the author and the reader; it’s a shared consciousness, very intimate. The reader is taking these blotches of ink I’ve written and bringing them to life.

FS: Most of your works are suggestive of a dramatic contrast between the extreme violence of human exchanges and the almost imperturbable serenity and beauty of nature. The mountains’ rock-hard permanence almost indirectly reads as a commentary on the triviality of men, while constantly highlighting their finitude. RR: Yes, I would agree. I think the psychological makeup of mountain people is very interesting. A person has to be influenced at seeing these things that have been there for millions of years, blocking any long gaze, reminding oneself of one’s small life, perhaps its insignificance? Yet sometimes the mountains can also be like a womb, protective from the outside world. That duality is very interesting to me.

FS: How is the writing of Above the Waterfall progressing? RR: It’s going; I’m doing something really different. I’ve got a narrator who is attempting to create her own language. It has been a difficult book and I’ve have come close to giving up on it several times.

FS: Is there a specific timeframe? RR: Yes, the present.

FS: May I ask you whether one of your own books is your “heart’s darling”? RR: Yes; two of them. But if I had to pick one it would be Serena. I feel that’s the one that is the most ambitious. But I also love One Foot in Eden; maybe that’s because it’s the first novel I published, but also for what I did in that book with the vernacular.

FS: Thank you, very much.

NOTES

1. Caddy is the only sister in the Compson family in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). 2. A collection of twelve short stories, Burning Bright was first published in 2010. 3. Ron Rash’s fifth novel, The Cove was first published in 2012. It was translated by Le Seuil as Une terre d’ombre (2014). 4. Rash is evoking his novel in progress, Above the Waterfall, which will probably come out in 2015.

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5. That story, entitled “Waiting for the End of the World,” is a first-person narrative told by an ex-teacher become guitar player who makes ends meet by playing all night long in a seedy joint. At the patrons’ request, he keeps playing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” and obviously is sick and tired of having to do so. 6. The World Made Straight was first published in 2006; it was translated in French as Le Monde à l’endroit (Seuil, 2012). 7. Saints at the River is Rash’s second novel, published in 2004. It relates the aftermath of a twelve- year-old girl’s drowning in the Tamassee River in South Carolina, as decisions have to be made in order to rescue her body. The novel has not yet been translated into French. 8. Brothers is a 2004 Danish film written and directed by Susanne Bier. 9. Winter’s Bone is a 2011 film directed by Debra Granik; it was adapted from Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel of the same title.

INDEX

Subjects: Reconnaissances

AUTHOR

FRÉDÉRIQUE SPILL Université de Picardie Jules Verne

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Deux entretiens avec Colum McCann

Cécile Maudet

Introduction

Il n'est que d'évoquer quelques-uns des nombreux prix que Colum McCann a reçus pour comprendre que la critique internationale s’accorde à reconnaître en lui un auteur talentueux. On peut citer le très prestigieux National Book Award (pour Let the Great World Spin), le Rooney Prize1 (pour Fishing the Sloe-Black River), le Pushcart Prize (pour sa nouvelle « As Kingfishers Catch Fire ») ou encore le American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, ainsi que le titre de « meilleur écrivain de l’année » décerné par le magazine américain Esquire (pour Dancer). Ces récompenses soulignent toutes le succès que connaissent les textes de Colum McCann outre-Atlantique et posent la question de la filiation littéraire de ce dernier qui affirme être aussi redevable envers les écrivains américains que sont Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (Cusatis 2011 14), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Philadelphia Free Library 2007) ou John Steinbeck (McCaffrey) qu'envers les écrivains irlandais James Joyce, William B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett ou Seamus Heaney (, consulté le 18 septembre 2009). Ce lien entre Colum McCann et les États-Unis révèle aussi la double appartenance identitaire de l'auteur qui, comme nombre de ses contemporains, est un acteur de la diaspora irlandaise. Certes, il explique qu'il perçoit l’« irlandité » comme intrinsèque à sa personnalité (McCann), mais en faisant le choix de s’installer à New York il y a plus de vingt ans, il est rapidement passé outre la tendance des auteurs irlandais qui l'ont précédé à s'enfermer dans la critique acerbe de leur pays à la fin du XXe siècle 2. Toutefois, s'il est vrai qu'il a indubitablement élargi son champ d’expériences aux Etats-Unis, ses textes ne se concentrent pas non plus exclusivement sur la société américaine. En effet, par l'écriture, l'auteur opère une rupture géographique et prend de la distance par rapport à ses deux cultures, celle d’origine et celle d’adoption, en vue de donner une plus grande portée aux voix tues par le récit méta-historique. Assez logiquement, cette rupture implique pour lui de composer avec des contextes socio-culturels

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méconnus3. Par ailleurs, bien que ses ouvrages s'intéressent pour la plupart4 à un volet récent de l'histoire, ils ne se penchent que très rarement sur une époque que l'auteur a lui-même vécue. Tout se passe comme s'il voulait creuser au maximum le fossé temporel, dans ce qui semble être un souci d'exhaustivité et une volonté de circonscrire au mieux l'événement historique, privilégiant le témoignage archivé par rapport au témoignage immédiat5. La rupture se joue sur deux plans dans l'œuvre de Colum McCann : on dirait que l'auteur double la rupture thématique d'une rupture stylistique et qu'il la formalise en revisitant les codes de la tradition réaliste. Car malgré le réalisme qui gouverne son écriture, il semble à certains moments que l'auteur cherche à empêcher le lecteur de percevoir ses textes comme de simples miroirs de la société, et qu'il y parvienne en épousant quelques tropes de la littérature postmoderne6. Par ailleurs, il a aussi parfois recours à des procédés qui visent à dissuader le lecteur de s’identifier aux protagonistes : le réalisme magique7, le symbolisme (biblique, le plus souvent) et le bestiaire tendent en effet à faire de ses personnages des figures universelles, des archétypes qui reflètent une expérience plus générique que singulière. En s'inspirant de la sorte du postmodernisme et réinjectant du mythe dans un univers pourtant inspiré du réel, McCann décloisonne les genres littéraires et revisite le roman social. Néanmoins, la rupture avec la veine réaliste ne signifie en rien un détachement de l'auteur par rapport aux questions sociétales de son temps. Les deux entretiens que nous avons réalisés montrent que Colum McCann a à coeur de sensibiliser le lecteur à l'empathie et de créer chez lui une situation de questionnement moral. En effet, selon l'auteur, le texte, quelle que soit sa nature, se doit de faire autorité et de guider le lecteur dans ses choix moraux8. Ainsi, les textes littéraires de Colum McCann deviennent des supports vers lesquels le lecteur peut se tourner et grâce auxquels il peut vivre une expérience existentielle par procuration, ce qui n'est pas sans rappeler le concept d'« ego expérimental » avancé par Milan Kundera9. Ces entretiens ont été réalisés à des moments clés dans la carrière de Colum McCann puisque le premier s'est déroulé très peu de temps après la publication de son roman TransAtlantic et que le second a eu lieu le jour suivant la parution française de son dernier projet en date intitulé The Book of Men (Être un homme, 2014). Ils se concentrent sur les deux recueils de nouvelles de l'auteur, Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994) et Everything in This Country Must (2000), ainsi que sur ses six romans : Songdogs (1995), This Side of Brightness (1998), Dancer (2003), Zoli (2007), Let the Great World Spin (2009) et TransAtlantic (2013). Le second entretien se concentre évidemment aussi sur The Book of Men, recueil de textes auquel ont contribué près de quatre-vingts auteurs internationaux réunis par Colum McCann, et qui s'intéresse au concept de masculinité. Cet ouvrage a vu le jour grâce à l'association Narrative 4 (dont Colum McCann est un des fondateurs et aussi le Président) qui met en application l'idée que se fait l'auteur du rôle de l'écriture et des histoires puisqu'elle les dote d'une valeur performative10.

Premier entretien (22 avril 2013)

CM: You have written mostly novels, but their composition is always fragmented into different stories told by various narrators. Their structures are thus somehow reminiscent of that of collections of short stories. I would like to understand the interest you find in resorting to so many voices within the same novel. What kind of spaces would you say that these condensed stories create for you as opposed to a longer story that would be told by

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one narrator? And what do you find in the novels that you don’t find in the short stories in terms of writing possibilities–because you've gradually left the genre of the short story aside these last few years, right? CMcC: I suppose first of all you write the books that you want to read. That’s the most important thing. People ask you: “Who is your reader?” Well, ultimately your reader should be yourself, twenty years from now. So you hope not to be bored by your stuff and you hope that it still has the electricity that runs through it. And also, I’m very interested in the kaleidoscopic notion of storytelling and increasingly interested in it as a political idea, especially the notion that it can be an all embracing sort of democracy, so that if you go to a kaleidoscopic point of view you can see things from several different angles. I have quoted this many times before–I’m sure you’ve seen me quote it–but John Berger says: “Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one.”11 When I came across that, it was really interesting for me because I was writing. I think the big moment for me was when I was just starting writing Dancer. Do you know the story about how I got to write Dancer?

CM: A friend of yours… CMcC: A friend of mine, he was in Dublin, his father came home drunk and he saw Rudolf Nureyev on TV and he sort of fell in love with Rudolf Nureyev. I thought that’s a beautiful story, an absolutely gorgeous story, really powerful. And I started to think: that particular story would never make it as a part of the official biography, the official history of Rudolf Nureyev because it’s a supposedly anonymous story. But if that story captures a life, or a part of a life, it captures not only Jimmy’s life–my friend–but it also captures Rudolf Nureyev’s life, right? It’s also a story about fathers, about cultures, about drink, it’s about Dublin, it’s about Russia, it’s about all these different things coming together. So each individual story has its own sort of kaleidoscopic moment, its own crystal, if you will. You look at it, you shine the light through it and you see it fractured in several different ways. But the accumulation of those things can tell a sort of biography. I’d just written a very small book called Everything in This Country Must, which was tight. The geography was tight, it was gathered all about Northern Ireland, and I wanted to sort of expand my lungs but also I wanted to write very much an international novel. And the origin is kind of stupid now when I think about it, but originally I wanted to write a novel that had every country in the world mentioned somehow. But then it became a device. I started it and then I thought: “No, this is a device, this is not good”. And it wasn’t true, even though Rudolf Nureyev would have been the perfect person for that because he was sort of all over the place. So the project started, I suppose, when I started Dancer. And then after Dancer, Zoli was a much more controlled book and much more focused book, and yet it still had different points of view. Well, maybe it’s because I’m influenced by cinema in certain ways because you have the high angle, and then you have the close up, and then you have the fish eye lens, and then you have different lenses. If you’re making a film you never use the same lens all the way along. So there’s something cinematic about it, there’s something to do with politics and democracy, there’s something to do with just the kaleidoscopic nature. And quite frankly I don’t want to bore myself or bore the reader and I love shifts in pace. So that’s kind of like music: things become contrapuntal and they’re moving in and moving out and then they bash up against one another. Sometimes it awakens the sleep in you in certain ways when you can’t write that way. That’s the sort of writing I enjoy reading. So part of it then is just logical, part of it is political, part of it is

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aesthetic and part of it is just because that’s the way I want to do, and maybe it’s the only way I know how.

CM: You've just mentioned the political aspect of your writing. You once said that “[you] don’t know what [the term fiction] means” (Birnbaum 2007) and that “you don't like the word [fiction] anymore” (Birnbaum) because, for you, stories are windows onto history. Could you elaborate on this a little? With this assertion, would you go as far as saying that your literature is akin to a historical testimony in a way, or archive? CMcC: Well, I don’t say that all fictions should be this way. One of the things that I think is really important to say is that I have my point of view and I will not impose it on anybody else. I don’t want to make any grand sweeping statements about the nature of fiction or anything like that, but I do think that writers, especially when they embrace the anonymous corners, are creating a new history. They become the sort of unacknowledged historians in a certain way. I think it’s really important. Their story has to be told over and over and over again otherwise it gets distorted and forgotten. The Jewish culture is really interesting in the sense that it has always known that it must tell a story over and over and over again. Otherwise you’ll have people appropriate it outside, they’ll say it’s untrue. Writing about the holocaust they’ve done the most incredible things. They’ve told it from so many different angles that you can’t really deny its truth. Anybody who tries to deny its truth seems ridiculous. If they hadn’t told their story, like, say, the Romani culture didn’t really tell their story, the truth would have been created for them from the outside. It’s like that Sartrian notion of the stereotypes,12 you know, that society conforms to its own stereotypes. If the truth is formed from the outside, that’s a real problem. The Irish culture forms its own truth much like the Jewish culture because we are storytellers. But there are certain things that we have avoided too like the famine. The Irish famine has been sort of avoided. So, in a certain way, I do find that there’s perhaps even a truer history involved in all this. I wrote an essay about Ulysses, I don’t know if you have had a chance to read it?

CM: Yes, I've read it. You're alluding to “But Always Meeting Ourselves,” (McCann 2009) right? CMcC: Right. And in that, I sort of assert that this fiction Ulysses is a more important history to me personally than that of my actual ancestors themselves. So, that Leopold Bloom–the fictional character–legislates my Dublin for me, because he’s there on June 16, 1904. My great grandfather, who I never met–but it pumps through my blood, right?–walked the same streets on June 16, 1904. Why do I know my great grandfather? I really know him because I know Leopold Bloom. That’s very interesting to me. The imagined is real, if not even more real than reality itself. I think that’s been my project for the past I don’t know how many books since Dancer. This new book, TransAtlantic, is very much like that project too. I think I’ve finished. I’m at the end of that. I’ve pushed it as far as it can go. I don’t know where I want to go next. Maybe off the cliff or out the window or something, I don’t know! But yes, I think we have a responsibility to history and we also have a responsibility to our characters. Much of the history, I get it right, as for example in TransAtlantic. I get minutely right and then I insert fictional characters.

CM: It's how you do, isn't it? CMcC: So I talked with Sacha Hemon–Aleksandar Hemon–about this and he says that in Bosnia, there’s no word for fiction. I think that’s really cool. He says it’s all called

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storytelling. So there’s no word for fiction or non-fiction; it’s just storytelling. And I think essentially that’s what we are engaged in.

CM: Talking about engagement, your political stances are not dissimulated in your press articles, especially concerning the Bush administration and the socio-economic changes that Ireland has gone through during the last decades. You said you wished the voice of today’s writers were more influential, and you deplore the “acute crisis of disengagement” (McCann date de l'entretien non mentionnée) from both readers and writers. You've also insisted on wanting to give a voice to “the anonymous corners of the world.”13 Such a recurring treatment of balkanized countries, the margins and migration leads me to ask you this: in what way would you say that your literary production is also politically engaged? CMcC: I will have to say that it’s politically engaged right down to its very core. But I’m not interested in telling anybody what sort of politics they should live, nor am I necessarily interested in anybody knowing what my politics happen to be after they finish the book. I think they have a fair idea. But what’s more interesting to me is that you allow a human experience through the function of writing. So tomorrow for instance, I have possibly the best day of my literary life, the biggest thing that ever happened to me, because I’m going to Newtown, Connecticut, where those twenty-six kids were killed in the shooting last year.14 The High School there used Let the Great World Spin as the text to navigate the grief for the High School children, for the seventeen and eighteen year olds. They’ve been studying Let the Great World Spin for the past two months. They are talking with counselors, they’re talking with themselves, amongst themselves, with their teachers about Let the Great World Spin but they’re also using it to navigate this horrible thing with their brothers, their sisters, the kids that they baby sat for, who were killed. And, to me, that's where literature comes in and has this moment of healing. This is where it becomes political because I’m sure that healing is political and engagement is political. And I don’t want to become a politician obviously–it’s so boring to be a politician, right?–but to be somebody who just talks about these human things that Faulkner talks about: the human heart at conflict with itself; love, pride, pity, compassion; these things that he quotes in his 1950 Nobel address.15 In fact, I always think it’s very interesting to look at the writers. When they receive their award, that’s when they become the most optimistic. They can be quite dark in their own work but virtually every writer worth his or her salt believes in the power of literature. And that’s fascinating to me. I mean, there’s no point to do it otherwise. We’d just be solipsistic or sort of onanistic. So, I would say that I would like to think that it is politically engaged but it’s not– hopefully–it’s not didactic.

CM: Sure, you don’t want to be didactic. Yet, literature is or has to be for some writers. Frank Norris said that the novel “may be a great force that works together with the pulpit and the universities for the good of the people.” (Norris 1970 241) Conversely, Richard Ford wrote that short “story writers–more so than novelists–are moralists at heart. The short story enables to kind of show the reader some path to follow.” (Ford 1992 xvii-xviii) According to these two writers then, it seems that literature–whatever form it takes–has an educative role to play. As it is concise and generally very efficient, I would personally agree with R. Ford to say that the short story could indeed be envisaged as an adequate way to convey a moral message. Would you acknowledge this congruence between literature and morality? And would you agree to say that literary texts are forms to, if not convey a moral message, at least trigger in the reader a situation of moral questioning? CMcC: For sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, I don’t see a massive difference between the literary forms, between short stories and novels. I also don’t even see a huge difference between novels and journalism, nor poems and playwriting. I believe

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that the well chosen word properly put down upon the page can be as influential in no matter what form it happens to be. I can do short stories and I can do novels. I’ve tried plays and they’re terrible, I’ve tried poems they’re really terrible, they’re unbelievably bad. I don’t want to show them to anybody! It doesn’t really bother me what form it happens to take in all the forms that I love the most but I think the most expansive form, the biggest form of all, is the novel, because it can contain everything. But in relation to its moral purpose and its moral parameters, I think it’s dangerous to say that the novel must be moral, but I will say the novel must be moral!

CM: I am currently working on the concept of rupture in your work. I think it applies thematically first of all. You always envisage historical events from a distance, so rupture is temporal. Would you say that, like historians who think they cannot legitimately investigate on the history of present time–as they think they need hindsight to deal with historical events (Leduc, date non mentionnée, et Soulet, 1989)–you want to wait for objectivity to operate–an objectivity that is only made possible with time? In Let the Great World Spin you don't deal with 9/11. I mean, you deal with it, yet only very obliquely. So, do you think that writers, or at least you, need a distance to write about historical events? CMcC: Yes, I think that this is where the difference comes in between, say, journalism and prose which I was just talking about. I think that one needs about twenty, twenty-five years before writing about events. That’s why with Let the Great World Spin it’s very obviously a 9/11 novel but it uses 1974 and the Vietnam War. It creates space for the reader’s imagination and the reader can go in whatever way she wants to, whatever way he wants to, to reinterpret these things. It’s sort of a guided morality if you will. It’s like saying: “Oh, I’m not being moral but here’s the world and here’s the photograph; why don’t you come into the photograph and then you take whatever it is you wander around behind it?” Is that legitimate or not? I suppose it is. It has to be, in fact. And in many ways I think of myself as a photographer. You’re obviously taking the photograph in the present, right? You’re influenced by the present moment, and then you’re looking back, right? And your lens goes into the past. I mean, the future doesn’t really interest me, because obviously, it’s not even here yet.

CM: You’re not a proleptic writer. CMcC: I'm not. This whole notion of projecting myself forward doesn’t really interest me. I'm interested in having the lens that’s in the present focused back upon the past because whoever we are now is whoever we have been before. So when we say: “Well, I’ll have a look at that back there,” it’s talking about now, it’s talking about the “then” as well. Although TransAtlantic goes all the way up to 2011, mostly it takes place in 1845 when Frederick Douglass goes to Ireland, and then 1919, when the flight goes from Canada to Ireland, and then in 1998, when the peace process is up in the North. The peace process is fifteen years old now so that’s a good time to start thinking about it and looking at it. I don’t know why it is. I mean, some books are good when they’re raw and they’re right on the edge, but in general I feel that you need that little telescope or periscope back into the past.

CM: Rupture in your production is also spatial, I think, because you deal with uprooting, displacement, migration and with characters who are outcasts, as we said. So, it’s quite logically cultural as well. You are often initially unfamiliar with the places you decide to set at the core of your stories, which accounts for the accurate researches that you make. You dig into archives, you spend time in libraries. And when you do know these places I have the feeling that you aim at making your task as a writer even more complex, because you focus on places the topography of which is less known to you. Indeed, when you write about New

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York, a place that you obviously know very well, you mainly write about its tunnels or the sky above it. When you write about Ireland, you write about Northern Ireland, or the west of Ireland where I don’t think you have lived. CMcC: Well, I lived there for a very short while. I lived in Castlebar, in Co. Mayo, for a little while when I was seventeen, for six months. But in the North of Ireland I didn’t live. What you're saying is true. I've never wrote about Dublin, ever. Well, in one short story in Fishing the Sloe Black River actually, but that’s not a big deal, it was just glancing. I did write about Dublin in TransAtlantic though. I don’t know what that means but for twenty-five years of writing I generally stayed away from where I had grown up. Is this my own form of interior displacement in order to make myself sort of uncomfortable? I mean, the thing about it is, when I first came over here in New York and sat down to write a book I realized pretty quickly that I had very little to write about. Well, essentially, I had to, I suppose, displace myself. I had to come away and then I had to go out on the road again. So I went on bicycle. I was going somewhere new every single day for about a year and a half. Some days I’d stay like a week or two weeks but more or less every single day for a year and a half I was sleeping in a new place. And that was a form of continual displacement. Now I know what I was doing: I was gathering stories. But up until that point I didn’t have these stories to tell, or I did maybe, but I just couldn’t recognize them. I mean I grew up relatively middle class. My father was a journalist in Dublin which was a really hard- drinking, hard-living game but he didn’t involve himself in that. He left home at seven in the morning, came home at four in the afternoon, he wrote his books at home. Anyway a fairly well-behaved, well-mannered sort of life. So when I came away I realized that I had little to write about. I suppose, it’s a form of wounding yourself. You know what truck drivers do to keep themselves awake?

CM: No, I don’t. CMcC: Sometimes they strike matches and they smell the sulphur. Some of them keep razor blades in their hands and they cut their hands. Or, you know the way when you fall asleep, when you try and drive, and you pinch yourself like this? For me that’s kind of what the emigrant does. He continually pinches himself because he is away. You remind yourself of your home whereas if you’re home you don’t have to pinch yourself. If you’re home, you sleep. So, to me, it was a continual form of moving on. That’s also what fiction is for me. It is a way, a manner and a means to continually pinching myself awake. Because I have this ordinary life. Look, oh fine I live in the Upper East Side, I am a block from the park, but I really want to live a little bit of a crazy life too.

CM: By proxy. CMcC: Most of my crazy life is done by proxy, exactly, in that little room inside, and I enjoy that.

CM: Well, I'd now like to discuss the style of your writing if you don't mind. You said you admire Zola (McCann) and, indeed, it seems that the realist streak runs through your works. Yet, you also resort to magic realism–I have “Cathal’s Lake” in mind–a genre typical of postmodern literature. And some of your texts look to me like they have also been influenced by the modernist current–I cannot but think of Claire in Let the Great World Spin as a contemporary version of Mrs Dalloway. Would you be able to tell me to what extent you have been affected by any of these currents? CMcC: I think that we get our voices from the voices of everyone and I don’t know what it is I write. I don’t know if I want to know what it is that I write. If I'm forced

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into a corner, if I'm seating besides someone on a plane and they ask me what I do, I say: “Well, I’m a writer”. And if they say: “What do you write about?” or they say things like: “What is your book about?” I say: “That’s about 350 pages.” But if they really force me into describing what my work is, I say: “Well, it’s serious fiction”. Then if we have to go further, I say: “It’s poetic realism.” And it’s not magic realism though I’m very fond of magic realism. I do now think that I have to further that term because I’m interested in these ideas of hope and cynicism. Obama talks about the audacity of hope.16 I’m also interested in the audacity of despair, and what it means to be cynical and what it means then also to be an optimist. Ultimately I am an optimist but I’m very well aware that calling yourself an optimist exposes you to all the slings and arrows of outrageous hatred because it can seem so sentimental to be an optimist. But it seems me to be the best possible optimist you have to be a really really good cynic first. So we have to get down to the heart of the realism, right down the dark. I would like to be able to take the very best cynic around and sit with her or sit with him in a room and be able to battle them as hard as humanly possible and be just as cynical as they are and then say: “Okay, are we finished?” And then they might say: “Yeah, we’re finished. We’re exhausted.” And I’d say: “No! That’s so uninteresting!” Cynicism is completely uninteresting to me, and I just think it’s a failure of the imagination to be just completely bereft and cynical. It’s much more interesting to be as cynical as them and then just vault away and go somewhere else. And that’s the only good optimist because if you’re an optimist and you’re not prepared to battle, really hard, then you’re finished. Cynicism is just too easy. Optimism is much more difficult.

CM: In your works despair may be overwhelming, and the way you deal with the body is sometimes very grim, especially in the way of presenting aging–Songdogs is quite striking in this respect. Twice in your stories, the tongue is eaten (This Side of Brightness and Songdogs). The bodies of dead soldiers in Dancer end up becoming providential material to make roads, they are also altered by the violence of dance. Brigid, in “Sisters,” tears out her nails. What is at stake in this treatment of the body? Why is it often reduced to its most debasing qualities? CMcC: Well, I don’t know! I don’t know is the simple and honest answer. But, if you take the body of Nureyev, it hits its pinnacle and then starts to disintegrate. In Dancer, it's true that you start out with this image of the bodies being used and then, tanks roll over them. And dance is all about the abuse of the body but to create some sort of spectacular human form, right? In This Side of Brightness Treefrog abuses his body, he scars his hands–let me see…

CM: In “Sisters,” Michael and Sheona get raped and that’s related in an anecdotal sort of way. In This Side of Brightness, Angela gets raped; what is a supposedly dramatic scene becomes devoid of any intensity because the narrator doesn't enable the reader to empathize with her. It therefore seems that the reader cannot fully empathize with physically suffering characters but only with those who are morally suffering. We empathize with Claire in Let the Great World Spin, who is tormented by her deepest wounds, but we do not empathize with Jigsaw (in the same novel) when he gets murdered: the killing scene is way too gore. His remnants–as well as those of Faraday in This Side of Brightness–become more of a logistical problem to solve than a moral problem–the question after their deaths boils down to something like “What will we do with the bits of brain here on the pavement or on the subway track?” CMcC: That’s very interesting, but I don’t know. I’ll think about it. But if you become too conscious of it then you lose [your ability to create]. Somebody said to me once

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how much I write about maps, that I have maps everywhere. But if he knows, recently I haven’t had so many maps. You know why? Because somebody told me I wrote about maps!

CM: An obstacle to your creation! I'll stop tormenting you about abused bodies then! CMcC: Oh no! The body is really interesting to me and I wonder why... I’m trying to think... That’s interesting... Maybe it stems from a weird catholic [background]. I don't know...

CM: Talking about religion, it seems to sometimes add dramatic intensity to your texts. In Let the Great World Spin, both Corrigan and the funambulist have been perceived by critics as Christ-like figures. Indeed, Corrigan goes down to “the Tombs.” (McCann 2009 64) About the prostitutes he's trying to help, he also says: “They just don’t know what it is they are doing.” (McCann 2009 29) He has “shoulder-length hair,” (McCann 2009 26) “carpenter pants” and “sandals.” (McCann 2009 41) Yet, the religious references may also endow your works with comedy. Many times, those who embody religion are discredited. The priest is drunk for Dana’s wedding in “Stolen Child.”17 He flirts with a girl behind the counter in Songdogs.18 He acts in an inappropriate way according to the narrator Kevin in “Hunger Strike.”19 As for the religious ritual, it is desacralized in Songdogs, This Side of Brightness and Let the Great World Spin where mass and prayers are respectively called “spiritual suppository,” (McCann 1995 157) “spiritual regurgitation” (McCann 1998 150) and “the Catholic hit parade.” (McCann 2009 13) So, let me ask you this question: What is left of the sacred in your work? Do you think that sacredness is still possible in literature nowadays? CMcC: Yes, absolutely I think it’s possible. In “Hunger Strike” there is that moment when the Lithuanian couple watch the boy smash up the kayak. Their eyes are large and tender. They understand what’s going on. That’s sacred, that’s Joyce, that’s possible.

CM: Some sort of epiphany? CMcC: Exactly. And the same at the end of Let the Great World Spin where Jaslyn’s in bed with Claire. So the sacred is personal, the sacred is never public.

CM: Never institutional? CMcC: The sacred never involves an institutionalized religion or even a political movement, or bureaucracy.

CM: It’s intimate. CMcC: It is. It is a moment of complete, personal intimacy. Even Nureyev rescues himself from me at the very end of Dancer when Yulia watches him go down the staircase. He just hops in the air, that’s it, and then continues down the staircase. That hop is for me one of the most sacred moments of his life. Because he’s saying to her: “I’m still alive. I’m going but I’m still alive. And I lived here. I had this joy.” And I think that goes to the heart of what we were talking about: optimism and pessimism. In the face of available evidence, in the face of all the shit that we get thrown at us every single day, this stuff in Boston,20 this stuff in Iraq, this stuff in Connecticut that I’m up to tomorrow. In the face of all that horrible human evidence, there is still possibility that you can create beauty.

CM: You often pay tribute to several Irish authors, and you said many times that you’ve been influenced by Joyce.21 As far as I know, you haven’t mentioned being influenced by classics of British literature. Yet, it occurs to me that your texts do contain some hints at canons of British literature about roaming. Indeed, I was struck by some parallels between Zoli and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Like Jane Eyre, Zoli wanders for three days and she doesn’t get to eat. She is rescued by a charitable farmer living in a remote place while Jane

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Eyre finally reaches a house in the middle of nowhere in the moor. Zoli is cast off her social group because she wanted to reach the highest spheres of society with her poetry the way Jane Eyre wants to reach spheres that she’s not supposed to belong to by marrying Rochester. Both pay the price for their pride. Both then try to emancipate from the masculine grasp: that of Swann for Zoli, and that of Rochester for Jane Eyre. Such striking parallels somewhat replace Zoli into the lineage of great heroines, of powerful feminine and independent voices. The Romani poet becomes some sort of heroine and is given some grandeur: the margin is put at the center. Could you comment on this reading of Zoli as having its heroine dignified? CMcC: Can I tell you a terrible secret?

CM: You haven’t read Bronte? CMcC: I haven’t. But that’s okay, and this goes to the heart of my own argument about criticism. I hate when authors get together and dismiss readings and interpretations of a work of art. The beauty of a work of art is that it can create other works of art. And the beauty of a good thought properly placed is that it makes other thoughts that are even more intelligent around it and deepens the thought, deepens the links and the connections that we have to things that are around. So, I love that! I understand what you’re saying. There’s something classical in it. There’s often people talk about there’s only seven different types of stories. And Zoli is very much a classical story about a woman outcast and then goes on a journey.

CM: Now, I would like to quote Michael Cronin who, in what seems to be a rather striking and provocative way, says that unhappy families “are […] a staple of late twentieth-century Irish fiction.” (Cronin 2009 77) Although there is no archetypal family in your texts, their common features are that they are never whole and barely big. Usually the father-figures are flawed entities who have given up their status as heads of family, either because they are dead, absent, afflicted, frustrated, withdrawn or disabled. How would you say that you negotiate with this statement by Cronin, that families cannot be happy in Irish literature? CMcC: You know the famous quote that he is quoting off of, right? The Tolstoy quote: “The unhappy families are...” or “happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are...” I forget what the actual quote is but it’s very famous: “Happy families are all alike and unhappy families...”22 Anyway, it goes to the heart of literary experience in that it was Montaigne, I think, wrote that “happiness writes white.”23 It’s so difficult to write about happiness. In this new book, TransAtlantic, I take on one of the most difficult things that I have ever done and I write about peace. And writing about peace is much more difficult than waging war. But part of it just goes to the fact that this is literary experience. Irish families can be crucibles of tension, an absolute tension. I have no idea why, given the fact that my mum and dad are still together and they’re still alive. I have four brothers and sisters. We are scattered, yes, but it's fine.

CM: Maybe it boils down to what we were saying, that you can’t write about patterns that you are familiar with? CMcC: I like writing about towards what I want to know. If I wrote about what I knew how boring would it be. So my day today: I woke up early, I got a little bit of work done, I helped nine year old boy because he’s got a test, I put some ointment on my fourteen year old boy because he had a bicycle crash the other day. We all had breakfast–well, we don’t really have breakfast together, we’re all running around doing all sorts of things–and then I did a little bit more work. I went to see my doctor friend, we went for a run, we went around the park. I came back here and talked to a few people, did a little more work…

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CM: Many things to talk about you see! CMcC: It’s so boring, right? It’s so boring! Why would anyone want to write a novel about that? We write towards what we want to know. And I am fascinated by it, and I do know about this terror and this difficulty in the world. I have great empathy for all that difficulty. I think this is the big political thing too, our ability to have empathy for others, especially when we have all the information at our fingertips in a most extraordinary way nowadays that we should be so much more deeply empathetic than what we are. And it’s the job of the storyteller, or the poet, or the novelist to deepen our ability for empathy–not to deepen our empathy because that’s ridiculous to say so–but to deepen our ability for empathy. And again it’s all about allowing: you can’t do it yourself but you present the case and you hope that somebody is able to look at it. So when you talk about unhappy families, you can pierce somebody else’s unhappiness but you also have to go towards a moment of joy. I mean, I can basically tell you that in every single story that I’ve written, I don’t think there’s anything that didn’t approach the darkness. “Cathal’s Lake” is the story of a man cursed to dig. He has to dig up the souls of the dead. But at the end, he looks at the fences–he’s walking away at the very last line–and says: “Someday that will have to be fixed”. In other words, it's reminiscent of the peace process. And this was written before the peace process. “Someday that will have to be fixed.” The same for Rudolf Nureyev, coming down the stairs, giving us those little skips, for Claire and Jaslyn, and at the end of Songdogs even, when the fish jumps out of the water and it’s Conor's mother. He understands it’s his mother and she’s reincarnated–well, that’s the salmon of knowledge. I do think that even in the deepest, unhappiest moments of families and fracture, my stories try to achieve some modicum of grace that comes out of them. The other part of it is, quite frankly, that you want to tell a good story. And a good story has conflict, it has drama and it has at least the possibility of some resolution, not necessarily of happy ending resolution, but a possibility or suggestion that there’s going to be some resolution. The last line of TransAtlantic is “We have to thank the world for not ending on us.” That's what it is: optimism.

Deuxième entretien (6 juin 2014)

CM: The movement westward is pre-eminent in your texts:24 six characters emigrate to the west in Fishing the Sloe-Black River,25 Zoli “strikes out west” after she is banished (McCann 2007 186) while Nureyev defects to France, and there are many more examples. According to Eoin Flannery, “the west has always been seen as the trajectory of new prospects and hopes, while the east is more often associated with mystery and the unknown” (Flannery 2011 191)–this conception of the East conjuring up Said's Orientalism26 (we can notice a powerful example of the way the East–Asia to be precise–ignites the imagination in “A Basket Full of Wallpaper” by the way). Yet, you said that “America was for a long time a dream place, a Tír na nÓg of the imagination […]” (Santel 2013), which shows that the West is also the object of fantasy. How do you account for this? Why is the movement westward such a recurring motif in your texts? CMcC: I think there's a few things. There is a “Westward Ho!” sort of feeling to a lot of the work. I think that doesn't just pertain to my work in particular. I think it might pertain to a certain facet of the Irish imagination as well. Tír na nÓg, in the Irish mythology, was the land of eternal youth and it was always set to the West. It was never set in the East. And on a personal level, my father used to go to the States to lecture. He'd be going West. And the one instance that I have in my own family of

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somebody going East is my sister who went to England. I was very close to my sister Siobhan–my older sister–and I always felt that England had robbed her in a certain way. When she came home when I was still quite young, she had an English accent. I remember I was quite upset by all of this, so I think it might be a combination not only of ancient mythology and that idea of the westward journey–the dream of going to a better place, a different place, and becoming a different person–mixed in some of my own personal history. And also the journey that I did myself was a westward journey. So it started on the East coast and ended up in San Francisco. It seems much more optimistic to do so, I don't know why it would feel so, but I would not have liked to have started in San Francisco and finished on the East coast. I can't particularly tell you exactly why, it just feels that way.

CM: So as you quickly mentioned, you have been inspired by the Frontier. It seems to explain why several allusions are made to the American myth of the Frontier in your texts.27 Yet, the transition zone that the Frontier represents has more to do with vertical expansion. It may be downward, with the sandhogs, in This Side of Brightness, who look like pioneers digging into unexploited soil, or with Fernando, in Let the Great World Spin, who is fascinated with the “virgin territory”–as he calls it–that the underground represents when it comes to artistic expression. (McCann 2009 174) But it may also be an expansion upward, as shows the unprecedented artistic performance by the tightrope walker, in Let the Great World Spin, who takes the sky of Manhattan as his playground, or the building sites dedicated to erecting skyscrapers in This Side of Brightness, so as to inhabit a “virgi[n] space.” (McCann 1998 196) So, focusing on the first part of the question (the Frontier) first of all, to what extent would you say American history has defined your prose? And then, why such an interest in the vertical organization of space in This Side of Brightness and Let the Great World Spin? CMcC: Well, I was endlessly interested in the underground being a sort of Frontier space. These characters who are underground would take their shopping trolleys that they would push through the [tunnels]. But what has happened to that idea of “Westward we go”, “Westward Ho!”? It has come in upon itself. That sort of “American Dream” has shrunk and become something dark, something where there's not a lot of space and not a lot of light. So it was definitely interesting for me to think about these men and women who are homeless people as being sort of Frontier's people but in an almost horrific sort of way, inhabiting that sort of darkness. And then, in Let the Great World Spin, with Fernando the character who takes the photographs down below, that was really just a way for me to get him from the Bronx down into Wall Street. Sometimes these things become practical issues for a novelist too. You and I have talked before about the notion that Dostoevsky talks about, that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased. (Dostoevsky 2001 99) So that when you know what it is that you're going to do, you bring a sort of malady to your work. And I increasingly like the idea that you are an explorer and that you're heading out and you don't know what territory it is that you're going to hit. But often you'll end up in a place that you have to make sense of as you go along. A lot of writers react against the idea of their work being interpreted in that way. I love it actually. I enjoy it very much. I like the expansiveness of the imagination whereby my texts would inform your texts and would inform somebody else's texts. To me that's part of the winding and the gyre, the Yeatsian notion of things meeting one another, which I employ actually in Let the Great World Spin, because we take the sixth century Mu'allaqât suspended poems–or the hanging poems–and then take Tennyson and then take Let the Great World Spin. These things, they take energy from one another. And we go back

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down too, it's not always a constant rising up so it becomes a comment on the historical process too.

CM: I now would like to pinpoint the way you deal with place in your work, especially in Songdogs. The description that you make of the train station28is redolent of what French anthropologist Marc Augé has coined non-places, which are “spaces in which no lasting social relations are established (transit spaces, spaces people pass through), [in which] there are […] evident social deficits. (Anonyme, 2009) People are only passengers in and users of non-places,29 and non-places are also said to be “immense parentheses” (Augé 1995 111) in people's daily lives, as they are not vectors of identity. In your foreword to the French version of The Book of Men, you have written that stories should enable to re-create a form of communication and to struggle against “one of [today's] biggest failures, the lack of empathy [and] our inability to understand one another.” (McCann 2014 8) Would you say that what you are seeking to do with the association Narrative 4 is to struggle against a universal form of non-place? CMcC: That's an interesting construction of it. I would say that I'd be seeking to put people in a place, to make the story valuable in that particular place. I am fascinated by this notion of place and the language that it gives to us. And this is a spectacular notion the idea of non-place, especially when you talk about an internet age where we exist in a sort of everywhere, and we have to establish a place and a value for ourselves. One hopes that you'll be able to go in and make these stories matter. When your stories matter, your place matters, and there's a value there that I find important. The reason I talk so much about empathy is because I do think that it's our biggest political failure, the failure to understand the other person also means the failure to understand the other's place, their history, their geography and where they come from. If we can step into another body out of this place into somebody else's place, then we're making a human leap that seems to me entirely necessary.

CM: It's interesting you mentioned the fact that people need to be affected by what they are reading or experiencing because some scenes in your texts convey excruciating violence and intensity (I'm thinking about the rape of Angela or Faraday's death by electrocution in This Side of Brightness, as well as Jigsaw's murder in Let the Great World Spin). Yet, the critical readers, although likely to experience the principle of the “willful suspension of disbelief”30– should be able to envisage things from a hindsight and to see the page as a barrier protecting them from the eventual harm that is done to the characters. You said that “what [you] want people to do is to live in the pulse of the moment” (Rose) when they read your texts, and this is mostly what happens: they live, they experience your texts, and in the case of the illustrations that we have given, they may be appalled. How can what is supposedly unreal affect the readers so deeply? How is this possible that we should react to a text the fictional aspect of which is unequivocally known to us?31 Would you agree to say that this happens because people are affected not by the fictitious situation, but by the fictitious situation because it possibly looks like everyday experiences?32 Do you believe in the fact that the readers can be physically affected by what they are reading? CMcC: Yes. I do think that the readers can be [affected]. You can read about the holocaust, right, and you can read about the famine, and you can read about, you know, the Iraq war, and you can read about things that are going on and you can be profoundly affected by it. You won't necessarily have the scars, right? You won't have the battle scars, but you can be profoundly affected by it. And in this way, I think there is a sort of non violence that goes about in the act of literature. It's inviting people in to understand what the violence is and how does violence sort of assault them for a while. It certainly assaults their brains and possibly assaults their hearts, but when you're finished, you come out of it and you're a changed person. You haven't necessarily experienced the actual violence but you understand it. So

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you're making this leap into a form of awareness of what violence is without actually having been hit, shot, kicked, abused, gassed, whatever series of horrific things that can happen to us. And in this way the act of imagination becomes sort of real. It becomes also an act of maybe even civil disobedience against this violence that is perpetrated upon us, so that the writer and the reader are in this together. And they whisper to one another: “Come with me, we're going to go somewhere really really dark.” When you come out of this, yes, you will be changed, but you won't necessarily be physically hurt by it at least. But then, you will perhaps have this empathy towards the other who has gone through this. That's why I said we have to tell these stories over and over and over again. There's not just one story, there's not just one story about the Roma, you have to say it over and over again. There's not just one story about the holocaust, or about the Irish famine. We have to continually have people experience what it might have been like. Yet some people shy away from that particularly in contemporary literature, they think that there is a duty to entertain. There is a certain amount of duty to entertain but there's also a duty to get right in under the skin and make people feel somewhat uncomfortable, you know. I think part of the problem with a lot of contemporary literature is that it steps inside, it closes the curtain and it says: “I won't hurt you, I'll stroke your ego and I'll make you feel good.” And I don't think that serves us too well.

CM: And when you said that you want to bring people to the darkest core of life, you may also want to lead them there and laugh with them about this. In Songdogs for example, the death of Michael Lyons's protectors–two Protestant nuns–is recounted in such a succinct way that it sounds quite absurd. Let me remind it for you: “In the water they might have suddenly looked at one another and remembered the essential fact that neither of them could swim.” (McCann 1995 7) In Let the Great World Spin, comedy looms in the text even when the situation is dramatic. Indeed, Tillie's speech is fraught with terms that are so colloquial that they are sometimes even blasphemous33 or disrespectful.34 Besides, Gloria's nodding and approval after each sentence that is uttered by her new friend Marcia, moved when talking about the funambulist that reminds her of her dead son, makes the dialogue sound like an evangelical mass.35 Angela, in This Side of Brightness, thinks that the coffin of Faraday, who died in atrocious circumstances, is “stylin'” with its “gold handles.” (McCann 1998 132)36 You don't hesitate to resort to comedy in the most dramatic situations, and it even seems to be mainly there that you use comic devices. What is the role of comedy here? Is this a way to alleviate the tension and play down the pathos? CMcC: I think that's probably exactly what it is. I'm not afraid of sentiment, but I'm deathly afraid of sentimentality. So as a writer, one of the things that I want to do is go as far as I possibly can. But I'm always conscious that if I go too far, I'll fall off the edge of the cliff. You know [Kurt] Vonnegut had that quote that “we should be continually jumping off of cliffs and developing our wings on the way down,” and I think one of the wings that we develop on the way down is the wing of comedy in order to alleviate some of the really darkest aspects of what it is that we have around. In the end, I mean, you do have to have a laugh. God is playing a big trick on us and at a certain stage we have to be able to look at it and say: “Maybe we need to experience it in another way.” I suppose for me it is the fear of pushing the sentiment into sentimentality. But I will not refuse the sentiment. I think too many writers are so scared of it that they become dry and they become tired and they become old before their time and not really prepared to go to the edge. I'd rather go to the edge and wear my heart on my sleeve than sit in the corner with all the cynics who don't really

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want to experience life out loud. But I've never thought of myself as a very funny writer!

CM: You are though! CMcC: No! Really? That's very funny! Well, I think Tillie is funny. I like Tillie. I'm writing a short story right now that's kind of funny. I hope it's kind of funny anyway! Well, we shall see!

CM: You also avoid sentimentality in “From Many One” (Fishing the Sloe-Black River). It's a short story that I think is very different from all the others that you have written. It seems to be that it can be perceived as belonging to what has been coined “minimalist realism.”37 To what extent would you say that you have been influenced by this trend or writers such as Richard Ford or Ray Carver? CMcC: Carver. Carver. And at the time I wrote this story I was at the university of Texas and in fact I was reading Carver at that time. Carver is all over that story. [This story] also deals with a thing that happened to me, because when I was at the university of Texas, I was a bartender and we used to get a lot of girls coming in with a lot of colored coins. And I said what's this story with these colored coins? And they told me that it was the strippers who used them. But so I just took that little piece. Because you magpie from your life, right? That's what you do, you become a magpie and then you build your nest. The nest itself is a story. In this particular case, it's a very minimal nest. That's an older story, but it's true I like to work in different forms.

CM: That's what I like about your work, it's so varied. CMcC: Wait and see the new collection of short stories, they go all over the place!

CM: Talking about people who may have influenced you, I would like to focus on those writers the texts of whom focus on father figures. Father figures have long been a significant focus of Irish writings, often presented as unfaltering authoritative figures.38 In your texts though, the fathers are flawed, and do not fulfill their duty as mentors because they are either dead (Zoli, This Side of Brightness and “Hunger”), absent (Let the Great World Spin), incapable of bringing up their children (“Stolen Child”), disabled (“Wood”) or introverted (“A Basket Full of Wallpaper”, “Everything in This Country Must” and Songdogs). Therefore, the young protagonists look for new role models to rely on.39 In that regard, some of your texts seem to have been inspired by the stories of initiation, a profoundly American tradition, John Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer (1841) having paved the way for these. Later, William Faulkner’s “The Bear” (1942), and before that, Ernest Hemingway’s “Fathers and Sons” (1933) have also been cornerstones as far as coming of age tales are concerned. John Cusatis wrote that you “acknowledged a debt to Hemingway’s […] The Old Man and the Sea, whose protagonist, Santiago clearly influenced the creation of the old Lithuanian in 'Hunger Strike'” (Cusatis 2011 105-106) but I haven't been able to find a reference for this assertion. Could you elaborate on this a little? Would you say you owe the writers of growing-up tales a debt? CMcC: Yeah. Well, first of all, yes, I think that I owe–I mean, we all owe–these writers a debt. And recently I had a debate with somebody who should go unnamed, a fairly prominent figure in Irish literature, and he said quite proudly: “I have not read Joyce”. So though he hadn't physically read Joyce I made the argument that he had read Joyce anyway because he'd read anything else that'd been around and because Joyce inhabits so much of what we are and who we are as a nation and also as a literary community. Even if he hadn't physically read him, he had actually read him and had been influenced by him. I think we have to acknowledge the influence of others very much so. And The Old Man and the Sea was a book that I read when I was in late teens and, in fact, my father got sick a couple of years ago and I was at his

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hospital bed and I read him the book aloud when he was in the hospital. I thought that was an interesting thing to read The Old Man and the Sea to my own father. My father was an enormous influence on me. He wasn't absent. I mean his own father had been absent. I think much of what I write about is actually about–for me personally, if you'd be looking at my own life–an absent grandfather. I never met my Northern Irish grandfather.

CM: In Joyce's stories, though, you did meet your great grandfather. CMcC: But in Joyce's stories I do meet my great grandfather, yeah. So I know him as a sort of imaginative figure. He's filled out for me. His body is filled out for me by a literary experience. To come back on both my grandfathers, I met my father's father one time in London, and my mother's father I never met. And so it strikes me now, I mean I've never talked about this before but it does strike me now that maybe the absent fathers there is really an acknowledgment of the absent father for my own father. Because my own dad is very very very important to me.

CM. I've seen that documentary on France 5 called La grande librairie and entitled “Gens de Dublin” and you were with your father in Dublin and it was quite touching. CMcC: Yeah, he's still alive. I will tell you that the first–I suppose the very first– literary experience I ever had was when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My father had a writing shed to the corner of the house and I would go out there and hear him type and at the end of about six months he came to me with one of those big rolls of paper we used in the newspapers, cut a sheet about this long and he asked me to read this thing and it turned out to be a book, a children's book, his first children book about soccer called Goals for Glory. And what he asked me to do, he said: “Would you read this and tell me what you think?” And basically he was asking me to edit it, which was fantastic. And now it strikes me that I read that thing and I really liked it and I made notes for him and things like this. I didn't know what I was doing, but that's what he just asked me to do. But a year later–or maybe a year and a half later–the book came out and I brought it to school, and my teacher in school, Mr Kells, actually read the book aloud to the rest of my class on Friday afternoons. So for me that must have been a bizarre thing to think that my father went out to the side shed of the house and typed away, you know. For however many months he typed away on that book and then suddenly it was there in my education and in my classroom. So, I suppose that's one of the very first immediate literary experiences that I can recall. And so much of it has to do with my dad, yes, and has to do with him putting Dylan Thomas on the record player when I was a kid, and about him coming back from the United States, and, you know, bring in Kerouac and Ginsberg and that sort of things. However, I read more about women than about men and I write more about mothers, and mothers in relation to their sons. So my mum has an important influence on that too.

CM: It's amazing you've just mentioned music because that is the subject of the following question. The references to music are incredibly important in your work, be they made by the names of the singers only, the titles of their songs or even the lyrics of the songs. They pervade your texts. If we keep in mind the fact that some of your characters are unable to express themselves, are such recurring allusions to music only a way to infuse the texts with realistic references or do you also sometimes use music as a way for your characters to replace words when feelings cannot be voiced? CMcC: Sometimes it would be this thing. I wrote this story call “Step We Gaily On We Go!”...

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CM: Heel for heel and toe for toe! CMcC: Yeah! I do sing but I can't sing, that's my problem! I need a few whiskeys and a few pints of beers before I start to sing! Music has always been enormously important for me. And also [I like] just listening to it as I write, listening to Van Morrison or listening to David Gray, or listening to...

CM: “Old Buttermilk Sky”? CMcC: Yeah, that again is from my dad, the Hoagy Carmichael stuff you know “Old Buttermilk Sky” that was all from my dad.

CM: Hoagy Carmichael is mentioned seven times in your work!40 CMcC: No way?! Seven times, really? I'll not be able to do it again!

CM: I'm sorry, I might create a block once again! CMcC: No, I love that song. My dad used to go around the house singing it all the time. But I don't know why. I mean it is a very Irish thing to have the music there, to be connected to music, but also the rhythm of language. You know one writes a story like one writes a song. Van Morrison doesn't go into the studio and suddenly knock off “Madame George” you know. He goes in, he works at it, he finds where the saxophone goes, he finds where the lyrics go and then he starts to shape it.

CM: And you did write songs, didn't you? CMcC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh I've written a few songs. I wrote one for TransAtlantic, with Clannad, that just came out. I wrote one with Joe Hurley, Let the Great World Spin. And then I've written one with Joe Henry.

CM: With Lisa Hannigan, right? CMcC: Lisa Hannigan, yeah. It's fun to do that sort of things, I like it. I sort of get outside my writing life.

CM: How do you get organized to be able to choose between the time you want to spend on writing a novel or a short story, or a song? How do you cope with everything? CMcC: I have a lot of things going on right now. I'm the President of Narrative 4, which is the story exchange part that you mentioned earlier. I'm a teacher at Hunter College. I'm writing a collection of short stories. I'm writing a screenplay...

CM: A screenplay? Remember last year, you told me that poems and plays were genres that you didn't want to dedicate yourself to, because you deemed yourself unskilled for writing them. CMcC: I know but the screenplay is different. Poems and plays I can't do, but a screenplay is slightly different–I'm doing that for Let the Great World Spin. But also I'm a soccer coach!

CM: Are you? CMcC: Yes, I'm in charge of two football teams, my sons' football teams, so I have to do all that too. I've got a lot of different hats! What is it that Jim Harrison says? He says: “Under the storyteller's hat, there are many different heads, most of them troubled.” (Harrison 2003 3)

CM: And a lot of voices in your head! CMcC: Exactly! An awful lot of voices in my head. An awful lot of voices in my head. But they are a form of music too. I mean, that engages with your previous question about finding the music of your characters. For example, when I was working on

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Tillie, I did a lot of work beforehand to find out what the life of a prostitute might have been like in the 1970s in New York. I looked at photographs, I looked at films, I looked at histories, I looked at sociology texts, I looked to see if I could find any interviews with them in the newspapers, all these sorts of things. I went out with cops, and then I talked to older cops who'd been around, then had to find a whole warehouse full of rap sheets. I've started to build up a composite of this character and if you'd asked me at that stage what the life of a prostitute would have been like, I could tell you. I knew a lot.

CM: But you didn't have the voice? CMcC: But I had no voice. So it took me a while and when I found the music of her voice, then it came instantly. So it's all about capturing it.

CM: The Greyhound buses quote? CMcC: That's right! “The skinniest dog that I ever saw was on the side of Greyhound Buses,” (McCann 2009 200) that's what she says. And once she'd said that, then I knew how she spoke. Because sometimes when we know how we speak, then we know how we are. Capturing: that's the hard work.

CM: You usually start with a very visual image, right? Is that the way you proceed? In your texts, some scenes are so powerfully visual that their pictorial quality makes us forget their original textual essence. You said to Joseph Lennon: “I very seldom try to wrap an image around an idea. […] I get corralled by an image: it bowls me over and I can’t avoid it […].” (Cahill et Flannery 2012 150) CMcC: Exactly.

CM: Your way of operating can be compared to John McGahern's, who wrote, in “Playing With Words,” that “Work often begins with an image, or a rhythm, or a line of dialogue that stays in the mind and will not go away until it's written down.” (McGahern 2009 9) This reminds me of what you said about the way you found a voice for Tillie Henderson, in Let the Great World Spin, as we just mentioned, by having her saying: “The skinniest dog I ever seen is the one on the side of the greyhound buses.” (Michod 2013) I would like to understand the way you craft your texts. When you are composing, do you really never intend to write in order to make your text visual? Is it always the other way round, the image popping up first? CMcC: Generally it's the image that pops up first. I like cinema and I like cinematographers. I like the eye that people have. I actually hate being photographed but I like taking photographs. And I think that's instructive in a certain way. Most photographers don't like to be photographed, it's very interesting. Nowadays when someone wants to take a photograph of me, I say: “Okay, but only if I can take a photograph of you first.” And so it becomes a reciprocal sort of relationship. And they become aware that they're taking something from me. So in terms of writing, I write like a photographer or a cinematographer but when you go in and create the photograph with words you hope that they have a painterly quality too. So it's not just being a photographer or a cinematographer, it's also being a painter too. Each of those three visual mediums, which are quite different to one another–one being static, one being moving, one being static and moving and also ridged–have a different topography to them. If you can combine all of those, then I think that you can create a scene. I spend a lot of my time with my eyes closed, isn't that weird? I go like this: I close my eyes and I can see things. And then I start to paint them. I use words to try and paint them. And I don't think I'm going to write about man's inhumanity to his fellow man, but that's what the work might be about. I mean, it's

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not for me to say what my work is about. I get in there and I try to paint and then others come in and try to interpret.

CM: When I first met you, you said that “you write the books that you want to read” and that “you hope not to be bored by your [books] and you hope that it still has the electricity that runs through [them].” (propos tenus dans le premier entretien) And like Umberto Eco or Wolfgang Iser,41 it seems that you are also interested in the readers' response and that you believe that they must be active in the reading process, as you just mentioned. You said that you believed in “creative reading” (Cahill et Flannery 2012 157) and in the fact that “the novel should be left open for interpretation.” (McCaffrey) CMcC: For sure.

CM: Do you perceive readers as investigators that you like playing with and manipulating before subtly guiding them towards some form of resolution? CMcC: There is a sort of manipulation that goes on, isn't there? I mean one would like to think that you're not manipulating, you're just presenting but of course you're manipulating. It's all crafted, you know, your character is driving the car and he or she is going to get you somewhere. You present these things but then you hope that the reader might be more intelligent than you, or that the reader feels the exact same emotion that you feel in creating it, so that they go out into the world and operate in the world. I get a chance to meet a lot of my readers, I travel a lot and generally–99% of the time–I like them. They are really interesting people, they are people who engage, they are people who do social work. So I like to think that I write the sort of story that such people get involved in. One would hope that you could convert the legions of cynics, the legions of people who don't want to do anything. It's part of what an artist's desire is. I meet a lot of filmmakers these days too, and filmmakers have an enormous reach and an enormous span. I'm working with J. J. Abrams, who's going to make Let the Great World Spin as a movie when he finishes Star Wars.

CM: Do you realize that? You come right after Star Wars! It's just amazing! CMcC: I know! I know! I know! I know! What's interesting about J. J is that he's enormously smart but he's using this medium as a popular medium: he's doing Star Trek and Star Wars and these sorts of things. He really wants to get into something serious now, that's why we're talking about doing Let the Great World Spin and wanting to do it in a pretty serious way.

CM: What do you mean “something serious”? CMcC: Yeah well, I shouldn't really say that, but I don't think Star Wars is all that serious. I mean some people do, but I don't really want to be on a space ship for two hours, you know. I'd rather be somewhere else. I'd rather be on the street in the Bronx looking at the human endeavor and human difficulty. I think a part of J. J wanted to be in both places. I admire him for his message that he wants to get across. His last Star Wars film was very much an Iraq analogy. I don't know if everybody got it, but it was. So there's a part of me who sometimes thinks I might just be snobby by writing these literary books, but I hope not. I hope not. I want to create a text that people can walk into and walk out of, if not changed, at least about to change, or wanting to affect someone, or pondering over issues of empathy, issues of belonging. I love it when a book does that to me, rattles my heart. There's not many writers who actually truly do it. Somebody like Michael Ondaatje truly does it, John Berger makes me want to change my life when I read his works. I like that sort of things. I think

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that's morally responsible. Should a novelist be morally responsible? I'm not going to tell other novelists to be so but I have to be so.

CM: Yeah, we discussed that last year. Not didactic though. CMcC: I'm not interested in being didactic. I'm not interested in telling anybody how to live. There's enough politicians telling people how to live. There's enough corporations telling people what to buy, what to think, what to feel, what to experience. But if you can present an experience for people, that is authentic. And this is the other thing actually about my Narrative 4 experience: we get these kids from all over the world together to step into one another's shoes and tell one another stories. It's actually an authentic experience for them in a world where there is not a lot of authentic experiences anymore. We hide behind our I-phones, we hide behind our identities on-line, we give ourselves new names on-line, we give ourselves new bodies, all sorts of things on-line. In Narrative 4, when these kids get together and they step across and look each other in the eye, their brains [light up]. We've done brain studies on stories and storytelling and empathy, and the brain becomes a carnival. It lights up when people sit face to face and tell one another stories. It's a fantastic thing.

CM: You know there has recently been an article in our local newspaper (Hosatte 2014) in which I read that your book Dancer has been studied by high school students this year in Finistère, in Brittany, 2 hours away from here.42 They have associated literature and arts so as to create the object that, for them, best encompasses the whole story of Dancer. That's fantastic, isnt't it? So it's a cage, a golden cage, in which the birds are replaced by ballet shoes. CMcC: No way? That's cool! I also know a wonderful Italian architect who started a course whereby you create a structure. You read a book, like Ulysses, and then you create a house, or a building of some sort. And the building must reflect the themes and the characters, and you can use all sorts of found items like cardboard boxes, Sellotape, toilet roll–whatever happens to be–and you create a structure based on the novel. These sorts of things give me great hope for the novel.

CM: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to turn a book into something else, into another artistic medium and way to communicate. Now, we've understood that you try to convey some specific messages, and I think that the way for you to do that is by resorting to symbolism. You said to me that if you had to define what you write, you would say it is “poetic realism.” (propos tenus dans le premier entretien) A perfect illustration of this is that your texts encompass a countless number of explicit comparisons between characters and animals, either evoking common physical features between the two, or identical ways to behave. These animals may be mammals,43 insects, 44 fish, 45 seafood, 46 invertebrates, 47 reptiles48 or birds.49 CMcC: “Owl faced”! That's from The Great Gatsby! That's a specific Great Gatsby reference.

CM: Right. Your texts being thus fraught with an imagery dealing with animals seem to bear similarities with bestiaries or fables.50 By depicting your characters like animals, what do you intend to do? Do you seek to inject symbolism into your predominantly realistic prose? CMcC: I don't know! I don't know! I don't know... I'd have to think about it. I'd be a liar if I told you that I had an immediate answer. I was in Paris yesterday and somebody asked me: “If you could be a word, what word would you want to be?” And he said: “Tell me immediately what you are!”

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CM: What was it? CMcC: It was “pigeon”!

CM: “Pigeon”! Why? You could have chosen “wren” instead! CMcC: Or “sparrow” or whatever!

CM: Yeah! Or “elk,” you know! CMcC: Well, “elk” is nice, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! No, but the name Colum means two things: either “dove” or “pigeon”.

CM: Right. CMcC: I don't want to be a dove. So I said “pigeon”. Pigeon is sort of dirty and a little bit cynical around the edges, but it still has flight. But to be a dove would be so boring. The dove of peace, you know. But it's nice to be associated with the dove of peace. A dove is a pigeon anyway.

CM: Yeah, but you once said to me that waging war was far easier than waging peace, so a dove would be great. CMcC: Yeah, I am very interesting in the idea of peace and I do think that we have to talk about it more and more and more. And all these assholes who are in charge of our military and so on could do with a lesson in how difficult it is to negotiate peace, much more difficult than it is to wage war. I'm a great admirer, as you know, of Senator George Mitchell who helped in the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, though it's a little bit shaky right now.

CM: The recent Gerry Adams case would be an example of how the past is still overwhelming there and how fragile the situation is. CMcC: Yeah, Gerry Adams, and so on. You have to continually work on this idea of peace. But, to come back to your question, I had no idea that I did so much of the animal imagery, so you're going to make me very conscious now!

CM: I'm really sorry. Don't worry, you won't meet me too often though. I may ask for one interview a year, is that a deal? CMcC: Okay, perfect, perfect!

CM: I had this conversation with a colleague of mine, whose name is Marie Mianowski, and she told me that it seemed that year after year you had more obviously turned into a pacifist, in your literary texts, interviews and pieces of journalism. CMcC: I don't know if I'm a very good pacifist. She's right, I would love to be a pacifist. I would fight my corner if I had to fight my corner. I would fight it very strongly. I do increasingly gravitate towards this idea of peace. I don't want to become soft. I don't want people to interpret it as being soft. I want it to be seen as something muscular, something tough. There is always a danger when you talk about peace, love. What's that great line by Nick Cave?51 Elvis Costello sings it. He says: “What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?” So what is so funny about it? There's nothing funny about peace, there's nothing funny about love or understanding.

CM: You said to me that you're more likely to receive arrows when you're a pacifist. CMcC: Sure, sure, sure, you just get kicked around because people think it's easy enough to do so. But then you have to have the courage of your convictions. And I think the really good pacifist would know what war is, what the act of war is, what people do to each other. It's nothing you avoid, you don't avoid the idea of what war

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is. It's not that as a good optimist you avoid pessimism, no. You've got to be as dark as the light side or as light as the dark side. That's a weird statement to say, but to be somebody who is going to believe in something, you have to be very capable of understanding what the exact opposite is. If you avoid the opposite, then you're in big trouble.

CM: About avoidance then–your last statement is serendipitous–you started writing in the 1990s, a paradoxical period in Irish history and literature as, while the social isolation and parental violence inherent to the rural way of life were still the main social reality and the preoccupation of Irish literature, Ireland suddenly had to adapt to the aggressive leap of the Celtic Tiger. In the years following the Celtic Tiger, Irish writers have proven to be reluctant to write about the subsequent drastic socio-economic changes. It is only at the end of the decade that Joseph O'Connor in The Salesman (1998), Colm Tóibin in The Blackwater Lightship (1999) alluded to a society forever shattered. Although, as soon as 1994 with “Sisters” (Fishing the Sloe-Black River), you did allude to the fact that Dublin had become a modern city, it's only later in Let the Great World Spin (with the Jaslyn section, 341) or in TransAtlantic (with Hannah struggling to cope, 276-277) that you came back to a globalized and modernized Ireland. Do you understand why the generation of writers that emerged in the 1990s has tended to stay away from the socio-economic realities of that decade? CMcC: Generally it takes writing about ten years to figure out what's going on. And when you write in the heart of it, you don't necessarily see it. It's like a hand in front of the face. It's all there but you can't actually see it. You have to hold it at this distance. That's part of it. And part of it is that we were very interested in not being at home. We wanted to go to lots of different places. We wanted to go to Argentina, go to America, go to London, go to Germany, go to France and write about those other places. In many ways, the Irish economy was like a teenage economy. I know we're an ancient culture and so on, but we were like a group of teenagers in the 1990s and the early 2000s, and we had a big party. Everybody was hanging out by the swimming pool and everyone was drinking martinis, and at about 5 o'clock in the morning, just as the music is really thumping, somebody goes up on the staircase and jumps down off the staircase and hangs out at the chandelier, swings out of the chandelier, and suddenly, the chandelier comes crashing to the ground and then somebody else looks up and says: “Oh oh, the parents are coming!”. The parents are coming down the driveway and guess who the parents were? The parents were the German banks, well the European banks, the Irish banks, whatever, but they were primarily German banks. And the parents are coming home to say: “You naughty little children, look at what you did!”. And our economy was fucked, I mean, it was really really bad. We were railroaded, not only by the banks but by our own politicians who allowed the banks to do that. Irish people had to pay for much of what had happened. Yes, some had been recklessly partying, but others had been those people who had allowed this to occur. This is only coming into focus now. A lot of the work is about this now. A lot of the younger writers are writing about this now, it's great. There's some really good stuff coming out. But we have some distance from it. I don't think I'm going to do too much. I did a little bit in TransAtlantic but I'm going to leave that territory for somebody else.

CM: My last question will focus on your most recent contribution to–or rather huge part in– the project that is The Book of Men. You have recently made your interest in the question of gender in literature quite obvious, by editing and writing in The Book of Men, and through your contribution to Poems that Make Grown Men Cry. Do you feel that in your work as a whole, you try to capture the essence of what it is to be a man (or a woman when you write from a woman's point of view). And in your work as a whole, do you feel that you have

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sometimes been about to verge into stereotypes as far as the representation of gender is concerned? CMcC: I got to tell you–this is the honest to God truth–the only reason that book is called The Book of Men is pure practicality because I started the organization Narrative 4 with a number of other people and I was sitting in a pub–in a bar–in New York with the editor of Esquire. I said to him: “Listen man, we've started this new organization, I need some help. I need some publicity. Can you give me some publicity for Narrative 4?” He says: “Yeah, let's think about it. What can we do?” And he says: “By the way, my next issue is called 'How to be a man'” And I said: “Okay, why don't we write about how to be a man?” He says: “Okay, why don't you get some of your writers to write about how to be a man?” I said: “How many do you want?” And we were drinking whiskey and he said: “A hundred of them.” And I said: “Okay!” And actually in the end I did, but we reduced those down to 75. It was purely practical, and in 6 weeks we pulled this stuff together. That's why some entries are so short and that's why some are so terrible! Some of them are good, some of them are not so good. I was a little bit embarrassed by this notion that we were doing this book called 'How to be a man'. Not anymore mind you. The next book will be 'How to be a woman' and then the next book will be 'How to be a teen'.

CM: 'How to be a toddler' too! CMcC: Possibly! That's a good idea! 'How to be dead' as well! 'How to be dead with great respect to yourself'! No but really it was just one of those things. People might think that it was intentional but it wasn't intentional. In relation to Poems that Make Grown Men Cry, a friend of mine was in charge of the anthology. He called me up and said: “Can you give me a piece on Poems that Make Grown Men Cry?”

CM: It's a beautiful poem the one you chose, by Wendell Berry. CMcC: I love that poem: “In a meeting I see my dead friend.52 He has, I know, gone long and far.”

CM: Have you known it for a long time? CMcC: Yeah, and it brings tears to my eyes because it reminds me of my friend Brendan Bourke who died last year. Can I tell you a story about Brendan? Because this goes to the heart of Ulysses. I don't think I've told you this. When I met you, had Brendan died?

CM: I think he had been dead for a couple of months. CMcC: Yeah, a couple of months, yeah. It was profoundly affecting for me because he was my best friend. So I went back to Dublin and we were in the funeral home. I was arranging the funeral with his wife–or his partner and I was in with the undertakers and so on. I had been getting him to read Ulysses for years and years and years. I had said: “Come on, you bastard! Read Ulysses, Come on!” And we talked about it and he said: “Yeah, I'm going to read it”. But he never did. He listened to bits and pieces of it. His partner came to me when he died and she said: “You'll never guess this, Colum. I was going through his stuff, and two weeks before he died he bought a copy of Ulysses.” The receipt was in there and everything. So she said to me: “I'm going to put it in his coffin.” So she put it in the coffin. It was an open coffin because in Ireland we're doing open coffins, and she put it on his chest. And I said: “Okay then, I'm going to open it.” I opened it and then I had an hour with him, because we were waiting for his family to come in, and I sat down and I read it to him. I read parts of it.

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I read the “What is my Nation” part and then I read the naughty bits, the dirty bits from Molly's soliloquy to give him a bit of a laugh. And then I just sort of left it open on his chest and that was a good way to finish things. But that's how books can affect us and also how friendship can affect us. I think it's a good story.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Textes de l'auteur :

Nouvelles

Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994), Londres, Phoenix Paperback, 2003.

Everything in this Country Must (2000), Phoenix Paperback, 2001.

The Book of Men (éd.), New York, Picador, 2013.

Etre un homme (éd.), traduit de l'anglais par Jean-Luc Piningre, Paris, Belfond, 2014.

Romans

Songdogs (1995), Londres, Phoenix Paperback, 1998.

This Side of Brightness, Phoenix Paperback, 1998.

Dancer, Londres, Phoenix Paperback, 2003.

Zoli, Londres, Phoenix Paperback, 2007.

Let the Great World Spin, Londres, Berlin et New York, Bloomsbury, 2009.

TransAtlantic, Londres, New Delhi, New York et Sydney, Bloomsbury, 2013.

Articles de presse

« But Always Meeting Ourselves », The New York Times, 16 juin 2009, (page consultée le 3 juillet 2009)

« I Am Here to Live Out Loud », Colum McCann’s Official Website, date inconnue, (page consultée le 17 septembre 2009).

Entretiens avec l'auteur

ANONYME, « Author of Let the Great World Spin discusses his National Book Award-winning Novel Ahead of the Bookworm International Literary Festival», City Week End Beijing Blog, mars 2010, (page consultée le 10 mai 2011).

ANOMYME, « Everything in This Country Must, Interview », Colum McCann’s Official Website, date inconnue, (page consultée le 18 septembre 2009).

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ANONYME, « This Side of Brightness Interview », Colum McCann’s Official Website, date inconnue, (page consultée le 18 septembre 2009).

BIRNBAUM, Robert, « Birnbaum vs. Colum McCann », Morning News, May 2007, (page consultée le 3 août 2010).

BIRNBAUM, Robert, « Colum interviewed by Robert Birnbaum: Identity Theory », Colum McCann’s Official Website, date inconnue, (page consultée le 13 mars 2011).

KACHKA, Boris, « Novelist Colum McCann on Let the Great World Spin and the 9/11 ‘Grief Machine’« , New York Mag, juin 2009, (page consultée le 23 septembre 2009).

LENNON, Joseph, « “The First Man to Whistle”: Two Interviews with Colum McCann » dans Susan Cahill et Eoin Flannery (éd.), This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2012, Coll. Re-Imagining Ireland, volume 17.

McCAFFREY, Laura, « Zoli Interview : Questions & Answers with Laura McCaffrey », Colum McCann’s Official Website, date inconnue, (page consultée le 18 septembre 2009).

McCANN, Colum, « Adventures in the Skin Trade, A conversation with Michael Ondaatje », Colum McCann’s Official Website, mai 2008 (page consultée le 20 mai 2013).

McCANN, Colum, « Conversation with Sasha Hemon », Colum McCann’s Official Website, date inconnue, (page consultée le 3 août 2010).

MEADE, Declan, « Declan Meade for The Stinging Fly Magazine », Colum McCann’s Official Website, date inconnue, (page consultée le 17 septembre 2009).

MICHOD, Alec, « The Rumpus Interview With Colum McCann », Rumpus.net, 4 juin 2013, (page consultée le 3 mars 2014).

PHILADELPHIA LIBRARY, « Take Five with Colum McCann », Philadelphia Free Library Blog, 12 mars 2007, (page consultée le 3 mars 2011).

ROSE, Charlie, « Irish Author Colum McCann on Novel TransAtlantic », Bloomberg TV, date inconnue (page consultée le 5 juin 2014).

SANTEL, James, « Funambulism: An Interview with Colum McCann », Los Angeles Book Review, 12 juin 2013, (page consultée le 17 juin 2013).

Réflexion critique sur l'œuvre de Colum McCann

CUSATIS, John, Understanding Colum McCann, Columbia (SC), The University of South Carolina Press, 2011.

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FLANNERY, Eoin, Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2011.

HOSATTE, Dominique, « Le plaisir de lire passe aussi par l'art », Ouest France, 28 mai 2014, (page consultée le 2 juin 2014).

Œuvres littéraires de référence :

DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor, The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky, traduit de l'anglais par David Magarshack, New York, Modern Library Paperback, 2001.

FAULKNER, William, « Banquet Speech », The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize, 10 décembre 1950, (page consultée le 25 avril 2014).

FORD, Richard, « Introduction » dans Richard Ford (éd.), The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Londres, Penguin Books, 1992.

McGAHERN, John, Love of the World: Essays, Londres, Faber and Faber, 2009.

MONTHERLANT (De), Henry, Don Juan, pièce en trois actes, Paris, Gallimard, 1958.

Lectures théoriques additionnelles :

ANONYME, « Transcript of Obama's Discourse for the 2004 Democratic Convention », Washington Post, 27 juillet 2004 (page consultée le 25 avril 2014).

ANONYME « Places and Non-Places : A Conversation With Marc Augé », Autogrill, On the Move, 26 janvier 2009, (page consultée le 5 juin 2014).

AUGÉ, Marc, Non-Lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1992.

CRONIN, Michael, « Inside Out: Time and Place in Northern Ireland », New Hibernia Review, vol. 13, n° 3, Automne 2009.

FARIS, Wendy B., Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Nashville (TN), Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.

GONTARD, Marc, « Le postmodernisme en France : définition, critères, périodisation », date inconnue, (page consultée le 6 novembre 2011).

HARRISON, Jim et KOOSER, Ted, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, Port Townsend (Wa.), Copper Canyon Press, 2003.

ISER, Wolfgang, L'Acte de lecture : théorie de l’effet esthétique (1976), traduit par Evelyne Sznycer, Bruxelles, Editions Mardaga, 1985.

JUDAKEN, Jonathan, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

KUNDERA, Milan, « Entretien sur l'art du roman » dans Milan Kundera, L'art du roman, Paris, Gallimard, 1986.

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LEDUC, Jean, « Histoire du temps présent, histoire immédiate », date inconnue (page consultée le 3 mars 2013).

MEMMI, Albert, Portrait d'un Juif, Paris, Folio, 1962.

NORRIS, Frank, « The Novel with a Purpose » dans George Perkins (éd.), The Theory of the American Novel, New York et Chicago, Holt, Rinehart et Winston, 1970.

SARTRE, Jean-Paul, Réflexions sur la question juive, Paris, Folio, 1946.

SOULET, Jean-François, L'Histoire immédiate, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, Coll. Que Sais- je ?, 1989.

TALON-HUGON, Carole, Goût et dégoût : L’art peut-il tout montrer ?, Nîmes, Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 2003.

TRÉGUER, Florian, Lectures de Richard Ford : A Multitude of Sins, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008.

NOTES

1. Bien que ce prix soit décerné en Irlande, il fut créé en 1976 par celui qui était l’Ambassadeur américain en Irlande à l’époque, Daniel Rooney. 2. John McGahern, Patrick McCabe, Edna O’Brien ou Frank McCourt par exemple. 3. Que ce soit le Mexique dans Songdogs, la Russie dans Dancer, l’Europe de l’Est dans Zoli ou Terre- Neuve dans TransAtlantic, ce sont là autant de lieux que McCann a dû apprendre à connaître en s’imprégnant de leur culture, soit par immersion sur place, soit au travers de nombreuses lectures documentées. Et même quand il se concentre sur l’Irlande ou sur New York, une ville qu’il connaît maintenant parfaitement, il semble qu’il se lance des défis littéraires en choisissant des lieux dont il maîtrise moins la topographie. 4. L’un des récits de This Side of Brightness s’intéresse à une période plus lointaine car il débute en 1916. 5. Ce que dit McCann à propos du 11 septembre 2001 ne laisse pas le moindre doute sur sa volonté d’établir une distance entre le moment de l’écriture et la période à laquelle se déroule l’intrigue d’un texte : “ I always feel that it takes about fifteen, twenty years for fiction to resolve these things” – “these things” faisant allusion de façon plus large à tous les événements historiques marquants. (Kachka 2009) Il réitère cette idée dans un autre entretien: “Twenty years have passed, perhaps just long enough for us to begin to see this history in a new light.” (, consulté le 18 septembre 2009). 6. Tels que la fragmentation de la narration et la composition parcellisée de ses textes pour ce qui est de la forme, ou l’intérêt pour le subsidiaire, et donc la marge, pour ce qui est des thèmes abordés. En effet, selon Marc Gontard, la littérature postmoderne va à l’encontre de « l’idée de centre et de totalité, [mais est au contraire le courant littéraire] du réseau et de la dissémination. » (Gontard date non mentionnée) 7. “Magic realism combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvellous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them.” (Faris 2004 1) 8. “I don’t see a massive difference between the literary forms, between short stories and novels. […] I believe that the well chosen word properly put down upon the page can be as influential in no matter what form it happens to be.” (propos tenus dans le premier entretien) 9. Dans L’Art du roman, celui-ci explique que l’auteur, et dans un second temps le lecteur, peuvent examiner quelques thèmes de l’existence grâce aux personnages. (Kundera 1986 51)

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10. Selon Colum McCann (qui parle au nom de Narrative 4 dans la préface de Être un homme), la littérature doit “renverser les barrières, briser les stéréotypes, par le simple fait d’échanger des histoires [...], l’un des plus grands fiascos de notre temps […ayant] trait à l’absence d’empathie, et notre incapacité à comprendre l’autre [étant] au centre de notre faillite collective.” (McCann 2014 8) 11. Colum McCann a déjà cité John Berger dans deux autres entretiens: “John Berger, in a quote that’s almost become a cliché because it’s so perfect and apt for writers, says: “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.”” (McCann) Et “John Berger’s says, “Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one.” That’s great quote. I admired him tremendously. He’s one of my great heroes.” (Birnbaum) 12. Colum McCann fait ici allusion à l’essai de Jean-Paul Sartre, intitulé Réflexions sur la question juive, dans lequel le philosophe cherche à comprendre l’origine de l’antisémitisme. Selon Sartre, la communauté juive a été définie d’une manière simpliste par des personnes qui lui étaient extérieures, les juifs eux-mêmes ayant été privés de voix. (Sartre 1986 88) Or, il se trouve que l’on a reproché à Sartre ces mêmes idées préconçues ; Albert Memmi a par exemple critiqué sa vision obtuse dans Portrait d’un Juif. Plus récemment, dans Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question : Anti- antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual, Jonathan Judaken a dénoncé la façon maladroite dont Sartre a essayé de s’emparer de la question juive et a condamné sa propension à verser dans des considérations proches des stéréotypes antisémites qu’il avait paradoxalement tenté de discréditer. 13. Il avait déjà mentionné ceci dans “Colum McCann Interviewed by Declan Meade for The Stinging Fly Magazine” (“I suppose the job of telling stories is to probe the small, anonymous corners of the human experience that are sometimes beyond what we would normally term non- fiction or history”) ainsi que dans “Conversation with Sasha Hemon” (“The job of “fiction” is to imaginatively probe the small, anonymous corners of the human experience, where the untold has been relegated to darkness.”) 14. Colum McCann fait ici allusion au massacre de l’école primaire de Sandy Hook qui a eu lieu le 14 décembre 2012. 15. “The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion.” (Faulkner 1950) 16. Pendant la Convention démocrate de 2004, B. Obama avait utilisé cette expression dans un discours qui l’avait propulsé sur le devant de la scène politique internationale : “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope ? […] I’m not talking about blind optimism here–the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope !” (“Transcript of Obama’s Discourse for the 2004 Democratic Convention”, 27 juillet 2004) Cette expression est ensuite devenue le titre de son second livre The Audacity of Hope : Thoughts on

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Reclaiming the American Dream, publié en 2006, alors qu’il n’était encore que Sénateur et dans lequel il inscrivit le programme de sa campagne présidentielle. 17. “The priest seems drunk, stumbling out of the sacristy with a red stain on the front of his vestments […] When the priest comes to take Dana up towards the altar, the smell of alcohol wafts through the air.” (McCann 1994 105 et 107) 18. “Old Father Herlihy […] was in buying a packet of cigarettes, flirting with the girl behind the counter.” (McCann 1995 92) 19. “He noticed that the priest brushed his hand against his mother’s elbow and the boy said aloud: You horny bastard.” (McCann 2000 112) 20. Cet entretien s’est déroulé peu de temps après l’attentat du marathon de Boston qui avait eu lieu le 15 avril 2013. 21. Colum McCann a rendu hommage à Joyce dans plusieurs articles et entretiens, notamment dans “Adventures in the Skin Trade, a Conversation with Michael Ondaatje” mais aussi dans “Colum interviewed by Robert Birnbaum : Identity Theory”, dans “Conversation with Sasha Hemon” et finalement dans “Everything in This Country Must, Interview”. 22. Colum McCann fait référence à la première ligne d’Anna Karenine de Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 23. La référence de Colum McCann est erronée car cette citation vient en réalité de la pièce Don Juan de Henry de Montherlant (1955), dont le héros éponyme déclare : “Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches.” (Montherlant 1958 98) 24. Dans Songdogs, Cici est à bord d’un train qui se dirige vers l’ouest (McCann 1995 140), le père de Conor continue ses pérégrination – seul, et plus tard avec sa femme – vers l’ouest (McCann 1995 35 et 78). Les frères Corrigan (Let the Great World Spin) quittent tous deux l’Irlande pour l’Amérique et Lily Duggan fait de même dans TransAtlantic. 25. Brigid et Sheona, O’meara, Osobe, Flaherty et Padraig. 26. Un terme qui a été utilisé par E. Said en 1978 pour indiquer la tendance des occidentaux à stéréotyper l’Orient. 27. Une des références les plus marquantes est celle de Tillie, dans Let the Great World Spin, qui imagine sa mère lui disant: “Here we go, honey, grab my high-heeled boots, put them in the wagon, westward we go!” (McCann 2009 342) 28. La description est la suivante: “The stations are among the saddest places in America. Everyone looking for a way out. Slinking around. Looking for lost children. Keeping eyes glued on nothing in particular, waiting for life to happen.” (McCann 1995 130 mes italiques) L’aspect transitoire du non-lieu amène les gens à chercher une sortie. L’expression “looking for a way out” a aussi pour effet de matérialiser la confusion relative à l’orientation qui règne souvent dans les non-lieux tels que les aéroports, les supermarchés et les autoroutes, qui se caractérisent par une grande superficie indispensable au nombre de personnes qu’ils accueillent. Qui plus est, la perte de repère inhérente au non-lieu est ici accentuée par le fait que des enfants ont été perdus. Enfin, deux autres aspects fondamentaux du non-lieu apparaissent dans cet extrait : la démarche furtive des voyageurs (“slinking around”) et aussi “l’expérience du rien” dans la gare (“waiting for life to happen”). L’attente du moyen de transport est une parenthèse dans un vécu et il est généralement impossible de faire en ce lieu anonyme l’expérience identitaire de l’histoire, du souvenir partagé ou de l’échange. 29. “L’utilisateur du non-lieu est avec celui-ci (ou avec les puissances qui le gouvernent) en relation contractuelle. L’existence de ce contrat lui est rappelé à l’occasion […] : le billet qu’il a acheté, la carte qu’il devra présenter au péage, ou même le chariot qu’il pousse dans les travées du supermarché en sont la marque plus ou moins forte […] Le passager ne conquiert donc son anonymat qu’après avoir fourni la preuve de son identité […] D’une certaine manière, l’utilisateur du non-lieu est toujours tenu de prouver son innocence. […] Le passager des non-lieux ne retrouve son identité qu’au contrôle de douane, au péage ou à la caisse enregistreuse [...] L’espace du non-

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lieu ne crée ni identité singulière, ni relation, mais solitude et similitude.” (Augé 1992 127-130 mes italiques) 30. Une expression utilisée par Samuel Taylor Coleridge en 1817. 31. “Comment […] des affects peuvent-ils être activés par des événements qui n’appartiennent pas au monde, du moins pas au monde de notre existence et de nos actions ? Comment peut-on réagir à ce dont nous connaissons le caractère fictif ? Comment la conscience de la fictionnalité n’interdit-elle pas le déclenchement de l’affect ?” (Talon-Hugon 2003 49-51) 32. “Nous n’éprouvons pas de sentiment à propos de situations fictives mais à l’occasion de situations fictives. [...] plus précisément, nous avons bien des affects mais les choses fictives n’en sont pas les causes. Elles en sont l’occasion, du fait de la ressemblance qu’elles entretiennent avec des situations réellement vécues. Autrement dit la réponse affective n’est pas provoquée par des objets fictifs, mais par des objets réels qui leur ressemblent.” (Talon-Hugon 2003 49-51) 33. Tillie se met en colère contre Dieu après la mort de sa fille: “I don’t know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I’m going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth. (...) I’m going to slap Him and push Him around until He can’t run away. Until he’s looking up at me and then I’ll get Him to tell me why He done what He done to me and what He done to Corrie and why do all good ones die and where is Jazzlyn now and why she ended up there and how He allowed me to do what I done to her. He’s going to come along on His pretty cloud with all His pretty little angels flapping their pretty white wings and I’m gonna out and say it formal: Why the fuck did you let me do it, God?” (McCann 2009 230) 34. Elle répond au Juge avec insolence lorsqu’elle comparaît pour vol aggravé : -And you understand you’re pleading to petty larceny? -Yeah, babe. -Excuse me? Soderberg felt a stab of pain, somewhere between the eyes and the back of the throat. A stunned flick. Had she really called him babe?” (McCann 2009 271) 35. -I just stopped cold, says Marcia. .(...) Because I didn’t want to know if the poor boy fell. -Ah-huh, says Gloria. -I just didn’t want to hear him dead. -I hear you, ah-huh. (…) -I couldn’t stand the mere thought of it. -No, ma’am. -And if he didn’t fall … -If he didn’t, no...? -I didn’t want to know. -Ah-huhn, you got it. -’Cause somehow, if he stayed up there, or if he came down safe, it didn’t matter. So I stopped and turned around and got on the subway and came up here without even so much as a second glance. -Say gospel. (McCann 1995 98-99 mes italiques) 36. Et quand il se fait arrêter et questionner sur son identité et sur la raison pour laquelle il vit dans les tunnels, Elijah répond : “I lost the key to my penthouse.” (McCann 1998 126) 37. “Minimalist realism is a literary streak that has bloomed with Ray Carver and Richard Ford, and which stands out by the detachment and distance that its prose conveys, and by its simple sentences and repetitive lexicon. Besides, in this literary vein, dialogues are rare and concise but betray tension and misunderstanding between the characters, as well as communicational failures.” (Tréguer 2008 60) 38. Deux valeurs fondamentales qui ont été défendues pendant des décennies par l’église Catholique et considérées comme essentielles dans un pays qui a été en proie à la colonisation.

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39. Zoli and Clarence Nathan voient en leur grands-pères des pères de substitution, Kevin se tourne vers le Lithuanien, Dana vers Padraig, Andrew est fasciné par les Orangistes et Katie par les soldats britanniques. 40. Sont aussi mentionnés Sinatra, (McCann 2009 122) Armstrong, (McCann 1998 108 et McCann 2009 65) Jimi Hendrix et James Brown, (McCann 1998 185) Rex Stewart et Nat King Cole, (McCann 2009 122) Mary Lou Williams et Henry Red Allen, (McCann 1998 120) Cole Porter, (McCann 1995 114) The Rolling Stones, (McCann 1995 145) Mick Jagger, John Lennon et Yoko Ono, (McCann 2003 247) Charlie Parker, (McCann 2003 182) Motown, (McCann 2009 46) Al Jolson et Billie Holiday, (McCann 1995 80) Richard Pryor, (McCann 2009 74) Marvin Gaye, (McCann 2009 64) Tommy Makem, the Clancy Brothers, Donovan et Tom Waits, (McCann 2009 59) Stevie Wonder et Kool ‘N’ the Gang, (McCann 1998 227) Miriam Makeba, (McCann 2013 272) The Saw Doctors, (McCann 1994 138) Van Halen, (McCann 1994 97) Edith Piaf, (McCann 2003 171) Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ (McCann 1995 143) Hoagy Carmichael (McCann 2013 266) et ses chansons “Ol’ Buttermilk Sky” (deux fois dans McCann, 1995 138 et McCann 1994 70) et “Up a Lazy River,” (quatre fois dans McCann 1994 5 et 20 ; McCann 2009 339 et 342) U2 et la chanson “I havent found what I’m looking for,” (McCann 1994 21) Ray Charles et le titre “Hit the Road, Jack,” (McCann 1995 192) Joan Baez et son fameux “We Shall Overcome,” (McCann 2013 272) le foxtrot populaire “Ain’t We Got Fun ?,” (McCann 1994 66) Molly Malone, (deux fois dans McCann 1995 71 et McCann 1994 62) A Chusla Mo Chroi, (McCann 1994 66) Mairi’s Wedding, (McCann 1994 64) la ballade espagnole “Juanita,” (McCann 1994 71) la comptine “Elephant Bell,” (McCann 1995 71) la chanson de Mary Poppins “A spoonful of sugar and the medicine go down,” (McCann 1994 140) et même un air de gospel. (McCann 1998 9) 41. “Le texte est un potentiel d’action que le proces de la lecture actualise.” (Iser 1976 13) 42. L’entretien s’est déroulé à Rennes. 43. Tout particulièrement les chats (McCann 1994 139), les hyènes (McCann 1994 131), les chevaux (à trois reprises dans McCann 2000 5 ; McCann 1995 163 et McCann 2003 59), les rats (McCann 1995 162), les taupes (McCann 1998 126), les mules (McCann 1998 92), les chiens (deux fois dans McCann 1998 57 et McCann 2003 164) ou les girafes. (McCann 2009 217) 44. La comparaison d’un personnage à un insecte est utilisée à trois reprises (McCann 1994 97-98 ; McCann 2003 37 et McCann 2009 94) et, plus précisément, il y a plusieurs allusions aux mouches (deux fois dans McCann 2003 141 et McCann 2009 134), aux cafards (deux fois dans McCann 2003 154 et McCann 2009 212), aux chenilles (McCann 2000 32) et aux grillons. (McCann 1994 98) 45. Le mot “fish” pour faire référence à un personnage est utilisé une fois (McCann 2003 73), et l’espèce de la truite (McCann 1995 135-136) et de la myxine (McCann 1995 10) sont aussi mentionnées. 46. Les berniques. (McCann 1995 160) 47. Les vers. (McCann 1998 14) 48. Les serpents (deux fois dans McCann 1998 37 et 144-145) et les caméléons. (McCann 1995 66-67) 49. La comparaison d’un personnage à un oiseau est faite onze fois. (McCann 1994 9, 11, 96, 97-98 et 110 ; McCann 1998 56 ; McCann 2003 182, 257 et 304 ; McCann 2009 212 et 223) Les personnages sont aussi plus précisément comparés à des mouettes (deux fois dans McCann 1994 23 ; McCann 2009 26 et McCann 1995 4), des chouettes (deux fois dans McCann 1995 197 et McCann 2009 152), des aigles (deux fois dans McCann 1994 158 et McCann 1995 198), des poulets (deux fois dans McCann 1995 48-49 et 160), des corbeaux (McCann 1995 32) et des roitelets. (McCann 1994 66) 50. Ces moyens de représentation codifiés sont censés être des miroirs de la société et prennent souvent une dimension satirique. 51. C’est le chanteur britannique Nick Lowe qui a écrit cette chanson, et pas l’australien Nick Cave. 52. “In a dream I meet my dead friend” est la citation exacte.

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INDEX

Subjects: Reconnaissances

AUTHOR

CÉCILE MAUDET Université Rennes 2

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Trans'Arts

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Weegee du 26 mars au 18 mai 2014 Galerie du Château d'Eau (Toulouse)

Muriel Adrien

Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

1 Après le Musée Maillol en 2007 (http://transatlantica.revues.org/2362 et http:// transatlantica.revues.org/1962), le Pavillon Populaire à Montpellier en 2008 (http:// transatlantica.revues.org/4103), le Centre International de la Photographie en 2012 (« Murder is my Business »), c’est au tour de la Galerie du Château d’eau de Toulouse d’exposer des œuvres du photographe new-yorkais Arthur Usher Fellig (1899-1968),

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plus connu sous le pseudonyme de Weegee. En effet, pour ses 40 ans d’existence, la Galerie du Château d’eau présente des photographies de la collection Michel et Michèle Auer (Fondation Auer Ory) du 26 mars au 18 mai 2014. Toulouse n’a retenu qu’environ 130 tirages, soit moitié moins qu’à Montpellier où la collection a déjà été exposée.

2 Comment expliquer un tel engouement pour Weegee en France depuis quelques années ? D’abord, l’on peut noter que l’intérêt pour Weegee est concomitant avec la présence de plus en plus affirmée, en France, de paparazzis plus ou moins professionnels dont les images envahissent la toile. Or les ancêtres des paparazzis sont précisément les photoreporters des années 1930 – et Weegee en est l’exemple-type –, ces « picture snatchers » qui, sous la pression des journaux illustrés, se lancèrent dans la traque de l’image « choc », du scoop, arrachant la photo à l’insu du sujet ou contre son gré. Weegee combinait le voyeurisme compulsif et un intérêt pour le people, même si ses images ont une verve et une présence qui ont traversé le temps, loin des clichés fades d’une certaine gutter press. Ensuite, ses photographies portent sur le monde de la pègre, des malfrats, voyous, délinquants et autres canailles dont se repaissent les discours sécuritaires d’aujourd’hui. De surcroît, l’éloignement dans le temps d’une époque dont les témoins disparaissent peu à peu suscite une mode pour les années 30 que l’on retrouve aussi dans d’autres domaines que la photographie. De cette époque, Weegee était et demeure un personnage haut en couleur, plus grand que nature, une célébrité à l’instar de celles qu’il photographiait, un personnage au sobriquet amusant dont pourrait aisément s’emparer la fiction à sensation, comme le fit du reste le film Public Eye en 1992.

3 Dans l’exposition du Château d’eau, le discours minimal des panneaux informatifs oriente peu le regard. Les rares textes ne sont tentés ni par un sensationnalisme populiste, ni par des propos esthétiques déplacés visant à ennoblir les images de Weegee, comme on a parfois pu le voir. Il n’empêche que le choix bien particulier des photographies infléchit quelque peu l’idée générale que l’on peut avoir de Weegee : sans éluder les aspects les plus célèbres de l’œuvre

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Corps d’Anthony Izzo, New York, 1942 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

4 – l’affiche de l’exposition montre un revolver en premier plan –,

Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

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5 contre toute attente, les photographies prélevées par le Château d’eau dans la collection Auer donnent à voir moins le photographe de crimes que la face plus discrète de l’homme, proche de la mouvance de la photographie humaniste (sans pour autant verser dans le sentimentalisme du réalisme poétique), avec les baisers fougueux volés,

Palace Théâtre, 1945 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

6 les rires que l’on imagine tonitruants, les effusions des noctambules,

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Artistes de variété chez Sammy’s, 1944 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

7 le sommeil des vieux et des moins vieux,

Dans le dortoir du cirque, 1945 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

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Vue d’enfants dormant avec un chat dans le local d’évacuation de l’échelle, 1945 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

8 les petits métiers en passe de disparaître à la Atget (dont, par exemple, un rétameur), la chasse à l’instant décisif, bref les à-côtés de l’actualité brûlante traités avec un optimisme et une joie de vivre évidents.

Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

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9 Les légendes, écrites par Weegee, évoquent les circonstances des scènes avec parfois un trait d’humour qui confère un air presque bonhomme et débonnaire à ses images les plus noires.

Simply add boiling water, décembre 1943 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

10 Une série de photos révèle également l’homme engagé : son parti-pris en faveur de la cause noire et des droits civiques est visible dans ses portraits d’Afro-Américains, et certains choix de sujets mettent en lumière l’absurdité de la ségrégation et de la « color line ». Il tourne aussi son attention vers les marginaux ou freaks (travestis, nains, clochards), préfigurant en cela le travail de Diane Arbus.

11 Les photographies sont regroupées selon des thématiques élaborées par les époux Auer (le sommeil, le spectacle, le monde de la nuit, le racisme et l’exclusion…). La gritty reality reste son fonds de commerce, mais les scènes de crime ne prennent pas les spectateurs à la gorge : la lecture de la légende est parfois nécessaire pour savoir qu’une tragédie est en train de se dérouler sous nos yeux. Et encore, les titres sont parfois plein de dérision, voire même de gaieté : ainsi ce titre, Joy of Living, alors que la scène représente un meurtre. Est-ce la mise en scène par le cadrage, la prégnance de films polars dans l’imaginaire du spectateur, le contexte suranné, ou bien le voisinage d’autres photographies goguenardes ou truculentes, le spectateur en vient à voir dans ces clairs-obscurs troubles mais plein de vie, des semblants d’œuvres de fiction, de comédie humaine drolatique, plus que des faits divers sordides et sinistres : par le truchement de la disposition du Château d’eau, Weegee semble en effet sortir le crime du caniveau et du macabre. Sans doute son goût du contre-champ1 y est-il pour beaucoup : lorsqu’il fonce sur la scène du crime, c’est surtout pour capter, dans la commotion, le regard des badauds et témoins, la gamme large, riche et crue de leurs expressions, où se côtoient des visages défaits par la douleur, la stupéfaction hagarde,

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l’agitation cocasse et même une forme de jubilation ou d’hilarité. Cette dernière forme d’expressivité est sans doute allumée – dans tous les sens du terme – par le flash de l’appareil photo et l’émotion de se faire prendre, puisque ces appareils étaient évidemment plus rares qu’à notre époque, surtout dans les quartiers défavorisés. De même, dans les salles de spectacle, son attention se focalise surtout sur l’auditoire qu’il photographie avec des négatifs en infra-rouge. Qu’il nous renvoie aussi par la même occasion notre propre spectre d’émotions de spectateurs ne fait que surenchérir sur le détachement par rapport à la situation référente, et donc sur la charge potentiellement fictionnelle des photographies. Plusieurs romans policiers (William Riley Burnett, Raymond Chandler…) et films de l’époque (Underworld) baignent dans une même atmosphère, et ce n’est pas un hasard si plus tard Weegee fut acteur et conseiller technique de quelques films policiers2. Loin d’être réductible à un vampire attiré par le sang, il s’agissait juste pour Weegee d’être dans le coup, sur le coup, you had to do whatever it took to shoot the shooting3.

Autoportrait, fin des années 50 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

12 Pour ce qui est de la scénographie de l’exposition, la sobriété des cadres et la discrétion des cartels en papier collant transparent mettent en valeur l’éloquence des images. Les tirages d’époque, qui en majorité ont été faits par Weegee lui-même, sont presque tous de grande qualité ; les effets touchants de patine – pliures, glaçages approximatifs – donnent une présence rare aux scènes. Son semi-grand angle (28-30 mm) lui permettait une grande profondeur de champ, une mise au point large, tout en assurant une très bonne netteté en plein dans l’action ; et sa technique d’open flash donnait des images particulièrement contrastées avec un premier plan très découpé qui semble sauter à la figure. Comme à Montpellier, l’exposition montre du matériel ayant appartenu à Weegee, dont son appareil photo à plaques 4 x 5 pouces mythique, the Speed Graphic,

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appareil typique des années 1930 aux années 1960, ainsi que son imposant flash à ampoule. On peut également y voir les éditions originales des livres qu’il a publiés.

Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

13 Deux sections sont plus faibles à mon sens : la partie regroupant les nus, évidemment situés dans la zone centrale du sous-sol, qui paraissent au mieux racoleurs, et le dernier espace, qui se situe dans le second bâtiment, lequel abrite souvent une exposition de jeune artiste, mais qui ici est consacré aux déformations optiques de Weegee. Certes, ces distorsions optiques – obtenues grâce à des miroirs déformants, des négatifs fondus, des lentilles multipliant l’image ou encore le weegeescope – ont sans doute dû paraître savoureuses en leur temps, surtout qu’elles démythifiaient quelque peu des célébrités, et montraient une certaine cohérence avec le monde du cirque qu’il aimait représenter ; mais aujourd’hui elles paraissent un brin ennuyeuses, systématiques et convenues4 aux spectateurs que nous sommes, blasés par les effets et filtres de Photoshop et autres logiciels de traitement d’images.

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Marilyn Monroe, distorsion, vers 1955 Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

14 En fin de parcours est proposé le visionnement d’un entretien avec Olivier Lorquin, directeur du Musée Maillol à Paris, qui avait exposé des tirages de Weegee de la collection Berinson en 2007.

15 Les anglicistes toulousains ne peuvent que se réjouir qu’à Toulouse les institutions culturelles s’intéressent à l’art anglophone, qu’il soit américain ou britannique. On regrette cependant que pour son anniversaire des 40 ans, la Galerie du Château d’eau ait choisi une exposition qui a déjà eu lieu ailleurs, et donc ne s’offre que du déjà-vu, qui plus est en version réduite, même si elle se démarque un peu par la sélection des photographies. On aurait aimé que cette institution, pionnière il y a 40 ans – ce fut la première galerie municipale consacrée à la photographie en France – et parfois encore audacieuse dans sa décision de soutenir des artistes émergents, choisisse pour marquer cet événement un sujet d’exposition plus singulier, inédit et novateur5.

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Weegee © Collections Fondation Auer Ory

16 Le dossier de presse, l’entretien avec Olivier Lorquin, ainsi qu’une conférence de Luc Quelin aux étudiants de l’Institut Français de la Mode se trouvent là : http:// www.galeriechateaudeau.org/weegee/

17 Une interview du directeur, Jean-Marc Lacabe, a été réalisée dans le cadre de l’émission « Regardez voir » de Brigitte Patient le 5 avril 2014 sur France Inter :

18 http://www.franceinter.fr/emission-regardez-voir-2-lieux-dedies-a-la-photographie

19 Muriel Adrien remercie le Château d’eau pour l’autorisation d’utiliser les visuels, et tout particulièrement Dominique Roux et Thérèse Pitte pour le temps qu’ils lui ont accordé. Rappelons que le Château d’eau, ancienne friche industrielle et sanctuaire photographique depuis 1974, est un lieu qui abrite un fonds documentaire très important, près de 15000 ouvrages. De manière générale, sa programmation panache avec bonheur photographie patrimoniale et jeunes artistes triés sur le volet. Le rôle de cette institution est de participer à l’éducation du regard en présentant des œuvres inscrites dans l’histoire et aussi en apportant un soutien et une vitrine à la photographie d’auteur la plus récente.

NOTES

1. Expression d’Olivier Lorquin.

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2. Il fut, par exemple, conseiller lumière pour Docteur Folamour de Stanley Kubrick. 3. Mon expression. « Shoot » en anglais signifie « prendre en photo ou tourner à la camera » tout comme il signifie « tirer un coup de feu sur », et Weegee a sans doute joué avec cette polysémie de manière plus ou moins consciemment métapicturale. Notons qu’en français, « tirer » est également employé dans le vocabulaire photographique mais pour exprimer la révélation de l’image, phase qui succède à au développement du film. 4. Elles paraissent plus artificielles que celles de Kertesz, contemporain de Weegee. 5. En septembre, sera proposée au Couvent des Jacobins une exposition organisée par Michel Dieuzaide de photographies de son père Jean Dieuzaide, fondateur de la galerie en 1974, en dialogue avec des photographies de Robert Doisneau, premier photographe à y être présenté. Cette exposition sera l’occasion de célébrer l’anniversaire de manière peut-être plus cohérente, même si le choix reste tourné vers le passé.

INDEX

Keywords: Arthur Usher Fellig, Weegee, Foundation Auer Ory, Galerie du Château d’eau, Photography, Gutter press, Paparazzi, Stanley Kubrick, Raymond Chandler, William Riley Burnett, Hollywood, Underworld, Public Eye Mots-clés: Arthur Usher Fellig, Weegee, Fondation Auer Ory, Galerie du Château d’eau, Photographie, Presse de caniveau, Paparazzi, Stanley Kubrick, Raymond Chandler, William Riley Burnett, Hollywood, Underworld, Public Eye

AUTHOR

MURIEL ADRIEN Université de Toulouse 2-Le Mirail

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Tiki Pop : L’Amérique rêve son paradis polynésien, musée du quai Branly, Paris, 24 juin-28 septembre 2014 Commissaire d’exposition : Sven Kirsten

Gwennaëlle Cariou

1 Le musée du quai Branly propose d’explorer, à travers l’exposition Tiki Pop, la manière dont une forme traditionnelle issue d’une culture non-occidentale a été reprise et transformée dans un contexte occidental, en l'occurrence aux Etats-Unis. Le titre même de l’exposition est éloquent : « Tiki Pop : L’Amérique rêve son paradis polynésien ». Ce que les Etats-Unis ont retenu des cultures de Polynésie, c’est une image idéalisée et fantasmée des îles du Pacifique, transposée dans la culture populaire par le biais de la mode tiki.

2 L’affiche donne d'emblée le ton de l'exposition : une pin-up des années 1950, en maillot de bain, est allongée dans la « gueule » d’une immense statue de style tiki. Reprenant sous un mode archétypal l’opposition entre civilisation et monde sauvage, déjà présente dans la célèbre photographie de Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, en 1926.

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FIG. 1. Reproduite avec l’aimable autorisation du Musée du Quai Branly

3 L’objet de l’exposition, c’est le tiki, un terme signifiant « homme », « dieu » ou « homme dieu » en langue maori, présent dans plusieurs cultures océaniennes (à Tahiti, chez les Maoris de Nouvelle-Zélande ou encore sur l’île de Pâques). Le tiki se présente sous différentes formes, notamment le hei tiki, « pendentif d’ancêtre », en jade ou en néphrite, souvent de manière anthropomorphique, constitué par une figure contorsionnée, tirant parfois la langue. Le tiki peut également prendre la forme de statues (telles que les colossales Moai de l’île de Pâques) ou devenir le motif de divers types d’objets (on songe par exemple aux ornements d’oreilles polynésiens ou encore aux bas-reliefs maoris).

4 Ces objets, mais surtout la mise en place d’un imaginaire lié à la découverte des îles du Pacifique, lancent, dans la période de l’après-guerre, la mode tiki. Présente dans des bars exotiques de Californie, cette vogue s'étend à l’ensemble des Etats-Unis, touchant tour à tour divers aspects de la vie quotidienne, que ce soit l'architecture, le design ou les multiples objets de consommation courante de cette époque.

5 L’exposition s’articule sous la forme d’un parcours chronologique évoquant dans un premier temps le développement d'une fascination des Etats-Unis pour le Pacifique à travers la littérature (notamment Robert Louis Stevenson) et surtout le cinéma hollywoodien (notamment Mutiny on the Bounty, sorti en 1935). Ce « rêve du paradis polynésien » s’est accompagné de la mise en place d’images stéréotypées du Pacifique, par exemple celle de la vahiné tahitienne ou la « hula girl », devenue l’archétype de la femme exotique et sensuelle du Pacifique. Dans cette première partie de l’exposition, intitulée « Polynesian pop pré-tiki », la scénographie est extrêmement simple : les objets (livres, affiches de cinéma, photographies, journaux) sont placés dans des vitrines plongées dans une semi-pénombre. Le plafond est agrémenté de luminaires en forme de

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boules de couleurs prises dans des filets de pêche. Le début du parcours présente ainsi les premières influences du style tiki et la manière dont il s'est développé dans l’après- guerre, pour connaître son plein essor au milieu des années 1950.

6 La deuxième partie de l’exposition, « Le dieu américain des loisirs », met en évidence la présence du style tiki dans la société de consommation américaine des années 1950, en devenant, au même titre que la musique rock’n’roll, un produit de marketing. Différents symboles représentant le Pacifique dans l’imaginaire collectif sont ainsi devenus des poncifs de l'époque. Outre la « hula girl » le tiki s'est massivement installé dans la culture de masse à travers différents symboles tels que l'ukulélé, le palmier, la hutte, la pirogue ou les fruits exotiques. Le tiki s'est par ailleurs décliné à travers une multitude de supports et d’objets quotidiens, tels que mugs à cocktail, salières et poivrières, cendriers, dont plusieurs spécimens sont ici présentés, tandis que statues et sculptures envahissaient le décor des tiki bars à partir des années 1930. Le premier d'entre eux, « Don the Beachcomber », avait ouvert en 1933 à Los Angeles, suivi en 1936 du « Trader Vic’s » à Oakland, où fut créée la fameuse recette du cocktail "Mai-Tai".

7 Les visiteurs du musée sont invités à prendre place dans un tiki bar, reconstitué pour l'occasion, au moyen d'une spectaculaire mise en scène : surmonté d’un auvent lui donnant l'aspect d'une hutte, le bar offre un décor typique fait de statues de style « néo-tiki » et d'ornements évoquant à la fois les cultures traditionnelles (par exemple des masques) et d'objets liés à l’imaginaire du Pacifique (instruments de pêche, poissons naturalisés, coquillages).

8 La dernière partie de l’exposition, « L’évolution de tiki - Grandeur et décadence », explore les développements du style tiki dans le monde des loisirs et de l’entertainement. Au-delà des tiki bars, le phénomène s'est étendu aux motels, parcs d’attraction, bowlings et autres mini-golfs, sur la côte Ouest pour commencer, avant de s'étendre sur la côte Est, puis jusqu'en Floride dans les années 1960. Devenu le cinquantième État américain en 1959, Hawaï est très rapidement devenu une destination touristique prisée par l'upper-middle class. Toutefois, à partir des années 1960, le modèle tiki est remis en question par la contre-culture de l'époque, incarnée par la génération suivante, pour laquelle le style tiki incarne une vision néocoloniale des populations du Pacifique, à la fois raciste et sexiste. Le style tiki s'efface alors peu à peu, et la majorité des bâtiments tiki est rasée ou transformée, pour disparaître du paysage américain au tournant des années 1980.

9 C’est à cette même période que le commissaire de l’exposition Sven Kirsten, auteur de plusieurs ouvrages sur le sujet, notamment The Book of Tiki : The Cult of Polynesian Pop in Fifties America (Taschen, 2003) et du catalogue de cette exposition, s’est intéressé au phénomène tiki. Sa collection personnelle d’objets tiki est ici montrée conjointement avec des artefacts océaniens issus des collections du musée du quai Branly. Ce travail d’« archéologie contemporaine » trouve ainsi une place tout à fait singulière au sein du musée. En effet, les pièces collectées et présentées ici, dans une institution nationale dévolue aux arts et aux cultures non-occidentales, sont considérées aujourd’hui comme des objets kitsch, de plus ou moins bon goût. Ce ne sont pas des objets non-occidentaux, mais des objets produits en Amérique du Nord à partir des modèles du Pacifique. Cette exposition permet donc de confronter des objets issus de la culture populaire (le style tiki) et savante (les tiki traditionnels océaniens). C’est dans ce sens que le musée du quai Branly propose une vision élargie des cultures du monde en faisant dialoguer l’authentique et la copie, la culture savante et la culture populaire.

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AUTHOR

GWENNAËLLE CARIOU Université Paris Diderot

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Kamau Daaood in Bordeaux: A Report on His Residency, Edited by Sophie Rachmuhl “sound moving / skyward:” experiencing the oral poetry of Kamau Daaood, a Griot in Bordeaux (March 23-April 12, 2012)1

Nelly Mok

Entering “the zone” with Daaood. Poetry reading with jazz bands at Librairie Georges, Talence (March 23), at Bordeaux 3 University, Pessac (March 26) and at the Théâtre National de Bordeaux en Aquitaine (TNBA), Bordeaux (April 1)

1 The tall imposing African-American man is standing in the middle of the improvised stage at the Librairie Georges on March 23. The university bookshop has turned from an academic haven mostly attended by students and professors from the campus in Talence, into a gathering place for poetry lovers, jazzmen and onlookers intrigued by the news of the griot’s exceptional residency in Bordeaux. Flipping through the bilingual collection of his works, Griot Notes from L.A., 2 while the audience is filling in the rows of chairs and the musicians are tuning their instruments, Kamau Daaood stands out from the surrounding hustle like a sturdy, ageless oak rising amidst a dappled haze of foliage and shadows.

2 “This is our first meeting, so we feel and see what happens,” he announces before the jazz trio led by saxophonist Shekinah Rodz starts playing, adapting to the poet's rhythm at times, initiating it at other times. Daaood's smooth yet slightly hoarse deep bass voice soon wraps us up as he opens his performance on “Griot Notes:” “freedom in this sound / spinning and turning at the edge / of possibilities quivering / in some

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naked speck of time.” Daaood readily invites us in, disclosing the very place which his writing and performance both stem from and strive for, namely an emotional state without the heart-numbing boundaries of intellectual frames and artistic conventions. His eyes closed, his whole body beating time, the poet generously consents to “lose [him]self in the performance,” to go into “the zone” as he calls this particular trance- like state, freeing his utterance from mental constraints, from self-consciousness, and letting his words take on life in the here and now.

3 Only when it is uttered – that is, only when it is spoken, told, chanted and sung – can the “word musician[’s]” poetry exist; only then can it be felt and experienced by the audience: “I do the words in performance,” Daaood explains, insisting on the performative nature of his poems whose rhythms differ according to the dynamics that take shape between the poet and the musicians accompanying him. This is what is unsettling about Daaood’s performances: one attends the artist’s very first meeting with the band, bearing witness to the making of their onstage relationship. One needs to overcome one’s cautious reluctance to see a performance free of the constraints of a scripted rehearsal, for Daaood’s poetry is necessarily improvised, therefore powerfully uneven, forcefully deconstructed.

4 One cannot merely sit still, listen to Daaood and understand his poems; the heart can fathom his words better than the mind for the griot resorts to language as a musical instrument, choosing and combining words as he would write a score, delivering them as he would stroke the keys of a piano or of a saxophone. In Daaood's poetry, communication lies in sounds more than in words. If words conjure up images that enable the reader/listener to visualize the artist's memories and feelings, they are mostly used as elements composing the specific soundscape of each poem. One can experience the word musician’s notes only by letting emotions take over reflection, by valuing phonetic harmony over cognitive cohesiveness. Sound is part and parcel of Daaood’s poems, hence one's irrepressible need to hear them being uttered or to read them aloud.

5 Although he performed with the same trio a few days later at the Théâtre National de Bordeaux en Aquitaine (TNBA), both the poet and the musicians avoided indulging in the comfort of familiarity and repetitiveness, therefore allowing spontaneous creativity to occur. Sometimes the griot would interrupt his reading and stand back to look up his Notes while the band kept playing; he would search for the verses that could fit the ambiance he had started to build with the musicians. Here is the art of a wanderer, I thought, as I watched him deliberately walking about onstage to let his artistic performance shape itself on the spur of the moment. I was discovering Daaood’s poetry in amazement and awe for I could sense his trust in the audience’s ability to lose their grip and to shed any expectation, the sole condition for his poetic intercourse with the present musicians to take place.

6 When he introduced the band which would play the accompaniment to his poems at the Students’ House in Bordeaux 3 University, the poet underlined the impromptu character of his encounter with the student musicians directed by Luc Lainé, from the music department: “We’ve never met before and we have no idea of what we’re going to play in the next minute and the minute after,” he said, inviting his audience to follow the unmapped trail he and the musicians were about to take. Then he started reading “Papa, the lean griot,” a tribute to his mentor Horace Tapscott, letting the band

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“begi[n] whenever they [felt] like it,” waiting for artistic symbiosis to spring from the moment: “If we had rehearsed, we would have messed things up but this was perfect.”

Daaood's celebration of the transcending power of music

7 Back to the very first day of Daaood's residency. I had come to the Librairie Georges, expecting to attend the poet's public reading of his work. Instead, I found myself lip- chanting the griot’s praises of jazz icon John Coltrane, “freedom fighter / Liberator of the spirit from the shackles of form;” I could almost hear myself droning along with him as he urged the audience to “hummmmmmmmmm,” his head bent down, his eyes half-closed, gradually giving himself over to a vibrant ommm-karan as though to summon the transcultural gathering power of music in all its forms. If Daaood's oral poetry imparts some of the mystical aura of mantras, it also partakes of the devoted passion of litanies: it owes its fieriness and hypnotic cadence to the sermonic tradition to which the poet has been exposed mostly through his poetic tutoring in the Watts Writers Worskhop in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Looking at the mesmerized audience in the bookshop, it seemed I had become part of a mass of believers to whom the fundamental musicality of life – “music music / all is music / music music / life is music” – and therefore, the sacredness of music, were eventually disclosed: “life is a saxophone / playing a sacred song.”

8 That feeling was not to leave me throughout Daaood's performances in Bordeaux: whether he addressed his audience onstage from behind a score stand at the TNBA like a preacher standing at his pulpit, or read/sang his poems from the platform of the Students' House amphitheater in Bordeaux 3 University, he invariably made me feel I was part of something bigger. I could hear him appealing to our primal sense of humanness while he celebrated Coltrane’s visceral music, his raw jazz notes, “becoming whole notes / not quarter notes / not half notes / becoming whole notes, whole notes…” All differences – be they ethnic, socio-cultural, political or religious – seemed to be transcended and to melt into one ecumenical faith in love and sharing: “ONE GOD / ONE WORSHIP / ONE SACRED PLACE / ONE HOLY BOOK / ONE WORSHIPPER / ONE,” the poet chanted, his steady voice carrying the quintessential wholeness, the fundamental oneness that lies within each and every human being.

9 To Daaood, music is obviously transcultural; it necessarily overflows boundaries, blooms in excess and variations. Multiplicity provides the breeding ground for “world music” whose cohesion and unity stem from the notes of the myriad wind, brass, percussion and string instruments – “one thousand saxophones / seven hundred kotos / (…) / three hundred violins / six hundred fifty bagpipes” – from the infinite number of sounds, animal and human, shouts and noises that make the world continuously sing: “ten thousand midwives carrying fresh fruit / seventy purple banjos / half a million Muslims chanting Quran / six thousand birds of paradise / (…) / eight thousand waterfalls / seven trillion ten billion six hundred and / one million two hundred and four tubas / and one black chopstick.” Listening to Daaood, I could hear the whole world’s music pouring into and resonating out of one man, that one black poet.

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Concert and Master class with Build an Ark at Rocher Palmer Hall, Cenon. April 7-8, 2012

10 What is striking about Daaood's poetry is its collective resonance: far from being circumscribed to the artist's personal experiences and individual subjectivity, it is meant to be collaboratively performed. His writing is definitely generous, its frame of reference expanding out of the confines of the self into the broader communal space of artistic exchange, as was obvious during his performance with the Los Angeles jazz collective Build an Ark at Rocher Palmer concert hall in Cenon. The multifaceted band, whose composition and size vary according to the pieces ̶ up to thirty artists can board this musical ark ̶ was founded and is directed by multi-talented and prolific Californian musician, arranger, producer, DJ and poet Carlos Gabriel Niño. The griot looked perfectly at ease onstage, his voice alternating with vocalist Dwight Trible's, the soundscape and rhythmic color of his poems starting off myriad different conversations between Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's viola, Mark de Clive-Lowe's piano, Trevor Ware's string bass, Dextor Story's percussion and Niño's cymbals and bells.

11 That love for communication and common creation underlied the band's instructions and advice to the students who participated in their Master class on the following day at the concert hall. Musicians of varying age, ability and background were sitting onstage next to the members of Build an Ark, surrounding Daaood and Niño, who was to direct the jam session. The griot's voice would set the tone of the piece which the musicians progressively “built” together as they played in tune with Daaood's vocal mood, soliciting and answering each other. Walking about the stage, Niño would dose out the contribution of each musician, occasionally inviting two instruments to pair up: “the goal is to connect to each other and to create a common environment around Kamau,” he explained. “That [session],” Trevor Ware later noted, “was about listening and contributing with what you felt ̶ a sort of collective trance within which each was searching for their right place.” Indeed, to Build an Ark, music is about reaching out; it is fundamentally global, transcultural: “the music that we play is creative soul music. It gives a collective vision of the world, how we live.”

12 Being the heart of that improvised orchestra, Daaood insisted on the necessity for musicians to “be there” so that they could listen to each other and properly communicate by playing “from the heart,” just as a poet needs to tell stories from the here and now, freeing his emotions, letting them out. His words provided a proper medium for artistic collaboration as they prompted the various instruments and sensitivities of the attending musicians to interweave and dialogue with each other. As a true storymaker, Daaood initiated the class's on-the-spot creation of a collective musical narrative: “we try to help each other tell our story. [This man] is speaking now so how can I help him tell our story.” To Daaood, this is what the griot should do: to act as the “emotional historian of a people.”

Poetry reading at the Librairie Olympique, Chartrons. March 28, 2012

13 Daaood's passion for music is manifest even when the poet performs alone: if music is the main thematic fabric of his poems, it also influences their aesthetics and rhythmic

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composition. Therefore, the musicality of his poetry can be perceived without the support of a band. No musician accompanied Daaood's reading at the Librairie Olympique, a small bookshop nestled on rue Rode which is a short narrow street in the Chartrons district along the docks of Bordeaux. With its subdued lights and its maze of bookshelves and tables covered with uneven heaps of books, the place looked like a hideaway for onlookers yearning to slacken their pace and withdraw themselves momentarily from the overwhelming hustle and bustle of the city; as the bookshop's evening host, the poet was sitting on a high stool next to the entrance door which had been left open to let his voice drift out and invite passersby to join the audience already gathered in the warm intimacy of the place.

14 Despite the absence of a band, the room was suffused with music as Daaood evoked his artistic lineage, summoning the souls of jazz pianist and composer Horace Tapscott in the poem “Papa, the Lean Griot,” as well as of singer Billie Holiday and saxophonist Lester Young ̶ “Lady Day” and “Pres”, as both liked to call each other ̶ in “Deep River in Her Voice” and “Balm of Gilead.” Reading “Griot Notes,” the poet would stand up, freeing his chest from the sitting position, giving his lungs more air, his body more space to sway and dance to the beats of his lines: “a flock of birds, jailbreak from a throat / and fade into the image of some child / holding a toy saxophone / this moment improvised, a theme of passion / silence broken up into little pieces and / sprinkled like seeds in the tone.”

15 Still, because Daaood was delivering his poems by himself, without any musical accompaniment, out of a stage, his performance stood out as a sort of aside during his residency in Bordeaux. The offstage proximity the artist was enjoying with his audience at the Librairie Olympique turned the event into a more interpersonal, intimate exchange, as it seemed to prompt him to dwell on the story of his origins, both as a man and as a poet.

16 “Blue Pachuca” revived the memory of his African-Filipino mother, Delores Keyes, whose sparkling cheerfulness and unconditional love and warmth would silence the rooted pain from incestuous abuse: “Blue Pachuca, / hair of Manila in blue light / you have taken your mystery with you / gone like the silent flight / of birds of paradise / (…) all I knew was that I was safe and warm and loved / I did not know the secrets buried within you.” The poem hints at the paternal presence, a loving yet withdrawn counterpoint to the maternal energy: “daddy was gone in morning when I rose / he would return in the evening / with his silence, his privacy, his introversion / his love was large, always quiet.” Then, a student who had attended the poetry class as well as the translation class with Daaood at Bordeaux 3 University3 asked him to read “The Watch,” his request revealing the underlying echo between both poems and conjuring the reunion of the ghosts of the artist's parents. As Daaood evoked the last moments he shared with his dying father, his restrained emotion suddenly overwhelmed him, brimming over his reserve and making his voice break off on the last words of the verse: “they said you had congestive heart failure / they told me it was like breathing underwater / you said you were tired / mother silently chanting in my ear / 'tell your father you love him, tell your father you love him'.” Taken aback by the maternal injunction he himself had simultaneously ressuscitated and obeyed by reading the poem, the artist yielded to the performative power of his words ̶ “my vocal cords hardened asphalt / a mute saxophone” ̶ as his voice momentarily died away.

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17 Asphalt ̶ ubiquitous, overwhelming, hostile in the urban environment of the poet who was born and raised in Los Angeles. Daaood explained his ambivalent relationship with this sheltering yet smothering material; he identified it as a determining element in his writing since it represents both an obstacle to the artist's perception ̶ the blinding screen of city walls ̶ and a source of elevation urging the poet to see what lies beyond and to expand his vision of the world: “asphalt is the symbol of life in urban areas ̶ hardness. In cities you can go days and days and not see the sky. You have a relationship with walls. Hardness can shelter us but the balance lies in softness, airiness, joy.” Thus, to Daaood, his “job is to get past the hardness” in order to reach lightness, “where you can learn and grow.” The artist traced his artistic journey back to his early encounter with creative writing in junior high school. However fortuitous this first experience ̶ creative writing was not the class he had wanted to take originally ̶ it shed light on the artistic and ontological nature of the writing process, beyond its mere communicative function: more than speech tools, words turned out to be instruments that could be tuned to his emotions and feelings ̶ his own personal, inner music. Nevertheless, instead of drawing mostly on his negative experiences and feeding on sorrow, pain and anger, like most writers back in the 1960s ̶ the time when Daaood started his writing career as a member of the Watts Writers Workshop ̶ the artist would rather step over the mudded ruts along the path and keep in the sunlight, not only writing about what one is struggling with, but also about what one is striving for: “You can't talk only about darkness or make people feel only darkness. Balance it with lightness,” he said to conclude his reading at the Librairie Olympique, his words echoing his verses from the poem “Angel of Scissors”: “there is light and there is darkness / and then again there is light / lightness / melody of feathers.”

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Screening of Leimert Park at Le Lacet film club, Mérignac. April 12, 2012

18 Because his poetry was born outside the boundaries of mainstream culture, making community art visible ̶ or in Daaood's words, making “light cutting away the tumor of darkness” ̶ was what urged the griot and the late internationally famous jazz drummer Billy Higgins to found the World Stage, an educational and performance gallery born from an open, dynamic collective of artists and arts lovers in Leimert Park Village, the heart of LA's African-American community, in 1989. Along with major figures like the late pianist and composer Horace Tapscott as well as drummer Cornel Fauler, to mention only a few of them, they significantly nurtured the artistic turmoil surfacing in a city prone to violent ethnic unrest and profoundly affected by the 1992 riots.

19 The Stage spurred numerous initiatives and events such as Fauler's weekly jam sessions and Masters series ̶ in which jazz legends like Max Roach, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones and Pharoah Sanders participated ̶ as well as the Anansi Writers Workshop, set up by Michael Datcher and developed by Daaood, Akilah Nayo Oliver, Nafis Nabawi and Anthony Lyons. The collective intended to provide LA's artists with a jazz hub and a space for literary creation and performance by finding public open places where artistic encounters and exchange could occur, therefore enabling collaborative creativity to burst out onstage and helping closet artists to get out of the shadow.

20 The screening of Jeannette Lindsay's documentary film Leimert Park (2008)4 at Le Lacet film club in Mérignac and the ensuing discussion between the audience and Daaood himself concluded the artist's week-long residency in Bordeaux, focusing on his pivotal role as a community arts activist.

21 The film evokes the story of the area, built in South Central Los Angeles in 1928, and retraces its evolution from a white-dominated district to a mostly black neighborhood

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since 1947, underlining the energy it drew from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s-1970s and the socio-political tensions that stirred up its population, especially during the Watts riots in 1965 and the 1992 riots. In the face of persisting dissensions, there came a vital need to feel communal cohesiveness and to assert a local identity; thus, the idea of the World Stage, like other spaces that sprang up in 1992, was a way out of the ambient darkness since it provided “an arena or outlet for minority artists,” Dale Brockman Davis, the co-founder of Brockman Gallery which opened in the Village in 1967, explains in the documentary. “The reason why we started the World Stage,” Daaood insists, “was because there was a need for it – the need to express oneself and share in the community.” The Stage actually played up the communal spirit which pervaded Leimert Park and which prompted one of its charismatic residents, Richard Fulton, to open Fifth Street Dick's Coffee House on Degnan Boulevard in 1992. The place became the soul of the area, a necessary “foru[m] for people to gather” over a cup of coffee, around chessboards left on the tables which the owner had put outside for “conversations to occur” and above all, around jazz music because “music has a tendency to give a community rhythm,” causing people to gather and dance, Fulton observed.

22 The community's concern for cultural sharing and transmission is palpable in Lindsay's film as one listens to the interview of Brian Breye, the founder of Museum in Black which displays only original African pieces as relics of a common African American history and culture to be known, (re)discovered and understood by people within and outside Leimert Park. To Ben Caldwell ̶ his community arts center, Kaos Network, hosts a major, hip hop, open-mic stage led by the pioneering collective Project Blowed ̶ offering a space where artists can “deconstruct the old Hollywood template” is essential to let a black aesthetic arise. Far from being frozen into a cultural memorial, one can see the Village undoubtedly enjoys remarkable artistic vitality, building and constantly renewing the testimony of its African American roots.

23 The documentary shows Daaood touring the teeming, effervescent environment from which his poetry has been more recently drawing its force and energy. Through the live performances and interviews of the late Billy Higgins and Horace Tapscott as well as a 1998 concert of singer Dwight Trible and Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, one can witness onscreen the gathering and healing power of art celebrated by the Stage, the community's passionate commitment to arts, fiery optimism and solidarity, which the griot conveys in his poem “Leimert Park:” “there are trees in Leimert Park / under which old men do divination / with the bones of dominos / Degnan a river, a nu Nile, on whose banks / young poets sharpen their hearts on the polyrhythms of Billy Higgins' smile / on the world stage where Tapscott fingers / massage your collective memory.”

24 A grim outlook seems to await Leimert Park as the end of Lindsay's film focuses on LA's 2006 redevelopment plan in the area, a project which many residents and shop owners have seen as a threat to the spirit of the Village. However, although the golden days of the Stage are over ̶ “the area is far different from what you saw in the movie,” Daaood commented after the screening ̶ the living forces of the collective, both the pioneers and the new generation of artists, keep fighting for art, not the money-making, business-obsessed kind, but true art which transcends barriers and brings all human beings together. Because the Stage was devised as “an offering of love,” there is no doubt that new grass will grow out of concrete again, reaching out for the sun ̶ a

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hopeful future which artist John Outterbridge, also featured in the documentary, envisions in his piece “And In the Hay Children Won't Play” (1991).

25 Daaood's unwavering commitment to the World Stage's fight for community arts in Leimert Park definitely struck a chord with the audience at Le Lacet film club. The viewers, most of whom were Mérignac residents, expressed their frustration about the lack of areas like Leimert Park in Bordeaux and their wish for places with a strong local culture and communal identity, where people could gather and connect thanks to shared artistic experiences ̶ a desire which the griot and activist readily encouraged: “In Bordeaux, there are vacant spaces ̶ if artists want to make them live, they can form a collective and do it.” This is how the poet ended the discussion and concluded his residency in France ̶ by asserting his faith in the power of art to carve out skylights in the thickest asphalt roofs. A prayer and a gift that are shining through Daaood’s dedication on my copy of Griot Notes from L. A.: “BRIGHTNESS!”

NOTES

1. During his residency in France, Daaood also performed with the band Build an Ark at the Banlieues Bleues festival in Seine Saint Denis near Paris on April 6 2012. He also performed with French guitarist Jean-Marc Montera, French cellist and composer Emmanuel Cremer and American jazz percussionist and drummer Famoudou Don Moyé at L'Alcazar Bibliothèque de Marseille à Vocation Régionale (BMVR) in Marseille on April 11. Pictures of the show at L'Alcazar are available online: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcyavell/6929716828/in/ set-72157629812259199/ 2. Kamau Daaood, Notes d’un griot de Los Angeles. Griot Notes from L.A. Trans. by the collective Passages, Nicole Ollier and Sophie Rachmuhl eds., Bègles, Le Castor Astral, 2012. 3. The poet had been invited to participate in a class on live poetry conducted by Professor Sophie Rachmuhl, and a translation class for graduate students supervised by professors Nicole Ollier and Véronique Béghain at Bordeaux 3 University on March 29 and 30. 4. Jeannette Lindsay, Leimert Park, Foster Johnson Studios, Los Angeles, California, 2008.

AUTHOR

NELLY MOK Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier

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Vision as Offering Interview of Kamau Daaood Monday April 9, 2012, by Nicole Ollier and Sophie Rachmuhl, edited by Sophie Rachmuhl and Kamau Daaood

Nicole Ollier and Sophie Rachmuhl

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The poems quoted are from DAAOOD, Kamau, Notes d’un griot de Los Angeles, Griot Notes from L.A., Nicole Ollier and Sophie Rachmuhl, ed., Bègles, Le Castor Astral, 2012.

The Journey into a Poem

Interviewers: Could you tell us how you work? There are several kinds of poems it seems, like the one about your father or the one about Lady Day, which are a bit more narrative than some others. And the one that you start your concerts with, “Liberator of the Spirit,” (hear it on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4btOXkGpwA8) maybe that’s less narrative. Kamau Daaood: You know the writing process with me is different. There’s no one set way that I write. I’m not a very disciplined person in terms of having a set routine or practice. A lot of poems come from pure inspiration where a thought or feeling comes and it’s very clear there are lines immediately that begin the journey into a poem. Sometimes it comes all at once. But there are other times where just one line may come. I’m taken by the line and I don’t know where it’s going and I’ll come back to it later. I’ll start seeing other lines that I have written the same way, and then I’ll see the connection. Or other times I have two different lines that I wrote at different times and when I bring them together they create the space that opens up a whole

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journey into a poem. There are times when I have a specific assignment, like when writing for a performance that’s thematic. I engross myself with things that relate to the subject, music, books, pictures anything that I can do to get inspiration.

NO & SR: So it’s not that you write a poem but you write poetry, and entities can migrate from one to the other.

Writing from the Intensity, the Magic or the Intimacy of the Moment, and Bringing Out the Universal

KD: Yes. What I am interested in now is writing from a more personal standpoint. Because much of my work before, it had me in it, but it had larger concerns and I think my growth will come with my work being involved in connecting my personal life with the larger concerns. And I think it has the ability to speak to people more, when you can write from the intensity, the magic or the intimacy of the moment, and bring out the universal in that moment. All of us have quiet time, and all of us have thoughts that no one else hears but us, those kinds of things. It’s important for me to get to those kinds of things. When you’re young, you preach, you teach, you got to let people know what you think you know. And as you grow older, you realize that you don’t know what you thought you knew. And it’s ok not to know. And you don’t have to define everything, to label everything, and that’s ok. So I think that’s where I’m at now. Where I’m at now is I want to work more. But it’s always been a process of how do I arrange my life in a way that I can do this. It settles over a period of time. Usually it works out to be the last minute, where I have been working on something for sometime and it all comes together. I prefer writing that comes from inspiration, when the words come effortlessly and fill me up, than writing that is a labored mental process. The inspired writing is better. The majority of my pieces don’t really take days and days to finish. There is very little revision. And then again there are poems I have written when I go back and look at them later, there are just a few lines I care about, I will actually extract those lines and trash the poem and they will end up in another poem later. There is no one set way.

Music Is a Major Force in My Life

NO & SR: This book was called the Language of Saxophones originally. Do you get your inspiration mostly from music? Is the oral quality of music what inspires you, or could it have been anything else?

Balm of Gilead

for Lester Young and Billie Holiday she graced him with the title of Prez he crowned her Lady Day they stand together on the stage these cousins of sorts and songs holy water drawn from the same well a common bond of knowledge a raw nerve runs deep so sensitive to the touch

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overdose of feeling, life full and aching, gardenia floating on a lake of tears porkpie hat flattened by the weight of the world this friendship sailing in a silver chalice of hemlock pearl necklace of broken hearts gold watch of shattered dreams the saxophone turns sideways smoke and warm fire oozing lava river gazelle dance in Kansas City air Lady Day’s angelic satin whining secrets in your ear the torn edge of raw silk surrounded by rainbows from light filtered through a whiskey shot glass the cool sound is pain shackled and made to walk a straight line, the pure tone of truth the tongue full of Cupid’s arrows the language an army of bent blue notes at the foot of the ear there is little money for the players only spirit and history the sweat from hot light, the ocean of applause shadows in lonely hotel rooms the laughter and the smiles of photographs she graced him with the title of Prez he crowned her Lady Day and at the church Lester laid out in a casket like a saxophone in its case Billie pleaded to sing this offering, this final gesture but they, the bloodsuckers the holders of her cabaret card, spit no on the purest request shit on her gift and stepped on her heart once again they carried her off to a saloon to sedate her in four months she would follow Prez off of the world stage into the spotlight seeking the balm of Gilead you dig? KD: Music has been a major force in my life. I love music. I’ve come up in the music. I'm constantly reading and listening about music, as well as working with musicians. It’s an area I know and I am very comfortable in. So it comes out in my work. In another lifetime I would devote myself to music. But I’m more inspired by my visual artist friends than my musician friends. I can go over to their studio space, see their stuff, and leave there full. Maybe it’s because it’s imagery that I see and I feel what I see. I’m inspired by art, but I know music best. One of the things that I’m challenged with now is breaking away from imagery and words that are comfortable to me.

NO & SR: Like what? What would be an example? KD: Rainbows in that book.

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NO & SR: You mean rainbows are something that would be more conventional or is it just that you use it a number of times? KD: If you just look in that book, and believe me, it’s been edited and edited and edited, there are certain terms, or certain expressions, or certain ideas, that have been approached, it’s just the same idea. So now it’s important for me to find ways to talk about other experiences.

NO & SR: I find the rainbow very fascinating because you can’t ever define a rainbow, in your work it comes in very different contexts. Does it have to do with a covenant?

Finding Constant Balance

KD: When I was a younger artist, I was very angry. As a young black man growing up in America I was very angry about social issues and the history of struggle and oppression of my people. I came up in the 60’s and they were very militant times. So that fire came out in my work. I was in an acting workshop once, a community center. They had everyone doing these improvisational monologues, or skits. Everyone was going up doing monologues full of rage or sadness. The facilitator told us it was easy to express these things. Then she asked us to show happiness, to show joy. And that was enlightening to me because when you do art you make others feel what you project. So if you project pain and suffering, pain and suffering is what your offering will be. If it’s joy and inspiration that you project; this is what you’re offering. Sometimes you go into dark places to bring light. I had to do more than make people feel bad real good! So then I tried to find balance, constant balance in my work. When I talk about shit, I also had to speak of rainbows. I felt I had a responsibility as an artist. If I took up people’s time, I had to strive to give them something of value. I look at the young rappers of today that live in bad conditions, and they’re good reporters about the experience of what their day to day life is like, but they don’t have the skill to see beyond reporting. What is the alternative, where is the vision. That’s what I see is missing in many of their works. They get stuck, stuck in the pain. When I realized this about my own work, I started searching for words that were light, airy, lofty in concept and began to infuse them in my work.

NO & SR: When you’re talking about a baby’s piss for instance, is it this kind of thing also? Do you find an excrement can be purifying? KD: The actual line in the poem you are referring to is “piss, fresh as a brand new baby’s bladder”. Now that’s fresh! The more shocking an image can be, the more jarring to the consciousness. Sometimes, if you’re able to have strong images in succession, it doesn’t give people time to regroup, and it can open up a new door for their perception.

NO & SR: You said something extraordinary about asphalt the other day. You said something about the asphalt meaning the urban environment of Los Angeles, where the asphalt was something hard, urban. Yet in the poem “Healer’s Lament,” there’s a seed that bursts in the asphalt (“watermelon seeds swelling in asphalt”). It leaves room for some growth. You also mentioned asphalt about your vocal chords.

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There’s No Set Way

KD: When you think about asphalt, the image of asphalt is a metaphor for life in the city environment and the hardness that goes with it. You relate to a city differently than the countryside. Life demands a certain amount of guardedness. You don’t think of asphalt as nurturing. You think, bruises and scrapes and things that make it hard to move forward. One doesn’t think of clear open space. It’s like trying to be a Light- being in a prison cell. Sometimes it’s the hardness of life that promotes the growth. That’s the beauty of dealing with hardship as opposed to being in a space where everything is nice, everyone is nice and warm, very little friction. It is the conflict, the challenges, and going beyond where you’re comfortable that deepens us. You go through this, and rise above it. There is no set way.

NO & SR: Does it signify also that you’re a child of L.A., and that you’re writing from L.A.? KD: Yes, to a degree. That I’m a city boy. I come from a city, I come from Los Angeles. This is what I know. I know the streets there, I know that environment.

NO & SR: Would you say you’re a community person? KD: I think I have been an introvert all my life. There are times where I feel I’m a jokester, and a trickster. But for the most part I’m very sensitive to my surroundings. I think I have the feminine side, I have a lot of that. I think that’s part of what’s made me a poet. To be ok with that.

NO & SR: You also have a lot of compassion, and empathy. Would you say that you’re an engagé poet? When you write about the world? The children being maimed in the streets? The war between Israel and Palestine?

DAMAGE

there is a child’s hand in the street it is small it should be attached to a three- or four-year-old you cannot tell if it is the hand of a Palestinian child or Israeli child you cannot tell if it was blown here from a suicide bomb blast or shelling from an Israeli tank it’s just a small bloody hand in the grey of the street someone weeps insane with the weight of this image someone who has held that hand taught the child to count the fingers on that hand in Hebrew or Arabic there is a baby’s hand in the middle of this Middle Eastern road and you can’t tell if the child’s parents read Quran or Torah it’s just there small and bloody without a smile and laughter attached to it so look away

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we are told it’s just unfortunate collateral damage

Feeling a Certain Responsibility

KD: When you become serious or when you accept this way that you view the world, you feel a certain responsibility. One role is that of witness. Another role is the broadcaster, or the messenger. There are probably other roles.

NO & SR: The prophet? KD: That’s the young stage. When you think you know everything and you have this message for the world.

NO & SR: So it’s difficult to be a poet and not be engagé, not to be involved in the world, not to be politically committed, or just committed.

Trying to Raise the Ideal without Losing Your Personal Identity

KD: There’s a line in an earlier poem: truth is a line between sides on which you walk. Truth is the only side. It’s that kind of thing. If you begin to take sides, based upon your tradition or some kind of belief system, you fall into a category that’s very dangerous, you’re not doing all you can do, because you’re not open to other ideas. I’m very conflicted about what the reality is for African-Americans in America, and what you have to deal with everyday. The conflict lies in terms of what has to be done to survive. But then, what the ultimate ideal is for human life on the planet. So you find yourself with this dual thing, where you are trying to raise the ideal without losing your personal identity. I really think that all of us are on earth together and that we all have histories and we all have roles to play and things to offer, to the planet, everybody. This is very idealistic talk, I know. Our histories are important to bring to the table. And everyone should be able to bring what they bring without having to have to empty themselves completely. By the same token, the key is being able to identify personal backwardness and also on the flip side to embrace the concept of tolerance and difference. There’s stuff in everybody’s culture that’s just backwards, that’s just wrong. We’re not perfect as groups. And the cultural arrogance that we bring to the table is something that is not going to be tolerated. People don’t tolerate pride that is directed against others. In some way people feel they have something that others don’t have and that makes them better. So, if you have that kind of thing happening, there’s no growth. You have all these histories with bad blood, nations and histories, if we can’t find the point of humility and tolerance, if we can’t let go, we can’t realize our highest potential, we just can’t do it.

NO & SR: Do you mean to say the middle passage is not something that interests you?

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Getting Other Communities to See the Commonness and the Humanity

KD: No, but this is a good example. You have the middle passage, this journey and all its horrors and the African’s relationships with colonizer and enslavers. All the attitudes, prejudices, social positions, complex pain and suffering magnified for over four hundred years. I understand the anger, the historical baggage, and the major roadblocks to growth. How do we move past the middle passages, the racism and the after effects of slavery? How does this change? It changes from a shift in the consciousness of humanity, a deep desire to move in a different direction. We have these strong allegiances to our tribes, right or wrong, that keep us stuck. The only way these deep-rooted fears and prejudices can be overcome is by the inner-work of individual people. When people change the world changes. As an artist this is my work: to open people up; to point to our commonness; to inspire growth, tolerance, love, vision; and the good stuff. At the same time, constantly working on me. Fighting the backwardness and ignorance within me. I know this is very idealistic, but that’s what artists do; they dream.

NO & SR: You’re talking about the reality of potential, and about vision. Your poetry is very dialectical, like other Los Angeles poets, who deal with opposites coming together. KD: And I really don’t think that this is any different than any other time period in human history. I think you have these dynamics going, you have this class thing and people with and those without. But there’s so much other stuff happening now in terms of what’s happening with our planet now. Where things are getting to the point now where if we don’t change it’s going to be a very, very different kind of place for us to live, just on a physical level. And we’re going to have to learn how to cooperate or we’re just going to do ourselves in.

NO & SR: It’s also very elegiac poetry. Your poetry is very much about you talking about people who are unsung. It’s as if you wanted to sing these people who left a heritage. You want their memory to keep. All these people you want to keep on this earth through people’s memory because your poems keep them alive. KD: I think it’s because of what lived in the people, that they were examples of certain principles, and certain concepts and that’s why I was drawn to writing about them, not because of the quality of their voice, it’s because of the quality of their stories.

NO & SR: Your poetry celebrates your community a lot, the different people, the different ways. It’s a celebration of your community’s vitality, its history and its richness. The group of translators who translated your poetry from English to French had to research quite a bit about your culture and ways in order to translate properly. And one thing we had to be careful about was how you relate to spirituality, things of the soul, what is God to you. Are you concerned with God, spirituality, religion, or are you more an atheist or a natural believer in God?

This Life and this World Are Divine

KD: I believe in spirituality; I’m cool with the God concept. I acknowledge the divine. This life and this world are divine. People bring their various mythologies, stories and practices based upon their culture, histories and experiences. There are many different approaches from the dogmatic religionist of many faiths to the dogmatic

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atheist, to everything in between. I think there is a center ground for people to stand on that provides tolerance, understanding and room for difference. People are killing one another over their concept of God. I think there is something very wrong with that.

NO & SR: Do you give grace when you eat? KD: Yes. When I am with my family, we bow our heads to acknowledge the divine and give thanks. The names or the tradition is not as important as the essence of the act. The concept of reverence is what is important. If someone from a specific faith is praying, I can be with him or her without getting hung up on the names or the language. To me it’s about the reverence for the Oneness.

NO & SR: Have you traveled to many places? KD: I did some traveling. I traveled to Egypt twice as a young man. I traveled to Somalia. I worked at this place called the Franz Fanon Research and Development Center, it was in Los Angeles in Martin Luther King Hospital. They put on a conference in Somalia about Human Development Models in Action. It was in 1979. They still had a country and a government. They were going through changes with Ethiopia and the government took us around and they showed us how they were trying to fight the desert by planting cactus. They have a large nomadic population and there’s one of the largest coastlines. But the nomadic people did not eat fish, they called it the snake of the sea. So they were trying to educate them, trying to get them to change and relate to the sea. It was very interesting. I was 28 years old, I did not know what the heck I was looking at! After I lived there, went to Egypt, the pyramids, and did that whole thing. I went there twice. I’ve been to the Netherlands about four times. This is my first trip to France.

NO & SR: Do you think it will inspire you with some poetry?

Silence to Dwell In

KD: This residency in Bordeaux has been very rich to me. For one, the environment is so different visually. In California, there are billboards everywhere. The bombardment of advertising and corporations is constant. You get up in the morning, turn on the television, and download what they want you to think, who's killing who, what you should buy. What is supposed to be important to you? You go through the day with this message in your head, spreading this message to others. You come home and upgrade a new program. The opportunity of this residency created a space where the lack of bombardment from the day to day of home was minimized. No phone calls. All we did was check our email, and even did that less. And then the language; the fact that I don’t speak French created a cocoon around me, even though there was sound all around me it was more like silence to dwell in. My wife became more present to me and I was able to hear my thoughts more clearly. One other thing, in America I wake up and travel the day as a black man. You wear race like a suit to keep you in your place. I experienced a lot less of that here. And that was refreshing.

NO & SR: You’re talking like Richard Wright in the 1950s and 1960s. Plus, you’re not so black. Does it mean you have a dual identity in the States?

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So I Am a Black Man

KD: To be black is a lot of things. It is ancestry, but it is also a way white culture keeps people in their place with labels. Obama has a white mother and black father. Why then is he considered black? Racial labels do more than establish origins. What about being a human being or a soul? What about a spiritual being, a fellow traveler, where we find our commonness? This is how we are brought up; this is how society is structured for us. So I am a black man, even though I have Native American, Irish, and Filipino as well as African ancestry. That is the kind of world we live in. I didn’t feel that race mattered in Bordeaux as much as in the States. It was refreshing here to see how different cultures interact. But I know there’s a flipside to that here. I haven’t been here long enough to experience everything. This is not a utopian society. It has its stuff to deal with. I know there’s an immigrant situation that’s causing tension in French society. Black people in America constantly acknowledge each other’s presence in public. In Bordeaux everyone stays to himself or herself no matter what race they are. I found them to be very helpful if you engaged them. I’ve had strangers help with my bags or young folks offer their seat on the tram. You don’t see a lot of that where I’m from.

NO & SR: Apart from your mother, you’re talking about blacks only, aren’t you? KD: Basically, I write from my experience. The people that are going to show up in my work are the people I know best. Just because I write through my black experience doesn’t mean that my concerns are not humanistic or universal. White writers can write from their experience and not have to worry about the confines of labels. So no, I am not only speaking about or speaking to blacks only. I use the images that I know best to speak to life.

THE WATCH

in the hospital you horizontal, me vertical i not wanting to know the time you handed me your watch and ring you had never done that before i sensed mother’s breeze in the room they said you had congestive heart failure they told me it was like breathing underwater you said you were tired mother silently chanting in my ear “tell your father you love him, tell your father you love him” my vocal cords hardened asphalt a mute saxophone in this silence this perfect space between us i would like to think you heard me gone from the body that carried the song NO & SR: There’s one thing that comes to my mind when I read your poetry, it’s the word redemption. There is something like redemption in most of your poems. Even “The Watch” is remembrance which is painful but joyous, or moving at the same time. You sing the words that you could not say, so at least you are saying them, but in a poem, after the fact,

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but they have been said. And about your mother. As if, there was always something to save, or something that could save the moment or save you. The moment is something that you talked about in the concert, saying you had to live in the moment. But here, you’re picking up the moment that is lost, in a way. KD: I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but the writing is much more for me than anyone else, and it is here that I can try and bring out my conflict and resolve my conflict, or at least put myself in a direction, or to be able to see my ideals, to make them more real in front of me. I want to be better, that’s the goal.

NO & SR: Is it healing for you? KD: It can be catharsis, yes.

The Emotion and Passion of Reading

NO & SR: What you’re saying here does not involve an audience. So where does the audience come in? KD: It’s something that I do. There’s a certain amount to share with others, that is the next step. Like I said earlier, I do realize that I’m not a plumber, I’m a poet. I’ve accepted that. In accepting that, I’m not writing to keep this for myself. I’m trying to get to the best part of what I see, and use that to grow from it and at the same time share with others.

NO & SR: Who do you think is your audience? KD: It depends on the piece. The main audience can vary from time to time. Hopefully, if you write well enough and the work is strong enough, it can have a very, very wide audience. How would I ever know that my audience would expand to France?

NO & SR: The performance aspect is really important, it gives a whole other dimension to the work. KD: In France, they’re not used to the emotion and to the passion of reading, and some said that most poets don’t read their own work! That’s almost like egotistical to read your work.

NO & SR: Beside Bob Kaufman, what are your writing influences?

My Biggest Influences Have Been My Older Friends

KD: I think really the biggest influences have been my older friends. Names like Ojenke, Eric Priestley, K. Curtis Lyle, to a degree Quincy Troupe, I didn’t really know Quincy as well as I know the others.

NO & SR: From criticism or from just being with them? KD: From being with them, from hearing them. And I guess the other two poets that strongly affected me were of course Bob Kaufman and Pablo Neruda.

NO & SR: No other American poets? KD: Poet Amiri Baraka aka Leroi Jones, he had a very strong effect on me too.

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NO & SR: As a poet, or as a writer in general? KD: As a poet and as an activist. He was very much involved in music also and in performance style. There were other people, like Jayne Cortez, she was a very surreal writer.

NO & SR: Someone else at the concert the other day asked if you were some kind of surreal poet.

The Literal Mixed In with the Out

KD: I think it had a lot to do with my imagery. When I was younger, I wrote a lot more literal poems. The change in imagery, learning that from a lot of my friends and these other writers like Bob Kaufman. It makes the imagery more musical and it opens up the imagination. I think my writing is a combination of both. Where you have the literal mixed in with the more out imagery. I try to combine it in such a way that, I love imagery that’s very out, but it’s very clear what you’re talking about.

THE LIVING WATERS

the living waters upon the lips at the center of the concept is life if the earth had breasts they could be here if the world had a womb it would be here in this place of beginnings the idea of race as a misnomer the world is One divided into many the breath and the landscape of possibilities the cleansing thought of circles our seamless existence, cause and effect the blindness of bad thinking dressed in a suit of dogma thought that makes things ugly an evil twist of nature, a false belief drive the hands to act upon the earth improper a stray note in a song in a perfect moment we could be one the richness in this moment, more than drums and stale rituals more than flag waving and staking claims a family regrouping for joy of the planet a school of perfecting the soul, we memorize the words to the human song heart beating as common music the breath and the land that connect us excuses are the links to our chains we could dance on a dirt floor of color and splendour each fingerprint makes its contribution if the earth had breasts they should be here the world’s children nourished

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from wisdom of oneness hear the rhythms of light shed your chains and dance drink of the living waters wash your face in the tears of humanity with mind, hand and heart will a new world into being

AUTHORS

NICOLE OLLIER Université Bordeaux Montaigne

SOPHIE RACHMUHL Université Bordeaux Montaigne

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Actualité de la recherche

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The Nations Within / Les Nations dans la nation Université Paris 7 - Diderot, 15 novembre 2013

Augustin Habran

1 La journée d’étude The Nations Within / Les Nations dans la nation, organisée à l’Université Paris 7 - Diderot le vendredi 15 novembre 2013 à l’initiative de Marine Le Puloch (Paris 7) et Céline Planchou (Paris 13), a proposé aux intervenants de s’interroger sur le statut des nations autochtones aux Etats-Unis, tant en termes juridiques qu’identitaires, depuis les fondements de la Jeune République jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Cette journée se proposait d’explorer plusieurs questions. Quelle place occupent les nations amérindiennes au sein de l’État-nation américain ? Comment les deux niveaux de gouvernement, État fédéral et États fédérés, appréhendent-ils leur statut légal ? Quelle est leur identité dans le paysage étatsunien ? Les contributions tentaient d’offrir des éléments de réponse à ces questions par le prisme des populations autochtones elles-mêmes.

2 L’intitulé de cette journée, tiré de l’ouvrage de Vine Deloria et Clifford Lytle (1984), est explicite. Il s’agit bien de poser la question du positionnement des nations amérindiennes, premiers habitants du continent nord-américain, dans la nation américaine. Une question dont la réponse s’avère complexe puisqu’il est nécessaire, afin d’établir des pistes de réflexion, de comprendre la manière dont l’État-nation américain s’est établi et développé en prenant en considération cette présence autochtone et, dans le même temps, les diverses formes d’adaptation des nations amérindiennes à l’expansion euro-américaine, vivement guidée à partir du milieu du XIXe siècle par la « Destinée Manifeste » des États-Unis et par le développement d’une république égalitaire. Ainsi, les intervenants se sont attelés à l’analyse de la reconnaissance diplomatique, politique et identitaire des peuples autochtones rassemblés en « nations » (concept qui, par ailleurs, pose des questions de terminologie) existant au sein de la nation américaine, dont 500 sont reconnues par le gouvernement fédéral, posant par conséquent la question du degré d’autonomie dont celles-ci jouissent aujourd’hui. En effet, au-delà du principe de « rendre justice » à des populations autochtones décimées depuis l’arrivée des premiers colons, se pose la

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question de l’échelon particulier que leur présence sur le territoire des États-Unis implique en termes de citoyenneté et de prérogatives par rapport aux autres populations qui composent l’État-nation, rassemblées autour du pacte républicain. Quelle relation le gouvernement fédéral doit-il entretenir avec les populations amérindiennes du pays, dont les droits collectifs ont par ailleurs été reconnus en 2007 par les Nations Unies, qui bénéficient de la citoyenneté américaine mais à qui l’appartenance à des nations amérindiennes reconnues confère un statut « à part » (double nationalité, américaine et amérindienne, droits collectifs liés à la propriété, prérogatives particulières par rapport à l’État et aux États concernant la protection de l’enfance, etc.) ? Une telle situation bidimensionnelle apparaît par conséquent entre nations amérindiennes reconnues par le gouvernement fédéral et celles qui ne le sont pas, cette situation étant à l’origine de divisions internes aux populations autochtones (le fait d’être reconnue donne la possibilité à la nation d’y construire des établissements de jeux, par exemple, du fait du Indian Gaming Regulatory Act de 1988), qui ne sont pas sans rappeler les déchirements tribaux liés à l’implication des Amérindiens dans les conflits dans lesquels les Euro-américains s’engagent sur le continent nord-américain dès le XVIe siècle. Comment appréhender ce statut autonome des nations amérindiennes ? Faut-il les considérer comme des nations étrangères d’un point de vue diplomatique ? Cela paraît difficile pour des nations que le droit fédéral indien reconnaît comme « domestic dependent » et dans une démocratie basée sur le refus de la discrimination et du racisme biologique.

3 Les intervenants de la première partie de journée ont ancré la réflexion sur les débats actuels liés à la place des nations amérindiennes aujourd’hui aux États-Unis et aux diverses problématiques qui en découlent. Aussi Céline Planchou (Paris 13) a-t-elle ouvert le débat en proposant une communication ayant trait à ses travaux de recherche en doctorat sur l’appartenance tribale des enfants amérindiens au regard des procédures d’adoption et de la protection de l’enfance, qui confère à ces derniers un statut, selon elle, « entre exception et assimilation ». Ainsi, cette présentation a montré combien cette question de l’adoption d’enfants autochtones jugés « vulnérables » par des familles allochtones est révélatrice de l’ambigüité de la place des Amérindiens dans le système fédéral des États-Unis. En effet, la double citoyenneté des enfants amérindiens pose problème puisque l’on observe dans les domaines de la protection de l’enfance et de l’adoption une superposition des législations découlant de l’autorité des États comme pour tous les autres enfants du pays d’une part, et de l’autorité tribale (réaffirmée par l’Indian Welfare Act de 1978) d’autre part. Bien que la citoyenneté d’État prévale dans la protection de l’enfance, l’appartenance tribale établit un lien indéniable entre une tribu et ses membres mineurs qui permet à celle-ci d’intervenir en parallèle avec l’autorité des États dans les procédures d’adoption de leur membres mineurs où que ces derniers résident sur le territoire étatsunien. Une situation qui n’est pas sans créer des tensions au sein de l’État-nation puisque les parents non-autochtones souhaitant adopter un enfant amérindien se retrouvent impliqués dans des procédures semblables à celle d’une adoption internationale alors que l’enfant est de nationalité américaine. On précisera d’ailleurs qu’une famille d’accueil dans la tribu est toujours prioritaire sur une autre famille. De telles remises en cause des droits fondamentaux des parents adoptifs américains s’illustrent récemment dans des procès tels que Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013) et montrent bien la complexité de l’entrelacs administratif et juridique entre les nations amérindiennes et la nation américaine dans laquelle elles sont incluses.

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4 Cette situation paradoxale entre autonomie et dépendance s’illustre avant tout par le prisme de la souveraineté tribale sur les terres indiennes, un thème essentiel aujourd’hui que Sophie Gergaud (Paris X - Nanterre) s’est proposée de mettre en avant à la lumière de la problématique de la journée d’étude. On sait que si la souveraineté des nations indiennes sur leurs terres a d’abord été reconnue par les Euro-américains, le développement de la nation américaine vers l’Ouest et l’expansion territoriale de celle-ci jusqu’au Pacifique s’est accompagnée de la perte systématique de cette autonomie amérindienne sur les terres ancestrales. La réduction des terres indiennes à peau de chagrin, à coups de traités fédéraux et d’accords locaux a ainsi mené à l’apparition de réserves, enclaves à l’autonomie fragile que les nations indiennes ont toujours dû défendre, à l’origine même de l’existence de ces « nations dans la nation », une situation complexe qui révèle la difficulté à articuler, comme l’indique Sophie Gergaud, la spécificité autochtone et les différents échelons du fédéralisme étatsunien. Pourtant, l’issue de l’affaire Cobell v. Salazar en 2009 semble changer la donne en ce qu’elle répond positivement à une plainte collective (à l’issue d’un procès ayant duré plus de 14 ans) en reconnaissant la mauvaise gestion par le gouvernement fédéral des terres indiennes (officiellement possédées par l’État qui réinjecte les bénéfices liés à celles-ci : location de terrain, extraction, etc.) et en garantissant la création d’un fond de 2 milliards de dollars destiné au rachat par les tribus des infimes portions territoriales possédées à titre individuel suite au fractionnement (allotments) et à la privatisation des terres instaurée par le Dawes Act de 1887, dont l’objectif était, pour le gouvernement fédéral, de « civiliser » davantage les Amérindiens. Mais des questions restent bien évidemment en suspens quant à cette réaffirmation de l’autonomie des Amérindiens sur leurs terres ancestrales, véritables enclaves politiques et identitaires au sein de l’État-nation. S’agit-il encore une fois d’une autogestion négociée et donc inévitablement partielle ?

5 Car en effet, l’autonomie politique des nations indiennes implique systématiquement une négociation, un rapport de force entre la nation autochtone et l’État fédéral, par le biais du principe de reconnaissance fédérale des groupes amérindiens, processus complexe dont Olivier Richomme (Lyon 2) analyse les paradoxes. La reconnaissance fédérale d’un groupe amérindien donne à celui-ci le statut de « domestic dependent nation » qui lui confère « presque tous les pouvoirs d’un État souverain » : immunité partielle, autogestion, contrôle des terres allouées à cette nation par l’État américain, etc. Par conséquent, au-delà de l’apparition de nations quasi-indépendantes « dans la nation », un autre échelon apparaît dans le paysage étatsunien, celui des groupes amérindiens qui ne sont pas reconnus par l’autorité fédérale et qui donc ne bénéficient pas des pouvoirs conférés par le gouvernement fédéral, une catégorie d’Amérindiens « de seconde zone » en quelque sorte. Cette relation « entre gouvernements » (government to govenment) est encore une fois une illustration de la place particulière occupée par les nations reconnues au sein de l’État-nation américain puisqu’on leur reconnaît une autonomie, certes négociée, mais dont bénéficie tout autre État souverain. Cette classification politique et non raciale, comme le précise Olivier Richomme, gérée par le Bureau des Affaires Indiennes (BIA), est possible par la mise en place de critères politiques, historiques, anthropologiques obligatoires (Mandatory Criteria), auxquels les groupes candidats à la reconnaissance fédérale doivent répondre. Un processus qui fait débat puisqu’il s’agit bien ici de donner une quasi-autonomie à une partie des citoyens de la nation américaine répondant à des critères allant à l’encontre des valeurs fondamentales égalitaires sur lesquelles repose la république des

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États-Unis. Quelle place pour ces citoyens américains bénéficiant de prérogatives différentes des autres par rapport aux autres communautés ethniques qui composent l’État-nation ? De plus, ce processus permettant à une tribu de devenir une nation pose un double problème : d’une part, le gouvernement fédéral étant à l’origine de la reconnaissance ou non d’un groupe amérindien est en position de force, d’autre part, une situation de concurrence entre les groupes autochtones apparaît, certaines nations reconnues craignant que davantage de reconnaissance pour d’autres groupes ne leur fasse perdre leur position de monopole, en particulier dans la gestion d’établissements de jeux construits sur le territoire de la nation, l’un des pouvoirs permis par la reconnaissance fédérale.

6 On a pu constater sur l’ensemble du territoire américain un bourgeonnement de casinos et de parcs à thème gérés par des investisseurs amérindiens sur les terres de leurs nations, de véritables espaces de loisir dignes de Las Vegas. C’est le cas de Foxwoods, le plus grand casino du monde occidental, géré par les Pequot Mashantucket représentés par Skip Hayward, dans l’État du Connecticut. Marie-Claude Feltes-Stigler (Paris 3) nous propose de revenir sur l’histoire de cette nation amérindienne qui, selon ses termes, « renaît » littéralement « de ses cendres » depuis les années 1980. Elle rappelle que l’arrivée des Britanniques au XVIIe siècle sur les côtes de l’Atlantique mit un terme à l’hégémonie politique et économique des Pequot Mashantucket dans la région. La nation, déjà fragilisée par une épidémie de variole en 1634, connut le coup de grâce lors du massacre de Mystic en 1637 après lequel les Pequot Mashantucket cessèrent d’exister en tant que peuple puisque même leur nom disparut. Mais c’était sans compter sur Skip Hayward qui dans les années 1980 parvint à faire reconnaître l’existence, et donc la légitimité, des Pequot Mashantucket, par les autorités fédérales dans l’État du Connecticut. La création qui s’ensuivit d’un resort et d’un centre culturel aux allures de parc d’attraction pose question. Pourquoi une population autochtone serait plus légitime qu’une autre à reformer sa nation originelle au sein de la nation américaine ? Et les critères de reconnaissance sont-ils réellement adaptés à une société qui refuse le racisme biologique (la reconnaissance par l’ADN pose problème dans une nation profondément métissée) ? Enfin, l’aspect financier de la question pose problème : certains considèrent Hayward et sa famille comme des opportunistes ayant manipulé les lois de manière à créer leur nation et ouvrir un casino. Aussi l’intérêt économique pourrait-il l’emporter sur la quête identitaire pour une population autochtone ? Un phénomène qui se comprend aisément lorsque l’on compare la réalité économique (pauvreté, chômage, etc.) au sein des réserves par rapport au reste du pays.

7 Il semble que, même s’il prend aujourd’hui des formes différentes, le rapport de force apparu dès les premiers contacts entre les colons et les Amérindiens que Richard White nomme Middle Ground existe toujours aujourd’hui aux États-Unis autour des questions liées à la terre, aux pouvoirs économiques, etc.

8 La deuxième partie de cette journée d’étude a invité les participants à revenir sur la création et l’expansion de l’État-nation américain à la lumière de la question amérindienne, en se posant la question du développement de la république fédérale des États-Unis et de sa prise en compte de la présence autochtone, mais aussi de la réaction des nations amérindiennes qui devenaient alors « nations au sein de la nation ». Elise Marienstras (Paris 7) a proposé de poser la question du rôle joué par les Amérindiens dans le fédéralisme américain. Après avoir rappelé que les peuples autochtones ont

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avant tout été les victimes du colonialisme puis, dans un second temps, du pouvoir fédéral des États-Unis, elle pose la question de leur place en tant qu’auteurs et acteurs du fédéralisme. Selon Elise Marienstras, jamais les Amérindiens ne furent les « auteurs » du fédéralisme et la théorie selon laquelle l’organisation séculaire et la charte dite de la Ligue des Iroquois auraient inspiré les rédacteurs de la Constitution des États-Unis et donné l’exemple de la démocratie de la Jeune République est extravagante. Néanmoins, s’ils n’ont pas été « auteurs », les Amérindiens semblent avoir été « acteurs » dans la mise en place et la consolidation du pouvoir fédéral en ce que la présence autochtone a joué un rôle essentiel dans la légitimité que s’est donnée le premier pouvoir fédéral américain, dans la souveraineté fédérale au travers du rôle de l’armée qui s’est développée et a agi en fonction de cette présence, et dans la mise en place de l’agent administratif et tutorial que fut le BIA. Aussi, la présence autochtone a permis au pouvoir fédéral d’affirmer sa supériorité par rapport au pouvoir fédéré. Elise Marienstras propose donc ici une analyse qui met l’accent sur la centralité des Amérindiens comme sujets à part entière de l’histoire des États-Unis, en concluant que la place occupée par les peuples autochtones a transformé une notion monolithique de la souveraineté en notion plurielle et diversifiée. C’est en effet l’affirmation de la souveraineté des nations amérindiennes au sein de l’État-nation américain qui est à l’origine de la forme actuelle du fédéralisme américain et qui pose les questions que l’on a étudiées auparavant.

9 Thomas Grillot (CNRS, EHESS) propose de poursuivre cette réflexion sur l’interdépendance entre les peuples autochtones et l’État-nation américain dans la construction du système fédéral que l’on connaît en prenant pour point de départ l’exemple de la nation Cherokee, cas exceptionnel sur le continent nord-américain. Aussi montre-t-il la manière dont la « nation » cherokee a pris forme en fonction de la puissance coloniale puis étatsunienne. Dès la fin du XVIIIe siècle, les populations autochtones du sud-est, en particulier la tribu cherokee, connaissent une mutation interne importante marquée par un développement national de type euro-américain par un peuple autochtone (centralisation politique, constitution, christianisation, alphabétisation, cadre législatif de la vie sociale et économique, première mobilisation du concept de souveraineté), lié à la présence d’une élite métisse influente, héritée des premiers contacts avec les colons. Le peuple cherokee fait donc l’objet d’une véritable mise aux normes pour s’assurer la protection de l’autorité fédérale et leur pérennité sur le territoire. Les arrêts de la Cour Suprême des États-Unis dirigée par le juge Marshall, et la décision en 1830 de refuser de considérer les Cherokees comme une nation étrangère pouvant se pourvoir en justice contre un État fédéré américain, et, dans le même temps, de déterminer le cadre juridique de la souveraineté des peuples autochtones par l’expression « nations domestiques dépendantes », marque la fin d’une période d’indécision quant à l’indépendance des nations amérindiennes. Désormais, les Amérindiens évoluent au rythme de l’Exceptionnalisme américain : les Amérindiens sont une population à la fois de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur, par conséquent inférieure ; les États-Unis sont une nation « exceptionnelle » pouvant se réclamer d’une spécificité, et donc d’une supériorité certaine. Selon Thomas Grillot, la nationalité indienne est impensable sans l’américaine. Il y a bien aux États-Unis deux types de nations : la nation américaine, souveraine absolue, et les nations indiennes qui restent sujettes, même si les citoyens en tant qu’individus sont désormais citoyens américains. Cette communication a donc été l’occasion de s’interroger sur la notion même de « nation » amérindienne sur le territoire américain puisque l’identité indienne semble être le

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résultat d’interactions entre les peuples autochtones et les États-Unis. Les nations indiennes co-évoluent en même temps que l’État américain.

10 Afin de conclure cette journée d’étude en regardant vers l’avenir, Joëlle Rostkowski (EHESS, UNESCO) a proposé aux participants d’analyser les perspectives nouvelles offertes par la Déclaration sur les Droits des Peuples Autochtones adoptée en 2007 par les Nations Unies. En définissant les droits spécifiques et universels des peuples autochtones vivant au sein des États-nations à travers le monde, les Nations Unies ont permis, après trente ans de négociations, de donner un cadre légal à leur souveraineté et à la définition de leur identité. En affirmant le droit indéniable des nations autochtones à l’autodétermination (gestion de leurs affaires internes, de leur territoire, etc.) et à la protection et la promotion de leur identité et de leurs valeurs ancestrales (héritage spirituel, droits d’auteur, etc.), la déclaration de 2007 ajoute un échelon à la superposition des souverainetés existant au sein de l’État-nation américain. Il n’est pas surprenant que les États-Unis s’y opposèrent en 2007 avec le Canada, l’Australie et la Nouvelle-Zélande (les États-Unis ne signèrent qu’en 2010). Néanmoins, Joëlle Rostowski rappelle clairement qu’il s’agit d’une déclaration et non d’une convention, un document non contraignant qui se garde bien de se rapprocher de la notion de « droit de disposer d’eux-mêmes » pour les autochtones. Et si le droit à l’autodétermination des peuples est assuré dans l’article III, toute interprétation maximaliste est évitée dès l’article IV puisque ce dernier insiste sur le fait que cette souveraineté est garantie uniquement pour les affaires internes aux territoires amérindiens. En précisant que le racisme n’a pas de fondement scientifique, en préférant le terme de « peuple » à celui de « population » autochtone et en refusant l’assimilation forcée, ce document représente une avancée historique, mais ces limites notables en font un cadre éthique plus que juridique.

11 Cette journée a donc été l’occasion de s’interroger sur la place qu’ont occupée les peuples amérindiens sur le continent nord-américain depuis l’arrivée des premiers Euro-américains jusqu’à aujourd’hui, et la manière dont leur statut et leur identité ont évolué en concomitance avec l’établissement de l’État-nation américain, forgé sur l’idéologie de l’Exceptionnalisme et de la Destinée Manifeste des États-Unis. Les interactions entre les peuples autochtones et le gouvernement fédéral des États-Unis sont donc à l’origine d’une superposition complexe de souverainetés et de prérogatives. C’est le résultat de la présence de « nations au sein de la nation », conséquence d’une adaptation forcée à l’Exceptionnalisme américain dont la forme pose question : que signifie vraiment l’expression « nations dépendantes domestiques » ? Peut-on parler d’États indiens dans l’État-nation américain (comparables aux autres États fédérés) ? Quoi qu’il en soit, l’affirmation par les Nations Unies du droit à l’autodétermination des peuples autochtones (davantage symbolique que juridique) est loin de remettre en question le déséquilibre du rapport de force entre autorités autochtones et pouvoir fédéral aux États-Unis.

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INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

AUGUSTIN HABRAN Université Paris 7 – Diderot

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Isabelle Montin : « Le Retour du travail : travail et société chez John Dewey » Paris, 6 février 2014

Clotilde Nouët

1 Le séminaire « Travail, Culture, Sociétés », qui analyse la culture et la société des mondes anglophones à partir de la question du travail, a accueilli, le 6 février 2014, une intervention d’Isabelle Montin portant sur : « Le retour du travail : travail et société chez John Dewey. » Isabelle Montin travaille sur les pragmatistes américains classiques et s’intéresse particulièrement à la théorie sociale et esthétique de Dewey.

2 Le regain d’intérêt suscité depuis une trentaine d’années par l’œuvre de Dewey impose de reconsidérer les enjeux philosophiques attachés à la lecture et à l’interprétation de certains aspects de sa pensée. Isabelle Montin s’intéresse notamment ici à la question de savoir s’il est possible de voir en Dewey un théoricien du « travail », et dans quelle mesure ses analyses peuvent être fécondes pour la philosophie sociale et l’histoire de la pensée du travail aux États-Unis.

3 Visant à nuancer l’idée que l’œuvre de Dewey serait structurée autour du paradigme du travail, Isabelle Montin propose un examen critique de la thèse défendue par Emmanuel Renault dans son article « Dewey et la centralité du travail » (2012). Elle se demande s’il est pertinent de faire du concept de « travail » chez Dewey un paradigme permettant de relier systématiquement sa théorie instrumentaliste — selon laquelle l’homme étant un animal faiseur d’outils, c’est la technique qui permet de saisir la forme de tout agir humain — et sa théorie sociale et politique. La réflexion deweyienne s’appuie en effet sur une thèse anthropologique en vertu de laquelle les pratiques (qu’elles soient de l’ordre du travail ou de la connaissance) et les interactions doivent être pensées à partir du rapport instrumental qui les constituent. Pour autant, cette centralité du paradigme instrumental doit être distinguée, selon Isabelle Montin, d’une centralité du travail à proprement parler. Le travail ne saurait être assimilé sans reste à l’activité instrumentale.

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4 Afin de réévaluer la place de ce concept, dont elle met en cause l’homogénéité, dans l’ensemble de l’œuvre deweyienne, Isabelle Montin propose de restituer les inflexions historiques et contextuelles qui ont marqué la réflexion de Dewey sur le travail. L’inflexion la plus significative lui semble se situer autour de 1929, date avant laquelle le concept de travail n’apparaît qu’épisodiquement, et s’articule toujours à la question de l’éducation. C’est à partir de 1929 que Dewey produit, dans des publications militantes, un certain nombre de textes très critiques sur les conditions concrètes du travail salarié aux États-Unis. Enfin, dans les années 1930, la question du travail est intégrée par Dewey à une théorie de l’activité sociale.

5 On assiste alors, aux yeux d’Isabelle Montin, à un « retour » du travail dans la pensée deweyienne, « retour » qui a permis d’articuler, sur le tard, la question du travail au postulat instrumentaliste à partir duquel se déploie son anthropologie philosophique.

6 Isabelle Montin repère une tension dans la réflexion deweyienne sur le travail. D’une part, dans la mesure où le travail relève de l’activité instrumentale, il est intimement lié aux postulats centraux de son anthropologie philosophique. Celle-ci, caractérisée par une thèse « présentiste », refuse la définition traditionnelle de l’action, fondée sur une distinction dualiste entre fins et moyens, et sur l’idée de la subordination des moyens aux fins. Au contraire, selon Dewey, fins et moyens interagissent et s’influencent mutuellement au cours de l’action, les fins étant toujours déjà à l’œuvre dans les moyens (ends in view). À cet égard, le travail, au même titre que les autres activités instrumentales (dont fait partie toute activité intelligente), est donc une activité à la fois utilitaire et productrice de valeurs. L’instrumentalisme deweyien permet de dépasser les oppositions rigides entre régimes d’activité, et notamment la séparation des types d’agir normatifs et instrumentaux.

7 Toutefois, indépendamment de cette conception instrumentaliste, le travail continue d’être pensé, chez Dewey, à l’aune de la distinction entre l’économie et la politique. De ce point de vue, il est assimilé à la sphère dite mécanique de l’économie, dont se détache l’activité libre et organique que recouvre la politique. Or, si la nature propre de l’agir se saisit, de façon dialectique, au-delà de la distinction des moyens et des fins, la rationalisation historique de la sphère productive conduit, tout au contraire, à accentuer la distinction des fins et des moyens, voire à l’hypostasier. Sous l’effet de la révolution industrielle, l’économie devient la sphère par excellence de la rationalité dite instrumentale, « religion des moyens ». Dans le même temps, le travail social subit les effets de cette logique : la division du travail intellectuel et manuel entérine la séparation entre la conception et le contrôle des fins d’une part, l’exécution ou la mise en œuvre des moyens, d’autre part. L’activité de travail est fondamentalement aliénée dans la mesure où sa fin, le salaire, est fixée en dehors d’elle et par l’employeur, et qu’elle exclut la possibilité que le travailleur y déploie librement son intelligence. Ces procédés ont pour résultat l’abrutissement du travailleur et son asservissement moral aussi bien que physique.

8 Si le travail est le lieu d’une soumission totale du travailleur à la logique productive, Dewey n’en condamne pas pour autant le productivisme comme tel. La production de ressources morales et spirituelles (l’intelligence, le talent) est fondamentale à une société. Et c’est à partir de ce modèle qu’est pensée la revalorisation du travail.

9 Isabelle Montin propose, pour examiner ce point, la lecture d’un article de 1938, « The Economic Basis of the New Society », dans lequel Dewey, revenant partiellement sur la position qu’il avait dans Liberalism and Social Action, où il défendait l’augmentation des

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salaires et du temps de loisir, réfléchit à une réorganisation d’ensemble du travail. Il faut que celui-ci, tout en exploitant l’intelligence collective, permette aux individus de s’y réaliser. Mais le modèle normatif à partir duquel Dewey pense la réalisation individuelle dans le travail n’est pas, souligne Isabelle Montin, interne au travail lui- même. C’est en effet l’idéal démocratique, l’association des individus égaux, qui assure la continuité entre l’expérience individuelle du travailleur et l’expérience sociale. Le système productif est valorisé dans la mesure où il permet de réaliser une fin politique : l’égalité des travailleurs dans la sphère de la production.

10 Faudrait-il en conclure que seule une normativité politique, plus précisément, démocratique, permette de repenser la place qu’il faut accorder au travail dans une société ? Isabelle Montin cherche à dégager une autre voie possible chez Dewey lui- même, à partir d’un modèle non pas politique mais esthétique. En thématisant l’expérience esthétique comme une forme de « consommation productive », Dewey repense la teneur de la satisfaction esthétique en même temps qu’il réévalue l’activité de la consommation elle-même. La consommation ne se réduit pas à une dépense stérile d’énergie : en tant qu’elle est une expérience, elle libère, de façon dialectique, un surplus qui concourt au développement des potentialités individuelles et dès lors collectives.

11 C’est à travers cette conception esthétique, ainsi que le suggère Isabelle Montin, que le travail est réarticulé à la matrice instrumentaliste de la pensée deweyienne. Tant qu’il demeure subordonné aux normes politiques, le travail entérine la distinction des fins et des moyens, en étant au service de la réalisation d’un idéal démocratique qui n’a pas sa source en lui. Le modèle esthétique, en revanche, permettrait de repenser le potentiel émancipatoire du travail à partir de son mode opératoire propre, dans la mesure où celui-ci est l’expérience d’une consommation productive.

12 Il faut donc reconnaître dans la théorie de Dewey une centralité anthropologique de l’activité technique, instrumentale et peut-être même du « travail » au sens d’une activité de production médiatisée par une communauté. Il semblerait toutefois que le concept de « travail » n’occupe pas la même place au sein de sa théorie sociale et politique. Jusque dans les années 1930, le travail, en tant qu’il relève du versant économique de l’expérience sociale, n’est pas exploré par Dewey. Soucieux de remédier à ce défaut et de penser l’articulation entre le versant économique et le versant politique de l’expérience sociale, Dewey intègre alors ce concept à sa théorie normative, sans toutefois lui faire jouer de rôle central.

13 La communication d’Isabelle Montin a été suivie de questions de la part des participants. Une première demande lui a permis de repréciser la notion deweyienne de travail. Les œuvres de jeunesse de Dewey révèlent une distinction entre drudgery (besogne) et work. Une activité besogneuse est subordonnée à une finalité extérieure à l’action. Parce que les fins et les moyens sont rigoureusement séparés, l’exécution et la conception étant effectuées par des individus distincts, l’activité de production à proprement parler est pénible et stérile. Le travail salarié tombe sous le coup de cette définition.

14 L’instrumentalisme deweyien, marqué par un certain biologisme, voit dans l’action et l’expérience un certain « travail » de l’organisme qui se recompose et s’accroît au contact du réel. Cependant, cela relève d’un travail non au sens de work ni même de labor, mais d’une interaction ou « transaction » qui contribue à la construction de l’individu, une transaction qui est à la fois expérience passive et action. Quand Dewey

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parle de « productivité », il pense à cet accroissement de connaissances que doit permettre toute expérience authentique. Il y a donc un faisceau de métaphores que l’idée du travail ne recoupe que partiellement.

15 Un second participant a demandé si le travail social, tel que Dewey l’identifie avec l’activité besogneuse et routinière, pouvait être rapproché de la notion de « travail » qu’on trouve dans la pensée d’Hannah Arendt. Isabelle Montin a reconnu une certaine proximité entre les thèses de ces deux auteurs, en particulier dans leur théorisation de l’action politique. Toutefois, quand Arendt thématise l’exclusion de l’action libre et du travail, Dewey, rattachant le travail à sa philosophie instrumentale, lui accorde un statut décisif dans sa théorie en cherchant à sauver son potentiel émancipatoire.

16 Enfin, Olivier Frayssé, prenant appui sur le texte cité au cours de l’intervention, « The Economic Basis of the New Society », a établi un parallèle entre l’idée d’une productivité économique de la réalisation individuelle, telle que semble la thématiser Dewey, et les théories post-fordistes du travail — plus précisément, la théorie du capital humain développée dans les années 1960 par Gary Becker. On trouve en effet chez Dewey, qui défend la valeur émancipatoire du travail, les prémices d’une argumentation favorable à l’investissement productif dans le capital humain.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

CLOTILDE NOUËT Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

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Journée d’Études internationale « The Politics of Visibility in the American West » Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, 21 mars 2014

Claire Cazajous-Augé et Céline Rolland Nabuco

1 Cette journée d’études internationale a été organisée par les Professeurs Wendy Harding (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès) et Nancy Cook (University of Montana, Professeure invitée à l’Université Jean Jaurès) avec le soutien de l’ambassade américaine, de l’équipe de recherche du CAS (EA 801) et du département d’anglais et l’UFR de langues de l’Université Jean Jaurès. Faisant suite à un premier colloque tenu en 2013 et intitulé « The Lifting of an Environment to Expression », cette rencontre vise à montrer comment les Américains perçoivent et se représentent l’Ouest. Dans son discours inaugural, Wendy Harding souligne que l’organisation d’un événement consacré à l’Ouest américain était un choix évident grâce à la présence de Nancy Cook à l’Université Jean Jaurès. Le thème des « politiques de visibilité » rappelle que, si nous avons tous en tête des images iconiques de l’Ouest, telles que Monument Valley ou Hollywood, il est intéressant d’interroger d’autres images moins communes, moins attendues, voire polémiques comme certains photographes, à l’instar de John Pfahl, savent les saisir1.

Gesa Mackenthun (University of Rostock), « Hidden Cities and Imperial Gothic : the Cultural Work of a Romantic Trope »

2 Auteure de Fictions of the Black Atlantic (2004), Metaphor of Dispossession (1997), Sea Changes : Historicizing the Ocean (2004), Gesa Mackenthun s’intéresse aux récits de voyages du XIXe siècle, aux ruines qui furent alors découvertes et à la manière dont l’archéologie a pu changer la perception d’un paysage. Gesa Mackenthun place son intervention sous l’égide de Jean Baudrillard avec une citation extraite d’Amérique

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(1988) sur le désert de l’Ouest vu à travers une vitre de voiture, qui souligne la dimension géologique du temps : « The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too »2. Elle s’intéresse ensuite au trope romantique de la ville cachée dans la forêt amazonienne, notamment dans les écrits de John Lloyd Stephens. L’invisibilité de la ville, à la manière des habitations des autochtones le long du Mississippi, dans The Professor’s House de Willa Cather, qui semblent fossilisées (« like a fly in amber ») et inaccessibles (« deeper into an alien landscape of mystery »), semble en contradiction avec les stratégies d’expansion vers l’Ouest et l’avidité de l’« imperial eye » qui désire posséder ce qui se donne à la vue. Enfin, Gesa Mackenthun prend un contre-exemple de Jean Baudrillard avec Savage Dreams de Rebecca Solnit, roman dans lequel la narratrice sort de sa voiture lors d’un voyage dans le Nevada et explore les lieux interdits, comme le site d’essais nucléaires qui représente un blanc cartographique, mais aussi les lieux oubliés que lui montrent les Hopis. Il s’agit d’aller chercher ce qui reste en retrait, par une démarche volontaire. Gesa Mackenthun termine en rappelant que les villes invisibles, ancrées dans l’imaginaire colonial, représentent ce qui est caché mais essentiel dans notre histoire.

Neil Campbell (University of Derby), « Fugitive Work : Affective Critical Regionality and Willy Vlautin’s Northline »

3 Neil Campbell a publié American Cultural Studies: an Introduction to American Culture (2011), American Youth Cultures (2004) et The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age (2008). Le roman Northline auquel il s’intéresse a la particularité d’avoir été publié avec une bande originale, son auteur Willy Vlautin étant membre du groupe « Richmond Fontaine ». En choisissant un cadre qui joue sur la visibilité de l’Ouest et sa mythologie, et en reprenant les thèmes bien connus de la Destinée Manifeste, de la conquête de l’Ouest et l’image d’une nation de bandits armés (« gunfighter nation »3), Willy Vlautin prend le contre-pied des attentes du lecteur. Car ce qui l’intéresse, c’est de dévier du modèle à l’intérieur même de ce modèle, selon la théorie de Deleuze et Guattari. Ainsi, la littérature se définirait par l’attention au mineur qui se place en marge, à l’intérieur même du majeur. Selon Niel Campbell, l’intérêt et l’originalité de ce roman est de proposer, à l’opposé du régionalisme (si on l’entend comme une perspective égotiste, fermée, conservatrice et statique) l’illustration du concept de « critical regionality », que Neil Campbell perçoit d’abord comme une redistribution du sensible, puis comme la promotion du mineur et enfin comme la capacité à créer du lien grâce à la reconnaissance du vulnérable. Ce concept explique la diégèse et les thèmes de Northline, ainsi que le choix d’un décor gothique, au point que la ville de Reno acquiert l’ampleur d’un personnage à part entière. Dans le roman Northline, Las Vegas est présentée comme l’incarnation du déclin des États-Unis. Pour Jimmy, archétype du héros masculin déchu, la nouvelle frontière se situe au Nord des États-Unis. Il est attiré par son mode de vie plus « simple », guidé par l’espoir simpliste que « The farthest North you go, the better it will be ». Ce personnage, par certains côtés pathétique, incarne l’Ouest violent, l’espoir éternel de conquête. Parallèlement à Las Vegas, la ville de Reno est un lieu de destruction, celle du dernier casino. Cet événement, qui a réellement eu lieu en 1999, fait dire à Dan : « I guess no one here cares about the past anymore ». Ce qui fait la force et l’originalité de l’œuvre,

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c’est le tournant inattendu, même inespéré, que prend la vie de Jimmy lorsqu’il se met soudain à faire preuve d’affection, de souci pour l’autre, revirement qui peut se lire comme un effort d’ajustement vis-à-vis d’un territoire méconnaissable.

David Rio (University of the Basque Country), « Hidden in Plain Sight : Basque Sheepherders in Western American Literature »

4 Spécialiste de littérature basco-américaine, David Rio a publié Exploring the American Literary West (2006), Beyond the Myth (2011), The Neglected West (2012) et A Contested West, New Readings of Place in Western American Literature (2013). Il se penche ici sur les textes adoptant le point de vue des bergers basques immigrés dans l’Ouest des États-Unis qu’il présente comme un groupe négligé dans les études critiques. Selon lui, l’invisibilité de ce groupe dans la littérature s’explique par l’isolement social, l’éparpillement et par le manque d’intérêt pour les bergers dans une culture qui valorise les « ranchers » comme en témoigne la présentation négative de John Muir : « The arch destroyers are the shepherds ». Pour David Rio, il s’agit de se demander s’il est possible d’adopter une perspective pastorale dans cette étude. Si les bergers font partie intégrante de la pastorale (en suivant la théorie de Leo Marx), les bergers basques sont pourtant à l’écart de l’imagerie pastorale traditionnelle. David Rio présente quelques portraits de bergers de la littérature américaine (Robert Laxalt et Sweet Promised Land, publié en 1957 par exemple) dans lesquels apparaissent des éléments anti-pastoraux tels qu’une nature hostile, l’isolement, le manque d’eau, la tentation de la ville. David Rio explique que les bergers basques ont d’abord été représentés par des auteurs eux-mêmes basques tels que Frank Bergon, Monique Urza ou Martin Etchart, avant d’apparaître dans les textes d’auteurs américains non-basques qui cherchent à déconstruire le schéma pastoral, comme Annie Proulx ou Michael A. Thomas. David Rio conclut en précisant que les bergers basques sont de plus en plus visibles dans la littérature américaine et que leurs portraits comportent des éléments de la pastorale traditionnelle, de l’anti-pastorale, mais aussi des éléments de la « post-pastorale », posture qui cherche à adopter une perspective de plus en plus réaliste sur ce groupe.

Nancy Cook (University of Montana), « Preserving Place and Revising History: Legacies of the King Ranch of Texas »

5 Nancy Cook, qui dirige elle-même un ranch dans le Montana, s’intéresse ici au King Ranch situé au Texas. Fondé en 1853, il s’agit d’un des ranchs les plus grands et les plus célèbres des États-Unis. Il participe de la culture du ranch, de son imagerie et de sa mythologie. Avec le King Ranch, cette mythologie devient un « business », au sens le plus péjoratif. Il s’agit en effet d’une très grande entreprise dont la marque joue sur l’iconographie de l’Ouest. Nancy Cook s’emploie à déstabiliser cette image donnée par les administrateurs de King Ranch. Elle tient à préciser que son travail a été rendu difficile par le contrôle de King Ranch sur ses archives et son image publique, comme en témoigne son site internet qui semble, comme elle le démontre, servir des fins de propagande. Elle souligne les inadéquations que le Ranch présente dans son

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fonctionnement et la collusion violente entre deux discours incompatibles. Elle explique que les fondateurs y présentent leur projet comme une oasis au cœur d’un environnement hostile, un microcosme presque utopique, en publiant notamment des images d’harmonie sociale avec les portraits de vaqueros qui travaillent et vivent dans le ranch depuis des générations. Les valeurs de virilité, fécondité et dur labeur sont mises en exergue. Cependant, il semblerait que priment la recherche du profit à tout prix et une production intensive (noix de pécan, jus d’orange, élevage, utilisation de pesticides). Selon Nancy Cook, le discours pseudo-écologiste se sert en fait de l’héritage naturel et culturel comme d’un produit dont il s’agit de tirer le plus grand profit économique possible, la politique de visibilité de King Ranch servant ici à alimenter son image à des fins commerciales. Nancy Cook analyse ensuite le discours paternaliste et romantique du Ranch, en s’appuyant sur la figure des Kinenos, les travailleurs employés et logés au Ranch qui ont participé au mythe, voire à la glorification de l’entreprise depuis des générations. Dans ce système féodal, ceux qui travaillent à l’exploitation du lieu n’en sont pas les propriétaires. Elle souligne pour finir la difficulté de ce travail d’enquête, du fait de la loyauté indéfectible des employés. En effet, lors des entretiens qu’ils lui ont accordés, elle a dû « lire entre les lignes » et chercher à s’engouffrer dans les plus infimes fissures afin de lever le voile sur la réalité de King Ranch.

Audrey Goodman (Georgia State University), « Split Screens : Vizualizing the Southwestern Borderlands »

6 Audrey Goodman débute son étude avec une photographie (Optical Parable de Manuel Alvarez Bravo) et à partir de l’idée que l’on voit le monde différemment avec un appareil photo. Elle prend l’exemple d’une photographie de Graciela Iturbide, Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert (1979). Cette œuvre cherche à mettre en contact une vision traditionnelle et un élément perturbateur qui vient disloquer l’arrangement confortable de nos perceptions. Mettant en exergue ce qu’elle nomme un faux dilemme entre l’image et l’imagination, Audrey Goodman insiste sur la nécessité, pour le photographe, d’être en alerte et invisible, à l’instar du chasseur. Audrey Goodman montre un intérêt particulier pour des photographies représentant des femmes indigènes qui sont, selon elle, détentrices de la culture spirituelle de l’Ouest américain (Alvarez Bravo, Iturbide) et pour le texte de Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead. Elle rapproche le langage de la photographie à une quête identitaire, parfois féministe. Citant Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak dans The Imperative to Reimagine the Planet, Audrey Goodman cherche à repenser ce lien entre photographie et identité, modernité et tradition, dans le cadre d’une théorie de la Frontière.

Kelly Dennis (University of Connecticut), « Hiding in Plain Site : Landscape Photography under Postwestern Skies »

7 Kelly Dennis ne pouvant pas participer à ce colloque, William Handley a lu sa communication, qui interroge l’héritage du photographe Ansel Adams (1902-1984). Deux de ses œuvres esthétisées et dépolitisées sont au centre de cette étude : Moonrise Over Hernandez et White House Ruins. Deux tirages différents de Moonrise Over Hernandez,

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parmi les 30000 tirages datés de cette photographie représentant un paysage nocturne du Nouveau-Mexique, montrent l’évolution de la technologie qui a permis à Ansel Adams d’obtenir le résultat désiré. Ainsi, Kelly Dennis montre que vingt-cinq ans après le premier tirage, les couleurs du ciel semblent plus contrastées. White House Ruins est une photographie qui met en valeur la dimension intemporelle des ruines et serait la copie d’une photographie de O’Sullivan, mais, selon Ansel Adams, la ressemblance est fortuite. Kelly Denis indique que ce clair de lune emblématique a été repris par des photographes tels que John Pfahl qui joue avec les attentes suscitées par un tel topos photographique (Moonrise Over Pie Pan). Ainsi, on croit voir le reflet de la lune sur la surface d’un lac alors qu’il s’agit d’un moule à tarte posé dans le désert. Robert Adams joue lui aussi avec ce cliché en utilisant un format vertical qui montre la beauté dans un paysage modifié par l’homme (un parking), dans la série Summer Nights. L’héritage artistique d’Ansel Adams peut se voir notamment chez Bruce Myren, Janet Pritchard et Trevor Paglen. À travers leurs photographies, l’Ouest apparaît familier et étranger à la fois. Kelly Dennis parle d’une esthétique au ras du sol (« ground level aesthetics ») qui attache une grande importance à la qualité tactile et à la proximité du regard porté sur le paysage. Enfin, la mouvance des nouveaux topographes est à rapprocher de cette vision originale : ils s’attachent à replacer les images de ruines dans une perspective temporelle.

Cathryn Halverson (University of Copenhagen), « The Atlantic Monthly, Gertrude Stein, and ‘Faraway Women’ »

8 Cathryn Halverson, auteure de l’ouvrage Maverick Autobiographies, Women Writers and the American West 1900-1936 (2004) s’intéresse à la littérature dite populaire (à travers l’étude de bestsellers), notamment au genre de l’autobiographie féminine, sous un angle résolument féministe, ainsi qu’aux masques que les auteures de ces textes marginaux ont dû revêtir pour faire entendre une voix parfois dérangeante. Cathryn Halverson prend pour exemple l’autobiographie de Gertrude Stein, publiée d’abord en 1933 dans la rubrique réservée aux lettres de « Faraway Women » de la revue The Atlantic Monthly, grâce au rédacteur Ellery Sedgwick, sous le titre provocateur The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Se faisant ainsi passer pour sa compagne, Gertrude Stein se pose en ventriloque et fait entendre non seulement la voix d’Alice mais aussi celle d’autres personnages féminins. Cathryn Halverson analyse aussi les récits, souvent épistolaires, relatant les vies de femmes appartenant à la classe populaire ou moyenne de l’époque, publiés par la revue entre 1915 et 1945. Elle souligne notamment l’intérêt de la correspondance publiée également en août 1933 entre Evelyn Harris et Caroline A. Henderson, regroupée la même année sous le titre Letters of Two Women Farmers. Elle montre comment ces lettres illustrent non seulement une amitié féminine mais aussi la force de caractère nécessaire pour des femmes de l’Ouest américain à cette période. Cathryn Halverson a également étudié un autre témoignage parvenant d’une contrée lointaine, publié en 1902 sous le titre The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, dont l’auteur, un homme, Yone Nogushi, se cache derrière le masque de Miss Morning Glory. Ces textes soulignent un même enjeu identitaire, la question du genre (genre féminin, genres littéraires, et pertinence des sous-genres) et de la légitimité des femmes à remettre, par leurs écrits, une société en question.

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William Handley (University of Southern California), « American Vanishing Acts »

9 Auteur de Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American West (2009) et coéditeur du recueil True West, Authenticity in the American West (2004), William Handley s’intéresse ici à l’adaptation cinématographique, par le réalisateur George B. Seitz, d’un roman de Zane Gray, The Vanishing American. Le film et le roman éponyme sont sortis la même année, en 1925. Le tournage du film a eu lieu dans des décors authentiques. C’est d’ailleurs la première fois que Monument Valley apparaît dans un film. De plus, les figurants sont des Amérindiens, notamment des Navajos. Dans le contexte culturel des années 1920 qui voit la crise de l’américanisation, les Amérindiens apparaissent comme une source et un modèle pour la culture américaine. Les films sur les Amérindiens deviennent un « médium » pour l’américanisation. William Handley souligne cependant l’ironie d’un tel phénomène. En effet, le film emploie des Amérindiens qui rejouent leur propre disparition, et l’acteur principal qui incarne un grand chef amérindien est un Américain blanc. Le film, à la fois mélodramatique et épique, se termine sur l’image de la mort de ce chef qui évoque la figure christique et la pietà. Selon William Handley, le corps y est présenté comme une icône, une statue révélant l’ambition du cinéma de transcender le temps. À travers cette image, l’Amérindien est voué à disparaître éternellement sous le regard du spectateur.

10 En conclusion des interventions et des discussions partagées au fil de cette riche journée, l’Ouest Américain apparaît comme un territoire complexe dont l’image d’Épinal communément véhiculée pour des raisons de facilité mais aussi d’intérêt financier (l’exemple du King Ranch en est révélateur) doit être nuancée à l’aune de réalités moins accessibles ou même cachées, implicites, occultées ou parfois écartées de peur qu’elles ne nuisent à l’image idéalisée nourrie par le mythe de la Frontière.

NOTES

1. Les remerciements de Wendy Harding vont à l’ambassade américaine pour son soutien, à l’équipe de recherche du CAS (EA 801), au département d’anglais et à l’UFR de langues de l’Université Jean Jaurès, ainsi qu’à tous les participants. 2. En anglais dans l’intervention. 3. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

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INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEURS

CLAIRE CAZAJOUS-AUGÉ Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

CÉLINE ROLLAND NABUCO Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

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Colloque international « Transferts, transgressions, transformations : évolution de la ville américaine / Transfers, Defiance, Alteration : Evolutions in American Cities » Université de Franche-Comté (Besançon), 10-12 avril 2014

Clément Lévy, Nathalie Roelens, Sandrine Baudry, Zeenat Saleh et Marta Alvarez

1 Ce colloque international, organisé par Karolina Katsika, Daniel Peltzman et Pascale Smorag, s’est proposé de croiser les approches disciplinaires sur la question des origines et celle de la transmission des identités urbaines aux États-Unis. Sociologues, américanistes, spécialistes de cinéma, géographes et littéraires ont tenté de comprendre la fluidité et la rémanence des échanges urbains, de proposer des définitions de villes modèles et d’en prouver l’impossible réalité. Cette problématique des transferts des savoirs s’inscrit dans la continuité des activités de recherche du laboratoire CRIT (Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et Transculturelles), dont la directrice est Laurence Dahan-Gaida (UFR Lettres, Besançon).

Atelier 1 : « Impair, passe et noir » : la ville prise au jeu / « The Impair, Passe & Noir » : City Stakes

2 Le premier atelier du colloque a proposé une série d’études théoriques tout autant que métacritiques sur quelques exemples précis. Avec « “L’être urbain” dans la sociologie américaine », Antigone Mouchtouris (Université de Lorraine) est revenue sur le courant interactionniste de la sociologie américaine. Proposant une réévaluation des travaux de la sociologie interactionniste, citant également Georg Simmel, Erwin Gofman et ses

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propres travaux sur le graffiti et la contre-culture, Antigone Mouchtouris offre une compréhension renouvelée des stratégies sociales du citadin américain.

3 Daniel Peltzman (Université de Franche-Comté), qui présentait « Carey McWilliams et la description du Los Angeles des années quarante et cinquante », étudie la figure de ce journaliste et militant pour les droits civiques, qui a publié des travaux pionniers sur le problème de l’eau dans le comté et sur les Zoot Suit Riots. Inquiété pendant les années McCarthy, cet intellectuel engagé a aussi été un précurseur en menant des recherches véritablement interdisciplinaires.

4 Charlotte Recoquillon (Institut français de géopolitique), avec « Gentrifier par les discours et les représentations : l’exemple de Harlem », s’intéresse à la façon dont un discours touristique et culturel contribue à faire disparaître son propre objet, en favorisant la gentrification d’un quartier de New York. Cette étude de la mobilité des habitants de Harlem après la réhabilitation du quartier a mis l’accent sur les ambiguïtés de la politique de la ville qui revalorise un espace à partir de son historique ethnique, sans permettre à ceux qui l’ont incarné de continuer à vivre sur place.

5 Dans « Les transformations inquiétantes de la ville moderne », Suzette Ali (Université de Laval, Canada) propose une étude de Tarmac, de Thomas Dickner (2009). Ce roman canadien est une fiction dystopique sur la fin du monde, présentée par la disparition de trois villes (Rivière-du-Loup, New York et Tokyo) sous les yeux des personnages du roman. L’espace urbain est décrit pour représenter différentes expressions du malaise contemporain par le biais de transformations fantastiques touchant des villes qui font partie du réel géographique de référence. Le contraste entre Japon et Amérique du Nord permet de mettre en relief la force symbolique de la réalité matérielle américaine.

Atelier 2 : Los Angeles : le rêve américain, envers et revers / L.A. : A Multi-Faceted American Dream

6 Cet atelier avait pour vocation d’interroger la fortune du rêve américain dans une ville sujette à l’urbanisation effrénée du point de vue de la géocritique et de son principe de « multifocalité ».

7 La contribution de Karolina Katsika (Université de Franche-Comté) et de Clément Lévy (Università degli Studi di Bari, Italie), « Un piéton à Los Angeles : pratiques et imaginaires de l’espace urbain dans le Ravissement de Britney Spears de Jean Rolin », ainsi que celle de Nathalie Roelens (Université de Luxembourg), « Lost in L.A. : le regard français (Baudrillard et Nancy) », se sont avérées complémentaires. En effet, chez Rolin, l’imaginaire pédestre, certes menacé par le culte de l’automobile, offre une rédemption possible, si infime soit-elle, à la vision apocalyptique et critique de l’expansion urbaine de Los Angeles qualifiée d’inhumaine. De même, selon Nathalie Roelens, les philosophes français ont tendance à réviser leur vision négative de départ, par exemple en remontant à l’origine de la ville (le bourg, essentiellement commercial et donc ouvert à la mobilité), voire en comparant Los Angeles à d’autres villes, comme l’a fait Robert Venturi dans son ouvrage Learning from Las Vegas. Mais, chez certains auteurs (Soja, Davis, Harvey), la vision américaine semblerait paradoxalement plus critique que celle émanant des auteurs français qui cherchent des voies pour concilier les pratiques piétonnes (la marche, la lenteur, l’esprit du lieu, les échanges humains) et la réalité

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actuelle, même si on peut reprocher à ces auteurs français de rester à un niveau purement théorique.

8 « La cité rêvée et l’agon du héros chez Wolfe, Fante et Kerouac » d’Amélie Moisy (Université Paris Est Créteil) a retracé, pour sa part, une généalogie des personnages arrivistes et héroïques des romans de la première moitié du XXe siècle qui entretiennent un rapport de force (agon) avec la ville qui leur résiste. La quête primitive et virile se solde soit par un échec du rêve d’accomplissement personnel, lié à la nocivité de la ville, soit par une évolution vers d’autres types : artiste, amant, sage. On est là encore partagés « entre célébration et effarement ».

9 L’intervention de Rachid Neji (Université de Gabès, Tunisie) « The Alteration of the Sacred in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and V » a établi un lien entre la déconstruction du sacré chez Pynchon et le fait que la ville soit désormais façonnée par ses habitants, en l’occurrence une myriade de groupes ethniques qui lui offrent une nouvelle transcendance. Cette contribution a toutefois suscité un débat terminologique sur les concepts d’« identité » ou de « sentiment d’appartenance » qu’il faudrait distinguer pour ne pas tomber dans une hybridité idyllique. On peut « appartenir » à Los Angeles tout en gardant son « identité » d’origine.

Atelier 3 : Ville d’échanges et de dynamiques sociales / Urban Interaction and Social Dynamics

10 Cet atelier ainsi que la séance plénière qui a suivi étaient centrés sur les approches en sciences sociales. Le but était de souligner l’importance des dynamiques spatiales et temporelles entre acteurs de la ville américaine dans la fabrication et le fonctionnement de celle-ci, mais également dans le développement de concepts par les chercheurs en sociologie, anthropologie ou encore géographie.

11 La présentation de Christian Guinchard (Université de Franche-Comté) sur les « Formes urbaines de l’intervisibilité » insiste sur l’analyse des échanges de regards entre les passants dans la sociologie américaine. Cette analyse se penche sur l’apport de la sociologie urbaine américaine dans l’étude des interactions entre citadins. Sur la base de ses travaux de terrain, Christian Guinchard cherche à souligner la manière dont les notions de « regard actif » dans cette sociologie et de « regard passif » dans la phénoménologie française peuvent être mobilisées afin de renforcer l’analyse de certaines interactions urbaines, autour notamment de la coproduction de la propreté. Ce faisant, il a posé la question, fondamentale en sciences sociales, de la transférabilité des concepts d’un contexte culturel à un autre.

12 L’intervention de Sandrine Baudry (Université Paris 7 - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique), intitulée « Des bulldozers au “greenwashing” : Le jardinage citoyen dans les villes américaines depuis les années 1970 », insistait quant à elle sur la nécessité de prendre en compte les évolutions de la ville et des jeux d’acteurs au cours du temps. En effet, l’exemple de la végétalisation des villes américaines par ses habitants montre qu’une activité à l’origine subversive et de résistance peut devenir un instrument de gentrification ou de contrôle social, voire un argument marketing pour les villes et les entreprises, en fonction de l’évolution des discours dominants.

13 Enfin, la contribution de Laurence Gervais (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre), « Paradigmes urbains, territoires et identités : Chicago, de la ville laboratoire à la ville

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globale », revenait sur la sociologie de l’École de Chicago ainsi que sur l’importance des dynamiques temporelles. Cette fois, c’est de la durabilité des concepts dans le temps qu’il s’agissait, et de la nécessité pour le chercheur en sciences sociales d’adapter son répertoire d’analyse aux transformations de son objet, en l’occurrence la ville. Mais, si Chicago ne peut plus être considérée, comme dans les années 1950, comme l’archétype de la ville américaine, il n’en reste pas moins pertinent d’étudier son évolution et, à travers elle, celle de la recherche en milieu urbain.

Séance Plénière : Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin (Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle - CNRS), « De la ville à la métropole : la reconfiguration de l’urbain aux États- Unis sous l’effet de la mondialisation »

14 La séance plénière de ce colloque international, présentée par Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin (Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle - CNRS), était la suite cohérente de l’atelier 3. En effet, en proposant une vision à plus grande échelle, spatiale comme temporelle, que les précédentes, cette intervention soulignait les changements intervenus dans les villes américaines depuis leur naissance au XVIIIe siècle, notamment à travers les dynamiques de globalisation et de métropolisation. Ces changements ont eu un impact fondamental sur la recherche en sciences sociales, puisqu’il a fallu adapter les manières de penser la ville, et notamment réfléchir à l’échelle à laquelle la penser, en mobilisant tour à tour ou de manière concurrente les concepts de banlieue, de métropole, de pôle de compétitivité ou de redistribution des services.

Atelier 4 : La ville, livre d’images / Portraits of a City

15 Frédéric Leriche (Université de Versailles Saint Quentin) et Jasper Rubin (San Francisco State University), tous deux géographes, nous présentent une nouvelle approche de l’industrie cinématographique en Californie, non pas à Hollywood mais à San Francisco, dans leur étude intitulée « Mutations économiques, transformations urbaines, identité territoriale : San Francisco et l’industrie du cinéma ». De grandes sociétés de production sont nées dans cette ville et ses environs. On peut citer les noms de Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood ou George Lucas en tant que précurseurs. C’est ainsi qu’une nouvelle relation entre l’industrie cinématographique et la ville a vu le jour. Entre 1990 et 2000, un lien entre les entreprises de haute technologie et le cinéma s’est construit. Avec le soutien de la San Francisco Film Commission, cette industrie locale a permis la mise en place de festivals et a employé plus de 10 000 personnes. Mais surtout, grâce à des programmes de rénovation, la politique urbaine s’est transformée afin de favoriser l’industrie cinématographique. Les auteurs de la communication montrent bien comment la gestion de l’espace urbain s’en est trouvée modifiée. Enfin, une telle éclosion ne s’est pas traduite par une concurrence avec les studios hollywoodiens, mais plutôt par une émulation et une coopération. La communication a suscité de nombreuses questions, notamment sur l’évolution de San Francisco.

16 Laurie Béreau (Université de Strasbourg) offre une perspective originale de la Nouvelle Orléans depuis le désastre de l’ouragan Katrina avec sa communication « La Nouvelle Orléans sauvée des eaux : réinventer la ville par la destruction créatrice ». En effet,

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selon l’intervenante, les stéréotypes décrivant une ville victime d’un certain laisser- aller dans sa gestion ont laissé place à une nouvelle dynamique urbaine. En 2005, le maire, Ray Nagin, décide de redonner une nouvelle image de la ville. C’est surtout sur l’aspect éducatif que Laurie Béreau met l’accent dans sa recherche, expliquant qu’il s’est opéré un profond bouleversement du paysage éducatif avec une remise en cause du système public. De ce fait, on peut se demander si ce bouleversement a eu des effets réellement positifs. Par exemple, les établissements scolaires effectuent une course aux bons résultats en modifiant la structure même de l’enseignement traditionnel. Laurie Béreau n’hésite pas à parler d’une dérive monstrueuse du capitalisme. Les questions ont porté sur les réformes effectuées sous les présidences Bush et Obama. Enfin, il apparaît évident que ces réformes ont déclenché une offensive contre les syndicats d’enseignants du secteur public.

17 Pascale Smorag (Université de Franche-Comté) nous propose une étude sur « Miami / Fort Lauderdale : les transformations du tissu urbain de la Floride du Sud révélées par sa toponymie », qui montre la manière dont les noms donnés aux lieux sont liés à un contexte historique et social. Les noms donnés à des résidences de luxe n’échappent pas à la règle. Dès les années 1880, certains investisseurs se sont efforcés de donner une image « aristocratique » à la région grâce à une toponymie inspirée par le rêve et l’opulence. Ces villes misent par conséquent sur une vision tropicale et exubérante. L’aspect ethnique est bien sûr présent avec l’influence de la population d’origine cubaine. La communauté afro-américaine, de son côté, est représentée lorsque l’on rencontre les noms de Frederick Douglass ou Martin Luther King, Jr. En fait, la communication de Pascale Smorag répond à cette question fondamentale : « Qui décide des noms ? ». La toponymie floridienne se révèle donc être un répertoire à la fois historique mais également socio-économique. Les nombreuses questions ont porté sur l’aspect contemporain de ce phénomène toponymique et sur ses transformations sans cesse en action.

Atelier 5 : La ville sous les projecteurs / Cities in the Spotlight

18 L’atelier qui a clôturé le colloque a réuni des communications sur New York, Los Angeles et Baltimore. La première partie de la matinée, sous le titre générique « New York mis en scène », a été consacrée à l’analyse des représentations de la grande pomme dans le cinéma et le roman. Zeenat Saleh, de l’Université de Franche-Comté, a commencé par rappeler que la fascination qu’exerce New York obéit en grande partie à sa condition de ville de cinéma, depuis que Thomas Edison y a créé le premier studio en 1896. Le titre de cette première communication, « The Worm in the Big Apple », annonçait déjà une approche bien éloignée de l’image de carte postale qu’ont privilégiée certains cinéastes, à partir de trois films — Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969), The Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971) et Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), présentant l’image la plus dure du New York de la fin des années 1960 et des années 1970.

19 C’est une partie bien concrète de la ville qui a intéressé Marie-Christine Michaud : le Bronx, foyer d’une importante communauté italienne, dont Robert de Niro nous offre le portrait dans le film A Bronx Tale (1993). La chercheuse de l’Université de Bretagne Sud, dans « Représentation du Bronx dans les années 1960 : entre réalité et fiction, l’exemple

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de A Bronx Tale », s’est attachée à déchiffrer les codes de la représentation filmique de ce groupe social au milieu du XXe siècle, en faisant le lien avec d’autres images plus contemporaines, comme celles de la série The Soprano (HBO, 1999-2007).

20 La communication de Marta Álvarez, de l’Université de Franche-Comté, a étudié les deux romans « américains » de l’écrivain espagnol Juan Francisco Ferré, Providence (2009) et Karnaval (2012), qu’elle a présentés dans sa communication intitulée « Providence, New York : images de pouvoir dans les romans de Juan Francisco Ferré ». Les deux textes montrent la confluence des imaginaires de l’après 11 septembre et de ceux de la crise économique, insistant sur la transformation de l’espace urbain qui résulte de cette conjoncture particulière du début du XXIe siècle.

21 Le second temps de ce cinquième et dernier atelier, « Sous et dans la rue : les cas de Los Angeles et Baltimore », réunissait les interventions de Christophe Beney (Université de Picardie - Jules Verne) et Mehdi Dubled (Université de Franche-Comté). Le premier des deux chercheurs a offert une étonnante promenade à travers la face la plus sombre de la cité des anges, dans sa communication intitulée « Que trouve-t-on sous la grande cité américaine ? Les égouts, machines à rêves de la machine à rêves hollywoodienne ». À la question posée par le titre, la communication de Christophe Beney répond : des images de nos corps, de nos peurs et de nos fantasmes, et cela à partir de l’analyse de blockbusters américains, réalisés pour la plupart dans les années 1990. Dans sa communication intitulée « Corner Boys : l’école de la rue dans le Baltimore de la série télévisée The Wire », Mehdi Dubled a étudié la quatrième saison de la célèbre série américaine (HBO 2002-2008), particulièrement centrée sur le rôle de l’école publique. Mehdi Dubled a ainsi mis en évidence comment elle devient un laboratoire pédagogique, dénonciateur des failles du système scolaire dont la rue prend parfois la relève.

Conclusion

22 Ce colloque a voulu s’intéresser à la fois aux évolutions, aux représentations et, enfin, aux transformations de la ville américaine. L’interdisciplinarité a joué un grand rôle. Tout d’abord, ce colloque a permis de mettre en valeur les aspects sociologiques du sujet abordé. Ainsi, une question essentielle reste la place de l’individu dans l’espace urbain, où naît une nouvelle forme de résistance face à une urbanisation effrénée et quelque peu inhumaine. Le colloque a permis de souligner ces différentes formes de résistance : rôle de la contreculture, opposition à la « gentrification » sous la forme de jardins ouvriers. Beaucoup d’aspects négatifs ont été ainsi soulignés comme, par exemple, la course aux bons résultats dans le domaine de l’éducation décidée par des autorités municipales.

23 C’est en quelque sorte la même démarche que l’on retrouve dans le domaine de la littérature. En effet, l’espace urbain y est représenté sous la forme d’un malaise aggravé par la perte d’identité des personnages, notamment sous les effets de la mondialisation et, très souvent, les personnages se retrouvent déroutés devant la dureté de la vie urbaine. Là également, les effets de la mondialisation soulignent les transformations de l’espace urbain — transformations qui, souvent, vont à l’encontre des personnages.

24 Enfin, ce colloque se devait d’aborder la représentation de la ville américaine par le cinéma hollywoodien. Qu’ils soient stéréotypés ou non, les groupes ethniques y sont

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largement représentés. Les Italo-Américains, en tant que groupe social, ont de ce fait souvent fait l’objet de films. On s’aperçoit qu’Hollywood n’a pas hésité à montrer une ville inhumaine où certains groupes n’ont plus leur place. Dans une certaine mesure, les films d’épouvante sont également représentatifs du malaise urbain. Les multiples dangers provenant des égouts ne font que refléter un sentiment déjà existant : celui de la peur au sein d’une ville où l’individu ne se retrouve plus.

ANNEXES

Lien vers le programme : http://llhple.univ-fcomte.fr/download/labo-lhple/ document/programme-ville-americiane-v1.pdf Lien vers l’affiche : http://llhple.univ-fcomte.fr/download/labo-lhple/document/ affiche-ville-americaine.jpg Lien vers les dernières manifestations scientifiques archivées du laboratoire : http:// llhple.univ-fcomte.fr/pages/fr/menu1444/archives-colloques-7540.html

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEURS

CLÉMENT LÉVY Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro

NATHALIE ROELENS Université de Luxembourg

SANDRINE BAUDRY Université de Strasbourg

ZEENAT SALEH Université de Franche-Comté

MARTA ALVAREZ Université de Franche-Comté

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One-day symposium “Memories of the Civil Rights Movement / Mémoire(s) du mouvement pour les droits civiques” University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, February 28, 2014

Wendy Harding

1 The one-day symposium on memories of the civil rights movement (Mémoire(s) du mouvement pour les droits civiques), held at the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès on February 28, 2014, brought together six scholars whose work evaluates how the cultural memories emerging from the mid-twentieth century civil rights struggle in the United States are shaped in words and images. Organized by two members of the Toulouse based research group “Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes” (CAS), the symposium was part of a larger, multi-disciplinary project, “MémoCris,” which brings together researchers in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines to study the memories of minority populations. The papers presented at the symposium and the discussions that followed brought to light the selectivity of memory and considered how iconic representations of past events have been an inspiration and sometimes a burden or an obstacle to the descendants of those involved in the struggle. Whereas official versions of the period and of black history tend to focus on a small number of charismatic figures, the symposium gave a broader sense of the multiplicity of voices and viewpoints that contributed and still contribute to the ongoing work of making the United States a more just and racially equitable society.

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Delphine Letort (Université du Maine), “Remembering the Civil Rights Struggle through the Nonfiction Films of Madeline Anderson”

2 The symposium opened with a paper on “Remembering the Civil Rights Struggle through the Nonfiction Films of Madeline Anderson,” presented by the first keynote speaker, Delphine Letort (Université du Maine), author of Du film noir au néo-noir: mythes et stéréotypes de l’Amérique (2010). Delphine Letort began by observing that early representations of the civil rights movement through the biographies of a few major figures has given way to a more complete picture that takes into account the importance of local activists. In recent years, African American filmmaker Madeline Anderson’s short documentaries on the movement have been unearthed from the university archives in which they had lain dormant. Providing original footage of the period, they are important sources of memory, for they permit alternative forms of understanding. Anderson was engaged in the civil rights struggle as an African American woman committed to “filming history in the making.” Her documentaries exemplify the development of a black aesthetic on television—including the production of William Greaves’ Black Journal (1968-1970)—while conveying an inside view of the civil rights movement. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of “subjugated knowledges,” Delphine Letort argued that Anderson’s films articulate the radical dimension of a fight that unfolded at a local level, pointing to unspectacular events that never hit the headlines. Selected footage from the films permitted Delphine Letort to show how the female gaze of Anderson’s camera eschews “documentary objectivity” and instead captures her emotional engagement with the filmed participants confronting issues of race, class and gender. Focusing on the Charleston Hospital African American female strikers, I Am Somebody uses one of the female participants’ voiceover (Claire Brown) to give personal reflections on her experience in the struggle, highlighting the empowering effect of the collective strike on the individual. The documentary’s subjective voice resonates with the biographical and autobiographical focus of innovative academic research since the 1990s. By drawing attention to less widely publicized struggles, Anderson shows the importance of the involvement of common citizens in local, grassroots actions. Her documentary portrayal of Malcolm X presents the leader as a model of black manhood; his pan-African cultural nationalism is presented as a rallying point for African Americans across the nation. She extols the power of Black Nationalist ideas among African Americans in the northern and the southern states, thus pointing out an aspect that the dominant narrative of the movement has often occulted. Anderson’s films also retrospectively reveal that the fight for racial equality and integration extended beyond what is known as the “classical phase” of the civil rights movement (1954-1965), thus prompting a critical look at the historiography of the period that long promoted the “dominant narrative.” Anderson challenges the dominant civil rights narrative by crafting a timeline that does not stop with the legislative gains of the 1960s, drawing attention to their concrete impact (or lack thereof) on the everyday life of African Americans across the country. Finally, Anderson’s films were devised as “calls for action” blending the personal and the political, following in the tradition of black feminism.

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Hélène Charlery (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS), “The Civil Rights Movement in Black Feminist Thought”

3 In her presentation, “The Civil Rights Movement in Black Feminist Thought,” Hélène Charlery (Université Tolouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS) began by reminding the audience of the popular tendency to date the emergence of black feminism from the late 1960s, when black women rebelled against the subaltern role they were given in the modern civil rights movement and black power movement. While black feminist scholars do not contest those women’s discontent and agree that black feminist theorizing and organizing took a leap forward in the 1960s, they also insist on the necessity to acknowledge an earlier tradition embodied in historical figures such as Julia Anna Cooper or Sojourner Truth. They see 1960s black feminist activism as a continuum rather than a rupture. Sojourner Truth in particular has occupied a central position, since she embodies the simultaneity of race, class and gender oppressions. Nevertheless, questions have been raised concerning the accuracy of the frequently quoted and anthologized speech that white female member of the audience recorded at the women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. Sojourner Truth’s afterlife as a cultural symbol may now overshadow her existence as historical subject.

4 Hélène Charlery went on to demonstrate how the famous speech has taken on different meanings in varied contexts and before diverse audiences. She compared four performances, three by African American actresses (Kerry Washington - 2006, Alfre Woodard - 2007, and Cicely Tyson - 2009) and one by black feminist writer Alice Walker (2006). The different readings vary significantly in the emphasis placed on the text’s leading sentence “Ain’t I a Woman”—repeated at key rhetorical moments of the text— and on the dialect. Moreover, factors such as the guest reader’s renown and the way she performs race and gender also shape the symbolic dimension of the text. Hélène Charlery argued that along with the reading or performance itself, the site where the text is read or performed and its immediate reception influence whether it is taken as the declaration of a historical subject or a cultural icon. She analyzed how the four black women’s differing pace, emphasis, and intonation evoked for their respective audiences laughter, approbation, or complicity. In contrast to the three actresses, who strove to embody Sojourner Truth as cultural symbol, Alice Walker looked at the text at key moments, emphasizing its message rather than its speaker’s charisma.

5 Hélène Charlery’s presentation prompted a discussion about the reliability of oral testimony as a source of memory. Moreover, there were questions about whether reenactments of the famous speech that was scripted in part by a white woman and perhaps reflecting nineteenth century racial prejudices, did not serve to travesty rather than honor the memory of this important historical figure. Indeed, Hélène Charlery replied that the dialect in which the speech is written probably misrepresents Sojourner Truth’s voice; it imitates a Southern accent and she was from the North. The question of whether the ex-slave deliberately gave a kind of black-face minstrel performance cannot be answered.

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Françoise Coste, (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS), “Ronald Reagan’s Long Crusade against the Civil Rights Movement: A Failed Endeavor?”

6 In a paper entitled “Ronald Reagan’s Long Crusade against the Civil Rights Movement: A Failed Endeavor?” Françoise Coste (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS), evaluated the former U.S. president’s paradoxical attitude toward issues of race and equality. Françoise Coste drew on archival sources that include Reagan’s personal notes, to illustrate the contradictions between Regan’s stances on public policy and his personal professions of belief. Though Reagan was unfailingly hostile towards the civil rights movement, when it came to expressing his views on racism, Regan voiced pride at having being raised in an anti-racist family. He saw race as a personal issue that government should not interfere with. His experience as a member of a football team convinced him that sports would provide a solution to the racial problem in the U.S. He was unable to admit the systemic and structural nature of American racism. In 1964, while still working in Hollywood, Reagan supported Barry Goldwater and applauded his refusal to vote for the Civil Rights Act. Reagan blamed the civil rights movement for the rise of violence in the U.S. He believed that Martin Luther King’s ideas were responsible for his death. Racial rhetoric became the hallmark of Reaganism throughout the 1970s, from his famous denunciations of the “welfare queen” in the 1976 Republican primaries to his rants against bussing and affirmative action in the 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan held two main ideological stances from which he would never deviate. First, he claimed that, thanks to his parents, he was not racist. Second, on civil rights issues he would adopt the most conservative position. Though he claimed to oppose prejudice and bigotry, he defended the right of individuals to demonstrate those qualities. For him, it meant distinguishing morality from legality. For Reagan, this twofold approach was not paradoxical at all.

7 Françoise Coste raised the question of whether the Reagan years marked a step backwards in the history of civil rights in the U.S. She pointed out that the economic reforms and the great wave of deregulation launched in 1981 disproportionately affected black people. At the end of Reagan’s first year in office, only 14% of Blacks had a positive opinion of the president. Faced with such numbers, Republican advisors panicked, yet Reagan proved completely unresponsive to their concerns. Françoise Coste cited a number of examples to illustrate Reagan’s insensitivity to the concerns of black voters, including his opposition to the creation of a new federal holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On this issue, Reagan failed to convince the country to follow him, and he grudgingly signed MLK Day into law. An even more meaningful defeat for Reagan came in the field of voting rights. When the 1965 Voting Rights Act came up for review, Reagan saw it as a great opportunity to advance his racial conservatism and please the millions of white Southerners who had supported him in 1980. Republican members of Congress ended up ignoring the President and voting for the renewal of the Act. Françoise Coste concluded that though Reagan hurt the African-American community from a social and economic point of view, he still failed to interrupt the long march of the United States towards racial justice and civil rights. Trapped in the ideological reflexes of the past, he never understood that his country was finally ready for more peaceful race relations.

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Leigh Raiford (University of California, Berkeley), “Civil Rights Movement Photography and Its Legacies”

8 The symposium reconvened in the afternoon with the presentation by the second keynote speaker, Leigh Raiford (University of California, Berkeley), author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2013). Leigh Raiford’s paper, “Civil Rights Movement Photography and Its Legacies” grew out of the work that she did for her recent book. In Fall 2010, while Leigh Raiford was doing research on key civil rights photographers and just as it was announced that a museum would open to celebrate the life and work of one of them, Ernest C. Withers, the shocking news emerged that Withers had worked from at least 1968 to 1970 as a paid FBI informant. The debates that ensued among civil rights activists, historians, journalists, photography buffs, pundits, bloggers and everyday folk about Withers’ guilt or innocence revealed continuing anxieties about black heritage, the legacies and memory of the civil rights movement, and the darker side of a movement Americans have enfolded into their popular culture as the apex of the nation’s efforts to better itself. It also brought to the surface concerns about artistic intent and aesthetic value. Leigh Raiford promised to leave aside the debate over Withers’ guilt or innocence on one hand, or as aesthetic testimony to the enduring power of the images themselves on the other. Her concern in her talk was to explore the entanglement between politics and aesthetics. Rather than trying to separate Withers’ work as a movement photographer from his work as a “racial informant” she wondered whether the two roles were not in fact complementary. What if Withers’ work as an FBI informant actually made him a better photographer, made his eye sharper, focused his camera in ways that he might not have otherwise, that he was looking with multiple purposes? Posing this provocative question led Leigh Raiford to explore the role that photography —as document, as art, and as surveillance—played in the modern civil rights movement. A recent spate of exhibits of both civil rights and black power photography has not simply presented the movements and their images; they have also placed the photographers themselves in the public eye, men such as Charles Moore, Bruce Davidson and Stephen Shames, as well as Withers. According to Leigh Raiford, these exhibits tend to imagine and celebrate a form of masculine fearlessness, coupled with political and artistic passion wrapped in racial innocence. Her talk worked to complicate the figure of the civil rights photographer by focusing as well on two lesser- known figures, Danny Lyon and Julius Lester, the first and last members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Photo Agency. Danny Lyon, a nineteen year old white man from Queens, New York, started his lifelong career as an artist and documentarian as SNCC’s first official photographer in 1962. And as head of the SNCC Photo Agency from 1966 to 1967, Julius Lester embraced photography for the medium’s ambiguities and for the ways it allowed him to speak to multiple audiences while working as a counterpoint to Lester’s own fiery writing on the meanings of black power. Leigh Raiford then concluded her presentation by moving to contemporary artwork by artists Glenn Ligon and Hank Willis-Thomas. Each engages Withers’ most iconic images in an artistic conversation that signifies on the earlier works. These contemporary African American artists suggest that such photographs, along with the movement itself, are always and should always be available for re-evaluation.

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Zachary Baqué (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS), “Music and Politics: Staging the ‘Beloved Community’ in Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973)”

9 One of the lesser know artifacts that remains as a memorial to the civil rights movement is a film documenting the concert organized in 1972 by Watts Records in conjunction with the already existing Watts Summer Festival to commemorate the Watts riots of 1965. Film specialist Zachary Baqué (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS) discussed this documentary in a paper entitled “Music and Politics: Staging the ‘beloved community’ in Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973).” Zachary Baqué reminded the audience that the riots took place one week after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and they showed that the struggle for racial equality was far from over. According to the website for the Wattstax DVD, the goal of the festival was to “redirect […] the energies of the community into tangible, positive solutions and alternatives by developing community pride, cultural awareness and political consciousness.” Zachary Baqué contrasted this little-known festival documentary to other concert movies of the 1960s that have gained near mythical status and are often considered chronologically as a metaphor for the rise and fall of the 60s counterculture. He argued that the film is the most politically conscious of all the festival documentaries. True to genre, Wattstax cuts between performers and the audience, but it goes beyond by including testimonies by local residents reflecting on their social and political conditions and on gender relations within the black community.

10 Zachary Baqué analysed a series of clips from the film to show how it featured individuals’ commentaries on their experience and how their testimonies transmitted the values of the civil rights movement. In terms of form, Wattstax borrows from various modes of documentary, taking in, but going beyond, the genre of festival movies. It is unusual in blurring the division between performers and audience, so as to suggest that the so-called stars are simply the catalysts for a communal expression of pride and togetherness. It represents the audience as a peaceful community of families, using humor to reconcile divisions of gender and class. Focusing on participants’ self- definition, the film works toward affirming a sense of black identity. Wattstax tries to reignite the communal dream and show how music can mend fissures in the social fabric. Both the festival and the film should thus be understood as political tools to unite a community. Moreover, the film works to include the spectator within that community by emphasizing the shared values of black culture.

11 Zachary Baqué concluded by evaluating the utopian impulse of the film. He sees Wattstax as featuring the dreams and hopes of the 1960s, but also its contradictions and failures. It should be taken seriously as historical document showing the union between a cinematic belief in the capacity of the camera to capture the real as it is, without any form of mediation by the director, and a cinematic subject that was itself bent on transforming the real to make it a better place. Though both utopias failed, the film still testifies to the possibility of change and of recording that change.

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Anne Stefani (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS), “Memoirs / Autobiographies of Activists: Re- appropriating the Past”

12 Anne Stefani (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès / CAS), author of a forthcoming book on white southern women’s private experiences of the long civil rights movement, presented a paper entitled “Memoirs / Autobiographies of Activists: Re-appropriating the Past.” Her paper insists on the importance of sources that were once neglected by historians: autobiographical narratives, memoirs, oral history interviews and private correspondence. Some of these sources were produced in opposition to what participants in the movement saw as an elite-centered historiography that produced a “master narrative” focusing on the acts of a small number of male leaders. In a two-way exchange, autobiographers not only respond to historians but also transform the work of scholars in turn, recalling the human dimension of events in the civil rights struggle. Drawing on texts by both black and white writers, Stefani argued that they chose to testify about their experience for different reasons. Some tell their stories in order to make sense of their own lives, to examine their motivations and actions retrospectively. Personal narratives become a means for authors to re-interpret their experiences in the light of later social, political, and cultural developments, and to redefine themselves in the process. Other writers are compelled to reconstruct a collective past by adding their own stories to the larger narrative. Their memoirs sometimes seek to correct mistakes or misinterpretations found in previously published works. As actors in the civil rights movement, former activists claim legitimacy in the reconstruction of the past they participated in.

13 Anne Stefani stressed the importance of these personal sources for historians of the civil rights movement. They reveal the roles of individuals and groups that have been omitted from the grand narrative. Many emphasize the key role of women in the movement at large. Others shed light on local, grassroots movements that have not drawn the attention of historians. Such works are essential because they lead the public and historians to consider the movement as a complex combination of interacting and sometimes contradictory forces. In some cases, the same events are told from two different perspectives that hardly ever converge. Anne Stefani recognized that the activists’ contribution to historiography can prove problematic, since personal testimonies are not completely reliable. However, their personal stories enrich the “grand narrative” by reconstructing its subjective, human dimension, which does not rest on factual information but on emotions, feelings, and the impact of events on personal relations. The new interest scholars have shown for emotion reflects an epistemological revolution brought about by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, starting with the black liberation movement. By challenging the domination of white, male, middle-class values in American society and culture, the civil rights movement and the feminist movement in particular also challenged the analytical models that prevailed in the humanities and social sciences. Subsequently, with the advent of the post-modernist era, such concepts as objectivity and truth came to be seen as constructions of an elite bent on imposing one single perspective on a multifaceted world. Subjectivity and emotions now represent important facets of social and cultural history. In the field of civil rights history, the new bottom-up approach challenged the grand narrative by shedding light on a multiplicity of experiences, a

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multiplicity of personal, individual truths that, taken altogether, constituted a much more complex and richer story. Anne Stefani showed that the multiplication of perspectives, sources, and testimonies coming from the many participants in the civil rights movement have produced a much more complex narrative than the one that prevailed in the 1980s.

14 Discussion after this final contribution to the symposium affirmed that the past is not static or fixed; it is always re-membered and inflected by past omissions or present concerns. Political action overlaps with aesthetic production; in fact, the two are not distinct but in dialogue. Similarly, historians, political activists, and cultural producers engage in an ongoing conversation, transforming their responses to past events and memorializing them for the present. One of the hopeful insights that emerged from the day’s conversations was that the dominant never have the final word about the past; memory is always contested, revised, and revitalized in an ongoing dialogue.

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHOR

WENDY HARDING Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

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Comptes rendus

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Will Hermes, New York 73/77. Des Ramones à Philip Glass, cinq ans au cœur d’une ville en feu traduit par Stan Cuesta, Paris, Rivages Rouge, 2014

Claude Chastagner

RÉFÉRENCE

HERMES, Will, New York 73/77. Des Ramones à Philip Glass, cinq ans au cœur d’une ville en feu, traduit par Stan Cuesta, Paris, Rivages Rouge, 2014, 427 pages, ISBN 978-2-7436-2723-2, 24 euros.

1 « New York City a tendance à effacer son histoire en se réinventant sans cesse : c’est sa façon de faire. Mais la musique demeure » (371). Voilà à quoi ce livre prétend : nous raconter l’histoire de New York, à travers la musique qui s’y est faite pendant cinq années de son histoire. Cinq courtes années, mais d’une richesse et d’une créativité artistiques exceptionnelles. De 1973 à 1977, New York connaît ce qui est peut-être la période la plus noire de son existence. Perpétuellement au bord de la faillite, traumatisée par une criminalité endémique, une abondance de drogues de plus en plus violentes, des meurtres gratuits en série (en particulier ceux perpétrés par « Son of Sam »), une spectaculaire panne d’électricité en 1977 et gouvernée par un maire, Abraham Beame, qui s’empêtre dans des accusation de corruption et des conflits avec les employés des services publics (enseignants, éboueurs, pompiers, police, corps médical) dont il est amené à réduire drastiquement les effectifs, la ville semble vivre ses dernières heures. Malgré cette situation catastrophique, ou peut-être à cause d’elle, suggère Will Hermes, New York est aussi un extraordinaire creuset culturel et artistique au cours de ces années.

2 L’ouvrage se présente de façon très classique (trop, certainement) comme une chronologie de la période, divisée en 5 chapitres, un par année, complétée par d’excellentes et très complètes annexes : bibliographie, discographie, filmographie et

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index. Du fourmillement artistique de ces années, l’auteur choisit de ne rendre compte que de la scène musicale, de loin la plus active et aux retombées les plus remarquables. Car si l’on a tendance à assimiler les États-Unis à la contre-culture, et en particulier celle des années soixante, et aux musiques folk ou psychédéliques qui l’ont accompagnée, il faut garder à l’esprit que New York est restée quelque peu à l’écart de ce mouvement, plus en tout cas que des villes comme Chicago, Los Angeles ou San Francisco, passées les premières années formatives de Greenwich Village ou de l’East Village. C’est une culture musicale souterraine plus sombre qui s’y est développée (on pense bien sûr au Velvet Underground), dont la reconnaissance est difficile à l’ère du peace and love. En revanche, avec les désillusions, les crises et les violences qui les caractérisent les années soixante-dix, l’univers sonore que propose New York, entre expérimentation arty, hédonisme festif et rage punk, rencontre une bien meilleure réception et trouve un contexte plus propice à son développement.

3 Will Hermes a choisi de mettre en valeur six formes musicales spécifiques (rock, jazz, musique latine, avant-garde minimaliste, disco, hip-hop), dont il narre le développement en associant à une trame historique d’une extrême précision (artistes et enregistrements majeurs, studios, clubs et salles de concerts) un réseau dense d’anecdotes, de récits et de souvenirs tirés d’ouvrages parfois méconnus ou oubliés, d’articles de presse et de nombreuses interviews personnelles, fruit d’un travail de recherche approfondi. Les autres formes artistiques, arts plastiques, photographie, littérature, poésie, dance, sont en revanche laissées dans l’ombre, à part quelques rapides allusions cinématographiques. Les cinq années au déroulement desquelles nous sommes conviés sont marquées par l’émergence de phénomènes culturels importants. En musique rock, nous assistons à la naissance complexe, douloureuse de ce qui deviendra le punk, forme musicale, mais aussi phénomène culturel sans précédent, dans un jeu de va-et-vient et de rivalités fructueuses avec la scène britannique. La salsa, propulsée par les communautés cubaine et portoricaine, rejoint sur les pistes de danse la disco aux racines plus africaines-américaines pour produire une culture festive et hédoniste, vite adoptée par les jeunes homosexuels, marquée par la prédominance du « club », la boîte de nuit, la discothèque, aux origines françaises, mais qui trouve sur le sol américain une énergie qui lui permet d’envahir toutes les cultures de la planète et toutes les classes sociales. Moins populaires, mais d’une influence marquée sur le travail d’artistes comme David Bowie ou Brian Eno, les expériences de l’avant-garde « minimaliste-répétitive » (faute d’un meilleur vocable) côtoient le jazz-loft, tandis que les premières formes de hip-hop se déploient lors de fêtes de rue, sur fond de graffiti, démontrant « que les genres, tout comme les divisions raciales, sont en grande partie des constructions factices. Tout ce qui compte, c’est que le rythme soit bon » (139).

4 Quelques artistes servent de guide du début à la fin de l’ouvrage, bien souvent traçant des ponts entre plusieurs des genres mentionnés : Héctor Lavoe, David Byrne, Patti Smith, La Monte Young, Kool Herc, Tito Puente, Anthony Braxton, The Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Bob Dylan, Ray Barretto, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Steve Reich, Rashied Ali, Sam Rivers, Philip Glass, Wayne County, Lester Bowie…

5 C’est donc l’histoire de la ville tout autant que celle de musique que nous suivons au cours de ces cinq années, et en même temps, en filigrane, c’est la jeunesse de l’auteur qui se déroule sous nos yeux, son cheminement de Queens à Manhattan, d’une vie d’adolescent un peu marginal à celle de journaliste réputé, sur fond de découvertes,

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d’expériences, de rencontres et de chocs esthétiques. Et c’est là que sans doute le livre se montre le plus passionnant. Car le filage historique nous apprend certes beaucoup sur la ville et sa musique, nous donne envie d’aller nous replonger dans les sons de l’époque, nous fait rencontrer ou redécouvrir des artistes majeurs, mais cet aspect de l’ouvrage, développé sur plus de trois cents pages serait un tantinet rébarbatif et réservé certainement à l’amateur éclairé, s’il n’était complété par cet éclairage personnel, malheureusement trop peu fréquent, qui nous fait partager les éblouissements de l’auteur et nous amène à suivre son apprentissage. Ainsi de sa découverte de la pochette du premier album de Patti Smith, Horses (1976) : « C’est une photo que je passe beaucoup de temps à étudier, dès l’instant où ma sœur de 13 ans rapporte le disque de chez Music Box sur Union Turnpike. C’est comme un portail qui donnerait accès à des myriades de façons de conduire sa vie, de canaliser le sexe et la passion, d’habiller ses rêves. Le disque déroule sans fin des images de femmes séduisant des femmes, d’hommes baisant des hommes, de sable et de neige, de corbillards et d’étalons, de corps dansant, nus, éventrés. Appuyé sur mes coudes, le crâne enserré par un casque, la moquette à poils longs grattant ma peau, j’écoute » (184). Car ce qui s’avère être au bout du compte une forme de bildungsroman, vaut avant tout, plus que par la somme historique qu’elle représente et les informations factuelles qu’elle distille, pour le souffle narratif et les fulgurantes, mais sobres descriptions d’œuvres ou de concerts, magnifiquement rendues par le traducteur, Stan Cuesta. Hermes ne cherche jamais à imiter le langage des musiques qu’il décrit, comme trop souvent dans ce style d’ouvrages, où les auteurs prétendent écrire « rock » ou « jazz » (et « salsa » ?!), mais plutôt à trouver le ton le plus juste pour communiquer ses enthousiasmes sans les asséner au lecteur.

6 Il faut enfin souligner que plus que ce seul ouvrage, c’est toute la collection Rivages Rouge qui mérite d’être saluée, collection qui sous l’inspirée et énergique direction de Philippe Blanchet a entrepris de reprendre le travail quelque peu en panne que les éditions Allia avaient entamé, en publiant d’excellentes traductions d’ouvrages anglo- saxons majeurs sur la musique populaire contemporaine. Dix-neuf titres à ce jour, à la très belle maquette, parmi lesquels on notera ceux de Peter Guralnick, John Sinclair, Richard Neville, Barry Miles ou Chuck Klosterman, portant aussi bien sur Tupac Shakur que Tom Waits, Led Zeppelin que Miles Davies, les Sixties que le punk, le rockabilly que la cold wave, le heavy metal, la soul ou le rhythm & blues, le MC5 que les mods.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEURS

CLAUDE CHASTAGNER Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3

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Célia Camoin, Louisiane. La théâtralité comme force de vie Paris, Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, collection Lettres Francophones, 2013

Nathalie Dessens

RÉFÉRENCE

CAMOIN, Célia, Louisiane. La théâtralité comme force de vie, Paris, Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, collection Lettres Francophones, 2013, 516 pages, ISBN 978-2-84050-849-6, 24 euros.

1 L’ouvrage est la publication de la belle thèse de Littérature Comparée soutenue par Cécilia Camoin en 2008 à l’Université Paris-Sorbonne dans le cadre du Centre international d’études francophones. Le projet est ambitieux (étudier deux siècles de littérature francophone louisianaise), l’approche est originale (examiner cette littérature au travers de la notion de théâtralité), l’arrière-plan théorique parfaitement maîtrisé. Le choix de l’auteur est d’examiner l’ensemble de la production littéraire francophone de Louisiane depuis la vente de la Louisiane aux États-Unis par la France, en 1803, dans le but d’observer « les moyens mis en œuvre par la littérature pour redonner corps à une société et une langue agonisantes » (15). La tâche est intimidante mais l’entreprise aboutit à une synthèse impressionnante de cette littérature.

2 Pour organiser son étude, l’auteur a choisi de prendre en compte le contexte politique et sociolinguistique de la Louisiane, ce qui lui a permis de distinguer trois moments forts qui correspondent globalement à trois moments sociolinguistiques importants, mais aussi à trois moments littéraires à l’intérieur desquels existe une forte dimension d’unité. Ce sont ces trois moments qui servent de cadre à l’organisation de l’ouvrage.

3 La première partie, composée de 9 chapitres, examine la littérature du long XIXe siècle, de la vente de la Louisiane au passage de la loi interdisant l’usage du français à l’école, en 1921. Cette littérature est celle des Créoles, noirs et blancs, et le centre littéraire est

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plutôt situé à la Nouvelle-Orléans. Cécilia Camoin démontre que cette littérature, d’inspiration romantique, a été accusée à tort d’être une simple littérature d’imitation, imitation de la production française, bien sûr. La trame originale de la théâtralité permet justement à l’auteur de bien souligner l’originalité de cette littéraire francophone, dont l’auteur montre qu’elle est duale et que le désir d’imitation y est compensé par la volonté d’engagement.

4 La deuxième partie, qui compte 9 chapitres également, couvre la période 1921-1968, celle où la langue française est devenue, en Louisiane, la langue honnie, interdite par la loi dans le contexte scolaire, sacrifiée à l’homogénéisation linguistique de l’État et du pays tout entier. Cette période est marquée par ce que l’auteur appelle un « état de guerre ». Cette partie est géographiquement décentrée, la Nouvelle-Orléans n’étant plus le centre culturel français qui se déplace vers les zones moins urbanisées de la Louisiane. Si les Créoles noirs sont toujours présents dans la production considérée, ce sont alors surtout les Cadiens et les Indiens Houma qui sont au cœur de la vie littéraire francophone. Cette période est aussi littérairement décentrée, puisque la littérature produite est une littérature de l’oralité.

5 La troisième partie, elle aussi composée de 9 chapitres, couvre la fin du XXe siècle, depuis la loi de 1968 qui fait de la Louisiane un État bilingue, la constitution du CODOFIL et la renaissance d’une littérature militante Cadienne, qui revendique haut et fort sa francophonie. L’ouvrage revient, dans cette partie, à une littérature de l’écrit, que Cécilia Camoin étudie dans son moindre détail. Elle suit l’évolution chronologique de cette renaissance, par le théâtre, d’abord, puis la poésie écrite, les textes autobiographiques, et enfin le mouvement plus général vers une fictionnalisation accrue, au travers tout d’abord de récits fantastiques et de nouvelles, puis, plus récemment, par le genre romanesque.

6 Les spécialistes de sociolinguistique, de bilinguisme, de littérature louisianaise francophone trouveront beaucoup dans cet ouvrage. Tout d’abord, un panorama complet de cette littérature, sous toutes ses formes, écrites et orales. Ensuite, une approche originale, celle de la théâtralité comme force de vie. Cette théâtralité est conçue au sens large (poétique, linguistique, sociale et culturelle) et prend en compte les spécificités culturelles louisianaises que sont le goût pour le spectaculaire et l’approche carnavalesque. Enfin, un arrière-plan théorique solide et un ensemble où l’auteur démontre une connaissance à la fois fine et encyclopédique du matériau culturel littéraire louisianais. Les annexes offrent des exemples passionnants de productions littéraires, dont de nombreux extraits sont aussi cités dans le corps du texte. Les extraits font l’objet de microanalyses convaincantes et révélatrices. Il s’agit là, donc, d’une source extrêmement sérieuse sur le sujet.

7 L’ouvrage est donc destiné, on l’aura compris, à un public universitaire de spécialistes et non au grand public. Sa longueur (516 pages et 27 chapitres) et la langue très métaphorique dans laquelle il est écrit font que l’ouvrage est encore très proche de la thèse qui lui a servi de base. C’est donc un ouvrage d’histoire littéraire stimulant mais réservé à un public spécialiste. L’historien ou le spécialiste d’histoire culturelle, en revanche, aura un peu plus de mal à adhérer à l’ensemble. Il y a peu de ressources historiques récentes (et tous les ouvrages cités en notes ne figurent pas dans la bibliographie). Le résultat est que l’auteur reprend à son compte certains mythes (par exemple les fameux Bals des Quarteronnes qui auraient abouti à la signature de contrats entre les Créoles blancs et les femmes de couleur libres, sous l’œil attentif des

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mères de celles-ci) que l’historiographie récente a mis à mal (voir, par exemple, les ouvrages et articles d’historiens de la Louisiane comme Jennifer Spear, Kenneth Aslakson ou Emily Clark). La référence utilisée par Cécilia Camoin est l’ouvrage de Blassingame, certes important à l’époque de sa sortie, mais qui date des années 1970, bien avant le renouveau et l’effervescence de l’histoire louisianaise de ces trente dernières années. De nombreux passages historiques sont aussi des raccourcis qui ne rendent pas grâce à la richesse et à la complexité de certains pans de l’histoire de cette région originale, d’autant que l’auteur adopte volontiers des points de vue subjectifs exprimés par des acteurs de cette vie culturelle louisianaise (par exemple dans l’avant- propos, page 13 pour une définition des Créoles, ou encore pages 27 à 30 du premier chapitre qui résume, en trois pages, l’histoire complexe des relations interraciales en Louisiane).

8 L’historien, même le spécialiste d’histoire culturelle, trouvera à redire à plusieurs passages de l’ouvrage. Mais il est difficile de reprocher à l’auteur des manques concernant un aspect qui n’est, après tout, pas du tout l’objet du livre. Son but est bien de rendre compte des évolutions et de la richesse des manifestations littéraires francophones de Louisiane et d’établir une continuité dans cette littérature, au-delà des périodes qui l’ont marquée, de la diversité des manifestations (littératures de l’écrit et oralité), et de la richesse des supports et des styles (théâtre, poésie, récits, production romanesque). Et en cela, l’ouvrage a parfaitement atteint son but.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEURS

NATHALIE DESSENS Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès

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Romain D. Huret, American Tax Resisters Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2014

Alix Meyer

RÉFÉRENCE

HURET, Romain D., American Tax Resisters, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2014, 370 pages, ISBN 978-0-674-28137-0, 29,95 dollars.

1 À l’occasion d’un dîner privé organisé pour financer sa campagne présidentielle de 2012, le candidat du Parti républicain, Mitt Romney, prononça un discours, enregistré à son insu, au cours duquel il expliquait candidement à son auditoire que « 47 % des gens voteront pour le président [Obama] quoi qu’il arrive. Ces 47 % qui le soutiennent sont des assistés. Ils se voient comme des victimes, ils pensent que le gouvernement est responsable de leur bien-être […] Ce sont des gens qui ne sont pas soumis à l’impôt sur le revenu. »1 En associant ainsi le non paiement de l’impôt sur le revenu à une prétendue culture de l’assistanat, le candidat Romney s’insérait ainsi dans une tradition politique américaine conservatrice dont le dernier ouvrage de Romain Huret retrace l’histoire.

2 American Tax Resisters décrit les personnes et les groupes d’intérêts qui se sont opposés à l’impôt progressif sur le revenu mis en place pour la première fois aux États-Unis durant la Guerre de sécession. À travers les époques et les régions du pays, le livre révèle l’immutabilité d’un mouvement de rejet envers cette forme particulière de taxation perçue par ses critiques comme contraire aux principes fondamentaux de l’Amérique.

3 S’il est devenu aujourd’hui la source principale des recettes de l’État fédéral, l’impôt progressif sur le revenu continue à focaliser l’attention et les critiques de ceux qui veulent réduire l’influence du gouvernement dans la société américaine. Romain Huret rappelle que, dès son origine, l’opposition à cet impôt s’est construite autour de trois

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griefs principaux : le caractère arbitraire de la progressivité des taux, la redistribution des ressources entre les classes sociales qu’il entraîne et le désir de rendre public les déclarations des contribuables. Parce qu’il augmente avec les revenus des personnes, il est décrit comme injuste car punitif pour les citoyens les plus vertueux et complaisant envers les indolents. Parce qu’il impose aux contribuables de déclarer leurs revenus à l’État, il est critiqué comme inquisitorial. Parce qu’il apporte à l’État des ressources substantielles, il est accusé d’encourager une augmentation constante des dépenses publiques.

4 S’appuyant sur un minutieux travail d’archive centré notamment sur les pétitions que ces « réfractaires à l’impôts » ont pu adresser aux commissions spécialisées du Congrès des États-Unis, Romain Huret parvient à faire entendre les voix discordantes de celles et ceux qui se sont opposés à l’impôt fédéral en un combat parfois douteux mais surtout assez souvent solitaire. L’ouvrage offre ainsi une perspective historique longue inédite qui enrichit notre compréhension des manifestations contemporaines du conservatisme américain.

5 Mieux connaître qui sont ces militants permet en effet de mieux comprendre leurs idées et leurs méthodes. American Tax Resisters révèle que le caractère immuable de leur opposition masque leur capacité à ajuster leurs objectifs pour s’adapter au contexte institutionnel et politique. En fonction des époques, ils poursuivent des objectifs plus ou moins maximalistes avec des succès variables dans leur croisade contre l’impôt fédéral.

6 Le livre est organisé de manière chronologique pour couvrir un siècle et demi, de 1862 à 2012. Le chapitre 1 revient sur la création du premier impôt progressif sur le revenu mis en place afin de financer l’effort de guerre au Nord mais aussi, de manière plus surprenante, au Sud. La résistance devant ce nouvel impôt, alors réservé à une infime portion de la population, est centrée sur des arguments constitutionnels2. Après la victoire de l’Union, on assiste à une mobilisation grandissante au sein des élites contre cet impôt qui mène à son abrogation en 1872.

7 Le chapitre 2 est centré sur la période du Gilded Age durant laquelle l’opposition s’étend à tous les impôts prélevés à l’intérieur du pays. Les droits de douanes sont présentés par les critiques de l’impôt sur le revenu comme la seule source légitime pour financer les opérations d’un État fédéral toujours trop prodigue. En parallèle, certains experts de la mouvance progressiste réfléchissent à une réforme fiscale construite sur un impôt progressif sur le revenu ouvertement utilisé comme un outil de solidarité nationale. Alors que les inégalités se creusent dans un contexte de crise économique un nouvel impôt progressif sur le revenu est ainsi adopté par le Congrès en 1894.

8 Le chapitre 3 décrit les débats autour de son adoption puis la manière dont il est frappé d’inconstitutionnalité par la Cour Suprême avec l’arrêt Pollock en 1895. Pour financer la guerre contre l’Espagne, le Congrès se tourne alors vers les droits de succession et l’impôt sur les sociétés. Là encore, on assiste à une mobilisation contre ces nouveaux impôts qui développe une série d’arguments qui continuent à être utilisés dans les débats contemporains.

9 Après la ratification du 16e amendement qui autorise explicitement le gouvernement fédéral à prélever un impôt sur le revenu des personnes, l’opposition n’abandonne pas la lutte. Ainsi, le chapitre 4 (« Not For Soldiers, Not For Mothers », titre en forme de clin d’œil à un célèbre ouvrage de la sociologue Theda Skocpol) montre comment, dans les années 20, la rhétorique se concentre désormais plus clairement sur le lien entre

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résistance à l’impôt sur le revenu et résistance à l’extension du périmètre d’intervention de l’État fédéral, notamment en ce qui concerne l’aide envers les populations les plus démunies.

10 Les années Roosevelt sont celles de la mise en place d’un système fiscal beaucoup plus progressif et redistributeur face auquel les réfractaires sont contraints de négocier. Dans son chapitre 5, Romain Huret décrit alors les luttes incessantes mais souvent infructueuses des opposants au New Deal.

11 Le chapitre 6 montre comment, dans l’après-guerre, derrière le consensus bipartite qui semble s’installer autour d’une plus grande intervention de l’État, on décèle un mouvement de rejet qui émane cette fois des classes moyennes supérieures et qui est lié à la féminisation du mouvement conservateur, les « suburban warriors » décrites par Lisa McGirr.

12 Dans le contexte économique beaucoup moins favorable des années 70, on assiste à une radicalisation d’une partie du mouvement anti-impôts dont les idées ont une emprise grandissante au sein du Parti républicain. Le chapitre 7 revient dans le détail sur le militantisme constant qui permet la progressive réintégration d’un discours anti-impôt et anti-étatique au cœur du débat public.

13 Le chapitre 8 couvre la période des années Reagan à nos jours au cours de laquelle le discours des réfractaires à l’impôt trouve une nouvelle traduction dans les politiques publiques, des baisses d’impôts votées durant l’administration Reagan à celles de George W. Bush. La vitalité de leur rhétorique est définitivement actée par la réémergence des « Tea Party » après l’élection du président Obama.

14 Si cette chronologie peut sembler a priori bien connue, Romain Huret en offre une lecture tout à fait originale en déplaçant le regard sur des épisodes et des acteurs que les traitements historiques traditionnels ont eu tendance à délaisser. American Tax Resisters raconte ainsi dans le détail le procès pour évasion fiscale d’Andrew Mellon, l’ancien ministre du Trésor, mais aussi l’infatigable activisme de figures moins connues comme Vivien Kellems.

15 Les huit chapitres du livre s’ouvrent sur de brèves vignettes qui permettent d’ancrer le récit dans le quotidien de celles et ceux qui militent contre l’impôt. Cette démarche contribue à rendre l’ouvrage très agréable à lire mais, surtout, elle démontre à quel point, loin d’être une simple question de technique administrative, l’impôt est toujours politique. Par delà les débats théoriques sur le rôle de l’État dans la société américaine, il amène à réfléchir directement sur le sens à donner à la citoyenneté dans une république et une économie industrielle puis post-industrielle. Par le biais de sa déclaration de revenu, le citoyen et contribuable est bien souvent amené à se positionner sur la légitimité de la contribution qui lui est demandée et, par ricochet, de l’action publique.

16 American Tax Resisters permet au lecteur de mieux appréhender la diversité et la complexité d’un mouvement de résistance qui va bien au-delà de la simple avarice. Le travail de Romain Huret montre que les « réfractaires à l’impôt » défendent leurs propres conceptions de la politique, du pouvoir et des hiérarchies sociales. Pour convaincre leurs concitoyens, ils usent d’arguments constitutionnels, économiques et moraux souvent présentés comme frappés du sceau du bon sens. Leur opposition a pu prendre différentes formes : des pétitions aux manifestations, du lobbying jusqu’au refus de payer ses impôts présenté comme une forme de désobéissance civile.

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17 Au final, le fait que l’auteur n’ait pas pu commencer son étude aux premières heures de la république américaine demeure une source de frustration. Les problématiques fiscales étaient certes très différentes durant la période révolutionnaire, mais il y avait sans doute matière à étendre l’analyse au risque d’ajouter encore une centaine de pages à un livre déjà conséquent. De même, on pourrait imaginer prolonger ces travaux aux mobilisations dans les États. Romain Huret évoque bien les succès des réfractaires à l’impôt dans la Californie des années 1970 sans pouvoir accorder autant de place à d’autres États et d’autres époques. Dans un ouvrage consacré à la résistance devant l’impôt fédéral, il ne pouvait en aller autrement mais, peut-être, de futurs chercheurs pourront s’inspirer de son exemple et s’intéresser plus spécifiquement à décrire les mobilisations anti-impôts dans le New Hampshire ou la Caroline du Nord à diverses époques de l’histoire américaine.

18 On pourrait enfin pointer du doigt les difficultés à mesurer l’efficacité de la mobilisation des réfractaires à l’impôt. Comment savoir dans quelle mesure les pétitions adressées au Congrès ont pu influencer le législateur ? Bien conscient de ce problème, Romain Huret reconnaît à plusieurs reprises que les effets de telle ou telle mobilisation sur les élus sont loin d’être avérés. En centrant son récit sur ces militants, il prenait le risque de les faire apparaître comme plus influents qu’ils ne le furent vraiment. C’est en replaçant toujours ces militants dans le contexte socio-politique de leur époque qu’il est parvenu à éviter cet écueil.

19 Le mérite indéniable de ce livre réside ainsi dans sa capacité à décrypter les nuances du jeu politique complexe qui se noue entre les multiples acteurs. Contre une historiographie trop longtemps marquée par un progressisme téléologique, American Tax Resisters invite le lecteur à ne pas perdre de vue la lame de fond conservatrice qui traverse la société américaine. Dans un anglais limpide, Romain Huret apporte ainsi une contribution particulièrement originale et un éclairage fascinant sur une problématique hautement politique et absolument incontournable.

NOTES

1. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser. 2. En effet l’article 1, section 9 de la Constitution américaine de 1787 prévoyait que les impôts fédéraux directs devaient être répartis entre les États à proportion de leurs populations respectives.

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INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEURS

ALIX MEYER Université de Bourgogne

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Catherine Armstrong, Landscape and Identity in North America’s Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745 Farnham, Ashgate, 2013

Carine Lounissi

REFERENCES

ARMSTRONG, Catherine, Landscape and Identity in North America’s Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, 218 pages, ISBN 9781409406631.

1 In her monograph, Catherine Armstrong takes up the old but still debated and still unresolved historiographical question of the potential existence before the Independence of the United States of an American identity different from an English or a British one. Her contention is that traces of this other identity were visible in colonial times “culturally” (11) speaking. Her research is a contribution to Atlantic history as she focuses on “cultural transfer” (11) and reflects on the hybridity of this new identity that was at the same time “American,” “colonial,” “Atlantic,” “British” and “creole” or perhaps none of them. Her focus is what she calls “the textual representation of the landscape” (11) in the Southern colonies. She relies on well-known sources, like William Byrd’s travel diaries for example, and on more anonymous or less known ones such as letters, tracts and pamphlets. This work on printed and manuscript archives is an important aspect of the book which concentrates on Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, the latter two having, especially since Jack P. Greene, been fully included in the historiography of the colonial Atlantic world.

2 Through six chapters devoted to the scientific, religious, political, economic, legal and wilderness-vs.-settled-area representations, she raises important questions about what it meant to be an American between the middle of the 17th century and the mid-18th century. She notably tries to establish whether there was a distinct “American” approach to the subject matter of the “American” landscape of the Southern colonies.

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In the chapter about the scientific vision of American nature, she concludes that there was “no uniquely American way of cataloguing the natural world” (40), but unravelling this issue becomes more complex when dealing with promotional literature. In the chapter discussing the commercial dimension of the relationship of the colonies with their mother country within the British Empire, her reflection hinges on whether promotional literature was an American genre or a British one. She points out how settlers in Georgia criticized this literature because it contained idealistic representations of the colonies. This genre even became the source of a satirical treatment on the part of “American” authors in books that were “designed for an American readership” (90). She also shows how the representation of the American land in the writings published in England evolved in the 18th century as the productivity of the American colonies came to be ascribed to men’s efforts and not to the bounty of nature merely. Such examples may help understand to what extent Benjamin Franklin’s famous work published in 1782, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, in which he opposed a work ethic to unrealistic visions of the American space-time, belonged to a tradition that had started early. The interrelated questions of the several readerships and of the circulation of printed material across the Atlantic but also among the colonies are central here, as C. Armstrong takes into account the “real reading community” (24) that existed at the time in the context of the birth of a “transatlantic republic of letters.”

3 The literature that circulated between England and the colonies was linked to the economic agenda of both local and metropolitan authorities and lobbies. As is rightly stated at the beginning of chapter 5, “every representation of the landscape during this period is an economic one” (141). The physical characteristics of the American landscape were used by settlers, for instance to prove that the cultivation of tobacco was better adapted to the Virginian climate than to that of England where some wished to promote this crop. As important as this form of competition within the British Empire was the rivalry between the English colonies and the other European powers (France and Spain) which vied for North America at the time. The political representation of landscape or what C. Armstrong calls “imperial representations of America” (86) are more specifically addressed in chapters 3 and 4. She shows how this contest led the colonists or those who wished to colonize the American territory to enhance the Britishness of the(ir) landscape. The imperial competition for land led settlers to understand the strategic importance of landscape and of elements, like the Mississippi River, which should not be controlled by the French. The Mississippi was even compared to the Nile in a writing describing Carolina and published at the beginning of the 18th century. However, the geopolitical significance of the river, which was to prove even more prominent by the end of the century, was completed in the same writing by an aesthetic vision of it since it is presented as “consummate art” as opposed to “mere nature.” This evinces to what extent several patterns were often interwoven in representations that were multifaceted. An example adduced to illustrate the conflict with Spain further confirms this: the manuscript of an anonymous ranger who travelled with Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, through Spanish Florida and who, according to Dr. Armstrong, “admired rather than feared the landscape through which he was passing” (132).

4 The issues of boundaries, borderlands and frontiers are, in this regard, essential. The material collected and studied here substantiates the fact that there was then no clear division between “the settled area” and “the wilderness” in the Southern colonies in

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contrast to the North East. The frontier area had a quite traditional or expected role insofar as it was a space where identity was questioned, blurred and redefined: “the idea of the permeable, contested frontier” serves “to show that authors manipulated these representations to claim that Americans were simultaneously Englishmen abroad and a new type of man” (111). Yet, applied to the Southern colonies, the frontier motif reveals “the complex relationships of the borderlands [which] pitted Englishman against Englishman as well as against other Europeans and Natives” (140). Setting the borders of the colony and the limits of individual plantations were therefore major concerns for colonists—hence the key figure of the surveyor, which will be embodied a few decades later by Mason and Dixon. What C. Armstrong calls “legal representations of land” (186) made it possible for settlers to “define their relationship to the land with only minimal interference from London” (187). This appropriation of space led to the development of a “local autonomy” in the “control, management and distribution” of land (190). As a result, C. Armstrong reasserts the importance of ownership as central for the birth of an identity that was related to landscape: “the creation of plantations in the American landscape represents a significant intellectual as well as economic leap” (174). The maps on which landowners had their names printed played a role in this appropriation process. According to the historian, planters in the South invented a relationship to the landscape that was influenced by two factors: a “response to the particular environmental conditions” and “perceptions of social significance of land use inherited from England” (167). In the Southern colonies, slavery contributed to the definition of a specifically American identity and her study begins when slavery became a specific status different from indentured servitude. Dr. Armstrong’s contention is that “the identity of the North American plantation owners was defined by their geography” (164), especially because they viewed themselves as different from “Caribbean planters”.

5 In addition to the white male elite of the Southern colonies, the book takes into account less wealthy owners but also unusual ones for the time (women) and even non owners (slaves and Native Americans). In Carolina, widows and mothers were allowed to inherit their husbands’ or sons’ lands, as the study of wills evidences. Slaves could sometimes appropriate some places of the plantations and make it their own as they “considered the plantation their home too” (160). C. Armstrong underlines how slaves contributed to shape the agricultural landscape of Carolina by teaching whites how to grow rice and how to turn swamps into rice fields. The swamp was an important space in the representation of the Southern colonies. It was “a place of refuge” (162) for fugitive slaves before being a source of revenue. She demonstrates how such clichés of the dangerous wild areas where Natives initially roamed were reactivated in 1739 after the Stono rebellion. This well-known image of the Indians as an object of fear was countered in promotional tracts or reports as some presented the relationships between Native Americans and settlers as peaceful and harmonious in Georgia. Beyond these two commonplace visions, C. Armstrong has found evidence that some verbal pictures of Indians by “colonial authorities and settlers” were brushed “in measured tones” (126). Yet what remained often first and foremost in the colonists’ minds was the “triangular relationship” (122) among the English, French and Indians.

6 Dr. Armstrong’s conclusion is that “a shared Atlantic identity” (197) as well as “a unique southern backwoods culture” emerged in the Southern colonies. Her research is a valuable contribution to intellectual history, especially as she addresses the question of appropriation through words of a space-time and analyzes how the different

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categories of people coming to America “symbolically conquered the territory” (45). One of the major difficulties when attempting “to trace a sense of difference among American settlers who did not merely consider themselves Englishmen abroad” (196) is precisely to manage to distinguish among (printed and unprinted) writings and documents written by settlers coming from England and from other parts of the British Empire, by those born in America, by English travellers, by authorities in Great Britain and in the colonies and also by those who had never been to America, like John Oldmixon. This intricate web is investigated here with many enlightening insights which do not fundamentally revolutionize the scholarship on the topic but further reveal the multiplicity of those identities and of the heterogeneous “imagined communities” in the Southern colonies.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHORS

CARINE LOUNISSI Université de Rouen

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Laurence Gervais, La Privatisation de Chicago Paris, PUPS, 2013

Dominique Crozat

RÉFÉRENCE

GERVAIS, Laurence, La Privatisation de Chicago, Paris, PUPS, 2013, 168 pages.

1 Mieux que les quatre grandes folles (New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco), Chicago cultive une image discrète et sérieuse qui évite également de tomber dans le travers de l’austérité dont se réclame Boston, probablement avec trop d’insistance. De fait, Laurence Gervais nous montre que cette image de Chicago est aussi trompeuse que celle de ses rivales ; nous le savions depuis longtemps : au-delà de son goût récurrent pour les icônes, tour Sears ou Cloud Gate aujourd’hui, c’est surtout l’invention de modes d’usages de la ville qui la mène, dès la reconstruction de la fin du XIXe siècle, à se poser comme un laboratoire urbain où s’expérimentaient de nouvelles dimensions de la ville future. C’est bien dans ce registre que se place l’ouvrage de Laurence Gervais avec une multiplication d’études de quartiers qu’on peut saluer, avec un seul bémol : je m’y perds car il manque une carte qui les situe et, du coup, mette bien en valeur le caractère inexorablement systématique de cette reconfiguration urbaine.

2 Or, justement, la dernière fois qu’on m’avait parlé de Cabrini, c’était voici une dizaine d’années dans l’excellent Respect : The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (2003) de Richard Sennett : il s’interrogeait sur l’échec d’une de ces initiatives, à la lointaine époque où on expérimentait l’habitat social à Chicago. On en est loin aujourd’hui : Cabrini n’existe plus car Chicago est en guerre nous dit Laurence Gervais ; une guerre moderne donc « soft », qui cache sa dureté derrière une communication habile, « Cultural war » au sens où l’entend Don Mitchell : la ville se reconfigure socialement mais la gentrification présentée très positivement avec la création d’espaces dédiés, pour les femmes, pour les gays, pour la classe moyenne noire, leurs initiatives réellement intéressantes en matière de valorisation touristique ou d’éducation

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expérimentale, etc., recouvrent en fait des processus très violents d’expulsion des pauvres, indésirables car hors-jeu.

3 Après l’excès d’encadrement infantilisant de l’époque de Sennett, la transformation de la ville ne les pense plus vraiment, sauf s’ils parviennent à devenir des agents économiques solvables dans le cadre d’un recul organisé de la planification au profit d’une privatisation qui implique les acteurs privés dans des domaines toujours plus nombreux de l’organisation urbaine.

4 Derrière la transformation des pratiques culturelles qui se joue dans la ville, c’est bien une rupture dans trois directions : d’un côté, la création de nouveaux espaces dont le statut public / privé n’est, au mieux, pas clairement défini, et le plus souvent expressément privatifs et exclusifs. En effet, l’autre dimension c’est le renouvellement de ces quartiers avec une spécialisation par comportements à fort potentiel identitaire qui exclut ceux qui se révèlent incapables de s’y conformer. Mais cette reconfiguration enferme aussi dans des espaces sécurisés qui se révèlent ainsi très contraints.

5 Comme après le Au-delà de Blade Runner : Los Angeles et l’imagination du désastre, de Mike Davis (2006), je suis ressorti de cet ouvrage mal à l’aise : est-ce la ville qu’on nous prépare ainsi ? À Chicago comme à Los Angeles, c’est vraiment une assignation à résidence qui se dessine et pas seulement pour les plus pauvres : en fonction d’une catégorisation large des populations, on nous dit : « voici où tu dois vivre et avec quels comportements ». Moins apocalyptique que chez Davis, mais du coup plus effrayant, le rouleau compresseur de ce triptyque privatisation-culture-sécurisation se déploie à Chicago avec une telle efficacité que je vous incite à aller découvrir dans l’ouvrage de Laurence Gervais votre vie future afin de commencer dès maintenant à affiner votre identification culturelle et choisir quel quartier de la Gold Coast vous allez intégrer : dans La lutte des places1 qui se joue, il est impossible d’échapper à l’obligation de choisir son camp.

NOTES

1. Voir l’ouvrage La Lutte des places : Insertion et désinsertion de Vincent de Gaulejac et Isabel Taboada Leonetti (2007).

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

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AUTEURS

DOMINIQUE CROZAT Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3

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The Unendorsable Frank Zappa Paul Carr, ed., Frank Zappa and the And, Farnham (Surrey), Ashgate, 2013

Bernard Genton

REFERENCES

CARR, Paul, ed., Frank Zappa and the And, Farnham (Surrey), Ashgate, 2013, 247 pages, ISBN 978-4094-3337-8, 49.50 pounds.

1 The title seems cryptic at first, and the thanks extended to “Jesus Christ—the author of all things good” in the acknowledgments section somewhat puzzling. This collection of essays gathered by Paul Carr offers a comprehensive view of Frank Zappa the artist, the public figure and the man. A prolific performer, composer, producer, recording engineer, social commentator and occasional film director, Frank Zappa never achieved the level of popularity of the major American bands that emerged in the mid-to-late sixties. If he was part of the global picture of rock music, it was mostly in the background or on the sidelines: as the editor admits in his illuminating introduction, “his music is unlikely ever to enter the mainstream of popular music” (14). Frank Zappa’s legacy, however, has endured, and many of his records are still available, not to mention the almost innumerable videos on YouTube and similar Internet sites. Having died relatively young from prostate cancer, Frank Zappa (1940-1993) has been a goldmine for fans and academics alike, and he has inspired a sizeable bibliography in English and many other languages.

2 The carefully edited (complete with bibliography and index) and multifaceted contributions in this volume cover almost every aspect of Zappa’s talent. Opening the series with a study on “ Zappa and Horror,” Richard Hand presents and analyzes Zappa’s gothic connections, “the place of horror” being an “essential element to his oeuvre, employed for the purposes of communal celebration, socio-political satire, or outright unbridled laughter” (32). Zappa’s memorable Halloween concerts in New York in the 1970s expressed this “saturnalian function” quite efficiently (18), drawing on a motley heritage of B-movies that many late-late-show aficionados in the audience

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shared and could identify with. In another stimulating introductory piece, “Zappa and Religion,” Kevin Seal assesses the musician’s spiritual dimensions. Everyone knows that Zappa was no friend of religion. He did come from a Catholic background—his father taught history at a Jesuit college, and “he considered entering the priesthood” (50) as a teenager—but he became aware of the strictures of religion in American society, and soon developed a skeptical, if not downright hostile attitude to Christianity—especially of the fundamentalist kind. Seal shows that Zappa’s cumulative comments on things religious in his recordings—alternatively Catholicism, Evangelism and Eastern religions —project a somewhat different picture. They confirm an aversion to established or conventional metaphysics, but they also reveal a deference to science. Zappa had come to believe that “everything in the universe is a vibration of a note”—which may lead to the tentative conclusion that while there is no single creator, there may very well be a “unifying force and energy”: music. When confronted with the question “what is your religion?”, Zappa would answer: “Musician”… (65)

3 Manuel de la Fuente, in his exploration of Zappa’s cultural legacy as movie-maker contends that the movies “are not a secondary aspect of his oeuvre,” as they possibly “establish a reaction and opposition against the social and political forces that are willing to control dissidence” (47). Speaking of which, Claude Chastagner sets out to capture the very essence of Zappa’s “Resistance.” This he does by examining a handful of songs or performances, such as “Do You Like My New Car/Happy Together” (1970s), or “Valley Girl” (1982). While these examples show that “Zappa’s overarching strategy seems to be humor” (110), what really characterizes his brand of resistance is his deliberate choice of positioning himself at a crossroads, a place Chastagner defines as the “interstice between pleasure and commitment, comedy and satire” (113). Thus it becomes possible to spell out Zappa’s politics: “I do not need you to endorse, nor imitate what I do; I will even do my best not to be endorsable; but start working on your own space too.” (114).

4 In diverse ways, the book unfolds and illustrates Zappa’s “Conceptual Continuity”—the semi-ironic “notion” developed by the artist himself. If we close our eyes and try to remember Zappa, what usually comes up are images of a lean, sharp-faced, dark-haired and goateed man holding forth on the stage in a curious short-sleeved orange-colored jumpsuit. Geoffrey Wills’ study “Zappa and the Story-Song: A Rage of Cultural Influences” explains Zappa from the point of view of his immersion in American popular culture in a broader sense. Strangely enough, it is not so much the singer or the guitarist whom we hear, but rather the distinctive baritone, “with his deadpan, sarcastic, surreal delivery” (120). Now this perceived persona is connected: it conjures up other images from the huge reservoir of popular figures like Groucho Marx, or even Orson Welles, another major example of a “laconic, insinuating baritone”… What Geoffrey Will explores more attentively, however, is the company of comedians, stand- up or otherwise, that emerged in the 1950s, a group which would include Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Victor Borge, Tom Lehrer, Shelley Berman, Ernie Kovacs and Ken Nordine. There are many connections here, but it is perhaps Ken Nordine who deserves a special notice, as an early critic of the effects of mass culture, one of his routines in particular, “The Vidiot,” having inspired Zappa’s “I’m in the Slime” (121). Another major source of inspiration were Stan Freberg and his parodies of major hits like the “Great Pretender” or “Heartbreak hotel.” Zappa, though not much of a reader himself, in the traditional, literary sense at least, was definitely an American storyteller. His kind of storytelling, as Nick Awde makes clear in his essay “Zappa and Satire,” departs

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radically from the safety of the “saccharine gagsmithery (e.g. Bob Hope)” (88) of humor for the masses, compatible with commercial television, family matinees or US-army- sponsored entertainment. Throughout his career, Zappa constantly adapted his humor “to maintain its relevance,” gradually moving away from the initial phase of conceptual comedy, to social comment, to the politics of perversion, when his satire became more both more virulent and more focused, culminating perhaps in the famous Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) hearings in Congress in 1985, when he testified vigorously against censorship in music.

5 Further contributions analyze and evaluate Zappa’s aesthetic techniques and significance. James Gardner, in his provocatively entitled piece (“Zappa and The Razor”) embarks on a minute analysis of sampling methods, trying to define how Zappa organizes sound while ostensibly disorganizing it. Martin Knakkergaard, examining the collage composition “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” (Mothers of Inventions, Absolutely Free, 1967), undertakes to demonstrate that Zappa’s work is “a highly coherent and stringently complex work of meaning” (168), in this particular case “a theatrical form not far removed from Brechtian epic theater, in its use of Verfremdung” (183), all of which point to the modernism, i.e., the originality of Zappa’s aesthetic choices. Michel Delville, in his piece entitled “Zappa and the Avant-Garde: Artifice/Absorption/ Expression” argues that placing him “in the camp of postmodern eclecticism” is all the more tempting as Zappa “cannot be credited with having developed a unique personal style.” But to understand and appreciate his importance fully, one has to measure his considerable force as a satirist and a resister—to “depthless and neutral models of expressivity.” This, for Delville, becomes especially “striking in his guitar solos, whose voices are immediately recognizable.” With all the non musical, non artistic material present in Zappa’s work, his special brand of resistance to the neutral brings him “closer to baroque and grotesque modes of representations,” Zappa’s own version, then, of “the avant-garde” (198-99).

6 There is a discreet undercurrent in the collection, which becomes quite manifest in David Sanjek’s article “Zappa and the Freaks: Recording Wild Man Fisher”; it is something which has to do with the humanity of Frank Zappa, in this case apparent in the way he related to Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, a “paranoid, schizophrenic, manic depressive street performer” born in Los Angeles in 1945 (151). There is something quite moving in Zappa’s fascination with Larry Fischer, in his insistence on accepting him on his (Larry Fischer’s) own terms giving him his due, no matter what the cost was. Paula Hearsum, in the appropriately final article, offers an interesting discussion of “Zappa and mortality: the Mediation of Zappa’s Death,” concentrating on the genre of obituary writing and its various functions—gatekeeping, creation of collective memory, construction and exploitation of cultural proximity.

7 Zappa’s own evaluation of rock journalism stands out in this section: “Most rock journalism, he once said, is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read” (201). He, of course, was a master of all three, in an infinite variety of ways, each one opening new perspectives and possibilities. Frank Zappa and the And: there is indeed no end to exploring the complexities of Frank Zappa, whose work and persona stand their ground in the history of twentieth-century culture. Judging from this collection, the point is well taken.

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INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHORS

BERNARD GENTON Université de Strasbourg

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John Carlos Rowe & Eric Haralson (eds). A Historical Guide To Henry James.

Annick Duperray

REFERENCES

John Carlos Rowe & Eric Haralson (eds). A Historical Guide To Henry James. Oxford, Oxford University Press, Historical Guides to American Authors Series, 2012, 271 pages, $99, ISBN: 9780195121353

1 Like all the volumes belonging to the series entitled The Historical Guides to American Authors, this collection of critical essays on Henry James is both “interdisciplinary” and “historically sensitive,” and combines close attention to one of the most widely read and studied American authors with a “strong sense of time, place, and history,” and a focus on issues that can still be considered as contemporary. It is indeed tantalizing to realize, as the co-editors write, that “James’s popularity is once more ascending” in spite of the fact that he definitely belongs to “a very different world and universe of discourse” (2). Events in James’s fiction “take too long to transpire for our contemporary world, where action is required”; for example, today’s Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady) “would file promptly for a divorce from Osmond on grounds of incompatibility,” and Mrs Grose the housekeeper (“The Turn of the Screw”) “would call the authorities to have the governess committed or have the trespassers arrested” (3). Even the best film adaptations often seem artificial and anachronistic. So why read James at all?

2 The present collection of essays intends to demonstrate that in spite of the apparent anachronism of both social background and ethical context—not to forget the intricacies of style and language—Henry James is still being read because he remains “historically important”; he struggles with problems that are still pertinent nowadays, like class, gender and sexual issues. Even if the formulations and solutions to these

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problems seem to be outdated, they help us understand “the genealogy of these issues” (4). Kendall Johnson’s biographical essay insists on the double cultural affiliation of an American-born expatriate who still thought of his origins as American but also embodied the first modern international cosmopolitan in the American literary heritage. Johnson skillfully reassesses the ambiguities “successive generations of biographers have struggled to understand,” notably about James’s sexuality, sense of national affiliation, class politics and racial prejudice. The main source of disagreement remains the interpretation of the accident the author enigmatically described as his “obscure hurt” (4). The ambiguity of James’s autobiographical account has undoubtedly “captured the imagination” of generations of literary biographers and scholars, but “to what degree James matched his intellectual and emotional intimacy to sexually physical affection remains an open question” (25). The interpretation of The American Scene and stories like “The Jolly Corner” as emblems of James’s ambivalence regarding racial and class prejudice constitutes another moot point. Kendall Johnson convincingly argues that the “self-critical tone” of The American Scene is very different, for example, from the tenor of a book like Paul Bourget’s Outre-Mer: Notes sur l’Amérique (1894)—“an embittered admonishment about the putative threats of race mixing” (41). Martha Banta (“Henry James and the true woman”) analyzes the incompatibilities between women’s rights activism on both sides of the Atlantic and what she describes as “the Jamesian donnée”—a focus of the essentially apolitical power of the individual spirit. If James was “passionately interested in a woman’s wish to control her own destiny” (82), he remained skeptical about the possibilities for social betterment and the success of collective action. For Martha Banta, James’s “imagination of disaster” was incompatible with the faith and optimism activism requires. “The poster-perfect New Woman had to believe her strivings would bear fruit, and in 1914 she staked her faith that history was on her side” (83). As for James, he discovered, once again, “that history is the great betrayer” (83). Stuart Culver (“Objects and Images”) reinterprets James’s ambiguous position towards the New Media. If the novelist fundamentally resented the pictorial, which he considered as detrimental to the language of fiction, he was also fully aware of the necessities of mediatization and accessibility. Stuart Culver argues that James “did not retreat from but became critically engaged with popular literary forms and new technologies” (97). He also offers an interesting analysis of the author’s exchanges with the photograph Alvin Langdon Coburn concerning the volumes of the New York Edition; their fruitful collaboration revealed “both a rethinking of photography and a reevaluation of Impressionist aesthetics” (115). Sara Blair (“Henry James, Race, and Empire”) tackles several topics associated with the notion of “empire-building”—the nation’s mission, imperial expansion, geopolitics, race, gender—and insists on the ironical treatment of those themes both in James’s fiction (What Maisie Knew) and non fiction (The American Scene). If James himself can sometimes be considered as “trading” on racist iconographies, “the ultimate effect of his doing so, however, is not a reassertion of the supremacy of whiteness or Anglo- Saxondom, but rather a calling of both into account” (140). Eric Haralson (“Henry James and Changing Ideas about Sexuality”) situates James’s “artistic prime” in the historical context of an “epistemic shift in Western societies” associated with “new sexual mythologies” (171). Like Kendall Johnson, he expresses reservations about “gay James” and insists on the “methodological risk” run by biographers and literary critics when they tend to establish a “deterministic equation” between author and character, as well as between sexuality and artistic creativity. He also skillfully demonstrates that

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James’s writings are better characterized as “queer” and “work to queer the repressive premises of modern culture” (188). For John Carlos Rowe (“Henry James in a New Century”), James has been extensively commodified in the context of postmodernism and contemporary globalization by “the academic and mass media veneration of his genius” (215). He would not be at home in our globalized world “but he helps us understand it” (216).

3 The present volume, which also provides an illustrated chronology as well as a substantial bibliographical essay, constitutes an excellent primer to the author’s fiction. Skilled readers and scholars will also find food for thought with the six essays and their judicious re-readings of fundamental Jamesian issues. The only negative point worth mentioning is that the focus on the American background tends to minimize the impact of the cross-cultural contexts in which the expatriate writer has also been read. It might have been worthwhile to include a few suggestions for further reading in the bibliographical essay, notably on the question of the cosmopolitan dimension and international reception of Henry James’s work.

AUTHORS

ANNICK DUPERRAY Aix-Marseille Université

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Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle

Mathilde Arrivé

REFERENCES

Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle, Berkeley, University of California Press, Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, 2012, 271 pages, 39 euros. ISBN-10: 0520272498

1 Lauren Kroiz, Assistant Professor in the History of Art department at the University of California Berkeley, offers a fresh look at the formative moments of early American modernism, by situating its emergence and development within a racially tense context (1890-1946) dominated by issues of nationality, immigration, ethnicity and identity. Building on a vast array of writings and artworks, Lauren Kroiz indeed argues that period debates about pluralism, assimilation, integration, miscegenation, nativism, and even eugenics, informed the formulation of new aesthetics in the New York avant- garde and provided different models or counter-models for art-making. Lauren Kroiz stresses the rapid and profound changes that occurred in the art world over the first four decades of the 20th century. While focusing primarily on Alfred Stieglitz, the author analyzes the ever-shifting contours of his New York circle and casts light on marginal figures—“diasporic outsiders”— in particular the Japanese German art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, the Mexican-born artist Marius De Zayas, the English Sri Lankan curator Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whose contributions to U.S. modernism have long been understudied.

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Book summary

2 The book is organized chronologically around four key figures and moments in the construction of U.S. modernism, which correspond to four major exhibition spaces (The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 291, Intimate Gallery, An American Place).

3 In Chapter 1, entitled “Defining Straight Photography: Artistic Pluralism or Assimilation to Painting’s ‘Foreign Tongue’”, Lauren Kroiz shows how Sadakichi Hartmann, in his early plea for “straight” photography, encouraged photographers to assert their own visual idiom rather than to imitate painting, its methods and effects. Indeed, as an alternative to the “assimilative” aesthetic of Gertrude Käsebier and her sentimental, fin de siècle pictorialism, Hartmann advocated a “pluralist” aesthetic that would enable photography to promote its distinctive identity and language as a new medium and art. Lauren Kroiz explains how Stieglitz navigated between these two stances before finally embracing Hartmann’s “straight” vision, which, ultimately, led to the dissolution of the Photo-Secession in the mid-1910s.

4 In Chapter 2, “‘The Caricaturist’s Way’: Abstraction and Constructive Miscegenation”, Lauren Kroiz analyzes Marius De Zayas’ writings and composite caricatures and the way he envisioned creativity as a sexualized process of “interbreeding” (51), at a time when Stieglitz introduced non-photographic artworks in his 291 gallery exhibits, especially abstract modern art from Europe. As Lauren Kroiz explains, De Zayas championed the combination of media as well as the mixture of races, considering hybridization and “constructive miscegenation” (56) as a model for both national identity and national art.

5 In Chapter 3, “The Promise of Cinema: Harnessing Spirit, Nation, and Art”, Lauren Kroiz explores Alfred Stieglitz’s deviation from De Zayas’ artistic and racial “melting pot” between the wars and, under the influence of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, turned toward symbolic, serial forms (epitomized by his Equivalents) with alleged universal and spiritual meaning, capable to appeal to a wide audience. Lauren Kroiz explains how the new medium of film fueled Stielgitz’s utopia of transcendence, transparency and unmediated experience, which she calls “transcultural spirituality” (100). In this chapter, Lauren Kroiz also analyzes Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta and, more generally, addresses the vexed relation of the New York avant-garde to standardization, mass production, and consumerism.

6 The last chapter of the book, “The Sense of Things: Collage, Illustration, and Regional American Culture”, focuses on Stieglitz’s “last circle”, which, as Lauren Kroiz notes, was significantly more homogeneous than his earlier cosmopolitan group. The author focuses on the ways in which Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe reactivated and appropriated regional imagery from the South and the Southwest respectively, drawing on African American, Hispanic and Native American heritage and material cultures to devise new genres of American abstraction. Lauren Kroiz situates this process of cultural appropriation within a two-fold context—the revival of regional folk arts and the emergence of new anthropological theories that spatialized culture and established regional objects as significant components of the national culture.

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Critical analysis

7 Combining contextual insights with close analyses of texts and artworks, Lauren Kroiz offers an archeology of modernist discourses by rehistoricizing the dynamics of their construction and their constant dialogue with the wider social world. With its contextual and interdisciplinary approach, its emphasis on the local, the minor, and the heterogeneous, and its focus on issues of class and race, Creative Composite is typical of U.S. “New Art History”. Lauren Kroiz indeed reaches outside art history, drawing on literary studies (Tony Morrison, Michael North), immigration history, and cultural history. Yet, political and institutional aspects are not central to her study. Creative Composite also builds on a rich pool of primary sources, since the author unearthed a great wealth of archival material from the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Institute, Princeton University, the University of California, among others.

8 Although the theoretical framework of the book is not made explicit, Lauren Kroiz, however, clearly distances herself from Visual Studies, as her goal is to tackle the issue of race outside notions of “the gaze” (154, 170, 186). The emphasis is therefore laid on tracing how racialized terms and ideas percolated in the art world, rather than on exploring the power dynamics underlying the period’s “racialized iconography”1. Lauren Kroiz analyses convincingly the parallels between race and aesthetics at the time, but the homology between media and nations sounds slightly contrived at times, while such insistence on race and ethnicity may lead to (re-) fetishizing them, which does not quite correspond to the ethos of the “post-racial” age the author mentions in her conclusion (192).

9 Creative Composites offers a revisionist alternative to earlier accounts of U.S. modernism. Lauren Kroiz rejects the idea that modernism was a “foreign importation” and a “derivative” phenomenon (186), arguing in favor of it Americanness instead. She also seeks to counter the view that U.S. modernism was strictly form-oriented, a-political, isolated from the political and social sphere (5, 15). But, above all, Lauren Kroiz departs from formalist criticism and questions the Greenbergian model and myth of “medium specificity”. For her goal is indeed to bring back to the fore the foundational diversity and heterogeneity of early U.S. modernism, which have been ironed out by Clement Greenberg’s grand narrative of “medium purity”.

10 As a response to Greenberg’s modernist teleology and “hierarchical segregation of media” (3), Lauren Kroiz focuses on hybrid and mixed forms (collages, assemblages) and explores intericonic, intertextual and intermedial connections. The book is richly illustrated with some hundred pictures, which form a dynamic network of visual echoes. Actually, the logic of composite assemblage may also apply, to some extent, to the book itself and characterize its sophisticated choral structure, which makes it a demanding but rewarding read altogether2.

11 Refusing any totalizing, ontologizing reading of U.S. modernism, Lauren Kroiz focuses on specific, localized narratives, marginal voices, singular encounters, non-canonical texts and minor genres (illustrations, caricatures). Lauren Kroiz also stresses its cosmopolitan ingredients, its transatlantic dimension as well as its regional extensions, and thus offers a valuable remapping of U.S. modernism, while paving the way for a truly transnational perspective on modernism3. In Creative Composites, U.S. modernism appears less as a static theoretical abstraction than as a complex, non-linear historical

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process, fluid to the point that the conceptual boundaries between “modernity”, “modernism”, “modern art” are not always clear in the book.

12 In spite of the difficulty of writing about Alfred Stieglitz—given the sheer bulk of scholarship on him—Lauren Kroiz manages to shed new light on the man, whom she portrays favorably, far from his reputation as a domineering, self-centered elitist. The author tends to downplay the numerous frictions and divisions within “the Stieglitz circle” and to present it as a diverse, inclusive, collaborative and constantly evolving constellation of artists, critics, curators and intellectuals with competing claims. Yet, the book does not fully dispel the impression that figures like Hartmann, De Zayas and Coomaraswamy were only mere passing satellites in Stieglitz’s grand solo modernist project. Indeed, Stieglitz’s status and role as the father, architect and leader of U.S. modernism is never challenged. And, in spite of the book’s focus on diversity, heterogeneity and the margins, the reader may sometimes get the impression that Stieglitz was early U.S. Modernism—a term that the author tests but nonetheless naturalizes—and that the art world over the period was restricted to the somewhat narrow, albeit shifting, perimeters of his club.

13 By questioning the Greenbergian mystique of “medium purity”, Creative Composite revisits U.S. modernism in the light of today’s taste for mixed media, and accommodates its legacy to new media theories. The book is original, intellectually creative and scientifically very sound, and offers new ways of envisioning and understanding modernism in the “post-medium” age (192).

NOTES

1. This is probably why the author does not touch upon orientalism or primitivism much, and leaves aside parts of the period’s “racialized iconography”, especially considering other Camera Work contributors like Baron De Meyer (“Study of Gitana”, Camera Work XXIV, 1908; “From the Shores of the Bosphorus”, Camera Work XL, 1912; “Aida”, Camera Work XL, 1912) or Fred Holland Day (“An Ethiopian Chief”, 1896, printed in 1905), for example. 2. The twelve-page index is an extremely useful tool to navigate within the book. 3. Creative Composites adopts a national perspective (the creation of an American art).

AUTHORS

MATHILDE ARRIVÉ Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier III

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Isabelle Alfandary, Le Risque de la lettre. Lectures de la poésie moderniste américaine

Andrew Eastman

REFERENCES

Isabelle Alfandary, Le Risque de la lettre. Lectures de la poésie moderniste américaine, Lyon, ENS Editions, 2012, ISBN-10 : 2847883053, 21 euros

1 Dans Le Risque de la lettre, Isabelle Alfandary s’attache à montrer la spécificité de quelques œuvres modernistes américaines, celles, très diverses, et présentées dans leur diversité, d’E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, et John Cage. À partir de ces écritures, considérées trop souvent comme marginales, elle s’est risquée à une théorie de la littérature. Mettant à contribution, de manière féconde, la pensée de Derrida, Lacan et Deleuze entre autres, son essai élabore une « poétique de la lettre », celle-ci étant à la fois la source de la littérarité et le « point aveugle » de toute lecture (157). Pour autant qu’elles « font voir » la lettre, les œuvres modernistes donnent lieu à une expérience inédite de la langue, de son étrangeté à elle-même ; et par la même occasion inventent un autre sujet parlant.

2 On pourrait reconnaître ici une approche convenue du modernisme littéraire, celui-ci étant censé attirer l’attention sur le langage lui-même en tant que médium (la formule d’usage était « calling attention to language »). L’intérêt, l’originalité, la richesse du point de vue que développe Isabelle Alfandary dans un essai subtil, d’une écriture alerte, constamment à l’affût de ce que l’auteur appelle « l’après-coup de la lettre », sont d’envisager l’incidence de la graphie et de ses conditions matérielles (typographie, impression) sur le poème, dont l’exemple paradigmatique est ici le i minuscule par lequel E. E. Cummings rend le pronom personnel sujet de la première personne du singulier, un effet de signifiance spécifique à l’anglais et ses conventions d’écriture. Malgré l’accent mis sur le « son » et la lecture à haute voix dans les discussions récentes

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de la poésie américaine, dont témoigne le merveilleux site PennSound1, une de ses spécificités a consisté en la production de poèmes qu’on ne peut pas simplement entendre, sans voir également comment ils se déploient sur la page. Isabelle Alfandary montre qu’avec la lettre (gramma) c’est « l’agrammaticalisme » chez Cummings, Stein ou Cage, qui est en jeu ; son approche tient ensemble prosodie (la composition vocalique et consonantique) et grammaire, comme recherche de ce que H. Meschonnic appelait une « grammaire prosodique et rythmique » du poème, envisageant le livre comme « expansion de la lettre », selon l’expression de Mallarmé. Les poétiques de la lettre travaillent cette labilité qui fait que tout signifiant en est presque un autre, du fait de la « contingence » qui hante la langue ; d’où il apparaît que c’est vers ces écritures « limites » ou se plaçant à la « limite » de la langue qu’il faut se tourner pour comprendre le poétique, la littérarité elle-même.

3 Le chapitre 1, « Le fait de la lettre », développe les prémisses de l’approche. Se plaçant dans le sillage du Coup de dès de Mallarmé, les « poétiques de la lettre » travaillent l’idée qu’un poème n’a plus à représenter le monde : les œuvres de Cummings, Stein, et Cage « compliquent les rapports » entre le monde et la langue (16). Les poétiques de la lettre entraînent comme corollaire la « disparition élocutoire du poète », cherchent à « donner la parole à la langue » (17), ou pour le nommer autrement, à l’inconscient. Le récit, du même coup, disparaît ; dans ces œuvres, « [l]a langue devient à elle-même son objet aussi bien que son sujet » (20). Le chapitre 2, « Poésie et matérialité », propose une théorie de la lettre. Celle-ci relève du « réel » en tant qu’elle fait voir la langue qui, invisiblement pour nous, constitue le monde ; les poétiques de la lettre sapent notre « croyance à la grammaire » (35). La lettre, nous explique Isabelle Alfandary, « se décline » (38), opérant par « chute » ou « variation » (ibid.), formulations suggestives qui s’éclairent, respectivement, à la lecture du poème « l(a » de Cummings et à travers une analyse fine des jeux d’anaphore et d’allitération dans « Eating » de Stein (40-41). Chez Stein notamment, la force de la lettre provient de ce que le système graphique et le système phonématique ne se recouvrent que partiellement. À la différence du signifiant, la lettre « est un corps » (44) ; n’étant pas que relation, elle existe « en soi » (45). C’est cette matérialité de la lettre que travaille John Cage dans Empty Words, effectuant une « transition du langage à la musique » (51) ; en « vidant les mots du contenu sémantique », ces écritures visent à retrouver « le chemin du sensible » (52).

4 Les trois chapitres suivants analysent les retombées de cette matérialité. Le chapitre 3, « Grammaire à sensation », développe les implications du rapport entre la lettre et la syntaxe. C’est pour autant que la lettre est « asémantique » (75), qu’elle se situe « à la jointure des ordres » (76), que la poétique de la lettre peut « touche[r] à la langue » (77) ; il suffit de « [l]a permutation ou la déclinaison d’une lettre » pour « faire sortir la syntaxe de ses gonds » (82). Là réside le « risque de la lettre », en ce qu’elle « signe le manque dans la langue » (89) ; par là s’explique qu’E. E. Cummings a recours à la forme- sonnet comme « filet de secours » (86). Le chapitre 4, « L’écriture et l’impossible », étudie les effets de la lettre sur la lecture, et la problématique américaine de la langue « maternelle ». Les écritures de Cummings, Stein, et Cage mettent la lecture elle-même en question : si lire, ordinairement, c’est faire disparaître la lettre dans le « balayage des signes » (101), chez Cummings ou Stein, « le corps de la lettre » est « mis à nu » (103), la continuité de la lecture « mise en échec » (ibid.) ; les limites de l’œuvre s’effacent. Mais, note l’auteur, cette « exposition à la totalité introuvable » retrouve « l’expérience concrète de toute lecture » (109), le fait que le texte « manque à notre désir » (111) ; et l’auteur en tire cette conclusion saisissante : « L’illisibilité est la

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condition même de la littérarité » (ibid.). Le chapitre 5, « Expériences poétiques », reprend la distinction posée par Barthes entre texte de plaisir et texte de jouissance, celle-ci étant le fait de la lettre, lorsqu’elle mène la langue « à ses confins » (140). Dès lors, le lyrisme, chez E. E. Cummings par exemple, « figure la voix en tant […] qu’objet manquant qui ne peut s’atteindre » (148). Par là, les poétiques de la lettre mettent en œuvre un « savoir » problématique, savoir de la langue qui se définit comme « savoir de la chute » (153).

5 On peut se demander dans quelle mesure ces écritures, très diverses, se laissent envisager comme une autre tradition moderniste. Isabelle Alfandary, sans jamais perdre de vue leur spécificité à chacune, dégage de manière cohérente ce qu’elles mettent en jeu : la conception de la langue. C’est là que se posent plusieurs problèmes que j’essayerai de formuler, en guise de discussion. L’analyse s’attache surtout à la portée transgressive de la lettre : l’écriture de Cummings, Stein, Cage, « porte atteinte à l’édifice de la langue qu’elle fait trembler sur son socle » (25) ; les modernistes américains écrivent « une langue défaite, défigurée, abîmée dans l’écriture » (125). Pourtant, par un étrange mais inévitable effet de retournement, ce travail de sape n’est pas plus tôt évoqué que minoré : le poème « finira par faire sens » (25) ; « l’anglais américain en ressort indemne » (ibid.) ; chez Cummings, « les transgressions de la syntaxe [finissent toujours] par trouver leur place dans le schéma de la langue » (81). On a ainsi parfois l’impression que l’auteure « wants to have it both ways ». Toutefois, c’est le point de vue transgressif qui domine : l’analyse en arrive-t-elle à la constatation, plutôt prometteuse, que la syntaxe est une production du discours, que « [d]es manières de syntaxe viennent suppléer au manque de la syntaxe » (85), elle revient ensuite aussitôt, comme irrésistiblement, au versant négatif : « sonnets asyntaxiques » (87), « les décombres de la syntaxe » (88). Ce serait justement en ces « manières de syntaxe » que résiderait l’intérêt poétique de la lettre. La seule « manière de syntaxe » dont il est question, c’est « la comparaison déréglée » (87) chez Cummings, mais sans qu’on explique de quelles règles « life is more true than reason will deceive » serait une transgression. L’analyse en reste à la définition stylistique de la littérarité comme écart à la norme : mais où, précisément, réside la norme ?

6 La « langue » est en effet un concept crucial, en tant qu’elle est ce qui subit la transgression : « La fin de telles poétiques est de pousser la langue dans ses derniers retranchements pour voir » (18), « affoler la machine linguistique » (19). Mais ce qu’il faut entendre par là n’est jamais bien clair : s’agit-il du système de la langue, de la langue standard telle qu’enseignée à l’école, de la langue « littéraire », de la langue de la linguistique, de la pensée traditionnelle du langage ? Les métaphores qui servent à la décrire sont, selon moi, sujettes à caution : la langue est « édifice » ou « mécanisme » (82), représentations statiques ou spatiales autorisant l’idée qu’elle aurait des « limites » à enfreindre. Il en résulte l’impression que la langue se réduit, ici, à des signes plus les règles de leur combinaison (111) : c’est le « découpage en mots et règles » que Humboldt qualifie de « bricolage mort de l’analyse scientifique » (174)2. Ce n’est pas simplement que la jouissance présuppose la Loi (131), mais que l’approche de la littérarité ici en jeu se donne les notions dont elle a besoin. Pourtant, « l(a » ou « Eating » enseignent une toute autre conception de la langue, comme activité d’énonciation, pour autant que le lecteur y est amené, non pas à « ânonner » (25) le poème, mais à l’accentuer autrement, à le saturer d’accents, à une suraccentuation et à une dramatisation de la voix—ou à ce que Gertrude Stein appelle « vie », notant, « That is what makes life that the insistence is different, no matter how often you tell the

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same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different » (Writings, 188).

7 L’approche par la transgression soulève la question de l’expérience de lire Cummings. N’est-ce pas plutôt à une prise de conscience des possibilités illimitées de la langue que ces poèmes nous invitent : à reconnaître que la langue, plutôt qu’« édifice », serait, comme le disait Humboldt, « précisément le travail éternellement recommencé de l’esprit, pour rendre le son articulé capable d’exprimer la pensée »3 (177) ? Chez Cummings, écrit Isabelle Alfandary, « la lecture […] est sans cesse découragée par un énoncé interrompu de bout en bout » (23), « [l]a continuité de la lecture est mise en échec » (103). Mais toute la poésie moderniste américaine nous apprend que l’espacement, ou disjonction, n’est qu’un mode plus fort de relier. Le poème « r-p-o-p- h-e-s-s-a-g-r » représenterait « le comble de l’expérience esthétique propre aux poèmes typographiques d’E. E. Cummings : la lettre qui sert à lire est pour ce qui la concerne illisible » (102). Et c’est tout à fait ça qu’éprouve, de prime abord, le lecteur. Mais—bien sûr—dès qu’on regarde de près, on voit que quantité de choses nous sont données à lire dans les lettres recombinées de « r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r »—syllabes, phonaesthèmes, approximations de morphèmes, mots étrangers, « manières de syntaxe ». Dire « illisible », c’est s’arrêter au seuil du poème ; alors qu’un poème comme « l(a »4 (Cummings, 673) travaille ce que Saussure appelle le « sentiment de la langue » (Écrits de linguistique générale, 184), « l’analyse des unités de la langue, faite à tous les instants par les sujets parlants » (Cours de linguistique générale, 251)—l’invention de la langue ; car, nous explique Saussure, ce qui est « réel » dans la langue, « c’est ce dont les sujets parlants ont conscience à un degré quelconque » (Écrits, 183).

8 Si, pour Isabelle Alfandary, la lettre « touche au réel » (76), c’est parce qu’elle découvre le hasard. Le poème est « un coup de dès unique dans l’infini des combinaisons de la langue » (99). L’identification au hasard, lecture de Mallarmé, repose sur une conception—traditionnelle—de l’hétérogénéité du signifié et du signifiant. L’auteur suit Lacan lorsqu’il propose de substituer au concept de l’arbitraire du signe, celui de « contingence » : la lettre travaille ainsi, selon Isabelle Alfandary, « [l]a contiguïté du signifiant et du signifié » (150). Mais l’arbitraire du signe, comme l’a montré Benveniste dès 1939 dans la « Nature du signe linguistique » (Problèmes de linguistiques générale), concerne le rapport entre signe et référent et non pas le rapport entre signifiant et signifié, qui est, selon Benveniste, « nécessaire » plutôt qu’« arbitraire » ; et le concept d’arbitraire chez Saussure est dans un rapport d’implication réciproque avec l’historicité radicale de la langue, activité et productivité individuelle-sociale, impliquant une motivation par le discours, alors que la « contingence », autrement dit le hasard, ramène la langue, et l’écriture, du côté de la nature. On comprend ainsi qu’Isabelle Alfandary puisse écrire, lisant Cummings à travers Mallarmé, que les lettres du poème « l(a » « chutent aléatoirement et s’entrechoquent à la manière des atomes de Lucrèce » (38) ; le poème, ajoute-t-elle, « donne un point de vue imprenable sur le réel en train de prendre forme et de se symboliser » (76). Mais les lettres dans « l(a », justifiées à gauche, ne manifestent aucune tendance au clinamen, sont tout sauf aléatoires ; les mettre du côté du hasard n’est pas sans conséquence pour les sujets du poème. Il me semble que la valeur de « l(a » est plutôt à rechercher dans la manière dont le poème fait appel au « sentiment de la langue », comme travail dans l’homogénéité du signifiant et du signifié, leur rapport nécessaire ; il devient alors possible d’envisager des « manières de syntaxe » comme poétique de la langue. Le point de vue du hasard réintroduit la nature dans la langue, et ramène à une forme de

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réalisme : ainsi le livre d’Isabelle Alfandary se clôt en définissant la valeur des œuvres de Stein par le fait qu’elles retrouvent « l’expérience de la langue même, l’écriture comme réel » (158).

9 Cette amorce de discussion ne pourra que souligner les perspectives extrêmement riches qu’ouvre et développe l’essai d’Isabelle Alfandary : la poétique de la lettre, parfaitement appropriée aux écrits qu’elle illustre, nous offre un point de vue fertile sur la subjectivation dans le modernisme américain. Ses principes et ses méthodes pourraient avec profit être étendus à d’autres œuvres modernistes : on pense, bien sûr, à Stevens ou à Zukofsky ; ouvrant une approche féconde de la culture américaine du livre et de la lecture, elle nous permet d’envisager, autrement, cette part d’illisible qui fait la modernité littéraire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BENVENISTE, Emile, Problèmes de linguistique générale, t. 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1976.

CUMMINGS, E. E., Complete Poems 1913-1962, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

HUMBOLDT, Wilhelm von, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, Paderborn, Schöningh, 1998.

SAUSSURE, Ferdinand de, Écrits de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 2002.

---, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, Payot, 1979.

STEIN, Gertrude, Writings 1932-1946, New York, Library of America, 1998.

PennSound : http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/ (consulté le 6 juin 2014).

NOTES

1. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/ (consulté le 6 juin 2014). 2. Ma traduction. Humboldt fait aussi cette remarque, qui intéresse la perspective de la lettre : « La recherche de la forme d’une langue commence à partir de l’alphabet, et à travers toutes les parties de celle-ci l’alphabet sera traité comme la fondation la plus importante » (ibid., 177). 3. Ibid. ; ma traduction. 4. Ce poème est le numéro un des 95 Poems et à ce titre porte le chiffre « 1 », représenté par un « I » en petite majuscule—et cette « lettre » appartient très clairement au fonctionnement du poème. Ici, mais ailleurs aussi (cf. Complete Poems, 94, 105), il ne se vérifie pas que la première personne du singulier est « toujours frappée » par la minuscule (89).

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AUTHORS

ANDREW EASTMAN Université de Strasbourg

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Juliette Nicolini, Gilbert Sorrentino, l’œil d’un puriste

Béatrice Pire

REFERENCES

Juliette Nicolini, Gilbert Sorrentino, l’œil d’un puriste, 248 pages, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013, 24 euros, ISBN-10 : 2878545893

1 Suite à l’étude pionnière en France menée par Marie-Christine Agosto sur Gilbert Sorrentino (Gilbert Sorrentino, Une exubérante noirceur, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), voici un brillant ouvrage sur le même écrivain, publié par Juliette Nicolini et issu de sa thèse de doctorat. Egalement diplômée des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Juliette Nicolini s’intéresse à l’écriture de la couleur chez le romancier américain décédé en 2006 et la dimension visuelle des textes, perçus comme une expérience picturale à part entière. Négligeant les aspects postmodernistes, métafictionnels et parodiques, plus souvent abordés par la critique, l’analyse tire plutôt Sorrentino du côté de l’Imagisme (William Carlos Williams) et du Symbolisme français (Rimbaud et Mallarmé).

2 Le livre est divisé en cinq chapitres intitulés « Valeurs grises », « Lumière et ambivalence », « Splendide-Hôtel : tension structurelle de la couleur », « Figures du purisme », « Ecrire la couleur ». La première partie dépeint les différentes valeurs que portent les variations en gris dans les romans Sky et Steelwork. Frappée de négativité, elle est la couleur de l’indifférenciation, de l’uniformité, de la platitude et d’une neutralité qui recouvrent aussi bien « la stérilité de l’Amérique des années 50 » (16) que l’âme grise et désespérée du narrateur. Dans cette grisaille, comparée aux ténèbres et au Tohu-bohu de l’Ancien Testament où nulle figure (« gestalt », 41) ne peut advenir, l’espace est esthétique mais aussi moral. Soulignant l’importance du catholicisme dans l’éducation de Sorrentino, Juliette Nicolini démontre que le gris informe est aussi mauvais, porteur du mal, et que Sky, dans la tradition du roman américain des origines, des récits d’exode et d’exil, forme une sorte d’« épiphanie inversée » (55).

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3 Le second chapitre de l’ouvrage se déploie sur ce fond opaque et obscur pour s’arrêter, au contraire, sur les trouées de lumière dans le texte, et livrer de magnifiques commentaires. Le motif de l’éclair est, par exemple, associé aux rayons de couleur qui traversent les tableaux sombres de Barnett Newman, « zips » ou fermetures éclairs qui, loin d’obstruer le regard, tracent au contraire une frontière dans l’informe, autorisent l’avènement de lignes et de repères, l’apparition d’un sens au sein du chaos, semblable au surgissement de la lumière et du verbe dans la Genèse. Le signe typographique du tiret a plusieurs fonctions dans les phrases. Cette « ligne pure » (69) permet parfois l’anamnèse, la lucidité d’un souvenir soudain recouvré, recomposé, redessiné au sein du magma temporel. Il peut aussi jouer un rôle identique aux formes géométriques dans un tableau, lignes qui arrêtent le flux spatial dans un cadre rigide et permanent afin que surgisse « la perfection magique » (69), le sacré voire le mythe. Le tiret a enfin valeur de symptôme, « fente iconique » ou « figure de la déchirure » qui ouvre la surface sémantique du texte pour laisser poindre l’inconscient des profondeurs : il est alors comparé aux fils rouges qui s’échappent du coussin dans La Dentellière de Vermeer, tels qu’ils ont été analysés par Didi-Huberman, à un trait « éminemment visible mais difficilement interprétable » (79). Séparant clairement l’obscurité de la lumière, l’écriture de Sorrentino peut aussi faire advenir l’une et l’autre simultanément, s’apparentant ainsi au travail mené par Pierre Soulages sur « l’outrenoir » (87) dans ses toiles, où ténèbres et clarté deviennent indissociables, indivisibles, ne se jouxtant pas l’une l’autre, mais advenant en même temps au regard, opérant ainsi « une résolution de la fonction contrastante » (88).

4 Le troisième chapitre du livre est centré sur le quatrième roman « rimbaldien » de Sorrentino, Splendide-Hôtel dont le titre fait référence au vers des Illuminations « Et le Splendide-Hôtel fut bâti dans le chaos de glaces et de nuit du pôle », et dont la structure s’inspire du sonnet « Voyelles ». Suivant les correspondances qu’établit Rimbaud entre lettres et couleurs, l’étude s’attarde, à partir de poèmes émaillés dans la fiction, sur les différences de nuances existant par exemple entre les adjectifs grey et gray, sur les contrastes simultanés propres à Delaunay que produisent certains syntagmes ou bien encore sur l’équivalent textuel d’une feuille de cellophane rouge « pellicule de matière fonctionnant entre le réel et l’illusion, ou la folie […], inséparable de l’étrangeté » (132). La filiation symboliste de Sorrentino est approfondie dans la quatrième partie autour du thème de l’azur dans ses résonances baudelairiennes et mallarméennes, une couleur de la beauté, de l’Idéal et de la vérité, qui serait aussi emblématique du purisme de l’écrivain. Soucieux d’une couleur « lumineuse et pure » (165), rétif à tout mélange qui, comme l’informe, est perçu comme « inquiétant et insupportable », voire affreux, Sorrentino s’inscrirait là encore, non seulement dans une tradition puritaine de l’écriture, mais aussi platonicienne et essentialiste. Force est d’ailleurs de constater que cet « œil de puriste » et ce goût de la précision semblent avoir aussi guidé le travail de Juliette Nicolini, dont certains développements sont parfois aussi « splendides » que l’hôtel de Rimbaud. Les références théoriques, philosophiques et esthétiques abondent et renforcent les analyses toujours subtiles et denses. L’« outreformation » artistique de l’auteur peut sans doute expliquer cette acuité plus fine du regard et cette attention soutenue à la matière, permettant d’appréhender les mots comme des objets du réel, aussi concrets que les gouaches étalées sur la palette. A suivre cette nouvelle étude sur Sorrentino, on aurait presque l’impression de relire soi-même l’œuvre à travers une feuille de cellophane colorée qui en aurait « défamiliarisé le connu, pour [nous] confronter à l’étrangeté latente de [son] monde » (132) fictionnel.

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AUTHORS

BÉATRICE PIRE Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle

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Alan Bilton, Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

Yves Carlet

REFERENCES

Alan Bilton, Silent Film Comedy and American Culture, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 244p, ISBN 978-1-137-02024-6

1 Le titre de cet ouvrage permet d’en mesurer l’ambition : il s’agit d’aborder une production cinématographique génériquement et chronologiquement circonscrite, comme révélateur des transformations qui affectent la culture américaine pendant cette période, qu’il s’agisse de l’apparition du consumérisme, de l’immigration, de la mécanisation, ou de l’impact de la première guerre mondiale ; c’est, pour citer l’auteur, « tout à la fois une étude du film muet et une exploration de la transition de la rigueur puritaine à l’excès matérialiste pendant les premières années du vingtième siècle »1 . Notons toutefois que, contrairement à ce que son titre semble annoncer, ce travail porte exclusivement sur le burlesque, et n’aborde donc pas des figures aussi importantes que Lubitsch, Stroheim ou De Mille.

2 Le livre s’ouvre sur une chronologie fort utile, qui rappelle les dates importantes du burlesque américain : développement des premières compagnies (Keystone, Biograph, Mutual, etc…), carrières de Chaplin, Roskoe « Fatty » Arbuckle, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Mabel Normand, etc…), et bien sûr sortie des grands films.

3 Le reste de l’ouvrage comprend huit chapitres. Le premier, introductif, rappelle le contexte culturel dans lequel s’est développé le burlesque, et commence par présenter les théories d’Edward Bernays, collaborateur de Hoover et (détail important pour l’auteur) neveu de Freud, selon lequel le potentiel de violence contenu dans les masses peut être contenu et maîtrisé par une élite technocratique qui orientera ces pulsions anarchiques vers la consommation. Il s’agit donc, comme l’indique un titre de chapitre de son livre Propaganda, « d’organiser le chaos ». Bilton aborde alors les textes sur le cinéma de Walter Lippmann, pour qui le processus d’identification hypnotique

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provoqué par l’image permet un véritable dressage des masses. D’autres en revanche, comme la progressiste Jane Addams, pensaient que ces manipulateurs jouaient avec le feu, et certains phénomènes de foule, comme l’hystérie provoquée par la mort de Valentino, semblaient leur donner raison. D’autres enfin dénonçaient la féminisation ou l’infantilisation encouragées par l’image. Tous se rejoignaient en revanche pour associer le cinéma à ce que Bilton appelle « the potentially dangerous immigrant unconscious ». Toute la question, pour l’auteur du livre, est de savoir si le phénomène régressif induit par l’image sert les stratégies d’une culture consumériste et conformiste, ou stimule le retour du refoulé, c’est-à-dire une explosion anarchique et irrationnelle.

4 Le second chapitre, intitulé « A Convention of Crazy Bugs », aborde la production d’un manipulateur de génie, qui a joué avec un art consommé sur les potentialités subversives du burlesque : Mack Sennett. Bilton commence par rappeler la fascination d’André Breton pour le slapstick, qui plus que tout autre genre cinématographique fait éclater les conventions narratives et sociales. Il évoque « la succession convulsive, presque épileptique de chocs, de coups et d’accidents de voitures », le « désastre perpétuel » générateur d’imprévisible. En somme, le burlesque selon Sennett est parfaitement conforme aux anti-modèles de Dada ou du surréalisme. Aux États-Unis, Gilbert Seldes et James Agee, puis Raymond Durgnat ont exalté l’extraordinaire vitalité de ce mouvement brownien, son instabilité éruptive, la manière dont, chez Sennett, la discontinuité du gag remplace la logique du scénario.

5 Mais pourquoi, demande Bilton, ce tourbillon provoque-t-il le rire ? Une réponse freudienne serait que, comme dans le rêve, le burlesque induit une « dé-sublimation agressive » qui permet aux pulsions de s’épanouir sans restriction. Bilton s’appuie sur Le Mot d’esprit et sa relation à l’inconscient, où Freud considère que le mot d’esprit fonctionne selon un processus de condensation, de déplacement, d’exagération et d’absurde. Le comique, en libérant le plaisir des inhibitions qui le bridaient, permet au « rire perdu de l’enfance » de renaître. Un exemple de ce processus est la subversion de la loi et de l’ordre dans les errances des Keystone Kops. Le monde de Sennett est fondamentalement anarchique, comme le rappelle Amos Vogel ; mais Bilton tient à situer cette entreprise dans un contexte historique : celui d’une irruption de masses prolétaires venues d’Europe, dans une culture encore marquée par les codes de la genteel tradition : « a robust immigrant response to prim and proper New England prudery ». Bilton évoque les conditions dans lesquelles le nouveau prolétariat s’est adapté à la culture américaine, et la peur qu’il a suscitée ; il rappelle après Robert Sklar que le slapstick a été très largement destiné à ce public.

6 Mais comment, dans un tel climat, Sennett a-t-il pu proposer une vision aussi subversive des rapports sociaux ? Une réponse possible est que lui-même s’est présenté non comme un fauteur de désordre, mais comme un simple bouffon offrant une soupape de sécurité aux tensions de la société. Il annonçait ainsi les analyses de Durgnat, selon lequel la comédie est souvent culturellement conservatrice, et de Bakhtine, qui a souligné le rôle stabilisateur joué par le carnaval. D’autre part, le modèle offert par le néo-paternalisme de Ford visait à l’américanisation rapide des masses, et Bilton note que l’évolution du film comique suit la même pente, puisqu’elle oublie peu à peu sa dimension ethnique des débuts — d’où le déclin de Sennett et l’apparition d’une thématique plus adaptée à un public de classes moyennes, ce qui semble valider la théorie de Bernays évoquée dans le premier chapitre.

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7 Au cas où les choses deviendraient trop simples, Bilton évoque alors plusieurs contre- analyses. D’abord celle d’Eileen Bowser, pour qui la majorité des nouveaux immigrants arrivaient avec un héritage culturel profondément conservateur ; d’où l’idée que l’association de ces masses avec le surgissement d’un « ça » dévastateur était essentiellement une projection des peurs de l’élite sociale. Puis celle de Mark Winokur, pour qui l’opposition entre une culture dominante et des masses tardant à la rejoindre est erronée, puisque l’énergie de ces masses a été un élément constitutif de la société américaine — d’ailleurs, tous les fondateurs des studios étaient soit nés à l’étranger, soit fils d’immigrants. Kevin Brownlow note en outre que l’image de l’étranger fournie par le cinéma des débuts était le plus souvent très négative. Bilton ajoute que Sennett lui-même ne correspondait pas aux clichés généralement associés à l’immigrant inculte. D’ailleurs, les premiers films de la Keystone sont beaucoup plus middleclass qu’on ne le pense, et (contrairement à la lecture des surréalistes) suivent une ligne narrative relativement cohérente, tandis que ceux de la dernière période sont encore plus délirants que leurs prédécesseurs. Enfin, il n’est pas exact d’affirmer comme Rob King que Sennett, en s’éloignant de ses racines plébéiennes, a perdu sa créativité. Pour Bilton, ils reflètent plutôt ce que Scott Fitzgerald a appelé « la plus grande orgie de l’histoire » — celle des années 1920.

8 Le troisième chapitre, « Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks », aborde les premiers films de Charlie Chaplin. Il commence par noter le nombre de pantins, d’automates ou de mannequins qui jalonnent ces films, et y voit un double motif : celui de l’homme- marionnette, et celui de l’automate humanisé. Charlie, échappant à ses poursuivants, se fige et se statufie ; mais inversement, l’alcool donne vie à la matière inerte. Plus le personnage de Charlot se précise et se développe, plus son impuissance fait place à une capacité surhumaine à animer les objets qui l’entourent. Pour Mark Winokur, cette virtuosité est celle de l’immigrant qui transforme un environnement étranger, voire hostile — motif qui trouvera sa plus belle expression dans la danse des petits pains, dans La Ruée vers l’or (1925). Bilton cite à ce propos l’analyse du rire par Bergson — « du mécanique, plaqué sur du vivant » —, et l’applique au policier de Easy Street (1917), poursuivi par un bandit ; mais il note également que l’image de Chaplin n’a pas tardé à s’imposer parmi les objets usuels de la vie américaine, faisant de lui une effigie plus qu’une personne, tandis que ses doubles, sosies ou imitateurs se multipliaient, ce qui lui semble illustrer l’essai de Walter Benjamin paru en 1914, « L’Œuvre d’art à l’âge de la reproduction mécanique ».

9 Ce phénomène a également sa part d’ombre, évoquée par Roland Barthes dans son essai sur les jouets, et déjà soulignée par Freud. Il est ainsi révélateur que les automates montrés dans les foires soient souvent associés d’une part à la sauvagerie, d’autre part au démonisme. La fascination exercée par ces effigies est profondément ambivalente, puisqu’elle est liée à l’espoir et à la crainte qu’ils se mettent à bouger. Pour Freud, cette ambivalence est celle de l’enfant, qui ne sait où le moi s’arrête et où le monde commence : le jouet fait le pont entre ces deux espaces, et sert d’objet transitionnel. Vu selon cette perspective, Chaplin habite un univers marqué par une sorte d’animisme, comme le montre Bilton dans son analyse de The Floorwalker (1916) ; mais il voit également dans ce film l’apparition du consumérisme, et d’une culture de la publicité qui donne magiquement vie aux objets.

10 Bilton évoque alors les créations provocatrices de Picabia et de Marinetti, puis le Ballet mécanique de Fernand Léger, dont le générique présente un Charlot transformé en

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automate cubiste ; il cite les nombreuses réactions provoquées par le rythme saccadé, spasmodique de son évolution — rythme qui a un sens réflexif, puisqu’il mime le processus même de la projection cinématographique, fait de l’alternance de stase et de mouvement. Faut-il donc voir en Charlot le corps-machine de l’ère de la machine ? Nullement, si l’on songe à tout ce qui, dans le personnage, renvoie à un passé révolu. Il serait donc plutôt un obstacle, voire une négation du machinisme, associé à l’objet usé, brisé, au déchet, moins proche de l’automate que de l’épouvantail. Le monde de Chaplin est jonché de détritus, peuplé de prolétaires crasseux. Le plus bel exemple de ces ambiguïtés est la première séquence des Temps modernes (1936), où Charlot est successivement objet passif manipulé par la machine et force incoercible qui échappe à l’aliénation mécanique — force qui d’ailleurs est plus individualiste que radicale. Bilton conclut ce chapitre par une analyse du Cirque (1928), où comme au début des Temps modernes le corps mécanisé montre sa capacité à revenir à la vie organique.

11 Le quatrième chapitre, intitulé « Nobody Loves a Fat Man », est consacré à une gloire éphémère du burlesque : Roscoe Arbuckle, alias Fatty, dont la brillante carrière devait être brisée en 1921 par une sordide affaire de mœurs. Bilton commence par citer un poème de Delbert Schwarz intitulé « The Hungry Bear » qui met en lumière le rejet du corps dans une culture occidentale essentiellement spiritualiste. Le paradoxe est que dans cette culture, l’homme est infantilisé, materné par sa compagne, réduit à un état d’oralité passive, donc réduit au corps. Fatty incarne ces contradictions : sa chair flasque suggère une impuissance qui est aussi une régression à l’enfance. Si l’on se penche sur l’Amérique des années vingt, il incarne aussi l’ère de la gloutonnerie et de la consommation débridée, dont Bilton analyse longuement l’émergence historique, en citant bien évidemment Thornstein Veblen, et en faisant référence au rôle joué par Herbert Hoover pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale. L’ère de la consommation a été également celle où la perte des valeurs patriarcales (le travail, l’abstinence, le contrôle de soi) mettait en péril l’image de l’homme. Fatty incarne ce processus : c’est un enfant déguisé en adulte, dont toute la gestuelle marque l’immaturité, et dont la gourmandise est un symptôme plus qu’une mauvaise habitude. Bilton analyse plusieurs films où Fatty révèle son incapacité à assumer son rôle d’époux. Il montre comment, lors du procès de 1921, la presse a exploité cette image pour la retourner contre Arbuckle, et comment, transformé en monstre, il n’a pu retrouver le succès, même après avoir été innocenté.

12 Le cinquième chapitre, « Dizzy Doras and Big-Eyed Beauties », se concentre sur une actrice qui a su faire sa place dans un monde essentiellement masculin (celui du burlesque) : Mabel Normand. Il commence par une référence à la théorie de Lévi- Strauss selon lequel dans le mariage ce qui est échangé est la femme comme signe. Pour lui, le rôle joué par Mabel Normand dans ses premiers films est exactement celui que décrit Lévi-Strauss ; mais ce rôle n’interdit pas la révolte ou l’insoumission de l’héroïne. Le producteur Hal Roach la présentait comme « the wildest girl in Hollywood », et soulignait son goût pour l’obscénité. Etait-elle un clown, ou un simple objet de désir pour les personnages masculins ? Ici encore, Bilton fait un détour par l’histoire culturelle en rappelant l’apparition de la « new woman » pendant les années 1890, incarnée par la « Gibson girl » — saine, athlétique, vigoureuse — et note que dans ses premiers films, Mabel Normand se conforme parfois à ce modèle, mais joue également les séductrices ou les enjôleuses. C’est Sennett qui construira l’image du « garçon manqué », à qui l’aisance corporelle et le surplus d’énergie permet d’échapper aux stéréotypes féminins, et donc de trouver sa place dans le film comique. Si Mabel

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Normand — pour revenir à Lévi-Strauss —représente un « signe », c’est un signe instable, dont l’instabilité même révèle les transformations à l’œuvre dans la culture américaine.

13 Le sixième chapitre, « Consumerism and Its Discontents », rappelle que la figure de Harold Lloyd a été présentée par beaucoup comme l’incarnation du conformisme, qui contrairement à Chaplin représente les aspirations de la classe moyenne — réussir, s’enrichir. Dans ses films, les énergies du stapstick seraient canalisées et contenues, l’arbitraire du gag ferait place à la causalité du classicisme hollywoodien. Bilton voit plutôt en Lloyd une figure qui illustre la théorie de Bernays : il cherche à sublimer le désir inconscient en une conduite qui est socialement acceptable — la consommation. Lloyd est contraint de suivre les normes sociales que les personnages de Sennett ignoraient superbement. Son autobiographie exprime un optimisme patriotique qui dissimule mal une insécurité héritée de son père. De même, les triomphes de son personnage sont constamment menacés par la peur de la chute, métaphore récurrente de ses films. Il n’est donc pas si éloigné d’un autre apôtre du succès, Gatsby. Bilton montre comment le scénario de Monte là-dessus (Safety Last) (1923) illustre parfaitement ces ambiguïtés, et souligne que la profession de Lloyd — il travaille dans un grand magasin — le met à la merci d’une foule menaçante de consommateurs. De même, le rôle central joué par le gratte-ciel dans ses films le place d’emblée dans le monde vertical du capitalisme urbain. Un autre film de Lloyd, Vive le sport (The Freshman) (1925), est une parodie de « college movie » où une peur morbide de la transgression sociale conduit à l’humiliation et à l’exclusion — ce qui est la parfaite antithèse du monde de Sennett. C’est donc moins un film conformiste qu’une satire du conformisme. En somme, les angoisses de Lloyd sont celles du rêve américain.

14 Le septième chapitre aborde une figure autrement importante : celle de Buster Keaton, présenté ici dans son rapport avec le Sud américain. Bilton commence par noter un paradoxe : de tous les comédiens du burlesque, c’est Keaton qui incarne le mieux l’ère de la machine ; or beaucoup de ses films se situent dans un Sud qui est à l’opposé de la modernité. La première réponse est que ce thème a pour lui une dimension autobiographique. Bilton rappelle que Keaton est né au Kansas dans une famille de comédiens itinérants, et qu’il a dû toute son enfance suivre un père alcoolique et souvent violent. D’où le motif récurrent du passage de la gaucherie enfantine à l’aisance de l’adulte. Mais ses films sont également nourris par la nostalgie pour le paradis perdu d’un Sud pastoral, bucolique, nostalgie qu’il partage avec nombre de ses contemporains, à commencer par D.W. Griffith. En revanche, le traitement comique de la Guerre de Sécession dans Le Mécano de la « General » (The General) (1926) — son film préféré — devait faire l’objet de critiques virulentes lors de sa sortie. Bilton propose une analyse assez lourdement psychanalytique du film comme rêve où l’anxiété masculine est résolue par la satisfaction du désir. Il en est de même d’autres films, comme Les Lois de l’hospitalité (Our Hospitality) (1923), marqué par une logique « onirique, irrationnelle et infantile », ou Cadet d’eau douce (Steamboat Bill, Jr.) (1928), où un fils rêveur et efféminé doit affronter un père rugueux et prosaïque. Le cyclone qui termine le film ressemble à la réalisation d’une phobie infantile, et l’onirisme de la scène est redoublé dans la scène du théâtre, où Keaton joue merveilleusement avec l’illusion filmique. Bilton associe cette inquiétante étrangeté à la disparition du Sud, la réalité perdue étant remplacée par l’artifice de sa représentation, illustrant la phrase fameuse de Faulkner : « The past is never dead. It’s not even past ».

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15 Le huitième chapitre, « The Shell-Shocked Silents : Langdon, Repetition-Compulsion and the First World War », associe Harry Langdon aux traumatismes de la Première Guerre Mondiale. Il note tout d’abord que le traitement muet de la guerre donne à celle-ci une irréalité angoissante, spectrale, illustrant la théorie psychanalytique (Laplanche) de l’après-coup : « L’éternel présent du processus filmique est aussi une sorte d’image fantomatique de ce qui a déjà disparu, et ne reviendra jamais ». Il suffit de comparer le film muet de King Vidor, La Grande parade (The Big Parade, 1925) au film parlant de Lewis Milestone, A l’ouest rien de nouveau (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930) pour comprendre la nature hallucinatoire et hypnotique du premier — caractéristiques qui sont exactement celles du traumatisme, du shell-shock. Bilton rappelle alors comment le traumatisme de guerre a intéressé la psychanalyse dès 1918, comment Freud lui-même l’a exploité par la suite et en a tiré sa théorie de l’instinct de mort. Puis il analyse le film de Chaplin tourné en 1918, Shoulder Arms, comme une séquence onirique où l’anxiété du petit homme est suivie par son improbable triomphe, à laquelle il oppose le traitement de la régression infantile dans les films de Harry Langdon : All Night Long (1924), Soldier Man (1926), et The Prisoner of Zenda. L’indécision de Langdon, sa paralysie comique est celle d’un homme qui est plongé par un coup violent dans un état catatonique, ou qui se protège du monde en retournant à l’état fœtal. Comme Fatty, Langdon incarne la régression à un stade infantile qui, dans son cas, est indissociable de son déni de réalité. Le chapitre se termine par une analyse lacanienne et metzienne du processus filmique comme exploration de la répétition comme (re)découverte de la mortalité. Face à la mort, la stratégie de Chaplin consiste à animer, à rendre à la vie, tandis que celle de Langdon consiste à arrêter tout mouvement.

16 Dans sa conclusion, Bilton cite Kracauer qui voit dans le slapstick une collision du corps et de la matière qui est aussi un jeu avec la mort, Walter Benjamin pour qui le cinéma représente un idéal nouveau de représentation à l’infini, et Adorno qui associe le burlesque à l’infantilisation des masses. Puis il revient à la théorie de Bernays présentant le cinéma comme une forme de contrôle social, fondée sur le consumérisme et l’illusion, et note que notre monde n’est pas loin de répondre à ce modèle. Quant au burlesque, son projet est moins de préparer le public à la consommation que de l’inciter à échapper aux contraintes du monde par une régression à l’irresponsabilité de l’enfance ; mais ce faisant, il pousse au paroxysme les tendances du capitalisme à créer une immense machine d’autodestruction.

17 Comment évaluer ce travail, dont je soulignais l’ambition en exergue de ce compte- rendu ? On notera tout d’abord sa densité, sa richesse, sa capacité à montrer comment la simplicité apparente du burlesque cache un tourbillon d’affects, de violences récurrentes, car irrésolues. Un tel projet ne pouvait éviter de puiser dans la psychanalyse pour aborder la conflictualité spécifique de ce genre cinématographique. On ajoutera qu’il est constamment fort bien documenté, reprenant souvent la critique cinématographique pour en montrer l’intérêt ou les limites. Il s’agit tout à la fois d’une somme et d’une réflexion personnelle. Certaines analyses — celle du monde hystérique de Sennett, qui ouvre l’ouvrage, ou celle du traumatisme chez Langdon, qui le conclut, sont très éclairantes. D’autres, comme celle de l’image féminine dans les films de Mabel Normand, sont plus convenues et débouchent sur une série de questions plus que sur une lecture. Le problème central du livre est lié à la manière dont il cherche une convergence entre deux projets : celui d’analyser le fonctionnement même du slapstick,

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à partir de modèles psychanalytiques, et celui de montrer comment ces films reflètent ou réfractent les évolutions de la société américaine. Le modèle ici est plutôt celui des cultural studies, qui apparaît assez clairement dans les développements digressifs sur l’immigration, l’image du corps, l’évolution des modèles féminins ou le traitement de la guerre. Bernays offre une piste intéressante pour associer les deux démarches ; mais la conclusion, peu concluante, montre la difficulté de l’entreprise. Enfin, on pourra regretter le tourbillon des références théoriques, qui tourne parfois au name-dropping, comme par exemple au début de la conclusion. Mais gageons qu’il s’agit là d’un péché de jeunesse. Nous avons là un ouvrage très estimable, qui ouvre nombre de pistes passionnantes, la moindre desquelles n’est pas la réflexion sur le caractère réflexif des films étudiés.

NOTES

1. Toutes les citations sont traduites par l’auteur de la présente recension.

AUTHORS

YVES CARLET Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3

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Will Norman, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time

Agnès Edel-Roy

REFERENCES

Will Norman, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time, New York, Routledge, Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature, 2012, 205 p, ISBN 978-0-4155-3963-0, $ 125.00

1 La création romanesque de Vladimir Nabokov est connue pour être emblématique des formes modernes, si ce n’est post-modernes, de l’autonomie de la littérature, en vertu de quoi cette œuvre autotélique, exaltant la jouissance esthétique d’une temporalité pure, indemne de toute contamination, serait dégagée de toute relation avec les autres formes du sensible, dont celle qui, pourtant, s’impose à nous tous, l’histoire. Mais des chercheurs aujourd’hui remettent en question la doxa de la critique nabokovienne qui, se modelant sur les prescriptions tant métatextuelles qu’intratextuelles de l’écrivain, a longtemps privilégié une approche anhistorique et décontextualisée de son œuvre. Le débat est donc ouvert : historiciser la fiction nabokovienne, est-ce en affaiblir la valeur ?

2 Dans son ouvrage, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time, Will Norman part du constat que « la fiction et l’autobiographie nabokoviennes mettent en scène une tension entre le désir d’accomplir la texture du temps et la présence menaçante de l’histoire qui contrarie ce rêve » (« Nabokov’s fiction and autobiography stage a tension between the desire to achieve the texture of time and the menacing presence of history which frustrates that dream », 1-2)1 ; tension qui prend la forme d’« une dialectique défensive qui oppose entre elles temporalités personnelle et publique, individuelle et sociale, esthétique et politique » (« a defensive dialectic which pits personal and public, individual and social, aesthetic and political temporalities against each over », 2). La poétique nabokovienne serait donc aussi traversée par la préoccupation de « l’Histoire avec sa grande hache » (Georges Perec). Certes, pour s’opposer à l’hégélianisme

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appliqué et matérialiste de la critique radicale russe et « pour résister à la contingence historique, et même la transcender » (« to resist and even transcend historical contingency », 9), l’écrivain a développé une conception en spirale, et déshistoricisée, du modèle dialectique hégélien de l’évolution, dont le dernier terme, « la conscience sans le Temps » (« consciousness without Time », 156), serait le début d’une nouvelle série dialectique définitivement libérée du temps. Mais Norman entend démontrer que la revendication de l’anhistoricisme est en réalité éprouvée, remise en jeu d’œuvre en œuvre et, donc, continuellement renégociée par Nabokov dans sa fiction. Pour lui, le rêve nabokovien d’une modernité esthétique autonome car hors du temps, cet « autre monde » (Vladimir Alexandrov) de la pure temporalité, est structurellement inatteignable (157).

3 Dans le premier chapitre, « Nabokov in Literary History », Will Norman revient sur l’inscription du génie nabokovien, revendiquant la solitude du créateur, dans l’histoire littéraire de la modernité et des différents modernismes, la jugeant plus problématique qu’elle n’a été dite jusqu‘à présent. Si l’écrivain, qui fut d’abord un écrivain de langue russe, a partagé avec les formalistes russes la volonté de créer un espace autonome pour la littérature, Norman rappelle que ce fut dans le modernisme français du dix- neuvième siècle et son rejet radical du déterminisme historique que Nabokov a conforté sa conception de l’évolution littéraire coupée de l’histoire, opposable aux compromissions idéologiques des avant-gardes, notamment russes.

4 Dans le deuxième chapitre, intitulé « The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Modernist Impasse », Will Norman postule que l’écriture de ce premier roman en anglais (décembre 1938-janvier 1939), dans lequel « Nabokov n’ignore jamais ni ne réprime l’histoire mais lui répond » (« Nabokov neither ignores nor represses history, but responds to it », 31) et met à l’épreuve « l’idée elle-même de modernité » (« the idea itself of modernity », 31), se fait à un moment de crise artistique personnelle de l’écrivain (impasse de sa prose russe) et de crise de l’histoire politique et culturelle de l’Europe (déclin du modernisme européen et apparition des thèses de l’engagement de la littérature). Pour « se réinventer lui-même comme auteur de langue anglaise » (« reinventing himself as an English language author », 33), Nabokov élabore une « ingénieuse construction formelle » (« an ingenious formal construction », 36) : il fait entrer en conflit le collage d’œuvres représentatives de la modernité littéraire (James, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce) dont sont tissés ce roman et son héros mort, l’écrivain Sebastian Knight (dont le narrateur, son demi-frère, cherche à relater la vie « réelle », sans y parvenir), avec les pressions du temps et de l’histoire pendant cette période troublée de la fin des années trente (dont la mort de l’écrivain est l’une des conséquences). Selon Norman, Nabokov résout ce conflit grâce au procédé formaliste de l’auto-référentialité de la littérature (la seule vérité biographique de Knight ne pouvant qu’être inférée de son art) et cherche à le dépasser en incorporant le non- littéraire au littéraire, puisqu’il procède à une inversion du genre mineur de la biographie romancée, mise à la mode par André Maurois, en faisant des fictions de Knight la seule réalité tangible de ce roman.

5 Dans le chapitre trois, « Nabokov, Benjamin and Historical Resistance », Norman fonde le rapprochement qu’il opère entre Nabokov et Walter Benjamin sur l’analyse de « l’écriture autobiographique comme moyen de prévenir l’effacement du passé personnel par la politique de masse et la tyrannie au vingtième siècle » (« the writing of autobiography as a means of preventing the effacement of the personal past by

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twentieth-century mass politics and tyranny », 54), - proposition osée si l’on considère leurs positions idéologiques divergentes mais qui se justifie par leur reprise, entre réappropriation et dépassement, du concept bergsonien de « durée » (le temps pur). L’auteur ajoute ici aux études déjà menées sur cette influence du bergsonisme une définition de l’écriture autobiographique comme esthétique de « la constellation » (61) qui, tout à la fois, reconfigure le passé personnel et se pose en acte de résistance au temps spatialisé, linéaire, et à l’histoire. Demeure cependant ouverte la question tragique de la rédemption, la preuve esthétique échouant parfois, selon Norman, à sauver l’existence, par exemple pour Mademoiselle O.

6 Dans le quatrième chapitre, « Totalitarian Time. The Struggle for Autonomy in Bend Sinister », Norman envisage Brisure à senestre comme le roman dans lequel se déploie une lutte pour la maîtrise du temps : contre la temporalité oppressive du temps de l’État totalitaire, temps de l’horloge et du présent homogène et déterminé, Nabokov organise la résistance de l’individu en quête d’autonomie en recourant à une temporalité subjective, d’origine bergsonienne, marquée par « l’indivisibilité ou impossibilité de mesurer le temps, l’accumulation de l’expérience du passé et l’imprévisibilité du futur » (« the indivisibility or immeasurability of time, the accumulation of past experience and the unpredictability of the future », 80), et qui se manifeste, thématiquement et stylistiquement, par la reprise, notamment, de motifs mallarméens et joyciens. Norman met ensuite en relation ce roman dystopique, à l’élitisme moderniste revendiqué, qu’est Brisure à senestre, avec la critique des formes américaines impérialistes de la culture de masse que Nabokov partageait avec cet autre émigré américain récent, le philosophe allemand Theodor Adorno. De ce rapprochement inattendu, l’auteur tire la conclusion paradoxale, mais éclairante, que Nabokov a évité, ici comme dans le reste de son œuvre, l’écueil moderniste de la transcendance du temps (qui, selon Adorno, serait un temps homogène, et donc tyrannique) en procédant constamment dans sa fiction à l’exposition des « traces de cette bataille pour le contrôle temporel » (« the traces of the battle for temporal control », 99).

7 C’est dans le cinquième chapitre, intitulé « Freudian Time. Lolita, Psychoanalysis and the Holocaust », et consacré à une audacieuse mise en relation de Lolita avec la psychanalyse freudienne et l’Holocauste, que l’exercice d’historicisation était le plus périlleux et qu’il est le plus novateur. Norman démontre d’abord que Nabokov avait une connaissance approfondie des théories et des concepts freudiens, popularisés en Amérique à la fin des années quarante, et qu’il les incorpore dans la structure et la rhétorique narratives de Lolita pour construire son personnage de narrateur non fiable (et pervers) qui fabrique un récit esthétique de disculpation, prétendument réussi mais éthiquement suspect. Les questions éthiques posées par l’identification (sur le modèle du transfert) que le texte induit entre narrateur repentant et lecteur séduit, et par sa conséquence herméneutique, l’intolérable complicité, sont ensuite examinées à la lumière des questions historiques liées à l’Holocauste, comme celle de l’interrogation sur la complicité dans le génocide. En conclusion de son étude, Norman nous livre une analyse inédite de la proximité qu’entretiennent la voix et le style de Humbert avec les déclarations et la ligne de défense des dirigeants nazis jugés pendant les procès de Nuremberg (1945-46) et prouve ainsi la pertinence de cette forme d’actualisation de la fiction nabokovienne que peu de critiques s’étaient risqués à opérer jusqu’à présent.

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8 Enfin, dans le dernier chapitre, intitulé « Swiss Time. Cold War Pastoral in Late Nabokov », Norman envisage « la retraite physique et esthétique de Nabokov en Suisse pendant les années 1960 et 1970 […] comme réponse à un ensemble spécifique de circonstances historiques » (« Nabokov ‘s physical and aesthetic retreat to Switzerland during the 1960s and 1970s […] as a response to a specific set of historical circumstances », 130) qui ont marqué cette période de l’histoire mondiale, et dont les principales sont la guerre froide et la guerre du Viêt Nam. Ainsi, Norman pense que dans les derniers romans de l’écrivain, même s’ils se caractérisent par des stratégies métafictionnelles postmodernes plus prononcées, « l’historique n’est pas tant occulté que déplacé » (« the historical is not so much occluded as displaced », 130), faisant alors figure de « cause absente » (« an absent cause », terme de Fredric Jameson, 131). C’est pourquoi il procède à une étude détaillée, dans Feu pâle (1962) et Ada (1969), de la reprise par Nabokov de la tradition pastorale (métaphore d’un isolement créateur enfin serein) afin de montrer comment les marqueurs du genre de la pastorale (séparation spatiale d’avec le monde de la fureur politique, circularité ou non-existence de la temporalité) ne sont opérants qu’en relation, et en conflit, avec l’autre plan de l’histoire, qui se dédouble nettement, dans ces deux romans de la maturité, entre temps collectif et temps personnel de l’âge et de la mort à venir. La présence perturbatrice de ces formes particulières du temps que sont le vieillissement physique et la mortalité, interrompant sans cesse le désir de transcendance historique, indique que la fiction nabokovienne tardive pourrait relever d’une tension temporelle impossible à résoudre, et pour laquelle n’existe aucune synthèse, celle de « la relation dialectique irrésolue entre matérialité et idéalité » (« the unresolved dialectical encounter between the material and the ideal », 153).

9 En conclusion, on pourra seulement se demander si l’omission, consciente, que fait Norman de l’œuvre romanesque russe de Nabokov (à l’exception de son dernier roman russe, Le Don) n’induit pas un problème de perspective. Elle est certes cohérente avec le propos de l’auteur puisqu’il pense que le changement de langue, l’abandon du russe pour l’anglais, fut la réponse de l’écrivain à sa mise en danger par l’histoire à la fin des années trente. Mais, pour notre part, nous pensons que c’est dès son origine en langue russe que la fiction nabokovienne s’est constituée comme rêve, sans cesse contrarié, d’annihiler la violence de l’histoire politique et comme champ d’expérimentation des pouvoirs modernes de la littérature dans leur capacité à résister au déterminisme historique, qui, selon Nabokov, menait invariablement au pire.

10 Cela dit, nous pensons réussi le pari critique de Will Norman qui consiste à « mettre en évidence les dimensions historiques de l’écriture nabokovienne et rétablir l’importance de leur temporalité sociale » (« to throw the historical dimensions of Nabokov's writing into relief and aim to restore to them a sense of their social temporality », 3). Avec Barbara Straumann et Dana Dragunoiu que Norman mentionne (et, ajoutons-nous, avec Laurence Guy, notamment, en France), il fait partie de ces chercheurs qui s’émancipent de la tutelle du maître en transgressant l’interdit le plus tenace qu’il ait énoncé, celui de la question de la politique de la littérature nabokovienne (au sens du philosophe Jacques Rancière) ou, dit autrement, de la forme particulière que construit l’autonomie esthétique, revendiquée par Nabokov, dans son rapport (qui est aussi historique) avec les différentes formes de l’expérience du sensible, dont celle de l’histoire. À rebours des lectures académiques, construites sur « l’exclusion de l’histoire » (« the exclusion of history », 158), et qui se caractérisent par leur « vénération unanime de la complexité

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formelle » (« unopposed devotion to formal complexity », 158), « en lisant Nabokov dans l’histoire, [Norman] développe une vue plus ambivalente, laquelle révèle la mutuelle identité du succès et de la défaite et permet d’interpréter les triomphes comme des échecs et vice versa » (« by reading Nabokov, [Norman] develops a more ambivalent view by which the mutual identity of success and defeat is revealed, by which triumphs can be read as failures and vice versa », 158]. Ce faisant, il rend à l’œuvre de Nabokov une part non-négligeable de son actualité et, dirions-nous, de son humanité, et contribue aussi à modifier le regard critique communément admis et, selon nous, historiquement et littérairement faux, de l’indifférence nabokovienne. Ainsi, l’historicisation de la fiction nabokovienne ne fait qu’ajouter à sa valeur.

NOTES

1. Toutes les citations en anglais ont été traduites en français par l’auteur de la recension.

AUTHORS

AGNÈS EDEL-ROY Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

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Philippe Ortoli. Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino

David Roche

REFERENCES

Philippe Ortoli, Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino, Paris, Cerf-Corlet, 2012, 534p, ISBN-10 : 2204097055, 39,90 euros

1 Première étude approfondie consacrée au cinéaste américain en français, Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino est, à ce titre, déjà un véritable événement. Le livre comporte un prologue, une introduction, quatre chapitres de taille conséquente, une conclusion, un index des films cités, une filmographie et une bibliographie.

2 Le prologue et l’introduction présentent Tarantino comme le premier véritable « auteur-star » depuis Alfred Hitchcock, cherchant, comme ce dernier, à être visible, mais avec cette différence que la persona de Tarantino est associée au cinéma de genre (16). Formaliste (9), il aborderait la mémoire du cinéma « sous la forme dynamique et constante de rapprochements » (12). Ainsi, les références qui sont la matière même de ses œuvres ne sont ni décoratives ni purement ludiques (13), elles ont une visée métafictionnelle : le cinéma de Tarantino offre « une réflexion sur ce qu’est le cinéma [...] par les mêmes moyens que son objet ». Il ressemble ainsi au « musée imaginaire » dont parle André Malraux (1947), « où converseraient les œuvres les plus diverses les unes avec les autres » (6). La problématique du livre de Philippe Ortoli est alors la problématique même qui habite l’œuvre du cinéaste : « la création cinématographique comme recherche fondamentale de l’écart existant entre un modèle et sa reprise, c’est- à-dire ne pouvant se comprendre que par la différence introduite dans le phénomène même de reproduction » (27). L’auteur y ajoute une touche originale en ancrant son étude dans les notions de mythe et de jeu, puisant principalement dans les écrits de Roger Caillois (1938, 1967) à qui il reprend la distinction entre mimicry (les jeux d’imitation) et agôn (les jeux de compétition) (58).

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3 Le chapitre 1, « Territoires des ombres, berges du regard », montre que les récits de Tarantino sont fondés sur la quête d’un objet qui manque (29), objet dont l’identification dépasse la simple diégèse en devenant « principe de composition esthétique » (39), notamment dans ce « plan-emblème » (46) qu’est le contre-champ en contre-plongée des personnages qui regardent à l’intérieur d’une béance (coffre, valise, tombe, etc.).

4 Dans le chapitre 2, « Masques et arènes filmiques : les règles immanentes aux films », Ortoli se penche sur la place de la parole et de l’écrit dans les films, en premier lieu aux noms et alias des personnages en rapport avec leurs identités génériques. La dialectique copie/modèle, qui est la base même de la création selon Tarantino, est alors thématisée, puisque les personnages de Tarantino, « vrai professionnels hawksiens » (139), jouent un rôle qu’ils doivent maîtriser (32) : « jouer à être ce modèle interne pour parvenir à être. Recréer pour se créer soi-même » (114). On passe ensuite à une étude rigoureuse et indispensable des titres de chapitre dont la fonction programmatique au niveau de la structure narrative respecte les trois unités néo-aristotéliciennes de temps, de lieu et d’action (110-11). Si le chapitrage renvoie, certes, à l’intérêt pour le romanesque de Tarantino qui se décrit souvent plus comme un auteur qu’un cinéaste (95-96), le chapitre « Mr. Orange » dans Reservoir Dogs (1992) « démontre en quoi le pouvoir du cinéma est supérieur à celui de l’écrit en ce qui concerne la possibilité d’insuffler la vie et la densité de la réalité à ce qui n’est que construction de l’esprit » (119).

5 Le chapitre 3, « La tentation d’une exposition universelle : la transcendance des films », examine les moyens par lesquels les films « explore[nt] un écart [vis-à-vis des modèles] qui est le prix de la création » (205). La première section s’intéresse au couple personnage/acteur. Ortoli démontre avec l’exemple de Pam Grier que « [l]’art de détailler pratiqué par le cinéaste n’a ainsi pas la même valeur que celui de Leone, puisqu’il ne s'agit pas de révéler le mythe comme absolu mais plutôt d’aller détecter sur quel support les éléments de sa fabrication se sont constitués » (255). Les seconde et troisième sections portent un intérêt similaire à la fonction métafictionnelle que peuvent avoir des objets (voitures, vêtements) et des plans empruntés à d’autres films. Avant de se lancer dans une étude du cinéma vu par le cinéma de Tarantino, Ortoli émet la thèse séduisante que le genre au cœur du cinéma de Tarantino serait, en fait, le mélodrame (308) : qui se penche sérieusement sur cette œuvre ne peut que s’apercevoir que ce qui en fait le prix est la manière dont elle déguise son enjeu principal derrière son contraire, ou, plus exactement, dont elle essaie de dégager son enjeu principal de l’exploitation de ses contraires. Amener, par l’imitation, la différence à naître car elle est, dans son affirmation, celle du mouvement du cœur qui refuse de se soumettre : voilà sûrement l’explication de l’émotion dégagée par ces films qui ne ressemblent jamais à de simples jeux de pistes. Ils projettent des sentiments exacerbés qu’ils interdisent d’éclore tant qu’ils ne se seront pas frayés un chemin vers l’affirmation d’eux-mêmes au sein de tout ce qui les étouffe : certains parviennent à trouver un support – Butch, Beatrix, Jules –, mais beaucoup demeurent à l’état latent, détruits par la fatalité d’un univers qui cherche à rappeler l’immuabilité de ses cycles conditionnés par ses règles. (309-10)

6 La dernière section est alors consacrée à l’étude des références non filmiques.

7 Le chapitre 4, « Devenir le modèle et son imitation ou l’élaboration d’une transfilmicité tarantinesque », se penche d’abord sur la persona du cinéaste telle qu’elle est employée

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dans d’autres films, avant de s’intéresser aux liens établis au niveau diégétique entre ses différents films (personnages ou objets récurrents), puis enfin aux projets – True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993), Tueurs nés (Oliver Stone, 1994), les Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005, 2007), Sukiyaki Western Django (Takashi Miike, 2007) – auxquels Tarantino a participé en tant qu’acteur, scénariste et/ou producteur. Ortoli souligne que ces projets s’intègrent dans le musée imaginaire de Tarantino en ce sens qu’ils témoignent de la même démarche de « mettre en valeur l’acte qui imite en se différenciant » (408), mais que le « souci du clin l’œil et du renvoi à des sources qu’on sait importantes pour Tarantino » apparaît « de manière beaucoup plus littérale que dans ses films » (387).

8 La conclusion « provisoire », « Inglourious Basterds : le règne du cinéma », se penche sur l’avant-dernier film du cinéaste, film politique qui, comme Il était une fois dans l’Ouest (Sergio Leone, 1968), s’intéresse aux origines « de la création de l’univers spécifiquement cinématographique qu’ils [la seconde guerre mondiale et l’Holocauste] ont pu produire » (450). Les citations filmiques attirent alors l’attention sur « la nature politique des sous-textes de ces modèles » (457), comme le souligne le choix de musiques puisées dans des « films dont le propos concerne la lutte contre le colonialisme » (449).

9 Le livre de Philippe Ortoli est tout simplement le meilleur livre sur Tarantino que j’ai pu lire en anglais et en français, et ce de loin. On pourrait regretter quelques longueurs et quelques redites, et on trouvera forcément quelques interprétations auxquelles on n’adhère pas pleinement ici et là, mais c’est le prix à payer pour la précision et l’exhaustivité dont le livre fait preuve. Sa connaissance du cinéma américain, du western italien et de la série B fait de lui le spectateur, et donc le critique, idéal pour analyser les films de Tarantino – justement parce que les films de Tarantino postulent un spectateur idéal à l’image du cinéaste : cinéphile, critique, passionné de culture populaire. Tarantino est un cinéaste exigeant qui oblige le spécialiste du cinéma américain à revoir les classiques et les films cultes, mais aussi à découvrir des films moins connus et souvent difficiles à trouver. On ne peut donc qu’être impressionné par le travail de recherche mené par Ortoli, notamment sur le cinéma asiatique que Tarantino affectionne. On est tout aussi impressionné par le travail d’analyse du corpus qu’il a mené, le livre abondant en macro- et micro-analyses d’une grande richesse : les échos d’un film à l’autre du fameux « plan-emblème » (41-52) ; les chapitrages et structures narratives de Pulp Fiction (1994) (157-74) et de Kill Bill (2003-2004) (140-156) ; les renvois au Parrain (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), aux Tueurs (Robert Siodmak, 1946) et à À bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) dans Pulp Fiction (295-98) ; l’étude comparée de True Romance et Tueurs nés (414-23) ; « la croix gammée gravée au couteau » sur le front du Colonel Landa comme « trace du mythe dans l’histoire » dans Inglourious Basterds (2009) (483). Plus essentiel encore, Ortoli montre à juste titre que les films palimpsestes de Tarantino n’ont rien de gratuit, mais participent d’une réflexion sur le cinéma qui tient compte de ses dimensions politique et éthique ; au sujet de la passivité de Vincent Vega dans Pulp Fiction, Ortoli conclut : « Ce n’est donc pas suivre ou refuser l’aspect programmatique des récits qui est générateur de morale mais chercher, en les adaptant, à affirmer la nécessité d’un acte libre. » (80)

10 Si l’auteur se positionne dès le départ contre les thèses émises par Laurent Jullier dans L’Écran postmoderne (1997), ce dernier suggérant, selon Ortoli, que le cinéma postmoderne « contrain[t] le spectateur à se soumettre à la sensation brute et développe des renvois de surface à l’histoire du cinéma en guise d’univers » (20), un

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grand nombre des analyses du livre laissent néanmoins entendre que Tarantino est bel et bien un cinéaste de l’ère postmoderne. Ainsi, l’idée qu’il n’y a « aucun texte original » (91), l’accent mis « sur la valeur discursive du modèle qu’il [l’univers filmique] signifie » (105), ou encore « [c]e souci de déterminer des racines à inventer, c’est-à-dire à faire du modèle une reprise de la copie présumée de manière à abolir leurs frontières pour ne promouvoir que le geste qui les transforme sans cesse, est riche de sens » (412), tout cela rappelle les grandes thèses de Derrida (1972), Baudrillard (1981) et Butler (1990, 1993) pour qui tout est simulacre ou copie, ainsi que la thèse de Brian McHale (1987) pour qui l’interrogation de l’ontologie est au cœur des textes littéraires postmodernes. Il me semble justement que l’une des thèses d’Ortoli, à savoir que les films de Tarantino « ne cherchent pas à déconstruire un régime de croyance supposément idéologique, mais bien à approcher, dans le remous provoqué par les images, le pourquoi et le comment de ce qui les agrège » (14), participe d’« une archéologie du savoir » qui n’est pas sans rappeler la méthodologie entreprise par Foucault de 1969 jusqu’à sa mort.

11 Si la notion de « musée imaginaire où conversent œuvres diverses » est tout à fait parlante au vu du cinéma de Tarantino, la notion de mythe pose quelque peu problème parce qu’elle pourrait laisser croire à une perspective anhistorique. Or, la vision du cinéma de Tarantino est justement ancrée dans une histoire cinématographique et dans une réalité pragmatique, comme en témoigne Grindhouse (2007) qui tente de reproduire non seulement les codes d’un genre, mais aussi la situation de visionnage dans les drive- ins des années 1960 et 1970 (par exemple, les effets de bobines qui sautent), situation qui fait partie intégrante du genre selon Tarantino. Il me semble que l’analyse convaincante que fait Ortoli d’Inglourious Basterds permet en partie de cerner l’articulation entre mythe et histoire, ou peut-être tout simplement entre fiction et réalité : « créatures mythiques de cinéma, ils [Raines et Utivich] apposent leur sceau sur ce qui va s’en aller rejoindre l’autre champ, la lisière de l’écran, son en deçà, autrement dit, là d’où ils proviennent, puisqu’ils ne sont que les produits de l’esprit de ses habitants. [...] Landa doit être marqué pour que le réel n’oublie pas la leçon prodiguée par l’imagination » (484). Une relation dialogique est ainsi nouée dans laquelle l’histoire nourrit le cinéma qui nourrit l’histoire. Comme chez Leone, remarqué pour les recherches qu’il menait sur le contexte historique (Frayling 206-207), le mythe n’est donc pas entièrement déconnecté de l’histoire. L’approche de Tarantino n’a donc rien de structuraliste : elle est néo-formaliste et post-structuraliste en ce sens qu’elle tient compte de l’histoire des formes et de l’inéluctabilité des contingences. On peut espérer que les chercheurs sauront poursuivre ces interrogations en s’appuyant sur l’immense travail déjà mené par Philippe Ortoli.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ouvrages cités

BAUDRILLARD, Jean, Simulacres et simulation, Paris, Galilée, 1985 [1981].

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BUTLER, Judith, Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York et Londres, Routledge, 1990.

---, Bodies That Matter : On the Discursive Limits of “Sex “, New York et Londres, Routledge, 1993.

CAILLOIS, Roger, Le Mythe et l’homme, Paris, Gallimard, 1938.

---, Les Jeux et les hommes, Paris, Gallimard, 2006 [1967].

DERRIDA, Jacques, La Dissémination, Paris, Seuil, 1972.

FOUCAULT, Michel, L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1969.

FRAYLING, Christopher, Sergio Leone : Something To Do with Death, Londres et New York, Faber and Faber, 2000.

JULLIER, Laurent, L’Écran postmoderne, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997.

MCHALE, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, New York et Londres, Routledge, 1987.

AUTHORS

DAVID ROCHE Université Toulouse 2 - Le Mirail

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Jeffrey Einboden, Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages

Jacqueline Jondot

REFERENCES

Jeffrey Einboden, Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 232 pages, ISBN 978-0-7846-4564-0, 115 $/ 70 £

1 Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages by Jeffrey Einboden, proposes to study the translations of some authors of the American Renaissance (Longfellow, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman) into Hebrew, Arabic and Persian, between 1900 and 1976, and to explore the literary, historical, political, and linguistic implications of these translations by prominent Middle Eastern writers. The choice of the corpus is justified by the fact that these American writers have played an important role in the nationalist definition of American literature and are therefore of great interest to Middle Eastern writers who are themselves seeking to define their own national literature in a changing Orient. Jeffrey Einboden argues that these translations into Middle Eastern languages afford scholars tools to read the canonical authors of the American Renaissance in a different light. First of all, they allow the relocation of the national canon within a global frame instead of reading it as a self- contained unit. Translation in this case is even more than usual a vehicle of encounter between different languages and cultures, offering “transnational, cross-linguistic and inter-religious readings of the American Renaissance” (3). One could contend that in a postcolonial context, some of these translators would use elements of the dominant discourse found in the nineteenth-century American authors to enhance their own self- empowerment by “appropriating and revisiting” (5) their authority, but Jeffrey Einboden insists more on the fact that these translations “convey ideas and identities

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back into home languages” (3) thus “widening out” (3) both the American textual source and the original oriental source. “Shifts in meaning which such processes engender” (4) impact both the American canon and the texts in Middle Eastern languages that have inspired them and the texts that may stem from them. Jeffrey Einboden speaks of literary genealogy across cultures, languages and time; to him, translation is a “pivotal space” (4) in the process. While he admits that translation “betrays” the text, he also argues that translating does not act as “a veil but as a lens” (2), enriching some American texts which he deems overlooked in their country of origin. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with inter-religious dialogue through the displacement of religious figures from Hebrew or Arabic into English and back into their language/culture of origin. Part 2 is devoted to two canonical texts – The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick – while part 3 focuses on several distinct translations of the same author, Whitman.

2 The first chapter (“Judaic Maccabæus: Longfellow and Joseph Massel”) is devoted to the translation of Longfellow’s Judas Maccabæus, by Joseph Massel, in 1900. In order to understand the choice of Massel to translate a drama considered by most critics as a failure, one must take into account the background of both the translator and of the sources of the drama. Joseph Massel was a Russian Jew, a staunch and active supporter of Zionism, who had to settle in Manchester in 1888 after being refused access to Palestine by the Turkish authorities. In Britain, he opened a printing press from which he could support the revival of the Hebrew language and literature. Through his work, he meant to promote Hebrew, the language of the Bible, as a language fit for a secular present. He envisioned translation as a cultural combat (26). Before Judas Maccabæus, he had translated other poems from the English in his Songs from the Ends of the Earth, which included poems by Longfellow among his own and poems by English poets, all concerned with “Jewish life and History” (24). In his introduction, he warns that “some of the translations will be found to deviate considerably from the original” (25). His translation of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1890) had been justified by its focus on the problem of Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land. Massel’s choices of translation always seem to be at the crossroads of political activism and literary or linguistic revival (30). Longfellow’s Judas Maccabæus (1872) offers interesting ground for Massel’s political and poetical enterprise. The American author had become interested in Judaic and Jewish themes through his contact with the historic Jewish communities in America and some of his texts such as “Psalm of Life. What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist” (1838) were attempts at establishing a dialogue between ancient Judaism and modern America, between the Old and New Worlds, the Middle East, Europe and America. Longfellow’s Judas Maccabæus is precisely situated at such a crossroads. In his diary he speaks of it as “the collision of Judaism and Hellenism” (19). He first discovered Judas Maccabæus through Handel’s oratorio, which uses the biblical story to celebrate the end of the Jacobite Rebellion. Longfellow wrote his drama just after the American Civil War. No wonder then that the theme should catch the eye of Massel, an active participant in the first three Zionist congresses between 1897 and 1899. The struggle between Jew and Gentile is central to Massel’s Zionism, even if Longfellow is considered to have a “backward-looking approach” (23) by other advocates of the Jewish cause such as Emma Lazarus and to be “blind to the urgency of contemporary Jewish issues” (23). However, what is even more interesting is probably the fact that the biblical text has only survived in Greek; the original Hebrew has been entirely lost. Massel’s translation is therefore “an attempt to establish, for the first

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time, a Hebrew source for this most Judaic of stories, building a new site for an unrecoverable text” (22). If the biblical text is “a translation without its source” (19), Massel will restore biblical Hebrew, basing his translation not on fidelity to the source (Longfellow’s text) but on rabbinic idiom and translation and in the end. Massel’s translation of Longfellow’s drama is an instance of “a textual bridge, conveying ideas and identities back into home languages” (3). Jeffrey Einboden, through his own translation of the Hebrew translation back into English emphasizes the shifts and deviations of Massel from the original text in order to serve his own purpose, that is to say “constructing a new literary home for a reviving people, erecting a linguistic ‘banner’ designed to lead towards ‘Zion’” (43).

3 The second chapter (“Mahomet or Muḥammad? Irving and Alī Ḥusnī al-Kharbūṭlī”) continues the exploration of cultural and religious negotiations. 1492, the year of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, coincides with the climax of the Reconquista, linking both events in a way which struck Washington Irving while he was in Spain to write his Life of Columbus. He was particularly impressed by the cultural hybridity of Andalusia, between East and West, Islam and Christianity. While working on the “founder” of America, he started work on his Life of Mahomet, published in 1850, nearly twenty years after his Conquest of Granada (1829) and Tales of the Alhambra (1832). His chronicles of Muslim Spain and his biography of Mahomet have attracted the attention of Arab Muslim translators who have tried to “impart an idea of the grace and beauty of the American’s Andalusian canon to Middle Eastern audiences” (48). The prophet of Islam is a highly sensitive subject to Muslims, and Irving’s biography, while recognizing positive aspects and virtues to the prophet and his creed, is also very critical when, for instance, he portrays Mahomet as self-deceived. This means a problematic reception by Muslims. Irving did not pretend to propose an original work as his Life of Mahomet is based on European Orientalist sources. However, he offers his readers an innovative treatment of the subject, “a lively narrative, imaginative style, nuanced evaluation” (50). This originality in the treatment of known sources is what has drawn the attention of Middle Eastern translators since 1925 and the first translation into Persian. The Life of Mahomet appeared in Arabic for the first time in 1960; a second edition followed in 1966. It was published by a well-established Egyptian publishing house, Dār al-Ma‘ārif. The translator, Alī Ḥusnī al-Kharbūṭlī, is a most prominent Muslim scholar. So how could the translator make a text in more ways than one incompatible with orthodox Muslim teachings acceptable to Muslim readers and avoid censure? al-Kharbūṭlī “navigate[s] between fidelity to textual source and fidelity to religious tradition – between faithful Islamic translation and adherence to the Islamic faith” (50). In his preface to his translation, al-Kharbūṭlī states that a literal translation would be inadequate and that he had an obligation to amend shortcomings and correct all errors (51). He retains the positive aspects of the original work but his translation is a revisionary process which “reconciles” Irving’s Mahomet with Islamic tradition and makes of the American text a highly commendable, “neutral, equitable and just explanation” of “Islamic teachings” (49). al-Kharbūṭlī “domesticates” (53) Irving’s Mahomet by reinstating the correct Arabic words and names, distorted by imperfect transliteration. He substitutes the proper Qur’ānic text to the American’s faulty quotations derived from European rather than original sources since Irving did not master Arabic. al-Kharbūṭlī does not translate but reinstates the sacred text in his biography which is thus re-inscribed into the authentic language of Islam. Because al- Kharbūṭlī writes from within the Muslim tradition whereas Irving does from without,

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meanings that were absent from the American biography resurface for the Arab readership. The most significant alterations take place when al-Kharbūṭlī expunges the references to Christianity that Irving uses to establish a hierarchy between the two religions and even more so the Hebraic influence that Irving underlines. In the process, al-Kharbūṭlī inverses Irving’s pejorative appreciations of the prophet and his creed. Alī Ḥusnī al-Kharbūṭlī violates translation principles, transgresses the limits between rendition and creation and doing so repatriates the American Mahomet to the Middle East and returns him to his original identity as Muḥammad. Thanks to this revision of his original, far less praising text, Washington Irving has become a source for academic work in the Middle East and “is implicitly recognized as an authority on Islam, a pioneer” (70) despite his claim of lack of originality. Alī Ḥusnī al-Kharbūṭlī himself has produced more works in which the frontiers between quoter and quoted are blurred. In his own academic production, he continues his filtering of Washington Irving who, at this cost, is domesticated into Muslim orthodoxy.

4 This first part, “Scriptural Circulations”, discusses two examples of cultural negotiations in which religious texts and traditions are rendered to their original language after a detour in American literature. Because the American authors distort the original Hebrew or Arabic sacred sources through their own lack of knowledge of these languages, they introduce unwilling discrepancies. Yet, the Hebrew and Arabic translations do not only supply appropriate corrections but use the discrepancies to introduce more discrepancies/deviations from the American text to either serve ideological or political purposes or to defuse possible conflicts. The second part, “Orienting the American Romance”, deals with the problematic translation of canonical American novels into another language, script, and culture, emphasizing the complex negotiation between linguistic, culture and religion, all the more so when some of the characters are common to both Bible and Qu’rān but are perceived differently in Christianity and Islam. How the American Puritan culture can be made accessible to a Muslim reader is one of the many challenges facing the Middle Eastern translators.

5 The third chapter, “Inscribing the Persian Letter: Hawthorne and Sīmīn Dāneshhvar” illustrates the difficult negotiation between a source text and the demand of a target audience with not only a different culture and religion but also a different alphabet system. The translation of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter by the best-selling Iranian female novelist Sīmīn Dāneshhvar poses a number of problems due both to the ambiguous character of the American novel and to the gap between the source and target languages and cultures. The problem begins with the title, the letter inscribed in the very title of the novel. The “A”, the central trope of the novel, has no equivalent as such in the Perso-Arabic alphabet; “alif” has no connection with the words implied by the English “A”. Therefore, Dāneshhvar, like other translators of the novel into Arabic, leaves out the signifier for the benefit of its signifier and The Scarlet Letter becomes Dāgh-e Nang, i.e. The Mark of Shame. Figurative function is privileged over graphic form. She will resort to such phrases throughout the novel, “replacing this unfamiliar graphic with a ‘sign’ more accessible to her audience” (81). She does reproduce the letter “A” once, creating disruption in the Persian text and introducing a foreign exotic element. To help her readers understand what the letter connotes for an American reader, she introduces explanations and/or footnotes. However, a simple word association, directly accessible to an American reader, will need a roundabout commentary. Such processes “highlight the intractable difficulty posed by the novel’s orthographically entrenched symbolism” (84). However, the rendition problem

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continues with the names which Hawthorne gives to his characters according to aspects of their personalities and which depend on word play. Dāneshhvar transliterates most of the names, unable to find equivalent rendering the suggested cultural references that they carry. She only translates Pearl as Marāvīd, as it is explicitly referential. However, her translation does not convey the biblical connotations. The epithets to which Hawthorne also resorts for characterization are an additional problem for Dāneshhvar, especially when they have a dual meaning, such as “leech” which is both physician and blood-sucker. The exact equivalent is not found in Persian but Dāneshhvar substitutes another signifier with double entendre, physician/ owl. These substitutions create a new web of connotations and relationships between the characters. The Scarlet Letter was written in a Puritan New England setting and uses religious vocabulary and style which introduces a new problem for the translator who “insinuates markedly Muslim phraseology into Hawthorne’s narrative, with no basis in US source” (89-90), with the risk of altering the meaning of the novel. There are certain ironical effects when the Puritan minister speaks in terms reminiscent of Islam. “The climactic moments of this Puritan novel are dramatised through reference to the Qur’ān’s own climax and conclusion.” (93). The translator is faced with a multiplicity of layers of problems which she resolves in different ways, always bearing in mind her Persian Muslim audience. The Scarlet Letter attracted Sīmīn Dāneshhvar’s attention when she was studying creative writing at Stanford in the early 1950s, under Wallace Stegner, who was not only a novelist but also a fellow Hawthornean. Her novel Sūvashūn (1969) was the first published by a woman in Iran and became a best-seller with at least 20 reprints. The Scarlet Letter, though not a source of inspiration, has left a deep imprint on Sūvashūn with its wounded yet resilient, female protagonist. The popularity of Dāgh-e Nang, the Persian “reincarnation” (97) of The Scarlet Letter has become a byword for feminist activism in Iran, illustrating the influence of a translation when adapted to its readership, even at the cost of some betrayal.

6 In the fourth chapter, “Navigating the Arabic Whale: Melville and Iḥsān ‘Abbās”, Jeffrey Einboden discusses the Palestinian scholar’s translation of Moby-Dick, a choice probably dictated by the translator’s own forced experience of exile and nomadism more than by Herman Melville’s fascination with the Muslim Orient dating from his travels in Greece and the Middle East in 1856-1857. Iḥsān ‘Abbās’s 1965 translation of Moby-Dick is considered a landmark in Arabic translation as it served to demonstrate “that modern Arabic was fully capable of meeting even the most difficult of translation challenges and of expressing the most complex concepts and ideas of other cultures.” (101). Moby- Dick has been translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu, these translations ranging from versions aimed at educated readers to adaptations for young readers. ‘Abbās is not only a translator but a scholar in Arabic and Islamic studies as well as an essayist on American literature. His essay “Islamic Influence on the Narrative Moby- Dick” surveys and explores the possible sources of Melville’s Islamic vocabulary. The translator of the American novel is faced with several issues, one of which is the paucity of nautical or whaling expressions in Arabic which forces him to coin new words derived from existing terms. However, he faces a greater challenge when dealing with Melville’s integration of Arab words: merely changing script or returning the Anglicized Arabic words to their original lexical form, therefore losing the exotic, oriental nuance of the original text. Iḥsān ‘Abbās often resorts to quotation marks to signal the word and in this way, to preserve its foreignness. This linguistic problem becomes more complex when it comes to religious terms or names. Melville borrowed

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from various scriptural sources and traditions, including Islam of which he had a knowledge relying on Orientalists. In some cases, ‘Abbās chooses to replace Melville’s word by a neutral one; for instance, “Ramadan” will become “fast” so as not to target any precise religious tradition. In other cases, ‘Abbās will intensify the religious nuances and go as far as “occasionally interpolat[ing] diction reminiscent of Islamic precedents, thereby tilting the religious axis of Melville’s original’ (107), making the Methodist minister sound like a muftī. The Biblicisms of Melville are often replaced by Islamic language. The discourse undergoes some degree of religious conversion (109) in order to “domesticate” the American text grounded in a Judaeo-Christian tradition. Because of its Abrahamic origins, Islam shares a number of figures and narratives with the Bible but instead of facilitating the translator’s work, it renders the negotiating process more complex. Ishmael’s place is crucially different in both traditions: the disfavoured exile of the Bible is seen as the beloved son of Abraham, a forbearing prophet of Islam, a positive figure. Therefore, in an “attempt to demarcate the original religious and cultural context of Melville’s novel”, Iḥsān ‘Abbās often chooses not to use the Qur’ānic name when an alternative exists: Jonas becomes “Yūnān” instead of the Qur’ānic “Yūnus”. However, the Semitic roots of some of the names, when they are returned into their “original” form, yield enriched meaning or ambivalence not obvious for English readers. Iḥsān ‘Abbās “balances between fidelity to its American source and the demands of reshaping this source for readers of Arabic” (117) and in the process “uncover[s] sources and semantic possibilities hidden beneath the narrative blanket of Melville’s English” (118); he also makes apparent the “transnational origins” (119) of the novel.

7 In the third part of his essay, “I too am untranslatable”: Middle Eastern Leaves”, Jeffrey Einboden deals with translations of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Hebrew and Arabic. “Viewed together, the Israeli and Iraqi Leaves appear a dissonant pair, their translated texts opposing in context, divergent in nation, religion, culture, politics” (158). In spite of the lexical mirror between ‘Ēsev and Ushb, both words coming from the same root, Simon Halkin and Saadi Youssef differ in their approach to the American text, one using it in a distinct political context, recalling Joseph Massel’s activism, the other recruiting Whitman’s innovative style to enhance his own poetic research. In these last two essays, Jeffrey Einboden examines closely both renditions, highlighting the interactions between languages and cultures.

8 Chapter 5, “The New Bible in Hebrew: Whitman and Simon Halkin” examines in detail the Hebrew translation of the American “New Bible” – in Whitman’s own terms. Since the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass has attracted a great number of Jewish writers, intellectuals and translators, probably owing to its debt to Hebrew poetry, the Bible in particular. Its psalmic form of verse together with its ethos made the critic Shin Shalom write: “To translate him [=Whitman] into Hebrew is like translating a writer back into his own language” (127). Simon Halkin’s translation work should therefore seem unproblematic but it is not so. By 1952, the date of the first publication of ‘Alē ‘Ēsev, a rendition of a great part of the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves of Grass, Halkin was already an influential critic and creative writer as well as a literary mediator between America and Israel between which he had repeatedly migrated. This translation met with immediate success, was awarded a prize and is still considered as the definitive edition of Leaves of Grass. A second edition was published in 1984, including more material from the 1891-1892 version. In the introduction, Halkin explains the problem posed by Whitman’s poetry and describes the foundations of the text and the role of America in

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Whitman’s works (127). According to Uri Zvi, “Whitman is moulded from the same substance as a Hebraic prophet” (130), and indeed his style has the allegorical and elliptical quality of Hebrew. The form of Leaves of Grass rather than the content is “richly Hebraic” (138). That is what has inspired biblical readings of Whitman. Halkin not only reproduces his style but he also improves on the American and “construct[s] a “new” Leaves of Grass for modern Israeli readers, even while echoing an antiquity that is “biblical”, producing a Hebrew Whitman that bridges disparities – national, religious, historical – through ironically conveying this American author back into his own” ( 128). In fact, Halkin amplifies Whitman’s Biblicisms and employs vocabulary “that coincides with terminology from the Bible” (133) and more particularly moves Whitman’s text away from metaphysical ideals towards specific settings. Halkin “biblically revises Whitman’s poetry […] and replaces English generics with Hebrew specific.” (134). Halkin grounds his Hebraic developments in Whitman’s style structured through repetition, antithesis, synthesis… echoing the Bible. These improvements would have special resonance for Jewish readers. Some tropes which are read as exotic by Whitman’s readers, are entirely familiar to those of Halkin who amends a certain number of expressions: “Syrian ground” becomes “Holy Land” or Messiah, “the Nazarene” and “Jehovah”, the name which must not be uttered is rendered as “God Almighty”… This translation appeared a few years after the creation of the state of Israel and like Joseph Massel’s translation of Longfellow’s Judas Maccabæus, the political environment is not indifferent. Simon Halkin accommodates Whitman’s American Civil War in the context of Israel’s war of independence, using the echoes of biblical antiquity to herald the modern Israeli state (141) and recruiting Whitman’s poetic nationalism to echo the shaping Israeli nationality. Halkin’s translations of Whitman were published in Hebrew/Zionist magazines in the United States, in 1946 and 1960, targeting a Hebrew readership “inhabiting New World space while speaking the idiom of ancestral homelands” (141) but also showing the impact and influence of this work which is echoed in Halkin’s own creative writing.

9 The next chapter, “American Song of Iraqi Exile: Whitman and Saadi Youssef”, Jeffrey Einboden tries to answer the concluding question of Saadi Youssef’s introduction to Awrāq al-‘Ushb, his 1976 translation of Leaves of Grass: “What is the significance of Whitman to the Arab reader, and to Arabic poetry?” Youssef’s is the first translation of importance in the Arab world, published in Baghdad although there had been other renditions of Whitman’s poem in Arabic. In fact, Whitman plays a prominent role in Arabic poetic reform, helping Arab poets to move away from the weight of traditional rules and conventions. Several poets at the turn of the twentieth century have experimented with free verse inspired from Whitman. Youssef, an important figure of contemporary Iraqi poetry and permanent exile, follows in their tracks while “transplant[ing] a poetic icon of American democracy within the soil of the ancient Iraqi capital” (157). Awrāq al-‘Ushb like Leaves of Grass is shaped in the context of national conflicts – American Civil War and the Civil War in Lebanon and the Kurdish rebellion in Northern Iraq. However, the innovative poetry of Whitman is the main concern of Youssef as is expressed in the choice of the term “Awrāq” which means both the leaves of a plant and textual leaves, “ balancing foliage and folio” (159). Thus Saadi Youssef not only offers but a selection from the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves of Grass, he also reorganizes the order of the chosen poems, producing “a fresh plot” (160): “Song of Myself” moves from the beginning to the end. This revision echoes the complex process of composition and correction of the original. By placing “Shut not Your Doors”

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at the opening of his selection, Youssef shifts Whitman’s plea to the debate on Arabic poetry and aesthetics, pleading for literary openness in the Arab world and acceptance of his own avant-garde style. Saadi Youssef uses Whitman in the interest of the artistic debate in the Arab world and also in defence of his personal writing. Youssef is found “domesticating the American in Arabic verse, even surpassing the originality of his original source” and “sound[ing] more Whitmanian than Whitman himself” (163). Without reverting to Qur’ānic diction like the translators discussed above, Youssef is still influenced by some of its tropes (such as direct second-person address) as well as some others common in classical Arabic poetry (such as paronomasia and euphonies) which, in some cases, lead him to homogenise and amplify the English original, generating new meanings. Some ambiguities disappear through the determination of pronoun gender or the dual form. The domestication of the American text through these stylistic choices offers new resonance specific to Youssef’s target readership. For example, when he translates “stranger” (from “To a Stranger”) by “gharīb” which means both alien and émigré, he builds a “bridge between Civil War America and inter- war Iraq” (165). Jeffrey Einboden argues that Youssef’s translation does not provide a full straightforward answer to his initial question but his innovative method “transcends the margins dividing translation and composition” (171). In the second part of this chapter, Einboden discusses Youssef’s New York Qaṣīdas (2007) at length and how the latter embeds Leaves of Grass in his own poetry, juxtaposing juxtaposes English sources and Arabic translations (174), again altering the order so that American sources follow Arabic translations of Whitman therefore revising the chronological order of influence (174). If Whitman is the model for Saadi Youssef’s own poetic revolution (171), the latter addresses him directly across time, space and languages.

10 Through his own re-translation of the Arabic/Persian/Hebrew translations of some canonical American texts back into English, Jeffrey Einboden is able to highlight the interaction between languages and cultures and the negotiations of the different translators to produce a new text acceptable to their national readership as if originally written in their languages but above all, ideologically acceptable. Part of the difficulty of this transaction springs from the fact that American literature is grounded in the Bible, therefore posing a problem for Jewish or Muslims readers. Einboden uses the term rendition rather than translation to underline the complex process. Einboden’s essay is rich with the cultural background of the works translated and the context of the translations, emphasizing the political nature of the choice of translating a particular work at a particular time, work which itself has been written at a particular place and particular time. The intersection of both times and purposes enlightens the ideology behind the translations. Moreover, most of the translators under study are also creative writers, and Einboden’s essay highlights the continuing influence of a certain writer upon his translator’s creation, showing new intersections, new cross- influences.

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AUTHORS

JACQUELINE JONDOT Université de Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail

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Lena Hill, Visusalizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition

Kathie Birat

REFERENCES

Lena Hill, Visusalizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition, New York, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, 2014, 250 pages, ISBN 978-1-107-04158-5, 82 $/75 €

1 In her ambitious rereading of important segments of the African American literary canon of works published between the eighteenth century and the beginning of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s, Lena Hill proposes to apply a methodology announced very clearly in the “Acknowledgments” to her work: “This book ponders visual images inspired by texts […]”(xiii). In a critical gesture that signifies on the well- known “trope of the Talking Book” she proposes the notion of the trope of the Picture Book to explain the way in which African American writers have from the very beginning associated the capacity for intelligent readings of American racial experience with the act of seeing. Her approach is on the one hand a way of taking into account the highly visual dimension of race and the reliance throughout history on visual imagery to reduce the black man to a caricatured stereotype. It implies, in other words, that the black writer’s answer to such reductive imagery is to attempt to teach others to see, hence her emphasis on the relation between seeing and instruction, one of the strong points of her argumentation. On the other hand, it constitutes an attempt to counter the emphasis on voice and sound which has dominated critical discussions of African American literature for many years. This is a bold project, for voice and orality have their roots in theoretical models and anthropological approaches that have been fundamental in revealing the vitality of African American culture. The reader familiar with the authors she invokes, like W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington,

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Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, will therefore be looking for new insights into a well-covered terrain. Another important distinction she establishes from the start is the place of visual culture in her analysis, for although she takes her subjects’ relation to visual media into account, her emphasis is on the act of visualizing, rather than on the objects which may eventually enter into the field of their vision.

2 Chapter one, entitled “Witnessing Moral Authority in Pre-Abolition Literature,” addresses the role of the founding figures of African American literature, beginning with the poet Phillis Wheatley. Hill analyzes the way in which Wheatley establishes her own capacity to see intelligently in her relation to great art as a response to Alexander Pope’s use of ekphrasis, directing readers’ attention away from the contemplation of great art to the perception of a “morally upstanding, discerning African American speaker” (26). She also studies the well-known engraving representing the poet at her desk in its relation to other visual representations of blacks at the time, emphasizing the way it diverges from models that leave the black subject no object of contemplation but the white master. She extends this analysis to Frederick Douglass through a comparison of a well-known daguerreotype with a later portrait that presented a less- aggressive picture of the abolitionist, inciting his anger. She focuses on the scene in which Douglass describes his witnessing of the beating of his Aunt Hester to show how Douglass in his narrative attempted to align the reader’s vision with his own. Chapter Two, “Picturing Education and Labor in Washington and Du Bois,” looks at the relation of W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington to visual culture, arguing that the photographic collections Dubois showed at the 1900 Paris Exhibition presented a more conservative bourgeois black population than the black folk represented in The Souls of Black Folk, who possess what she calls a “black interior vision” (66). In one of the most original sections of the book, Hill examines the photographs of Tuskegee Institute taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston as a key to understanding the “interior spaces” of Tuskegee on account of the way they reveal the role of European art found on the walls of the classrooms and provide clues to the way in which Washington prepared his students to see the world in sophisticated ways, a reading which supplements without contradicting the image that Washington projected of an industrial education. Chapter Three, entitled “Gazing upon Plastic Art in the Harlem Renaissance,” addresses the way black women writers “invert[ed] the expected power dynamic of the gaze” (82) by imagining women as artists capable of creating images of the black woman outside of the restrictive alternatives of “pristine Madonna” or “sexually unfettered primitive” (101) epitomized by Alain Locke’s inclusion of Winold Reiss’s The Brown Madonna in his collection The New Negro. Hill’s analysis of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand relies on an interesting contrast with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein ; the mask serving to deconstruct Stein’s face becomes a passively accepted mask of stereotype for Larsen’s unassertive protagonist. Fauset’s Angela in Plum Bun, on the contrary, proves capable of achieving “revised notions of black beauty” (116) and using them “in cultivating her political activism,” thus enabling her to elaborate “an artistic philosophy that empowers the broader black community” (116).

3 Part Two, Lessons from the Museum, solicits the museum as a metaphor for the forces that allow writers to educate the vision of their readers. Hill uses the development of museums in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to show how a writer like Zora Neale Hurston, who studied anthropology with Franz Boas, relied on the type of seeing and observation used in anthropology to construct a fictional world based on

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“rigorous looking” (120). In so doing, she analyzes Boas’s insistence on the need for contextualization of objects in museums and links it to a similar concern in Hurston’s writing, which reveals, according to Hill, a desire “to picture an intellectual spectrum in rural black communities” (127), allowing them to be seen as complex contexts. Hill considers the major novels, in particular Their Eyes were Watching God, as what she calls “exhibition books” (132) on account of the way they attempt to “self-consciously exhibit the folk mind.” Starting from an emphasis on the “sites of observation” represented by the “front porch” and the “gate-post”, Hill shows how Hurston allows her characters “to perform the work of the cultural anthropologist” (132). Chapter Five, “Melvin Tolson : Gaining Modernist Perspective in the Art Gallery,” extends the museum metaphor to the art gallery, using the distinction between two visions of the African American museum, as temple or forum, as a way of analyzing Tolson’s desire to reconcile the need for high artistic standards with the desire to see black art as a vector for the affirmation of a complex black identity. In his collection of poems Harlem Gallery, he uses the character of the Curator to explore the difficulty of promoting sophisticated forms of modernist art for a public unwilling or unable to perceive it properly. Calling upon classical works from the past, the Curator uses them as stepping stones toward an understanding of what constitutes the essence of perspective- changing works, before presenting in later sections of his long poem the experiences of black artists confronted with the difficulty of reconciling artistic achievement with racial goals. Tolson, a relatively unknown poet who sought to promote a genuinely modernist black aesthetic, is seen as another visionary bent on educating the African American eye and making it capable of overcoming the “double consciousness” bind. The final chapter is devoted to Ralph Ellison. Here Hill uses Malraux’s idea of a museum without walls to trace the way in which Ellison’s Invisible Man learns to see beyond the exhibitions of power with which he is confronted early in the novel in order to arrive at a greater “visual maturity” (201). Hill, who has co-authored a reference guide to Invisible Man, relies heavily on her reading of the manuscript versions of the novel to show how Ellison weeded out references to modern art in order to focus on the difficulty his hero experienced in learning to decode the visual signs of black culture in order to arrive at a better understanding of the complexity of the African American identity. She pursues her analysis with a reading of Ellison’s unfinished novel Three Days Before the Shooting…, showing how the jazzman-turned-preacher Hickman is “more than willing to deploy his power of perception in multiple museum inflected spaces” (206), thus revealing a more sophisticated capacity for visual interpretation than his more well-known literary predecessor.

4 One is tempted to conclude that Lena Hill was inspired to carry out this study by the work she did with Ellison’s manuscripts, for Ellison was interested in both music and the plastic arts and was highly influential in relating artistic complexity to the development of African American fiction. The chapter on Ellison provides useful insight into the way in which Ellison resolved the potential contradiction between his interest in artistic complexity and his desire to present an authentic picture of black culture. There are many interesting moments in this book, for instance the discussion of the photographs of Tuskegee Institute that reveal the complexity of Booker T. Washington’s approach to education. However the argumentation occasionally appears forced, and the number of complex sentences used to relate each author to the general trope of the Picture book attests to the difficulty of keeping the reader’s attention focused on a message which does not always flow naturally from the examples evoked.

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Her discussion of Zora Neale Hurston is a case in point. Hill’s contention that “her novels focus on the visualizing practices of her protagonists” (147) seems difficult to accept uncritically for those who remember Phoeby’s “hungry listening” (Hurston, 1937, 23). While interesting, the chapter on Hurston does not quite reach its mark. The book is carefully researched and documented, with extensive use of archival sources and a useful exploration of writers like the poet Melvin Tolson who are not often included in the canon of African American literature. However, a careful reading of the book and a perusal of the bibliography leave one perplexed by the absence of reference to scholars from outside the United States, even for theoretical purposes. Malraux is evoked because he was read by Ellison. Isn’t this a clue to the breadth and depth of Ellison’s vision ? Richard Wright, who could also usefully be related to visualization, and who spent much of his life in France, is not included. This is a highly intelligent and thought-provoking book, with a laudable point of view anchored outside the current interest in voice and orality, but it could have profited from taking into account the vibrant interest in African American literature by scholars from other parts of the world, whom the computer age has brought into an international conversation with American critics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works Cited

HURSTON, Zora Neale, Their Eyes were Watching God, London, Virago Press, 1986 [1937].

AUTHORS

KATHIE BIRAT Université de Lorraine

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Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions. The Movement of Images in Early America

Richard Phelan

REFERENCES

Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions. The Movement of Images in Early America, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 2014, 226 pages, 47 €/ 54 $, ISBN : 9780520251847

1 Modern and, more especially, post-modern art has adamantly reinstated the picture- as-object next to the picture-as-illusion. Think of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Whereas a long tradition —strategies of the frame, of linear perspective, of the internal relation of forms and narratives (2) — had virtualized the painting, much of the art since the 1960s has returned the issue of the work’s real space to the visual process: witness Smithson’s Land Art, Institutional Critique, the Installation. In a welcome gesture linking contemporary art with the art of the early American Republic, Jennifer L. Roberts, as it were, “rematerializes” paintings produced between 1760 and 1850 and enables us, through her virtuoso interdisciplinary construct, to re-imagine their material history.

2 Her precise project is to analyse the importance of transport in the production and reception of American paintings made in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Her case studies are focused in three dense chapters on Copley, Audubon and Durand. In each case, she explores the issues of transportation and how these issues leave their formal imprint on the work. Geography, she believes, does not surround the work, but is integral to it; and temporality is constitutive : at play are issues of delay, resistance and loss.

3 Take the case of a talented and ambitious Boston artist seeking to have his work validated by the British academy. Such is that of self-taught John Singleton Copley,

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who, when selected to present paintings in London, became engaged in a process involving long delays — it was six months before the artist heard how British artists responded to his work, and even longer when he needed to question their feedback. All these temporal calculations, as Roberts demonstrates, went into the production of his Boy with a Flying Squirrel (1765). The dress, for instance, was simplified in order to circumvent problems of fashion; a boy was chosen (and his youth exaggerated) in order to give greater universality; the numismatic profile was borrowed from medallions or coins for greater currency; the configuration of the table was strained to foreground exchange as in conversation pieces. For Roberts, the artist’s thinking about the work as a transportable showpiece reveals itself, moreover, in his representations of water and measurement (the glass and the chain) and the squirrel proves metapictorial. The author offers subtle readings of the tabletop reflections. Her treatment at the close of this chapter of Watson and the Shark (1778) provides equal intellectual delight: her reading of the black figure ; her conflation of this harbor drama and the Boston Tea Party (in which Copley was personally involved) ; Watson and the Shark figuring the danger of losing a painting during its transatlantic voyage.

4 Likewise, John James Audubon’s gigantic Birds of America — as much a shipping and distribution project as a scientific and artistic one — involves the question of the circulation of images across the Atlantic but also across the continent at a moment (between 1820 and 1839) of crisis in both geographical scale and monetary exchange in the USA. Audubon traveled 3500 miles for (and with) The Birds of America, producing what was (until 2004) the largest book ever published. But why did the artist complicate things by refusing scale, when abstraction from size is the basis of representation, the founding operation of virtuality? Why did he prefer the near-indexical transfer from body to page ? To answer a question which has been inadequately addressed in the scholarship, Roberts weaves a stunning narrative with an intricate network of determinations: the gothic living image (as in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe), transatlantic natural history (like his fellow Americans, naturalist Audubon refutes Buffon), western frontier tall tales … and wildcat banks. The artist’s performance proves in particular to be a resistance to both the latter, his insistence on the bulk and materiality of images a symptom of his own suffering in the financial panic of 1819. “His rhetoric of honesty, self-evidence and immediacy, responded directly to Audubon’s experience of the instabilities of modern monetary culture” (112).

5 Another tour de force is performed in the final chapter devoted to Asher B. Durand. Roberts attends to Durand’s lesser-known work, his engravings (particularly his uncommissioned project to engrave a copy of Vanderlyn’s Ariadne), and his foregrounded landscapes of moss, tree and rock. Roberts links both to the temporal and spatial changes brought about by Durand’s fellow artist Samuel E. Morse when the latter invented the telegraph. The visual arts, like Ariadne, are left behind, and, in another act of resistance, Durand insists on conveying the adhesive reality of things by making pictures which Roberts defines as “non-conducting” (112). The argument is again stunning, almost vertiginous at times.

6 “In tracing the transit of paintings and prints through British America and the United Stated in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century [Roberts shows] how such pictures could and did register the complications of their own transmission” (1). For Roberts, pictures served communities as connective devices, maintaining social links across vast ranges of space at a time when space was not annihilated by

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technologies of instantaneous communication and information transfer. Time is what her book reimagines and conceptualizes for us. After Bourdieu, she endeavors to reintroduce time and by extension space with its rhythm, its orientation, its irreversibility into the analysis of cultural production (16).

7 Roberts convincingly juxtaposes Audubon’s prints with works by Mel Bochner and Jasper Johns, and for each artist she convokes not only art which is contemporary to us, but literature contemporary to the artist (Addison for Copley, for instance). She wields and weaves together various histories — those of technology and economics in particular. She brings to her text her art history toolbox, picture theory, anthropology, philosophy and what she calls (after Bill Brown) “thing theory” (9). The resulting approach is an art history that has assimilated visual and cultural studies.

8 Transporting Visions manages to conceptualize links with broad aspects of society and to narrate the diverse elements in vivid detail while operating sharp analyses of the visual works. An elegant balance of concrete detail and subtle argument is thus achieved in a prose that is alert, witty, and consistently clear. The wealth and depth of the research is impressive, the critical debate fully present in the notes. One wonders what other artists the author might examine in this way, what other works in early America formally preprocessed the distances they were designed to span. One wonders especially what projects outside the question of transport this book could and will generate. Beautifully produced with excellently disposed reproductions, it is a major work, and one that deserves to be known outside the English-speaking and American- art-focused world.

AUTHORS

RICHARD PHELAN Université Aix-Marseille

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