Omparatist Contents

the volume 31 : may 2007 CC omparatist Contents

Editor’s Column: Continuing Traditions and New Beginnings 1 Dorothy M. Figueira

Essays acla: International Forum Comparative Literature: Where We Started and What We Have Become 4 Dorothy M. Figueira Comparative Literature in Hong Kong 8 eugene Chen Eoyang Literary Studies in The Netherlands 12 hans Bertens Where Are We Going and Who Will We Teach? Conjectures about Comparative Literature and the Humanities 15 ross Shideler The icla and Disciplinary Renewal 21 steven P. Sondrup On Comparative Literature in Korea 25 CHON Young-Ae Japanese Encounters with Latin America and Iberian Catholicism (1549–1973): Some Thoughts on Language, Imperialism, Identity Formation, and Comparative Research 27 inaga Shigemi

Collecting and/as Cultural Transformation Introduction: Collecting and/as Cultural Transformation 36 Janet A. Walker, Helen Asquine Fazio, and V. G. Julie Rajan “I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle”: Pablo Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 40 kelly Austin Photographic Appropriation, Ethnography, and the Surrealist Other 63 linda M. Steer Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 82 Janet A. Walker

New Comparative Readings Borges’s Translations of German Expressionist Poetry: Spaniardizing Expressionism 115 laura Sager Eidt I Call That Patriotism: Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 140 Benjamin Boysen The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 157 ahmed Farouk Elbeshlawy Masks of Authenticity: Failed Quests for the People in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and The Silver Dove by Andrei Belyi 175 irina Anisimova review essays

Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture; Volume II: Forms and Themes 193 John Burt Foster, Jr. Michael D. Garval, “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture 199 Marie-Pierre Le Hir reviews

Philip Cranston, Tones/Countertones: English Translations, Adaptations, Imitations and Transformations of Short Poetic Texts from the Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and German 206 Mary Ann Frese Witt Alain Montandon, Le Baiser des Lumières Alain Montandon, Le Baiser: Le corps au bord des lèvres 208 anca Sprenger Zahi Zalloua, Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism 211 David LaGuardia Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns, The Target, Translated and with an essay by Ben Stoltzfus 213 lynn A. Higgins Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, eds.,Crowds 215 Martha Kuhlman Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction 216 Christopher Johnson Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics 219 Paul Fox Gail Pool, Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America 220 Jeffrey R. Di Leo book notes

Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania 225 otilia Baraboi Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form 226 keith Cavedo Colleen Glenney Boggs, Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773–1892 228 leslie Eckel books received 230

The Rutledge Prize 233

Editor’s Column Continuing Traditions and New Beginnings

It is with great pleasure that I assume the editorial responsibilities of The Com- paratist, the official organ of the Southern Comparative Literature Association. I assume the tasks of editor also with a great sense of dedication. This journal is one of a handful of publications devoted to Comparative Literature in the United States. It has a fine tradition of mentoring the work of young scholars in our field. This commitment is highlighted by the yearly publication of the best graduate student paper from the preceding year’s Scla conference. Under the able hands of its past editors, The Comparatist has done much to foster the work of scholars in the initial stages of their careers. I have a personal fondness for this journal since it was here, under the able editorship of John Burt Foster, Jr. that I published my own first articles. Although I then lived and worked in the North, I knew that the Scla and The Comparatist were the places to go if one needed mentoring and feedback on one’s fledgling steps in the profession. It was my experience with the Scla and The Comparatist that has so endeared me to this organization and this journal. I hope to continue this editorial dedication to helping and mentoring young scholars during my tenure as editor. The Comparatist, however, is also a journal that senior scholars hold in esteem and seek as a congenial site for their work. I am committed to upholding the custom of publishing senior contributions alongside the work of junior colleagues. With the encouragement of the Board of the Southern Comparative Literature Association, I plan in the coming issues to dedicate space in each volume to innovative clusters of articles. These clusters will in no way replace the open submission content of the journal which has, I am happy to say, increased exponentially in recent years. These cluster groupings will take various forms. In this issue, for example, I have included a forum sponsored by the International Comparative Lit- erature Association last year at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Puebla, Mexico (April 19–24, 2007) where a number of representative scholars from the United States, Europe, and Asia gathered to discuss the field of Comparative Literature in their respective countries. Although our discipline is presumably global in scope, we can be as provincial as any national language and literature group. It was for this reason that I organized this forum at the American national association’s meeting with the goal of facilitating discussion concerning what was happening in our discipline internationally. I introduced the forum in

1 my then capacity as President pro tempore of the International Comparative Lit- erature Association. Taking off my sober top-hat of Editor and putting on the more comfortable cloche of cynic and polemicist, I reproduce this introduction here to present this collection. Eugene Eoyang offers his thoughts on the state of Compara- tive Literature in Hong Kong. Hans Bertens discusses how recent developments in European university reform have impacted on the discipline in The Netherlands. Ross Shideler discusses the health of the field, as it is currently configured in the United States and Steven Sondrup outlines the role the international association plays in the discipline. Chon Young-Ae gives a brief analysis of the past and future of Comparative Literature in Korea. Inaga Shigemi offers a history of Japanese encounters with the West as a point of departure for his discussion of how Com- parative Literature might develop in the future. An expanded version of Professor Inaga’s comments in Puebla is presented in these pages and they provide an ideal bridge to the next grouping of articles appearing in this issue. At the acla Conference of 2004 a panel was devoted to the topic of collecting. Several papers from this panel have been expanded and appear herein. Kelly Austin argues that Neruda, a material collector of shells and a metaphorical collector of Walt Whitman, recast the American poet as a character in the narrative of the Latin American and, specifically, Chilean, attainment of a classless society—as a communist supporter of the pueblo. Linda M. Steer sheds light on how Western photography and surrealist writing collected the colonized Other to create new identities for the West in the era of colonialism. In the third essay of this cluster, Janet A. Walker analyzes Vincent van Gogh’s act of collecting Japanese woodblock prints and the relation of this collecting to his construction of an image of Japan. This issue is then rounded out with several articles of a more traditional comparative nature. Laura Sager Eidt investigates the role of Borges as a mediator between Spanish and German literary traditions. She shows how Borges’s translations transform German Expressionist poetry and impact upon subsequent Spanish reception of Expressionism. Benjamin Boysen looks at the character of Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses as offering a message of love and non-violence. He brings to this investigation expertise in ancient and medieval literature. In particular, he shows the relevance of a thinker such as Augustine and casts new light on Joyce’s anti- nationalism, pacifism, and socialism. Ahmed Farouk Elbeshlawy looks at the image of America as a stereotype and a symbol in the French and Chinese imaginaire as well as through a reading of Kafka’s Amerika. Finally, this issue concludes with an expansion of the Rutledge Prize essay. Irina Anisimova investigates the point of intersection in Russian and African-American literary representations of the folk as a site of racial authenticity. As this volume attests, The Comparatist fills an important niche. It provides a venue for varied scholarly contributions from all over the world. The Editorial

The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Board vetted some forty-odd submissions last year! Unlike Europe, Asia, and South America, the United States has a dearth of small scholarly presses. I foresee this journal being able to publish what elsewhere would appear in such presses. In the coming years, I also hope to dedicate clusters of articles, mini-Festschriften, dedicated to the work of senior scholars, soldiers in our field, who have contributed in their scholarship and as citizens in the discipline, to the contours of Comparative Literature in America. We are a regional journal with a national and international readership, perspective, and mandate. I am fortunate to be able to build on the hard work of my predecessors in this job, most recently Mary Ann Frese Witt. I am ably assisted by Edward Donald Kennedy, the Associate Editor; Roxana Verona, the most able Review Editor; and Jenny Webb of Webb Editorial Services, my editorial assistant and Managing Editor. I am grateful to the Dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, and the University of Georgia Willson Center for Humanities and Arts for supporting my work as editor. I am grateful to the production team at the University of North Carolina Press, notably Kim Bryant and Michelle Coppedge, for facilitating my transition into this post. The Comparatist has been a great academic journal for many years. I hope to uphold its standards of excellence.

Dorothy M. Figueira u University of Georgia

Editor’s Column Dorothy M. Figueira Comparative Literature Where We Started and What We Have Become

I would first like to thank the conference organizers and Kathy Komar for allowing me and my icla colleagues to address you today. Many of you may be unaware that it was the acla that contributed to the establishment of the icla some fifty years ago. We in the International Association owe much to our American colleagues. It was, therefore, a great honor to convene this forum at your annual meeting. I would like to preface this discussion with some anecdotal background thoughts on the state of the discipline of Comparative Literature before I turn the podium over to my colleagues who have come to discuss with you the state of Comparative Litera- ture in their respective countries. I came to the study of Comparative Literature very late in my student career, after considerable graduate work in theology and classical religions. I was able to segue into a new discipline because I had good linguistic training as an historian of religions. These were the days when one studied languages by studying literature (there was no Rassias method, there was no brutal immersion process). As soon as the rudiments of a language were learned, one began to read the literature. More advanced language courses often consisted of survey literature classes. So, in the process of training to read classical languages and secondary European scholarship in the history of religions, I simultaneously received rudimentary training in ancient and modern literatures. I could, therefore, easily make the transition from the study of comparative religions to Comparative Literature. Most importantly, however, my training in the history of religions acquainted me with the philosophical, psychological, and anthropological source material necessary for understanding the background of much of structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory. This point is crucial, because my broad background equipped me precisely with the tools that would be necessary for me to understand much of what was happening in literary theory. Early in my teaching career, some time in the late ’80s, I realized how my own scholarly formation differed from that of my students who were merely a few years behind me in their studies. I was then teaching in a Comparative Literature program at a large metropolitan state research institution in the northeast. I remember talking with a senior colleague who succinctly explained to me what I then per-

ceived as the topsy-turvy system operative in certain Comparative Literature programs. Students did not come to graduate work in Comparative Literature with a broad background in three literatures as a point of departure and apply to them one critical method or another. Nor did we find any longer in Comparative Literature departments students such as myself who saw in the discipline an avenue for interdisciplinary work (the old model of Comparative Literature as the place where one could study “literature and . . .” as in the model of Indiana’s “literature and music” emphasis or, in my case, “literature and religion”). Entities such as humanities insti- tutes had taken over the function of interdisciplinary studies on many campuses, often without requiring their students to develop the linguistic, theoretical, or historical skills necessary to engage in truly interdisciplinary studies. From the late ’80s onward, this trend has continued. Students read the theory of the moment. They then read the literature cited in the theory. In the era of deconstruction, this method led to a discrete and limited canon. I still have memories of the virtual cottage industry that then existed in deconstructive readings of Lao Tzu, Mallarmé, and Rilke. The result was that the students would be fully versed in “their” theory (often without any understanding of its precursors—Derrida without Husserl or Heidegger) and know only the literature that lent itself to the theoretical method they had adopted. In the case of postcolonial theory, the handful of seminal theoretical articles became the literature itself. In many graduate programs in the US today, we have not advanced much beyond this theory-centered model of literary studies. The result is that many advanced students of literature do not actually know much literature at all. They are quite familiar with various critical trends and exceptionally skilled at employing the corresponding theoretical jargon and style. They then apply their chosen theory to the standard texts that it custom- arily fits. This methodology makes for a certain dogmatism and has created rigid doxologies—those very things that were absent from the field of Comparative Lit- erature, when I first began and which drew me to the discipline in the first place. Close readings of texts, the mainstay of New Criticism, have become replaced by close readings of theory. The texts themselves have been largely eclipsed by the critic’s experience of them. It is no small irony that this strategy wonderfully suits the market, by providing an economical means for churning out the volume of publications needed to establish oneself in the profession. The days of long archival research are over. The formula of interpreting texts, when one already knows the answers, certainly aids productivity. It has also been well-documented how adept students and scholars have become in their attempts to catch and ride an incoming critical wave. In this context, I must digress for a moment and tell you of a recent incident I witnessed at an organizational meeting of the Fat Studies Association I recently attended during a Popular Culture conference. In addition to participants who identified them-

acla: International Forum selves as Fat Studies scholars and others who called themselves “Fat Activists,” I was surprised to encounter quite a number of young Queer Studies scholars. It became clear that this latter group was there because they could not be sure that their chosen field of expertise would remain in vogue long enough for them to find jobs and get tenure. In other words, they sensed the waning institutional interest in Queer Studies and were positioning themselves for the future and, in a rather colonizing fashion, were proactively morphing themselves into what they perceived as the next field that would share in Queer Studies’s aesthetic of victimhood, namely, Fat Studies. It was a rather sordid affair. Fat Activists and Fat Studies scholars were trying to form a new field of inquiry, establish an association and develop a journal for this new discipline, yet found themselves from the start being co-opted by the previous generation of activist scholars. I felt old. I remember when life had been simpler, two decades ago when a menopausal and misogynist Marxist could morph himself into a male feminist, while still wreaking havoc on the female graduate student population. Those days of seamless retooling were clearly over. You had to think fast these days: chart the field, scope out whether tenure could be won before it fell out of favor, and make the jump to the new hot topic. I bring up this instance of my encounter with Fat Studies neither to denigrate nor mock the scholars who are engaged in this project. It seemed to me, rather, emblematic of a continuing trend in our field. At the Fat Studies panel, I had prepared a paper examining the theme of fat in Sanskrit court poetry and erotic manuals. The members of the audience were astonished that I had sought to engage actual texts. At the time, I remember thinking that we had now reached the culmination of the process I had witnessed at the beginning of my teaching career. We had begun studying literature by absorbing a canon of texts. This canon was, indeed, flawed, not inclusive of minor literatures and minority authors. In response, we felt we were solving this problem by opening up the canon to underrepresented voices. This was, to some degree, a partial gesture. Representative women of color writing in English do not really accurately reflect the world and its disenfranchised. Next, we read the texts that theory cited. Often, the scope of this analysis was monolingual, not truly comparative in any sense of the term. At a certain point in time, the texts became the texts of theory itself. Soon, we were examining less literature and more the theorists’ experience of it. Now, in view of the astonishment that greeted my attempt to engage an emerging field through a comparative reading of original texts, it seems that we are dropping texts completely and instead examining theorists’ own life experiences. My cynicism here is not misplaced and I am certainly not the first to lament how, in the age of unmasking essentialisms, theory has become the greatest of master narratives. Dissident voices regarding the politics and projects of theory abound. As the recent volume Theory’s Empire by Daphne Patai and Will Corral has shown,

The Comparatist 32 : 2008 the critique of theory’s ideological postures and its displacement of literature have a long pedigree and a sustained argument. Even luminaries such as the late Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak mourn the loss of the traditional hermeneutical scholarship that their respective brands of analysis did much to inter. In her recent book, Spivak goes as far as to assume the mantle of a born-again comparatist. It is also true that the imperialism of theory has weighed more heavily on the psyches of comparatists in the States. I firmly believe that my involvement in the icla and its large publishing initiatives has enabled me to relativize theory’s empire and see literature’s subjugation as not reflecting a universal condition. It was through dialogue with international colleagues, whose scholarship is not necessarily dictated by the latest trends emanating from the tri-state area or Palo Alto, that I realized how provincially we as comparatists can envision our field. By communicating with Indian, Japanese, or Korean colleagues, I realized that all comparatists are not wedded to the American theory du jour. In fact, for many, those topics and themes that most animate us here in the States have no currency abroad. Personally, I find it illuminating that colleagues in countries such as Estonia, Turkistan, and Kazakhstan who might experience what we in the West refer to as postcolonial subjectivity, find no interest in colonial discourse analysis because, based as it is on the nineteenth-century Bengali model, it fails to offer them any viable framework for discussion. I am equally fascinated to learn that female colleagues from former Soviet states ignore American and French feminist conceptu- alizations because they are just too reminiscent of the Soviet Marxist mythology of gender equality. We would do well, as comparatists, to realize how insular we may, in fact, be and seek out opportunities to dialogue with our international colleagues. It was for this reason that I sought to organize this forum and discuss how Com- parative Literature is configured outside the US.

u University of Georgia President, pro tempore International Comparative Literature Association

acla: International Forum Eugene Chen Eoyang Comparative Literature in Hong Kong

In reporting on the situation vis-à-vis Comparative Literature in Hong Kong, I need to allude to René Wellek’s 1983 essay, “The Name and Nature of Comparative Literature.” I think it fair to say that the name of “Comparative Literature” is mori- bund if not well-nigh dead in Hong Kong, but the “nature” of Comparative Litera- ture remains as vital and as flourishing as ever. Let me first deal with the name. The Hong Kong Comparative Literature Asso- ciation died in the 1980s. Its last president, Professor P. K. Leung, then a professor in the Comparative Literature program at Hong Kong University, now a Chair Pro- fessor of Comparative Literature at Lingnan University, is an active and productive poet, teacher, and cultural studies scholar, who recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Germany. In Hong Kong, there was (and is) only one Comparative Literature department, and that was (and is) at Hong Kong University—although comparatists were to be found in the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well. In the course of the past twenty-five years, the legacy that was left by such luminaries and stalwarts as Anthony Tatlow (hku, 1965–1996), John Deeney (cuhk, 1977– 1997), Yuan Heh-hsiang (cuhk, 1974–1998), Chou Ying-hsiung (hku, 1979–1985; cuhk, 1985–1994; hku, 1991–1994), and Yu Kwang-chung (cuhk, 1974–1985) has taken many forms and assumed many guises. They have not, however, material- ized in a single Comparative Literature department of distinction, although distinguished comparatists dot the landscape in Hong Kong. The decline of Hong Kong University’s Comparative Literature department stemmed from a combination of moral turpitude, administrative ineptness, and academic pusillanimity. Some individuals were asked to leave; some fled in disgust; some were reassigned. In the interest of discretion, I will detail only those who fledhku ; they include: P. K. Leung, a distinguished poet and scholar; Gregory Lee, a renowned scholar of Chinese modernism, and an expert on the Chinese translations of French poetry by Dai Wangshu; Anne Mette Hjort, formerly of Mc- Gill and Aalborg University in Denmark, who has contributed studies of Danish Cinema as well as a monograph on the Hong Kong director, Stanley Kwan. Given the diminution of Comparative Literature at Hong Kong University over the years, it is perhaps ironic as well as symbolic that the most influential work produced by the Hong Kong University Comparative Literature faculty in the last generation was Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997).

When I first proposed in 1999 that the 17th Congress of the International Com- parative Literature Association be held in Hong Kong, it was assumed that the Hong Kong Comparative Literature Association would play a central role. Alas, despite efforts to revive it in 1999, Lazarus would not rise from the dead, even though, as we shall see, Comparative Literature is alive and well in Hong Kong. The 17th Congress of the icla in 2004 (originally scheduled for 2003, but postponed as a result of the global hysteria about Sars) attracted over 350 participants from over fifty countries, and involved keynote speakers from Taiwan, Beijing, and Tokyo, as well as sixty-nine panels, forty-nine workshops, seven special workshops, and thirty-seven roundtables. Although the name “Comparative Literature” has fallen on hard times in Hong Kong, the nature of Comparative Literature—in its cross-cultural dimensions, in its preoccupation with both “high” and “low” culture, in its interest in studies across media, both verbal and visual—more than survives. Even if Comparative Literature departments are not to be found in Hong Kong, Comparative Literature courses are staples in English, Chinese, and translation departments. At Lingnan Univer- sity, where I teach, Comparative Literature courses are offered in the Chinese and English departments, as well as in the new visual studies program. It could be said that all the courses in the translation department are, indeed, Comparative Litera- ture courses (indeed, many of the instructors have been trained in Comparative Literature), if one believes, as I do, that, contrary to the outlandish claims of a Susan Bassnett-McGuire, translation studies is a subset of Comparative Literature—and not the other way around. At Lingnan University, the Center for Humanities Research is doing vital work on Hong Kong literature and cinema, producing articles and compiling unmatched archives of print and film materials. For example, the most recent issue of theJour - nal of Modern Literature in Chinese is devoted to the films of the iconic Hong Kong director, King Hu. The Center also organized a symposium in the fall of 2005 on East Asian literature attended by scholars from China, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Earlier this month, chr hosted an alibi Workshop on Hong Kong and French Literature (alibi stands for Atelier Littéraire Bipolaire and was initiated by the French Sinologist, Professor Annie Curien, to promote Sino-French literary exchanges). Among the Comparative Literature luminaries in Hong Kong this past decade have been the following:

Joseph Lau, who has been writing articles in the local Chinese newspapers, and is now well-known in Chinese as a feuilletonist of some distinction who appears regularly in the Chinese newspapers, especially in Ming Pao and the Hong Kong Economic Journal. In 2000, with John Minford, Joseph Lau published Classical

acla: International Forum Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations, Volume I: From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty (which appeared under the joint imprint of Columbia University Press and the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong).

Zhang Longxi left uc-Riverside in 1998 and took up the position of Chair Pro- fessor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, which publishes Ex/Change, a journal which features comparative studies involving China and other cultures. Since he arrived in Hong Kong in 1997, Zhang published Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (1999); Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Litera- ture East and West (2005); and Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures (2007).

When he first came to Hong Kong in the 1990s, Leo Lee taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; since 2004 has been teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies. He recently offered an entire course focused on the work of Edward Said, the comparatist who is, of course, the father of post-colonial studies. Lee has also promoted the study of contemporary Chinese film, and has become a regular music critic for the Hong Kong Economic Journal. He, too, has established a flourishing career publishing memoirs and essays in Chinese often involving topics in Comparative Literature and comparative culture.

William Tay moved to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from the University of California in 1990 and is active in critical theory, cultural criticsm, film studies, and twentieth-century literature in Chinese. He published 《電影類型與類型電影》 Film Genres and Genre Films (2004), 《縱目傳聲》 Distant Views, Echoing Voices, and 《小說地圖》 A Map of Fiction (2003)—all in Chinese.

I might close with a brief account of my own activities since arriving in Hong Kong in 1996 to teach at Lingnan University. Appointed Chair Professor of En- glish, I spent the first two years helping the English department evolve from a service department teaching English composition and conversation to a full-fledged disciplinary department offering a b.a., an m.a. in contemporary English studies, and most recently, a b.a. in contemporary English and education. Since 2000, I have also served as Director of General Education, trying to extrapolate the same principles of intellectual synergy in Comparative Literature to a broad liberal arts curriculum. As a comparatist I have been active, publishing “Borrowed Plumage”: Polemical Essays on Translation in 2003 and organizing the icla Congress in 2004. For some years, I have taught a course comparing Western literature with Chinese

10 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 classical literature, and recently, I developed a course on the comparative study of film, in which I contrast Asian and Western, chiefly American, films in terms of specific themes: for example, the loner (Yojimbo and High Noon); old age (Tokyo Story and On Golden Pond); companionship (The Road Home and When Harry Met Sally); illicit love (Springtime in a Small Town and Love in the Afternoon); and cross-dressing (Farewell My Concubine and Some Like It Hot). My new book, Two- Way Mirrors: Cross-Cultural Studies in Glocalization was published in 2007. Although it lies strictly outside my charge of reporting on Comparative Litera- ture in Hong Kong, it would not be amiss if I added a word about Comparative Lit- erature in Macau, the former Portuguese colony that was repatriated in 1999, and which has become, in a very short time, the most profitable gambling venue in the world, outstripping even Las Vegas. The Matteo Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History was founded in 1999 just after Macau was returned to China, and publishes Chinese Cross-Currents in Chinese and English four times a year, under the able editorship of Eric Sautedé. Many of the Chinese Cross-Currents are literary: indeed, a forthcoming issue will include my piece, “Cuentos Chinos: The New Chi- noiserie” in both English and Chinese.

u Lingnan University

acla: International Forum 11 Hans Bertens Literary Studies in The Netherlands

Comparative literature in The Netherlands has been strongly affected by the so- called “Bologna” agreement, the outcome of a 1999 summit on higher education during which the member states of the European Union, joined by a substantial number of non-eu nations, some of which have since joined the Union, agreed to create one single—and transparent—model for European higher education by the year 2010. The model that the ministers of education who met in Bologna agreed on is essentially the Anglo-American Bachelor-Master model, with the Bachelor phase taking either three years (in traditional universities) or four years (in professional schools and other institutions of tertiary education that prior to Bologna were not allowed to call themselves universities), and the Master phase taking either one or two years, depending on the generosity of the minister of education in question. It is worth pointing out, by the way, that such generosity is always extended to the sciences, but not always to arts and humanities programs. In any case, the enormously diverse and heterogeneous landscape of European higher education has in the new millennium been replaced, or is in the process of being replaced, by a far more homogeneous academic horizon. That landscape, however, has not been completely effaced. In fact, virtually every participant in this wholesale restructuring has succeeded in creating special features that are as baffling as the original diversity they sought to supplant—in The Netherlands, for instance, Masters programs in literary studies come in three varieties: one year, one-and-a-half year, and two years. There is no denying that things have considerably improved with regard to important issues such as the exchange of students—the agreement also included one uniform credit system (ects—European Credit Transfer System—for which the French surely have a different acronym)—and the reciprocal acceptance of degrees. In The Netherlands the restructuring of all programs that was necessitated by the introduction of the Bachelor-Master model made it possible to tackle a problem that had begun to manifest itself in the early 1990s: the ever decreasing interest in language programs and, within those programs, the decreasing interest in literary studies. To give one example: in The Netherlands new majors in German language and literature programs, which are offered by six universities, totaled around 120 in 1991. In 2001 the number of new majors was less than 30, with one program reduced to only two new majors, one of whom out of sheer frustration transferred

12 to another university. (This has all the appearance of a tall story, but its source is the student in question himself, who was interviewed by a student newspaper.) All modern languages, including Dutch, were hit by what can only be called an en- rollment disaster and were all forced to downsize through the 1990s and the early 2000s. Since keeping small programs afloat is a costly business, the restructuring that had to take place anyway led in a good many institutions to greater cooperation among the various language programs. Here, perhaps, I should point out that prac- tically all Dutch academics have a reasonable or even good command of English, German, and French, which makes such cooperation easier. Moreover, Compara- tive Literature now holds a far more prominent position, both in the undergraduate and at the graduate level. As a matter of fact, all so-called Master of Philology programs in literature, programs leading to a research rather than a teaching degree, have de facto, if not necessarily de iure, become comparative literature programs, usually called literary studies programs in order not to offend anyone. Thanks to wholly external circumstances, comparative literature is doing a brisk business in The Netherlands. What is that business like? Well, diverse. Although Comparative Literature was never affected as strongly by the poststructuralization of literary studies, as were foreign language programs and remained both fairly traditional and focused on literature, Comparative Literature in The Netherlands certainly did absorb some of poststructuralism’s interests, especially those interests that fitted a comparatist agenda. To offer a prominent example, given the Dutch colonial past—in 1945 The Netherlands still was the third colonial power, after the U.K. and France—postcolonial studies became a focus of inquiry. Scholars from the Departments of English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian—this is the situation in my home university—collaborated with their Comparative Literature colleagues to create a thriving research program. Other interests that naturally became prominent under the new circumstances were translation studies and literary—and cultural—border crossings in general. A third area, and one which has grown spectacularly in recent years, is that of cultural memory studies. Given the overlapping histories of many European nations—if only through wars fought with or against each other—the study of the ways in which national literatures have kept certain memories alive— often vastly different in neighboring countries—is a perfect target for collaboration between Comparative Literature scholars and their colleagues in the various modern languages. Finally, studies in texts and mediality have boomed. Which brings me to a perhaps less welcome development. Mediality and cultural memory easily branch out in the direction of media studies, cultural studies, cultural history, and related

acla: International Forum 13 fields. There is, in fact, a strong tendency to see literary studies as a subfield within a much larger field that studies culture as such, including the ways that culture is transmitted, preserved, internalized, and so on. If there is a drawback, then, to what at first sight should inspire unmitigated bliss, it is that literature itself may well leave center stage—which is of course what, to a certain degree, has already happened in the world of literary studies outside the Comparative Literature fold.

u Utrecht University

14 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Ross Shideler Where Are We Going and Who Will We Teach? Conjectures about Comparative Literature and the Humanities1

This paper offers a dark and light macro and micro vision of graduate education in the Humanities in the United States with some anecdotal evidence specific to Comparative Literature. I’ll intersperse my comments with some data and conclude with a few comments about the future of Comparative Literature. As Haun Saussy has so eloquently argued, “Comparative Literature has won its battles. It has never been better received in the American university” (3). But where is the Ameri- can university going? As an amateur in the field of higher education studies, let me propose a few answers. First, Comparative Literature in the U.S. seems to be thriving. The membership of the acla has doubled from approximately 600 to 1200 in the past two years. There are about 175 Comparative Literature programs and departments in the U.S. according to the September 2006 pmla. Not all of these, however, are in the Carne- gie Foundation’s 96 Very High Research Universities, nor in the 103 High Research Universities and 84 Basic Doctoral Research Universities (see Carnegiefoundation. org or The Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac Issue 2006–07). Indeed, the Na- tional Research Council survey that is currently underway has just announced that there are forty-seven Comparative Literature programs in their doctoral survey. This compares reasonably to other doctoral programs in the Humanities: for instance, forty-three in French and Francophone, thirty-three in Germanic languages, sixty-two in Spanish and Portuguese, and one hundred twenty-five in English departments (Council of Graduate Schools Communicator). Given these numbers, Comparative Literature is doing quite well. However, the Humanities in general are struggling, partially because we in the profession are not doing as effective a job as we could in teaching our students when they are seeking academic employment to look beyond a narrow selection of Very High Research Universities, nor are we publicizing the value of the education we offer. This conclusion leads me into a somewhat darker discussion. At the Council of Graduate Schools meeting in Washington, D.C. in December 2006, the Comptroller General of the United States, David M. Walker, in a paper titled “America’s Fiscal Future: Implications for Higher Education and Global

15 Competitiveness,” gave a complex and almost terrifying picture of the American economy over the next forty years. In brief, if some major changes are not made in federal expenditures and tax codes in the U.S. in the next few years, America will go bankrupt. Let me note that the Comptroller General wrote and gave this speech before Al Gore’s film and the United Nations report on global warming. But apart from floods and droughts, the effect a national bankruptcy would have on higher education is obvious. If the head of the gao does manage to persuade Congress to balance the budget and not pay a projected 40 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (gdp) in interest on loans (as we will be doing by 2040 if we continue current policies), we still are not out of difficulty. Part of the challenge America faces is that international competition in higher education is becoming much more intense, as I’ll mention in a bit more detail in a few minutes. On the lighter side of the future of education, we also heard another paper at the Council of Graduate Schools conference outlining the 150-year history of higher education and the last sixty years of world-wide mass education. The transition that an ever increasingly educated world population is making and will continue to make is almost miraculous, as many of you know who have seen the abrupt changes in educational systems in places like China and India. Add to this that countries like Australia are developing very fine higher educational systems, and that they are competing intensely for international students, students who formerly would have come to the United States. I could spend additional time here talking about the changes in the European education system as a result of the Bologna Treaty, a treaty that basically outlines a plan to harmonize the higher education system in Europe so that students can transfer with ease back and forth between different European countries and universities. This is making and will continue to make Europe even more competitive with the U.S. for graduate students. The important point, however, is that unless there is a planetary catastrophe caused by global warming, the future of higher education in the world seems assured, though a lot more competitive, and it is going to take some extraordinary new directions. One aspect of the discussions in Washington D.C. last December was the continuing dominance of America in Research Universities, though how long this will continue is difficult to predict. Now if some of you have come to this paper to hear about potential jobs, let me add a comment here. The range of teaching opportunities in the U.S. is extraordinary, but it is crucial to recognize the nature of those opportunities. The Carnegie Foundation lists a total of 283 Basic, High, and Very High Research Universities with doctoral programs in the U.S., and only a few of those have an extensive range of doctoral programs that might include things like a doctorate in Comparative Literature, but the Carnegie Foundation also lists a total of 4,387 associate colleges, colleges, and universities. Given this remarkable number of American schools of

16 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 higher education, there are obviously a lot of colleges that need faculty with PhDs. So my first note to potential job-seekers is: start expanding your vision. Recognize that there are some great jobs in two and four year colleges, even if you don’t get a position in one of those approximately 200 high or very high research universities. A substantial number of Comparative Literature PhDs are hired by language departments, however, so neither the forty-seven doctoral programs or the 175 Com- parative Literature programs should mislead you. There are positions throughout the country. One crucial point is: you do need to be prepared to teach in language departments and that means you have to have not only a very solid knowledge of the language, but genuine depth in the literature and, preferably, teaching experience. Now back to a general perspective on Comparative Literature and Graduate Education. There’s been a lot of writing about the future of doctoral education in the Humanities. The adfl (Association of Departments of Foreign Languages) Bulle- tin regularly publishes articles on languages and graduate education and the ade (Association of Departments of English) Bulletin’s 2005/2006 Fall/Spring issue focused on the Situation of the Humanities and included mla Surveys of Hiring and PhD placement. A recent book edited by Chris Golde and George Walker—Envi- sioning the Future of Doctoral Education—has a chapter on “Rethinking the Ph.D. in English.” Many of these studies emphasize the need for a new perspective on graduate education in the U.S. and what graduate students must be able to do in the future. These warnings imply that there may be a crisis in the Humanities, but scholars were writing similar articles and books about a crisis in education in the 1990s. The current crisis is more or less real, but it cannot be reduced to a single issue or a magic solution. For instance, in 1996–97 in the U.S. 35 percent of English PhDs and 40 percent of Foreign Language PhDs received tenure track positions in their first year out. By comparison, in 2001 42.9 percent of English PhDs and 38.5 percent of Foreign Language PhDs (I believe that Comparative Literature degrees were counted in the Foreign Language category) entered tenure track positions in the year the degree was conferred (103 [ade Bulletin 138–39 (2005–06)]). If you add in PhDs who got full-time non-tenure track positions, the number reaches somewhere between 50–60 percent. How you interpret those figures depends on who and where you are. Is the cup half-empty or half-full if you spend six to eight years to obtain a PhD and have an approximately 50 percent chance of getting a tenure- track position? (I don’t think PhDs in other fields such as social sciences are in a significantly different position, but that is a separate issue.) Part of the sense of crisis relates to the role of Humanities in the modern world. As I am sure you all realize, a lot of money and international interest is focused on the so-called stem fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics),

acla: International Forum 17 because of their obvious importance to national and international development. Additionally, a general questioning of the value of the Humanities has been taking place. Perhaps in response to that kind of doubt, Kwame Anthony Appiah gave an eloquent appeal for the values of a Humanities Graduate Education at the Council of Graduate Schools conference I mentioned above. For him, articulating the value of understanding and retaining our cultural heritage is one of the essential obligations of the Humanities PhD, and literature is one of the primary ways to do that. Without understanding the languages, literatures, and arts of our diverse cultures, we lose our identities, our understanding of the values that have shaped the past, and their intrinsic connection to the present. Thus, he argued for the relevance of the Humanities and for studying foreign languages, even as he stated the need for connecting the aesthetic and the intellectual to the present, for if we do not succeed in keeping these values central to our society, all the stem doctorates in the world may not save us. Part of my goal here today is to reinforce both the need for interdisciplinarity and foreign languages and to suggest how Comparative Literature graduate students and faculty are crucial to that task. Obviously, a fundamental part of modern life is information technology and my guess is that anyone seriously interested in working in education in the future will have to be adept in the it world. Before I say more about that, however, let me give a couple of anecdotes about Comparative Literature. First, there is the dark side: I recently heard a graduate dean of a small but prestigious Eastern university make the statement that Comparative Literature PhDs had the hardest times getting jobs, because nobody knew what they could do. My response to that position is the list of Comparative Literature programs and departments I mentioned above, and the fact that ucla, to take my own university as an example, has succeeded in the last few years in placing several of its PhDs at major universities. In some cases these appointments were in language departments rather than in Comparative Literature departments, but it was clear that part of the reason these students were hired was because they had an in-depth knowledge of a single field and at the same time a range of knowledge far beyond a single literature and period. Their teaching experience in our lower division world literature and composition courses played a part in their placement as well. Let me also mention that the students weren’t all hired in their first year out. I also have to confess that there are some very fine recent Comparative Literature PhDs from my program still looking for jobs. But they and all Humanities PhDs must reach out further into the education mainstream, to public and private high schools, to community and state colleges, as well as to research universities. And it is our duty as academics to expand our students’ vision to recognize the value of teaching in any and all of those institutions.

18 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 David Damrosch has written a lucid essay called “Vectors of Change” as the introduction to Golde and Walker’s Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education, and he offers a number of cautionary words about the inability of tenured faculty to change or to see the need for change in the academic system. Among other things, Damrosch points out the need for more collaborative work between faculty and students. Andrea Abernathy Lundsford, in her essay in that same book, makes a persuasive argument for interdisciplinary collaboration on research projects, up to and including doctoral dissertations. She also argues for team teaching. While I think these are good ideas and some of them might even be put into place if complex issues related to things like teaching assistant unions and faculty workload can be resolved, new technological advances are going to force faculty to work together with students in a wide variety of ways. So what do I think about the future for Comparative Literature graduate students? Haun Saussy’s eloquent introduction to his Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization beautifully argues the success of our discipline, and the contributors to that volume have made persuasive cases for the field itself. Based on my own experience, I can assure you that the range of Comparative Literature is extraordinary and that by itself suggests a healthy discipline. It is also apparent that that range extends from traditional literary period and thematic comparisons and analyses to surprising interdisciplinary projects. So what should Comparative Literature PhDs be doing? First, keep learning languages and cultures (for me they are inseparable) even as you extend your knowledge of other disciplines. Basic knowledge as well as flexibility are key to positions in some of those many colleges and universities listed in the Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac. Graduate Comparative Literature students can, of course, continue with traditional literary studies; it seems likely that for the next decade at least there will continue to be departments and disciplines hiring candidates whose training and dissertations reflect those historic interests. However, given the drastic changes in information technology that are taking place on an almost daily basis, current graduate students should also be trying to keep abreast of that technology. But they also need to focus on teaching. Education is going to change significantly, but good teachers will be even more crucial as universities keep striving to sustain themselves as institutions while developing and profiting from new internet resources and learning tools. Colleges and universities will begin to pay even more attention to teaching, especially to teachers who know how to utilize information technology. The publish-or-perish system is gradually going to have to adjust to the new realities of an on-line intellectual life and the reduction of traditional print resources in its promotion criteria. But while that transition takes place, teaching, creativity, and academic productivity based on the knowledge of languages, literatures, and cul-

acla: International Forum 19 tures will remain crucial. That’s why Comparative Literature graduates will remain valuable and essential.

u University of California, Los Angeles

Notes

1 This paper is based on but by no means identical with one I gave at the Modern Lan- guage Association Conference in Philadelphia in December 2006.

Works Cited

Council of Graduate Schools Communicator Vol. 40.3 (April 2007). Golde, Chris and George Walker, eds. Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline, Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Saussy, Haun. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

20 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Steven P. Sondrup Theicla and Disciplinary Renewal

Narcissism is certainly not regarded as an attractive or desirable personal trait, and in its most extreme clinical form has serious pathological consequences. From its inception and certainly from its establishment in North America as a wide-spread academic discipline, Comparative Literature has occasionally manifested certain narcissistic characteristics or at least a marked tendency to reflect back on itself and its methods of literary research. Although other academic disciplines have certainly taken the opportunity for self-reflection, the tendency in the Comparative Literature community has been, perhaps, more pronounced since it emerged as an acknowledged discipline far more recently than its close academic relatives and has had to fight for intellectual and institutional legitimacy with a notable degree of fervor and energy. Manifestations of this self-reflexivity extend from the legendary debates that pitted what was known as the French model against the American to the now periodic and institutionalized reports on the nature of the discipline. Although all comparatists from sometime early in their career on have had to contend with the awkwardness of their discipline’s name and with the adjectival inflection of literature that has long been recognized as not adequately describing either the nature or the distinguishing features of the discipline, the name has per- sisted. In spite of its inadequacies, the term comparative adduces a method that is by no means unique to the discipline and yet is one that designates a procedure that is particularly important to it and emphasizes one of the important roles that juxtaposition of various models, concepts, and practices typically plays. Since its founding in the early 1950s and its first congress in Venice in 1955, the diversity that the International Comparative Literature Association embodies has been far more characteristic of the essence of Comparative Literature than any imagined yet superficial unitary system that some observers have supposed that it managed to impose. Having been brought to life by a European contingent of scholars who typically had broader linguistic competence than most of their North American counterparts and a cadre of North Americans consisting auspiciously of native-born scholars as well as a significant proportion of richly polylingual and multicultural east European, war-time émigrés, the icla was in an excellent position to begin the very modest comparative contextualization of literary works. As has often been observed, this new endeavor at contextualization involved instances of the methodological debate that was being pursued in other quarters involving

21 on the one hand the examination of literary works with works from related discursive systems (e.g. music, the visual arts, anthropology, sociology, etc.) and on the other the comparison of works from different linguistic traditions that would have, due to the contrasting languages, escaped the whole-hearted examination of colleagues from national traditions. Even though a few voices were raised in protest that the comparisons were not very far-reaching or as revealing as the methodology would theoretically allow because those items being brought forward for comparison were not very different to begin with: both typically descended from the traditions of Aristotlean poetics and European Latinity, had places of origin that were only separated by a few hundred miles and highly porous borders, and were manifestations of the same literary- critical discursive practices. To compare what was from a very broadly international perspective only minimally different did not as many would understandably anticipate yield particularly arresting insights. This eurocentrism of the efforts of the early comparatists has often been noted and in some cases lamented, and it is clear that these narrow perspectives were institutionalalized in national and regional associations as well as in the organization and the programs of the icla. Although the icla called itself international, it merited that designation during the early years of its life to only a limited extent. In more recent years, however, it has made a concerted effort to assist with the organization of national and regional associations in parts of the world where they heretofore have been unknown and has then drawn them into the organizational structure and full activity of the As- sociation. Among the earliest and most successful efforts along these lines were those in east Asia where Comparative Literature had been a recognized academic discipline as long as it had been in the West. Large associations in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and India now are integral parts of the icla, have hosted triennial conferences or meetings of the executive council, and are the principal focus of the research of some of the icla committees. A history of east Asian literature is being prepared under the aegis of the icla as a parallel to the series of volumes that make up the Comparative History of Literature in European Languages, and yet another series devoted to the comparative history of literary cultures of south central Asia is under discussion. Former Soviet republics and the nations emerging from the break up of the former Yugoslavia have also provided another important influx of national and regional associations. Recently associations in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Bulgaria, Slo- venia, Croatia, and Macedonia have joined those in Estonia and Poland, which have longer histories of involvement with the community of comparatists at large, and have formally affiliated with the icla. The reports of their conferences and sym- posia attest to both similar lines of comparative study they are pursuing as well as different emphases and focal points that may well serve to stimulate the thinking

22 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 of comparatists internationally. Discussions in Latvia and Lithuania as well as other parts of eastern Europe about forming organizations with a view to affiliating with the icla are also underway. Although the icla is pleased with the expansion of involvement that the affiliations of these new areas represent, regions remain where considerable work is yet to be accomplished. The Arab-Islamic world, as well as Africa in general, are regions that are seriously underrepresented. Although discussions about formal organization are taking place in a number of areas, officially established associations allied with the icla are found only in Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, and South Africa. Both Morocco and South Africa have hosted meetings, and South Africa, notably, sponsored the triennial congress of the entire Association in 2000. An icla research committee on the history and aesthetics of the African novel in both the colonial as well as indigenous languages is moreover hosted by the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Latin America is another area in which some expansion of the presence of the icla has been seen but in which more remains to be done. Small but vibrant associations are found in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay with preliminary discussions underway in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela. This catalogue of countries affiliated with the icla and enhancing its diversity and intellectual range, however, is just a point of departure in effecting the transformation of the discipline of Comparative Literature from a predominantly euro- centric organization given to the comparative analysis of works and traditions that are from the beginning closely related. With the extension of the peripheries of the discipline, there is all the more reason for comparatists to meet face to face to exchange and build upon one another’s experiences and emerging methods. As communication has become more rapid and the world—thanks to political changes— has become more open and amenable to personal contact across national borders, one of the principal functions of the icla is to bring scholars together in ways that allow for contact that not only invites sharing new methods of pursuing the discipline, but also requires that old and time-honored frameworks, guidelines, and methodologies be at the very least reconsidered but more probably reconceptual- ized in order to accommodate the expansion and far-reaching changes of the literary landscape. In this regard, Comparative Literature’s penchant for self-reflexivity is particularly advantageous. Among the insights that this meeting of minds represented by this panel of scholars from across the globe will elicit is that the discipline must be prepared to accept far greater demands on our preparation and our expertise. The list of the more extensive requirements that must be considered is long and generally well known. It is clear that a mastery or at least acquaintance with a wider range of languages will be necessary. We can no longer be content to conceive of Greek

acla: International Forum 23 and Latin as the classical languages, but we must be prepared to include Sanskrit and the classical forms of Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese among others; the once standard constellation of English, French, German, and Italian or Spanish will need to be augmented by the likes of Mandarin, Bengali, Farsi, Swahili, or Tupí-Guaraní. We must be prepared to acknowledge that the most productive comparative juxtapositions we can investigate are not those that have a relatively conspicuous genetic link, but rather those whose mutually illuminating facets are far from initially obvious and require more seasoned imagination and carefully honed intelligence to uncover. The challenge, however, is not just intellectual. In times when competition for available funding is fierce and the disparity of available resources in one part of the world as opposed to another is particularly marked, the need to make the case for the discipline and find a way of at least beginning to level glaring inequities is particularly pronounced. A general goal of the icla and a specific aspiration of the organization of this panel is to take some small steps toward understanding the breadth of our discipline as it is practiced in the various parts of the world here represented to the end that our thinking about the ever-expanding field of literary culture can remain apace of the rapid changes in society in general. If we abandon opportunities for self-examination in the broad context of varying perceptions arising in diverse cultures, we risk seriously diminishing the vibrancy and relevance of our discipline.

u Brigham Young University

24 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 CHON Young-Ae On Comparative Literature in Korea

Regarding Comparative Literature in Korea, it would be best to say that it’s still growing and gradually moving away from its dependence on foreign influence. The origin of Comparative Literature in Korea may be found in the reception of world literature—the majority of which was Western literature—in the fifties and sixties. World literature served to fill the cultural vacuum following the colonial period and the Korean War. At that time, two publishing houses created series of world classics, which consisted of more than a hundred works from the traditional world literary canon. The concept of Comparative Literature was introduced in the 1950s as a natural development of the increased availability of world (Western) literature. Let me attempt to contextualize this process: Koreans take great pride in over 5,000 years of history and tradition. But they have also experienced a short painful tabula rasa through the rupture of tradition during the colonial and war periods. After the war, Korea grew rapidly in terms of economic development. Korean scholars endeavored to fill the spiritual vacuum left by its rapid economic growth. This movement sometimes brought about a hasty reception of Western culture. The Korean Comparative Literature Association k( cla), founded in 1959, currently has about 500 members. The association consists of scholars from diverse disciplines of national and foreign literature. Scholars of Korean, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese literature all participate in the association. Comparative literature is practiced mainly by scholars who bring their expertise in national literatures to bear on their interest in Comparative Studies. Recently, there are more formally trained comparatists, many of whom studied Comparative Literature in Europe and in the United States. The annual conferences of the kcla take place twice a year, providing an opportunity for scholars from all over Korea to meet. Thek cla also produces a journal that is published three times a year. Its articles cover a wide variety of topics, including comparisons of national and foreign literary works, research on translated works, and comparisons between literary works and other art forms. Currently, ap- plications of the new theoretical methods to Korean literary works are particularly popular. The journal also provides a forum for gender and postcolonial studies. A few titles from the latest volumes, 39 and 40 (2006), demonstrate the breadth and depth of Korean Comparative Literature.

25 The Open Motifs in Lyric: A Comparative Study of Sowol’s “Ummaya Nunaya” and Goethe’s “Wanderers Nachtlied” A Study on the Translations of Old Korean Poems—With a Special reference to The Grass Roof of Younghill Kang The Formation of National Identity in the Film “Welcome to Dongmakgol” The Postmodern Rhetoric in the Pre-1900 Korean Tales and Folklores (The Postmodern Rhetoric in Choonhyangjeon) A Comparative Study on Diderot’s and Zeami’s Acting Theory from a Decon- structionist Perspective The Comparative Study on Extramarital Affairs in the Works of Korean and Chinese Female Writers

In short, Comparative Literature in Korea is interdisciplinary. It also serves as a crucial medium for enriching our own literary tradition. As a discipline at Korean universities, Comparative Literature has yet to be strongly established at an institutional level. On the undergraduate level, it exists in the form of comparative area studies, which mainly focus on East Asian culture. Currently there are five Comparative Literature graduate programs. These programs are sustained through interdisciplinary cooperation, as in the case of my own institution, Seoul National University. My colleagues and I in the German department, for example, offer the students the opportunity for research abroad. We are engaged along with our students of Comparative Literature in a very good partnership with the Comparative Literature Institute of the University of Munich. We regularly exchange students and colleagues for cooperative research, financially supported by the daad. Korea is in the process of opening itself energetically, perhaps even more than other countries, to the world. Korean scholarship in Comparative Literature can only benefit from this increased openness.

u Seoul National University

26 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 INAGA Shigemi Japanese Encounters with Latin America and Iberian Catholicism (1549–1973) Some Thoughts on Language, Imperialism, Identity Formation, and Comparative Research

Prologue

Almost one century after Cortes had conquered Nuova Espana in 1519, the Japa- nese delegation on board the San Juan Baptista docked in Acapulco on January 28, 1614. Consisting of more than 100 Japanese members, this delegation was lead by Hasekura Rokuzaemon Tsunenaga (1571–1622), a vassal of the Lord Date Masamune (1567–1636). The ship had set sail on October 28, 1613 from the port of Tsukinoura and took nearly three months to cross the Pacific Ocean. On board was Luis Sotelo (1574–1624), a Franciscan priest from Seville, who had accompanied the delegation. Upon his return to Europe, Sotelo dictated his experiences to an Italian archivist, Scipione Amati, who compiled the document Historia del Regno de Voxu in 1615.1 In this history, Luis Sotelo triumphantly reported that seventy-eight Japanese were baptized in Mexico City, although the extant church records, as noted by Van C. Gessel,2 make no mention of such event. It was also reported that a group of twenty or so Japanese sailed from Veracruz on June 10, 1614. One may presume that they passed Puebla in 1614 on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. They were probably the first Japanese countrymen to make the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. On November 3, 1614 they met Pope Paul V, but this audience produced little in terms of concrete results. The Tokugawa Shogunate, founded by Ieyasu (1543–1616), had expelled the Christians in 1613, the year of Hasekura’s departure. So, while the delegation was abroad, its goals had already been abandoned in Japan. On his way home, Hasekura received orders to stay in Manila for several years. It was only in 1620 that the Japanese authorities allowed him to return home. When Hasekura died two years later in 1622, his diary was confiscated and destroyed. The loss of this first-hand document makes it difficult to reconstruct this initial Japanese encounter with the new world. It was also in 1622 that Luis Sotelo disguised himself and made his way back to Japan. The priest was arrested and executed. His martyr- dom took place on August 25, 1624. This diplomatic mission fascinated Endō Shusaku (1923–1996), the Japanese

27 Catholic writer, and it became the inspiration for his novel The Samurai (1980; translated into English by Van C. Gessel in 1982).3 The narrator of the novel, Velasco, is faithfully modeled after Luis Sotelo. In this book, Endō examines his own faith while, at the same time, his psyche while analyzing the mental and spiritual suffering of the Japanese people as a whole. Endō asks: why did all those who were involved in the mission have to suffer for the sake of Christianity? Was their suffering redeemed? Indeed, the writer’s life-long concern was with human suffering and, in particular, the passion of Christ. Recent studies in comparative literature have re-examined Endō’s novels from the post-colonial perspective. In this paper, I would like to briefly discuss three issues that are relevant to the historical and cross-cultural range of Endō’s literary creation and place them within the larger context of our discipline.4

Christian encounters with Japan challenged the notion of universality. Firstly, Euro- pean exposure to the Japanese language raised fundamental questions concerning how to incorporate it into the pre-existing system of knowledge. It is well known that Saint Francois Xavier’s (1506–1552) letters from Japan led Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) to believe that Japan was the Kingdom of Prester John. Postel believed that the Japanese language offered the key to solving the Christian mystery.5 Half a century later, in 1606, the Jesuit Joan Rodriguez (1561?–1639), a famous inter- preter who was based in Japan, compiled and published Arte da lingoa de Iapam in Nagasaki. The book was the first grammar of Japanese ever written in a European language. Its description of Japanese grammatical structure was groundbreaking. Rodriguez regarded the particles of the Japanese language (the so-called te-ni-wo- ha) as equivalent to the inflections in European languages. Following the standard model of Luiz Alvarez’s Latin grammar, Rodriguez then tried to put the particles into the form of the declension or conjugation tables of European languages. In the process, however, the Jesuit was faced with the challenge of comparing the in- comparable and forced to abandon his effort. Rodriguez’s task was to invent a new grammatical category that deviated from the Latin model so as to recognize the particles as a particular function of the native language.6 The shift in his methodology dramatically demonstrates the emblematic failure of an attempt to absorb Otherness by reducing it to familiar classificatory categories. It also testifies to the moment when the putatively universal applicability of Latin grammar revealed its limit. Thelingua franca had to acknowledge an incompatible grammatical system. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that Rodriguez’s edition was rediscovered. The appearance certainly contributed to the reconstruction of phonetics and semantics of the Japanese language as they were conceived in the

28 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 early seventeenth century, as Suzuki Tae has shown. However, the importance of the Rodriguez grammar does not end there. It is true that the newly discovered foreign language was annexed to the Western territory of knowledge. But, like a Trojan horse, it began to challenge the monolithic foundations of the Western epistemological paradigm and invalidated, at least in part, the norm of the Western science of language. This incident may be counted among the problematic paradigm splits (if not shifts) in human intellectual and linguistic history. Western superiority as the conquering/colonizing power was seriously put into question, at least on a symbolic level, by the indigestible gift (in the sense of Derridianpharmacon ) offered by the indigenous people, who were destined to-be-conquered/colonized.

We must also take into account the spiritual dimension involved in this cultural confrontation. In her recent doctoral dissertation, Orii Yoshimi has studied Luis de Granada’s (1504–1588) impact on Japan.7 Very early on, some of Luis de Granada’s writings, including Contemptus mundi (1536) were well-received in Japan. Guia de pecadores (in Spanish), for example was translated as Guia do Pecador (singular in Portuguese) and published in movable wooden types in 1599. Previous studies of early Christian translations were mainly limited to the fields of lexicology, historical-linguistics, Christian bibliography, and missionary studies. The general lack of interest in these cross-cultural literary encounters stems from the false as- sumption that these translations had only limited impact on Japanese society, as Christianity was forbidden shortly after their publication. Indeed, within one century after Francis Xavier’s arrival to the archipelago in 1549, Christianity in Japan was obliterated by violent persecution. According to Orii’s hypothesis, however, the inter-religious dialogue that was initiated by these translations had a significant afterlife. Let us examine one instance of this cross-cultural encounter. Orii demonstrates how the influential Sect of Pure Land, Jōdo-shinshū, initially placed secondary significance on the notion of retribution and salvation. It was not until the restoration movement initiated by Renyo (1415–1499), the eighth abbot of the Honganji temple during the Ōnin civil war, that emphasis on Buddhist notions of retribution became prominent. The passage to the Pure Land was promised as recompense for the fulfillment of human ethical obligations. This teaching was widely welcomed by the population and the sect developed its influence in the first half of the sixteenth century. According to Orii, the popularity of the Ikkō Sect served as a convenient seedbed for the reception of Christian ideas of redemption and heavenly salvation, as elaborated in Luis de Granada’s interpretation of ascetismo. It was Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), the visitor-general of the missions, who chose Luis de Granada’s works as convenient textbooks to

acla: International Forum 29 inspire Japanese conversions to Christianity. Valignano is known to have formed a basic strategy for Catholic proselytizing in Japan, commonly known as “adaptation.” He tried to avoid cultural friction by accommodating Christianity to Japa- nese customs. It is not clear if Valignano was conscious of the affinity between these Chris- tian ideas and those of the Rennyo Sect. Still the textual comparison proposed by Dr. Orii shows that crucial vocabularies of the Pure Land Sect were adapted in order to transmit Luis de Grananda’s ideas into Japanese. Instead of exacerbating mutual incompatibility, compromises were sought in order to propagate Christian belief. In this context, two terms deserve special attention. First, the term “hōsha” usually designates the idea of “infinite thanks” that human beings express to the Amitabha Buddha. In the Japanese translation of Christian catechism, however, the same term supports an additional meaning. Human beings express thanks to the grace of God, and God, in return, rewards human beings for their devotion and service. The reci- procity or complementary relation between human efforts at self-salvation (jiriki) and Buddha’s unconditional mercy (tariki) is attuned to the Christian notion of God’s blessing through the notion of “hōsha.” In addition, the notions of human redemption through the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the resulting adoration and praise for Jesus Christ that we exhibit are also crystallized in the same Buddhist term of “hōsha.” This specific term thus “transfigured” by its contact with Chris- tianity, facilitating Japanese access to Christian notions of salvation. Another crucial term is “jinen.” It denotes the opposite of God’s providence in a passage that explains how the universe and its creatures could not have been created by accident, but by divine providence. In this context, the term “jinen” trans- mits the idea of “acaso” (accident, hazard). But at the same time, the same Chinese characters can also be used to designate the idea of the “auto-genetic becoming” of nature. In this case, the term may be pronounced as “shizen.” “Jinen” as accident may not necessarily contradict God’s providence, but “shizen” as the auto-genetic nature of things inevitably contradicts the idea of God’s creation of the universe. The ambiguity of the term “jinen/shizen” in the translation shows the ambivalence of the Japanese, who had difficulty in understanding the notion of God-The-All- Mighty as creator of the universe. This difficulty still exists today, and prevents the majority of the Japanese from converting to Christianity (in sharp contrast to post- World War II Koreans). Needless to say, Endō, as a Japanese writer, struggled with this difficulty throughout his life and work.

III

During the period of Japan’s first exposure to the Iberian West between 1549 and 1639, the Japanese experienced the conflict between universality and particularity.

30 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 More than 300 years later, this same conflict was to be articulated in the most paradoxical way by a self-made scholar in linguistics who lived in the Japanese Bra- zilian immigrant community in the mid-twentieth century. Questions regarding the universality of language and divine providence—two perennial problems come together in the work of Rokurō Kōyama (1886–1976), and lead to a new theory regarding the origin of the Japanese language. A Japanese Brazilian immigrant and amateur scholar, Kōyama launched the audacious hypothesis that Japanese and the seemingly unrelated Amerindian language, Tupi, sprang from a common source. “Ikō,” for example, means “let’s go” both in Japanese and in Tupi. In the Tupi etymology that Kōyama proposes, “ikō” stems from the exclamation one makes upon discovering a much-coveted source of water. Strangely reminiscent of Christian “vidi acquam” (which Endō, if not Kōyama, mentions en passant), this etymology suggests a foundational and “catholic” link in phonetic associations. What looked like a mere coincidence at first sight becomes a conviction that both Japan and Brazil were linguistically connected with each other through a Polynesian language. Here we find an expression of Kōyama’s pan-Pacific vision. Further, Kōyama was convinced that the Tupi language, because of its trait of assigning a single meaning to each sound, can provide us with an etymological key to decipher Japanese vocabulary. One typical case that he offers is that of “Kashiwara,” which is explained as stemming from “koshiara” [the past] in Tupi. “Koshiara” is ety- mologically composed of three Tupi syllables meaning holding (ko), light (shi), and sun (ara). Kōyama sees this term as referencing the Japanese ancestral Sun deity, the Goddess Amaterasu, to which the Kashiwara Shrine is dedicated (though, in fact, the Kashiwara Shrine is a modern invention and was founded only at the end of the nineteenth century). Kōyama also sets up ad hoc rules of phonetic transformation in order to rectify Tupi pronunciation from the putative phonetic corrup- tion caused by Portuguese influences. Through his compilation of a Tupi-Japanese lexicon (1951), etymology (1970), and sound-semantic elucidation (1973), Kōyama provided the necessary documentation to make his case that the Tupi language was, in fact, Ur-Japanese. He thus offered a “paleo-semantic” dimension to the archaeo- logical excavation of the onto-phonetic origin of the Japanese language. Though apparently eccentric, nationalistic, and lacking in sound scholarship, Kōyama’s intellectual endeavour is worthy of our noting. The underlining subconscious motivation of his research is easily understood. The Japanese immigrants represented an ethnic minority that was linguistically isolated and socially alienated from the Portuguese-speaking Brazilian citizens. The establishment of a positive Japanese ethnic identity was sorely needed. The Tupi-Japanese connection that Kōyama claimed to have established allowed the Japanese to find roots in Brazilian soil as legitimate and authentic settlers. It provided them with a relevant founda-

acla: International Forum 31 tional narrative that could justify their presence as legitimate immigrants in Brazil. Indeed, Tupi-Japanese common ancestry, if positively proved, could ethnically connect the Japanese to the Brazilian natives. It could simultaneously rehabilitate the symbolic value of the marginalized vernacular Tupi language and contribute to the consolidation of Japanese settlers’ social recognition and civil status. The hypothesis of a Tupi-Japanese common ancestry represented a narrative. Instead of building a new counter-narrative to subvert the dominant Brazilian social order, this fictional Tupi-Japanese identity allowed Japanese immigrants, at least symbolically, to take part in the Brazilian social hierarchy. For Kōyama, the investigation into Tupi-Japanese language was part of his contribution to tupinology, in particular, and to the building of Brazil, in general, as an ideal human community. It was not in the name of ethnic separation but rather of social integration that Kōyama advocated the Brazilian racial democracy when he wrote: “It seems to me that it is Brazil that is realizing the universal ideal of the equality of human beings because this country does not discriminate against any immigrant from any place in the world.”8 Hosokawa Shūhei, an ethno-musicologist and migrant scholar who stayed in Brazil in his youth and helped rescue Kōyama’s writing from oblivion, remarks: “For Kōyama, it is only when people around the world ‘sense’ the Tupi sound symbolism hidden in all the languages of the world that they will be able to communicate with each other. Like the Tupi of the past, the world will become truly peaceful.” Hosokawa concludes: “Far from being the quirk of a blind recluse or a linguistic absurdity, Kōyama’s Tupi-Japanese-Brazilian world articulates the socio- political, affective, and ideological conditions of the Nikkei (Japanese-Brazilian) community. It is [a] ‘true fantasy’ embedded in the mythico-historical consciousness of a minority group.”9

Epilogue

These three cases of cross-cultural and trans-cultural contact bring me to my conclusion. However, before finishing, let me call your attention to the American Natu- ral History Museum in New York. At the Entrance Hall, dedicated to the memory of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1918), there are a series of huge mural paintings to which visitors no longer pay much attention. On the right side (the North wall) is the panel commemorating the building of the Panama Canal. On the left side (the South wall) is the panel representing the Treaty of Portsmouth, September 5, 1905. In front of the memorial hall, on the Western wall, flanked between the south and north walls, the scenes from Roosevelt’s 1910 exploration in Africa are represented. The biblical legacy, recounting the separation between the Semitic and the Hamitic, is depicted along the top, reminding us of the logic used to justify slavery. Many of the beasts, like African elephants or Nubian Lions that

32 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 the President hunted during his safaris, have been generously donated to the Mu- seum. These trophies were stuffed (i.e. “naturalized” in French) and still welcome the visitors to the Museum even today, almost one hundred years after their “natu- ralization” to the American Museum of Natural History. The painting, commissioned by William Andrew Mackay (1878–1939), summa- rizes the typically American imperialistic world-view at the beginning of the twentieth century. No less than the “game” that Mr. President shot in Africa, the Panama Canal and Portsmouth Treaty were also part of the world “games” of which the President was an active and decisive player. In this representation of memorable incidents in the career of Theodore Roosevelt, Japan and Central America face each other as the entrance gate to Asia and South America, respectively. Both of the gates are put into the framework of the Americo-centric perspective. The juxtaposition of Japan and Central America can hardly be a mere coincidence, judging from the strategic and geo-political worldview at the dawn of the twentieth century. At the height of colonialism, the United States was taking the leading position to become a “master” of the so-called free-world. In the icla Forum within the American Comparative Literature Association, Central America and Japan are summoned side by side in front of North America, more or less in the same manner as was the case in the Roosevelt Memorial Hall. The similarity between the two may account for, to a certain degree, the role of Japanese speakers here at this panel in Pueblo. However, it would hardly be justi- fiable if the power structure depicted in the painting almost ninety years ago were still present here in a duplicated form. Indeed, the mural paintings at the entrance of the American Natural History Museum epitomized the model of the imperial monopoly of knowledge. Each of the three situations that I briefly examined shows a particular case of resistance to universal claims to the hegemony of cultural domination.10 It was through the resistance to, and negotiation with, the globalizing and self-assertively universal value that vernacular cultures contributed to mold and enrich configu- rations of the world histories. My anecdotes must be multiplied by other no less important and crucial experiences, including examples from Meso-American geo- poetical events. Each configuration forms one particular elliptical orbit, an ellipse that is traced in a precarious balance between a universal center and local peripheries. Comparative Studies, which claim to be free from any hegemonic and cen- tripetal world-view, have yet to make fundamental and foundational contributions to these rich and elliptic loci of transpacific human experiences. We are now in the epoch of the internet and websites (even though we do not question who is able to access them). We are now witnessing the Night at the Mu- seum-era. The huge and gigantic archives that have accumulated world knowledge are no longer relevant. The epoch of the museum as the modern hegemonic insti-

acla: International Forum 33 tution is coming to a close. I wonder if the owl of Minerva takes flight in the dusk of the evening; I also wonder if the discipline of Comparative Literature, far from being the “master,” takes the role of “sur-veillance” in the Night at the Museum of Welt Literatur.11

u International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate School for Advanced Studies, Kyoto, Japan

Notes

1 This short text owes its birth to Dorothy Figueira’s paper “Merchants, Missionaries, and Miscegenation,” read at the Department of Comparative Literature at the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo, in 2006. I thank Professor Figueira for putting her text at my disposal. Recently an international symposium was held in Colmar on the subject: Les échanges entre le Japon et l’Europe lors de la diffusion du christianisme au Japon Durant le XVIe et le XVII siècle, Centre européen des études japonaises à Alsace (ceeja), du 16 au 18 mars 2007. 2 See Van C. Gessel’s “Postscript: Fact and Truth in The Samurai” found in the 1982 edition of Gessel’s translation of Endō’s book (see endnote 3). 3 遠藤周作『侍』新潮社、 1980. Shusaku Endō. The Samurai, A Novel. Trans. Van C. Gessel. New York: Harper & Row and Kodansha International, 1982. See pp. 268–72. Professor Tatsushi Narita’s paper, “T.S. Eliot and Shusaku Endō: Transpacific Perspec- tives,” presented at the acla conference in Puebla 2007, was revealing in this aspect. 4 See Kazue Nakamura. “On Hearthen Crosses: Christian Frontiers in the Writings of Agnes Sam, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Edgard Mittelhölzer, Witi Ihimaera, Albert Wendt, E.J. Pratt and Endō Shūsaku.” Hikaku Bungaku Kenkyu [Studies of Compartive Litera- ture] 88 (2006): 4–36. (Original in Japanese.) 5 長谷川光明「ギヨーム．ポステル『世界の驚異』 (1553) 研究-東西インドの発見と万物復元-」東京都立大学人文科学研究院博士論文。 2004. (Haesgawa Mitsuaki. Essays on La Merveille du Monde by Guillaume Postel. Thesis. 2004.) 6 Suzuki Tae. “Joan Rodriguez et Arte da lingoa de Iapam: un regard sur la langue et la société japonaise du XVIe siècle.” Presented at “La Rencontre du Japon et de l’Europe: Images d’une Découverte,” held at L’Université Marc Bloch à Strasbourg, ceeja, 2005 (à paraītre). Curiously, the particles enable the Japanese language to absorb any foreign vocabulary, without being subordinated to the grammatical rules that the imported foreign language tends to inflict upon it. 7 Orii Yoshimi. Fray Luis de Granada y Japon: Comparative Studies of Hispanic and Japa- nese Culture in the Christian Literature [original in Japonese]. Ph.D. dissertation, 2005. My thanks go to Ms. Orri for her information. 8 Kōyama Rokurō. Tupi Ongo Niemu no Gogen: Imide Jinrui Ongo Kōsei Ichion Ichion wo Imi Kansei Kenkyū [Investigation of meaning-sense of each syllable in the composition of human verbal language through original meaning of the Tupi Language: Nhem]. Vol.2. Sao Paulo: private publication, 1973. 9 Shūhei Hosokawa. “Speaking in the Tongue of the Antipode: Japanese Brazilian Fan-

34 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 tasy on the Origin of Language.” In Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism. Ed. Jeffery Lesser. Durham: Duke University, 2003. 21–45. 10 See, for example, Shigemi Inaga. “Is Art History Globalizable?” In Is Art History Global? Ed. James Elkins. New York: Routledge, 2007. 249–79. This article is part of my implicit response to David Damrosch. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 2003. 11 The Holywood film, Night at the Museum (2006) prompted a 20 percent increase in museum attendance between December 22, 2006 and January 2, 2007 (“Asian Art Takes Over Nyc.” Museums New York. 13.1 [2007]: 11). For the idea of “sur-veillance,” see pages 34–35 in Roland Barthes. “Drame, poème, roman.” In Théorie d’ensemble. Ser. Tel Quel. Paris: Seuil, 1968. 25–40.

acla: International Forum 35 Introduction: Collecting and/as Cultural Transformation

The three comparative and interdisciplinary essays in this section treat collecting in the historical context of imperialism and range over the geographical spaces of France, North and South America, New Caledonia, and Japan. Shorter papers on which the essays are based were presented in a three-day panel organized and chaired by the Guest Editors entitled “Collecting Actual and Metaphorical,” the idea for which originated with Helen Asquine Fazio, for the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association. We are grateful to the Editor for extending us the opportunity to explore the notion of collecting in the context of this journal.

Collecting as the Appropriation of Identities

Material collecting, or the systematic accumulation of material objects by individual and museum collectors, has been widely theorized from the 1980s by historians, art historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and literary and cultural critics. Although the Guest Editors’ approach to collecting in the following essays builds on scholarship that views material objects as having a simple material existence, it extends that scholarship to consider collected objects as part of a broader symbolic system. Following Susan M. Pearce, we consider collecting as a process of communication between subject and object. Pearce argues that “objects are our other selves; the better we understand them, the closer we come to self- knowledge” (vii). Pearce goes on to argue that objects, like language, are “social ideas” (22); that they are “signs and symbols, creating categories and transmitting messages which can be read” (15). In light of her comments, we consider collecting, then, to be a process that mediates between subject (the collector) and object (that which has been collected), whether that object be tangible or an abstract idea or image. We further consider the process of collecting as an appropriation that builds on a systematic gathering and interpretation of objects—whether a person, a people, or a country—within a certain symbolic code. As such, we envision collecting to be a metaphor for a practice of transformation that has profound material and symbolic consequences in various cultural registers. Finally, we consider collecting as the building of a narrative—a narrative of identity. Walter Benjamin, in “Unpacking My Library” (1931), suggests that, in the

36 process of building up a collection of material objects, the collectors become authors, constructing a narrative that links the objects they have collected to their identity as it has unfolded in time. Extending that idea, narratologist Mieke Bal argues that collecting is “a process consisting of the confrontation between objects and subjective agency informed by an attitude. Objects, subjective agency, confron- tations as events: such a working definition makes for a narrative” (100). In line with that logic, Pearce, perhaps the foremost theorist of European collecting in all its ramifications, argues that: “[C]ollections are essentially a narrative of experience; as objects are a kind of material language, so the narratives into which they can be selected and organized are a kind of fiction” (412). She further argues that collecting, whether of objects, images, or ideas, is “part of our effort to construct an intelligible world-view” (vii). Consequently, in the practice of collecting, subjects “subjectivize” the objects they have acquired by assembling them to construct a narrative that resonates with their perception of themselves; this narrative reflects their personal desires as they are informed by the temporal, spatial, and cultural contexts in which they construct and express them. As this narrative is framed by their desire, its edges are indefinite and its meaning ambiguous, as the narrative includes both their representation of their past self and their articulation of a future self that does not yet exist and that they do not know. Incorporating those ideas, the essays by Kelly Austin, Linda M. Steer, and Janet A. Walker examine the act of collecting with regard to literary and other sorts of texts, including visual art and photography. They contextualize European and Latin American writers,’ artists,’ and photographers’ acquiring and appropriation of material objects, images, and identities as acts of memorializing, possessing, organizing, imagining, and envisioning; through those acts, and in their specific contexts, the collectors construct new identities, both for themselves and for what they perceive as the Other. In instances of artistic creation, including writing, photography, collage-making, and painting—which we consider acts of collecting—the authors explore how writers and artists collected images of and translated the identities of the Other, through their own panoptic visions, to reflect other individuals, other spaces, and other historiographies.

Imperialist Constructions of the Other

The three essays in this cluster explore collecting in both its material and metaphorical senses as a practice that developed under the aegis of imperialism. In the nineteenth century, the military, economic, and cultural processes of imperialism brought about Western hegemony throughout much of the world—a hegemony that enabled Europeans to collect non-Western objects in large quantities and to import them from culturally and/or economically colonized spaces into Europe.

Introduction: Collecting 37 At the same time, and in a parallel process, the ideologies of imperialism allowed Europeans in their physical collecting of those objects to re-interpret them symbolically to suit European needs. As such, the physical process of collecting non- Western materials that had been imported into Western spaces allowed for a rep- resentational transformation of those objects: in European spaces, the original cultural meanings associated with non-Western objects collected by European travelers, members of the colonial administrative staffs, missionaries, anthropologists, writers, and artists, among others, were recast to represent the various desires and anxieties of European imperial subjectivity. Through this process, non-Western objects became the symbolic sites upon which the authority and legitimacy of the panoptic lens was forged. Along these lines, James Clifford, in his The Predicament of Culture, has interpreted modernist artists’ practices of collecting and imitating so-called “primitive” art as reflecting modernism’s disquieting “taste for appropriating or redeeming otherness, for constituting non-Western arts in its own image” (193). Here the practice of collecting begins with modernist artists’ physical gathering of African and other “primitive” art objects and extends metaphorically into their “aesthetic appropriation of non-Western others” (197). Thus, the European artists, writers, and photographers of the age of colonialism who collected non-Western objects, including lives and countries, to formulate a narrative of identity also created new identities for the individual Other and for Other spaces and histories such as “Japan” and “New Caledonia”—identities resonating with their desires as European individuals. In the postcolonial era, the same processes of the collecting and metaphorical translation of identities have been practiced by artists in cultures outside of Europe. The essay on the Chilean poet Neruda’s collection, construction, and translation of Walt Whitman’s identity to suit his own communist purposes demonstrates that writers of formerly colonized or marginalized regions, such as Latin America, can appropriate and translate the identities of the Center, in this case, North America, to produce their own national narratives. The following essays consider various manifestations of the transformative processes underscoring the notion of collecting on the part of artist-collectors in both colonial empires and contemporary nation-states. They further reflect on how the recasting of the meaning of objects, both material and immaterial, collected in both political situations expresses the desires and anxieties of the artist-collectors’ socio- political imaginaries. The essays in this section elucidate some of the ways in which individual collectors who are also renowned fabricators of culture used acquired objects and appropriated identities of the Other to create new selves and engage in new ways with the worlds they imagined they were inhabiting. The engagements occurred through the collection and translation of the remote Other by means of poems that celebrated him and his poetry while recreating him in the poet’s own

38 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 image; through photography, and the many assignments of order and meaning associated with the career of the ethnographic photograph; and through primitivist paintings of nature that expressed the dream of a life close to nature, paintings that testified to a deep sympathy of the collector-artist with a remote Other. All three essays illustrate how creative collector-artists, with passion and imagination, forged a relationship with the objects and images that they collected, making them part of their own narratives of identity. As such, this section demonstrates that the appropriation and translation of the Other through collecting are common cultural practices that have occurred in the past and are still occurring, and suggests that they will always occur, though their socio-political contexts will differ. It is our hope, then, that the essays will contribute to the re-visioning of collecting as a way of reading both historical and emerging culture.

Janet A. Walker u Rutgers University Helen Asquine Fazio u HA Fazio Associates V. G. Julie Rajan u Rutgers University

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting.” The Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. 97–115. Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 59–67. Clifford, James.The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pearce, Susan M. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 1995.

Introduction: Collecting 39 Kelly Austin “I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle” Pablo Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet

In “Yo, el malacólogo” [I, the Malacologist]—a part of Pablo Neruda’s memoirs, Confieso que he vivido, finished shortly before his death in September 1973— Neruda recounts the day he decided to donate his seashell collection to his alma mater. With over 15,000 shells overflowing from the bookshelves and falling from tables and chairs, as well as enough books about seashells to fill his library, he boxed up his already famous collection and sent it to the University of Chile. He thought he had sealed its fate: “Como buena institución sudamericana, mi universidad los recibió con loores y discursos y los sepultó en un sótano” (228) [Like a good South American institution, my university received my collection with speeches and fan- fare and buried it in a basement].1 Neruda saw his self as multiple, split as an author, collector—malacologist and bibliophile—as well as donor; simultaneously a man of public and private pursuits. Indeed, at a crucial turning point in his life, Neruda declared that he planned to dedicate himself to his seashell collection and politics as poetry no longer interested him:

En México el Partido Comunista Mexicano organizó el 25 de Septiembre de 1941 un gran homenaje a Neruda. Juan Larrea, uno de los participantes, cuenta que la serie de homenajes dados a Neruda en México, llevó a éste a pensar en dedi- carse a la política. En una recepción en casa del pintor Carlos Orozco Romero, Neruda le habría hecho una confidencia: “No sé lo que tú pensarás, Juan. Pero te diré que a mí, la poesía ya no me interesa. Desde ahora pienso dedicarme a la política y a mi colección de conchas.” (Schidlowsky 444)

(In Mexico, on September 25, 1941, the Mexican Communist Party organized a great homage for Neruda. Juan Larrea, one of the participants, recounts that the series of homages given for Neruda in Mexico, led him to think about dedi- cating himself to politics. In a reception at the painter Carlos Orozco Romero’s house, Neruda divulged in confidence: “I don’t know what you think, Juan. But I’ll tell you that poetry no longer interests me. From now on I think I’ll dedicate myself to politics and to my seashell collection.” [my translation])

40 Neruda’s sobering statement, reverberating with irony, both announces new pursuits and simultaneously monumentalizes and trivializes them in comparison with the history of his dedication to poetry. 2 He made this statement in the very month that he published his translation of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Set against the backdrop of a Chile falling under an increasingly xenophobic government, this claim constitutes a piece of Neruda’s life that frames his acts of collecting and translating in a decidedly political manner. What Hannah Arendt asserted in reference to Walter Benjamin, that “Benjamin could understand the collector’s passion as an attitude akin to that of the revolutionary” (42), echoes sympathetically with Neruda’s attitude toward collecting. As Neruda reflected on his poetic transitions while living in Mexico as consul general—symbolically bound up with his increasingly official dedication to communism, and during “a moment of intellectual and artistic splendor” in Mexico (González Echevarría 4)3—his approach to his collections and his comments concerning them reveal a poet grappling with the dilemmas of how to reconcile his own private act of collecting with communism’s concept of property, as well as the question of the value—intimate, aesthetic, commodity, and cultural—of books themselves. And when one sees Neruda’s collections housed at Isla Negra, at La Universidad de Chile, and at La Chascona—the headquarters for the Fundación Neruda—it is clear that Neruda’s bibliophilia is one of the constitutive, seminal, and traditional points of departure for literary studies of his oeuvre. Neruda’s collection offers concrete evidence of the primary and secondary volumes that he read and recollected. His library testifies to his status as both a reader and collector of Whit- man. Yet, curiously enough, Neruda explicitly links his library—filled with the best editions of the classics, including Cervantes, Dante, and Molière—to his prized seashell collection in his memoir through a section entitled “Libros y caracoles” [Books and Shells]. Neruda was an impulsive, diligent, and obsessive collector of everything from glass bottles and mobiles to miniature guitars and mastheads. Neruda’s considerable interest in and collection of various genres including encyclopedias, books on natural history, travel tales, poetry, and fiction form the context for his Whitman collection and flesh out the repertoire of his bibliographic resources. For Neruda, his book collection constitutes, in part, an intra-textual treasure hunt, one that multiplies the possible incarnations of a figure as colossal as don Quijote in his numerous “Quijotes increíbles” (Confieso 377) [incredible Quijotes] and leads to a “Whitman innumerable” (Obras Completas 684) [“Whitman innumerable” (Canto general 257)] through the metaphor of his many editions of Leaves of Grass and his creative re-workings of Whitman in his translations and original works. According to Wilberto Cantón, Neruda introduced his friends and colleagues to his Whitman collection via a treasure hunt. Thus, it was within the context of a staged practical joke that the fellow venturers with Neruda—Neruda the com-

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 41 munist, Chilean diplomat, and celebrated poet of Latin America—encountered the poet’s first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Neruda pretended that the money he had put aside for safekeeping within the pages of his prized edition of Whitman, the money he had been entrusted with to launch the journal “La Gaceta de Chile,” had been stolen:

Nunca hubiéramos sospechado que Pablo eligiera para guardar nuestro capital en una primorosa edición ilustrada de Walt Whitman, resplendeciente en uno de los libreros de la sala. Cuando el poeta nos lo reveló todos sonreímos; él se dirigió hacia el libro lo abrió y . . . ¡nada! Los mil pesos habían volado. Con gesto febril, Pablo volvía las hojas, registraba las tapas, estropeaba la “camisa.” A gritos pidió que revisaran las bolsas de todos los trajes que había usado en la semana. La casa se puso en movimiento. Él corrió hacia el escritorio, vació los cajones; levantó la alfombra. Vociferaba como nunca lo habíamos visto hacer. Nosotros, en silencio sufríamos la angustia del poeta. Nos quebrábamos la cabeza edeando soluciones. De pronto, se me ocurre levantar del suelo el ejemplar marchito de Leaves of Grass y comienzo a examinarlo detenidamente. Y he aquí que tuve un hallazgo imponderable: con letra muy pequeña, cuidadosa, en un ángulo de la tapa decía: “Véase Bernal Díaz del Castillo, t. II, p. 309.” Acudimos todos al libro indicado, y en la página 309 encontramos otra señal: “Ver Santa Teresa, p. 120.” Y de Santa Teresa se nos mandó a Milozc, y de éste a César Vallejo, y de Vallejo a Elizabeth Barret Browning, a Esquilo, a Dante, a Rilke, a Platón, a Rabrindranath Tagore, a Ercilla, a Goethe, a Dostoievski . . . ¡Fué un viaje por toda la literatura mundial! Al fin, en la página 213 de los Cuentos de Andersen hallamos nuestro tesoro. (Cantón 93–94, quoted in Alegría 333–34)

(We never would have suspected that Pablo would choose to keep our capital in a pristine illustrated edition of Walt Whitman, resplendent in one of the room’s bookcases. When the poet told us, we all smiled; he directed us toward the book and opened it and . . . nothing! The thousand pesos were gone. With a feverish gesture, Pablo turned the pages, looked at the covers, searched the jacket. At the top of his voice he asked us to search the pockets of all of the suits he had worn that week. The house was set in motion. He ran to the desk, emptied the drawers, lifted the rug. He shouted like we had never seen him do before. We suffered in silence the anguish of the poet. We wracked our brains for solutions. Suddenly, it occurred to me to pick up the forgotten copy of Leaves of Grass from the floor and I started to examine it deliberately. And there was an unimaginable find: in a small, careful hand, in a corner of the cover it said: “See Bernal del Castillo, Vol. II, p. 309.” We all went to the book indicated, and on page 309 we found another clue: “See Santa Teresa, p. 120.” And from Santa Teresa he sent us to Milosz, and from him to César Vallejo, and from Vallejo to Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

42 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 to Esquilo, to Dante, to Rilke, to Plato, to Rabrindranath Tagore, to Ercilla, to Goethe, to Dostoevsky. . . . It was a trip through all of world literature! Finally, on page 213 of Andersen’s Fairy Tales we found our treasure.)

Amidst the fray surrounding the supposed monetary loss and the ruse, Cantón recognized the still greater value of what had been found—namely, one of Neruda’s personal copies (but a small part of his Whitman collection) of Leaves of Grass, which serves not only as a record of Neruda’s engagement with the poet, but also of Neruda’s vision of Whitman vis-à-vis the Spanish-American and world canon. With clues written in the book margins, Neruda sent his friends from volume to volume, from Dante to Milosz, from Vallejo to Dostoevsky, having hidden the money in a volume of Hans Christian Andersen. In sum, Cantón characterized the value of “nuestro tesoro” [our treasure] as positioned ambiguously between “capital” [capital] and “un viaje por toda la literatura mundial” (93–94) [a trip through all of world literature]. Neruda’s feigned dismay at the supposed loss of the capital for the literary journal unveils the material conditions on which a part of literary production depends. Following Marx in the Grundrisse, “when the formation of capital had reached a certain level, monetary wealth could place itself as mediator between the objective conditions of life, thus liberated, and the liberated but also homeless and empty- handed labour powers, and buy the latter with the former” (272). But, Neruda’s de- ceit aims to dissociate him, as much as possible, from the endless “circulation of money as capital,” especially insofar as Marx declares in Capital that “as the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capi- talist” (333–34). As he guides his colleagues through the material artifacts he has collected, artifacts that represent a web of social and artistic exchange that cannot be reduced to economic value, Neruda gestures toward the complications of any straightforward or essential equation between money and capital. This act reveals his hope for an historical change that might revolutionize labor relations by re- defining value, even as he highlights his inevitable entanglement in his particular historical moment. And, in part, the treasure hunt invokes Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism: the idea that “value [. . .] does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as labour” (322). In this sense, the “mystical quality” of Neruda’s books, to a certain extent, reflects their distance from a value solely based on use-value or even surplus-value (Marx 320). Just the same, Marx argues, art “exercise[s] an eternal charm”—a charm he associates with nostalgia for the bygone social conditions under which it uniquely arises

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 43 and that can never be fully recuperated (246). This suspended timelessness moves literature, and the books that collect and contain it, away from a value determined solely by “labour-time,” whether it circulates value in relation to the commodity or subsistence, and is likewise distinguishable from the endless movement of capital (339, 341). And, yet, despite the recognition of nostalgia as one aspect of literature’s timelessness, Neruda’s treasure hunt also foregrounds the continual circulation and reconfiguration of literature as creating literary traditions as eternal hieroglyphics. Neruda’s annotations that guided the treasure hunt firmly embed Whitman in a Spanish-American tradition that Whitman would certainly not claim as his own, one he decreed as destined to be subsumed within the expanding frontiers of U.S. democracy (despite his exuberant, misspelled calls of camerado). Whitman has been an integral part of this tradition since the inception of the Latin American literary movement modernismo and the first extended commentary on Whitman’s work by José Martí in “El poeta Walt Whitman” in 1887. Whimsically likening Leaves of Grass to seashells, as I did earlier, is no wandering association; rather, it is precisely in understanding Neruda’s conception and praxis of collecting that we can most aptly explore his translations of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” with the goal of examining the particularly telling ways he negotiated hemispheric dilemmas with his U.S. literary antecedent. Neruda’s libraries do not simply testify to an almost obsessive desire to collect the works of Whitman, but are also artifacts that force readers to come to grips with the very manner in which Neruda re-invents and values the process of collecting, encounters Whitman, and, in so doing, launches an attempt to push the pursuit of collecting from the private to the public sphere. Neruda envisions his collections as a reasonable part of his emerging communism, yet does so in daring defiance of socialist norms as well as assumptions about the generally accepted relations between capitalism and accumulation. In the end, both Neruda’s rhetoric and his collecting practices reflect a personal and paradoxical reckoning with wider economic relations and political ideologies. Neruda places his collections both within a colonial heritage and an international communist conviction. When Rita Guibert, in a 1970 interview, criticizes Neruda for accumulating things while maintaining that he is a communist, Neruda spins out from this critique, saying that it is “mostly a myth,” characterizing his chief inheritance as a colonial inheritance, while likening himself to Columbus in chains:

In a sense we Latin Americans have received a rather bad inheritance from Spain. She could never bear her nationals to be outstanding in any way, to dis- tinguish themselves. As you know, Christopher Columbus was put in chains when he returned to Spain. And I think that we got from Spain the reaction of an envious petit bourgeoisie which spends its time brooding over what others

44 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 possess and it doesn’t have itself. I have dedicated my life to the vindication of the people, and what I have in my house, and my books, are the result of my own work. I have never exploited anyone. But this reproach is never directed against people who inherit large fortunes. It’s never made against writers who come from rich families. They are thought to have a right to greater prosperity than others. On the other hand, when a writer like me has been writing for fifty years, they keep saying: “Look! Just look at the way he lives. He’s got a house by the sea, he drinks good wine!” It’s very difficult to drink bad wine in Chile because almost all Chilean wine is good. The fact is, I couldn’t care less about this chorus of present-day cretins. It’s a situation that in a way reflects the backwardness of our country—the mediocrity of our society, in fact. You told me yourself that Norman Mailer was paid about $90,000 for three articles in a North American magazine. Here, if a Latin American writer were to receive such a reward for his work it would arouse a torrent of protests from other writers, saying: “What an outrage! How shocking! Where will it stop?” instead of everyone being delighted that a writer should be so well paid. Oh well, as I’ve said, these are the drawbacks of so-called cultural underdevelopment. (28–29)4

This tellingly post-Columbian comrade first suggests the history of European conquest in Latin America, crucially, only in order to critique Spain’s treatment of Columbus—not to point to a pre-Columbian golden age free of Spain’s intervention, but to identify himself with the aftermath of the discovery. The inheritance passed on to Latin America by Spain, in part, he says, is one of envy. And Neruda further distances himself from this inheritance by locating the critique of his collecting practices within the “petit bourgeoisie,” anachronistically situated at the time of discovery and conquest. Neruda implies that Columbus was placed in chains out of envy for his perceived possession of the New World. In short, Neruda as collector finds himself in an enviable and precarious position. He must indict his critics for envy and mediocrity while distancing himself from petit bourgeois pretension. He distances himself from those who are “thought to have a right to greater prosperity than others” and at the same time reserves the space to critique those who would declare: “Look! Just look at the way he lives.” And at the same time, he deflates the basis of the petit bourgeoisie’s judgment that good wine is a sign of privilege by locating the good life in the inevitability of geography, mocking the self-important wine connoisseur: “It’s very difficult to drink bad wine in Chile because almost all Chilean wine is good.” In one sense, Neruda embraces the pueblo and patria in like fashion, and in another he symbolically links Chile to one of the markers of civilization, punctuating his statement with an assertion of his own (assuredly worldly, in the implied comparison) refined palate and good taste.

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 45 At first, he seems to fall in line with a long tradition of Latin American reformers by envisioning a progress from “so-called [Latin American] cultural underdevelopment” through following the example of the United States—embodied, in part, in terms of monetary rewards to writers like Norman Mailer—and all that that represents. Neruda contrasts the inheritance of “writers who come from rich families,” which fails to come under attack according to Neruda, with his earned possessions: “[with] what I have in my house, and my books [. . .] the result of my own work.” Neruda’s “vindication of the people” is better understood when read in response to his self-conscious invocation of “myth.” By pointing to prominent American leftist Mailer’s financial rewards, Neruda places Mailer in the role of the “rich” North American writer—heir to a U.S. patrimony of hemispheric dominance—and in this mythic gesture Neruda undercuts the very system he hopes might save him from the “envy” of his own colonial heritage. Colonial Spain had been driven from the continent, but she had given over both “envy” and Columbus’s chains to the imperialist United States. These chains, which had and would continue to wound Latin America, included economic inequalities and exploitation, rampant cultural stereotyping, and longstanding historical envies that extended into the realm of literary production and valorization. Mailer may have earned more, but Neruda would turn the tables and collect Mailer, and in the process attempt to reverse the exploitative political and literary economy of “discovery” in a manner similar to the one he used to translate Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as his own ars poetica. Neruda boasted that he “discovered [Mailer] in [his] own way,” pointing out that his Euro- pean translators “had a devil of a time finding out who Norman Mailer was” and claiming that “no one knew about him” until he was mentioned in Neruda’s “Que despierte el leñador,” one of the central poems of Canto general (Guibert 49). Neruda sets his own artistic production alongside that of North American writers, particularly Whitman (Guibert 49). And yet, once again, reflecting the central conflicts between collecting and communism, he calls for delight from others in the fruits of “my own work,” even as he critiques envy’s personal sense of entitle- ment, opening a possibility for a new type of work—a type of work that implicates others and himself, that acquires through contradictory modes of creation: creation of wealth, creation of discovery, and creation of unique interpretive stances toward acquisition. And when pressed, Neruda details that he does not possess his possessions. Neruda emphatically declared that his home, books, and collections had, for more than twenty years, belonged to the Communist Party of Chile, to whom he had given them publicly:

Doesn’t this accusation gain weight from your belonging to the Communist Party? That’s exactly the strength of a position like mine. A man who has nothing—it

46 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 is often said—has nothing to lose but his chains. Whereas I am at every moment risking my life, my person, my possessions, my books, my house—I throw all these into the balance to defend the future and justice. My house has been set fire to, I have been persecuted, I have been imprisoned more than once, I’ve been exiled, declared incomunicado, and hounded everywhere by thousands of police. Very well, then. I am not just feathering my own nest. I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle, and the house you are now in has belonged for the last twenty years to the Communist Party of Chile, to whom I have given it publicly. I live in this house simply as a result of my party’s decision and the generosity of my party. I am enjoying the use of something that doesn’t belong to me, because I gave it away, along with all my collections and all my books, and everything this house contains. All right, let those who reproach me do the same, or at least leave their shoes somewhere so they can be passed to somebody else! (Guibert 29)

Neruda thus interprets “all I possess” as a gift: “I am enjoying the use of something that doesn’t belong to me.” Neruda “gave it away” and the party returns the favor. Invoking the famous Marxist phrase, Neruda insists that “[a] man who has nothing [. . .] has nothing to lose but his chains,” certainly linking his collections and donations to a future freedom through communism, but also to the possibility of Columbus’s reconciliation with the Spanish Crown, a possibility that is ultimately dependent upon his dispossession of the New World. Neruda does this even as he obliquely critiques the glorification of the myth of benevolent conquest, represented by the story of Columbus’s life that has been pressed into the door of the U.S. capitol as a relief. In “risking my life, my person, my possessions, my books, my house” and “all that I possess” he simultaneously acquires “the use of [. . .] all my collections and all my books.” Moreover, by repeatedly placing at the forefront his role as collector (as donor), Neruda also transforms himself into a visitor to his own collection. He negotiates between the stances of having and not having, of inheriting colonial values and inheriting wealth, and using, possessing, and giving away material culture and cultural property. In this way, he helps to illuminate the paradox inherent in his poetic practice and political critique: his denunciations, on the one hand, of “the emphatically imperialist doctrines of the United States” (Guibert 16) and his conviction, on the other, that the expansive and expansionist Whitman belonged to Spanish America: “He was our poet” (Bly 157). On the one hand, Neruda’s dilemmas about collecting are in some ways incom- parable. On the other, one of the most seminal works on collecting, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” by one of Neruda’s contemporaries, Walter Benjamin, allows one to see Neruda’s collecting practices in terms of other

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 47 modern collectors who are Marxists. Benjamin attests to the urge, on the part of certain modern Marxist collectors and thinkers, to come to terms with the drive toward collecting, the collected objects’ relation to property and capital, and the investment in historical materialism as the foundation for revolutionary potential. Balancing an exploration of Benjamin’s ironic and whimsical canonical ideas on collecting with the wonderfully irreconcilable positions of Neruda, we see that Neruda’s positions constitute an at once peripheral and common collecting praxis and political ideology that reveals the particularities of his investment in materialism. Neruda’s materialism shows a belief in the physical and also displays his ma- terialistic side. In other words, Neruda proposes a reconciliation (at many places incomplete) of personal property with communal property as well as an understanding of the ways this personal accumulation overlaps with his communism. This materialism also sheds light on the varying value Neruda’s collections have on a personal, intimate, or affective level as collections that have a complex relationship with outside standards of judgment on both aesthetic levels and on levels of cultural heritage. It brings together the tendencies toward fetishism and reification in his book collecting with the intertextuality and re-writing exposed in his translation and collection practices. The parallels with and divergences from Benjamin’s thought invite a closer look at Neruda’s multiple identities through the lens of the library, at both the personal and world level. An examination of Neruda’s library, in light of the unpacking of Benjamin’s, offers inroads into explaining the role of the poet’s aesthetic choices and the development of his own poetic repertoire through translation. It sheds light on how his materialisms, as evidenced in his collecting practices—in the explanations he gives of how his collecting tendencies develop, in his explanations of his poetic meaning, in his theories about words and materiality, and in his reliance on Marxist inheritances—form the foundations of the various aesthetic agendas in his prose and his poetry.5 The caprice and method of these forking paths of acquisition point to a mode of producing meaning that lies among the personal poetic production and the particular cultural, political, and institutional contexts of Neruda’s creative choices. In the opening pages of “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin invokes Terentius Maurus: “Habent sua fata libelli” (61) [Books have their own fate]. He quotes faithfully and famously, if partially and anonymously, in order to erase the reader reading (pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli [the fate of books depends on the dis- cernment of the reader]) and, in the gesture of a palimpsestic erasure, in order to highlight a conception of the book as an object with an independent destiny. His citation of Terentius Maurus displaces the unique and original book by adding that copies of books also have their fates and plays upon the reader as a determiner of that destiny in order to substitute the collector for the reader. Here Benjamin treats

48 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 both the reader’s comprehension and the collector’s martial grasping as coincident and divergent and his own endeavor to unpack his library as a cunning conquest and a Lilliputian triumph: “collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” (63). For Benjamin, the book does not reveal in and of itself worlds and destinies, but the revelation occurs in the “marches” undertaken in the “pursuit” of books. The endeavor lies at least somewhere between that of a flâneur and that of a self-ironic military strategist, and, thank goodness, has less dire consequences than war. Neruda’s own marches occurred as much within cities as by mail, as the many letters in his archives concerning payments to booksellers attest. The circle of Neruda’s conquests reveals a worldwide pattern of exchange, widening the geographical horizon of the metropole collector conceived by Benjamin. Moreover, the treasure hunt that Neruda devises reveals a much less martial trajectory (even as it reveals the shadow of a communism with a much more martial trajectory), but stages the pursuit of books in a way that lays bare the subtle play of difference between nuestro capital and nuestro tesoro. And although all of the subtleties that Benjamin raises about the relationship between readers and collectors and the destinies of books are at play in analyzing Neruda’s collections, the coincidence of Neruda’s turn toward collecting and communism shifts the context for analysis toward his evolving vision of books, poetry, and the political destiny of the pueblo, even as other worldly contexts inevitably intrude. Benjamin interrogates how “books cross the threshold of a collection and become the property of a collector” by tracing the “history of their acquisition” (61). In this translation, or crossing, a collection becomes housed and the nuptial contract of the collector with his collection is sealed by crossing the threshold to infuse history with traditions and paths of passion and possession from the outset. The book is potential property in a collection. Throughout the essay Benjamin details various ways that a book might transition into a collection and evidence its collectibility to the individual possessor and the culture (depending on acknowledgment by each housing and houseling of it). In the case of Neruda, his method of collecting the books in his Whitman collection has a history that speaks to the formulation of Neruda’s personal ars poetica. Whitman is collectible, in part, because he constitutes a volatile foundation for a continental voice—mined, reworked, and translated for Neruda’s emerging politics—as Whitman sometimes represents the voice of an expansionist and capi- talist U.S. politic. At the crossroads of monetary and cultural capital, in terms of

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 49 both physical acquisition and ideological inheritance, carrying Whitman across the threshold involves a test of the ritual of personal property in terms of the donor— in this case Neruda, a communist donor, a poet of international stature. From the outset Benjamin marks the interdependence of personal acquisition and fame (public acknowledgment) and tempers it with a playful tone—the personal production of private property receives the highest accolades: “Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method” (61). Here, writing is a mode of acquiring. Specifically, it is an ostensible mode of (and substitute for) collecting. For Benjamin, the writer acquires through creation, through writing “oneself,” and at the same time he reveals or unveils the social dimension of this activity of collecting; here, the activity is “praiseworthy.” In the case of Neruda, space must be made for translation as an ostensible mode of collecting, even as, in general, both culturally and historically, translation falls below the praiseworthiness of writing. Neruda translates because he is at once “dis- satisfied” and pleased with the poems available, and in crossing the threshold from English to Spanish he reveals the potential of the original and the translation to inform one another in the context of his collection, a collection pushed increasingly toward the public sphere. This shift occurs even as he attempts to elevate himself to the status of a collector of merit as well as to the status of a poet of America. Benjamin outlines the personal motivations for collecting as an individual activity, but never loses sight of the audience’s judgment of modes of acquisition. In this way, they too create the context of collection as a history of acquisition. Yet, “praiseworthy” cannot be read as in any way a straightforward statement. This is to differ from, and to take into account, Naomi Schor’s assertion in “Collecting Paris” that collecting most closely approximates the work of the author:

Among the nineteenth-century social types studied by Walter Benjamin, the collector occupies a privileged place: collecting, rather more than flânerie, is the activity that most closely approximates that of the author in that collecting and especially (though not exclusively) book-collecting involves the retrieval and ordering of things past; collecting provides the link between the bourgeois childhood evoked in Berlin Childhood and the adult project of Das Passagen- Werk. (252)

But Benjamin’s vision of collection and its relation to the author is more complicated by judgment, both personal and public, than Schor allows, as Benjamin’s example of the writer—of writing as a form of acquiring books—has as much to do with substitution, whimsy, desire, and invention as with retrieval and ordering. Benjamin asserts that the reader might “regard this as a whimsical definition of a writer” and that “everything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical” (61–62, emphasis mine). Through various perspectives of whimsy, from rhetori-

50 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 cal flourishes to self-irony, Benjamin, as collector, undercuts any solid ground for comparison. He reveals that judgment might be turned on its head and come under critique, inserting the possibility for irony into the collector’s activity as well as into the evaluation of that activity. From this horizon, we can appreciate how Neruda models a respectful irreverence that cuts both ways, ironizing both himself and his surveyors. To be sure, Neruda deals with the fact that his zeal for the pursuit of personal property for his collections is seen by most to be at odds with his zeal for communist ideals. He negotiates the discrepancy between collecting and communism through a complex rhetorical strategy, arguing, as he says, from the “angle of a real collector” that he does not possess what he possesses. He has willed it to the people, to the Chilean Communist Party, entailing as much a creative ordering of things past as a desire in trust to the future. The critic chronicling the history of Neruda’s collecting has the challenge of facing both earnestness and irony without allowing either to cancel the other out; Neruda’s notions of “praiseworthy” are at times in sync and at times at odds with those of his audience, and thus the judgment of his collection and collecting practices is unsettled due to the multiple lenses through which they might be viewed. Benjamin points to the possibility that the constructions of unities in cultural history (which offer the appearance of progress, rather than an image that might refer to the Messianic era) might be laid bare and come under critique from both the most likely and the least likely of angles: from within the drive to construct an inventory and the complementary drive toward disruptive (and unpredictable) destruction. In contrast, the later Neruda definitely establishes his notion of history on the unification of the oppressed of Machu Picchu with the miners of Northern Chile, and on the unfolding destiny of communism that will liberate the pueblo. Thus, when Benjamin first questions and praises the way that collectors collect, writers write, and then reveals a disjunction between his own definition of writers and the definition of the audience—“ladies and gentlemen” (61)—he offers a blueprint for negotiating the multiple frames of cultural and ideological interpretation that inform our reading of Neruda’s Whitman collection. It begins to unveil what is at stake when theorizing the unity of the Americas and constructing a Lit- erature of the Americas—a literature where more than two Americas meet and where aesthetic strategies collected from Whitman are transformed from tools used to prop up U.S. imperialism to those used to further the cause of international communism. To elaborate the intricacies of this blueprint, it is worth exploring the way that Benjamin injects the chronicling of modes of acquisition with irreverence: “Of the customary modes of acquisition, the one most appropriate to a collector would be the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning” (62). This mode is most

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 51 “appropriate,” but not in a traditional sense. It is not fit and proper. The measure of the collector’s mode is thus split between two judgments: “The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books” (62). Benjamin here draws the reader into his whimsical, if not pessimistic, judgment: a book borrower with “real stature whom we envisage” (emphasis mine) is contrasted with a deaf ear turned to “the everyday world of legality.” Benjamin splits the public’s judgment between what “we envisage” and “the everyday world of legality.” The proper collector’s property, when he is fulfilling his “real stature,” does not conform to law (Mosaic law), much less to the letter of the law, convention, or the word. The collector is instead defined by “his failure to read these books.” Nor does Benjamin confine collecting to a certain time period, as he imagines a Socratic dialogue, with Socratic irony, that inquires into tradition and modernity through non-reading: “And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world” (62). The “non-reading of books” as “characteristic of collectors” is “news” perhaps to the imaginary audience, whose queries are written in playful banter and who find themselves squarely within the realm of readership, and thus in contradistinction to one of the failures that constitute, in part, one of the characteristics of “inveterate” collecting—but it is not a recent phenomenon, according to Benjamin and “experts.” When Benjamin calls upon the (in this case purposefully emptied) rhetorical gesture of “experts,” he calls attention to the conventions of argument, without subscribing to the rigor of evidence. In fact, he ends this paragraph with a joke in order to illustrate the attitude of the collector toward non-reading: “Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?’ ‘Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?’” (62). Certainly, returning to the example of the treasure hunt, when “se [le] ocurre levantar [a Cantón] del suelo el ejemplar marchito de Leaves of Grass y comienz[a] a examinarlo detenidamente” [it occurred to [Cantón] to pick up the faded copy of Leaves of Grass from the floor and to begin to examine it thoroughly], his “hallazgo imponderable” [inestimable discovery] is not the poetry therein, but the note written in Neruda’s hand leading the group on a trip through a non-reading of world literature. In this sense, the material reality of the books in Neruda’s collection at times supersedes their consideration as intertexts to excavate for signs of influence on Neruda’s oeuvre. His books come to mean both more and less than the rich-

52 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 ness of the texts housed between the covers. In the treasure hunt, they are both material evidence and symbols of the world canon at Neruda’s disposal, according to the whimsy, desire, and method of his collecting practices. As material objects that are part of a collection, they both do and do not fall in line with the bourgeois habits that Neruda eschews. In other words, Neruda measures the philistine in other terms than those of Anatole France, necessarily splitting the judgment of Neruda’s collecting at least doubly. This speaks to the vexed terms of Neruda’s collection as property, terms that were not imagined in Benjamin’s notion of borrowing: Neruda’s explanation that he possesses without possessing; that his collection is not only his own, but communal property; that it is infused not only with his own memories, but with shared collective memories. Neruda’s ambivalence toward his collection complicates and expands Benjamin’s intricate notion of acquisition and possession as having “a very mysterious relationship to ownership” (Benjamin 60): “for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (67). The collector has the potential to create “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate” (60). For Neruda, his desire, if not always fulfilled, is that the intimate relationship with his collection cannot be confined to himself as an individual, but involves a questioning of what is proper and appropriate to him as a collector: to what extent, within his vision of the world, can he claim his collection as personal property? To draw our discussion of Benjamin to a close, it is important to point out that he is concerned with uncovering the “dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order” (60) and that he imbues his own methodology with whimsy and arbitrariness:

What I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? (59–60)

With the afterlife of these memories in mind, tracing Neruda’s “collecting” then becomes a process—inevitably incomplete and relying on whimsy—of discovering

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 53 the peculiar juxtapositions of orders and disorders; of sifting through Neruda’s collection placed on his personal shelves, in his various homes, in university libraries (dedicated spaces), and in museums; and of tracing what remains of Neruda’s memoirs of his collections, what remains of the commentary on his collecting practices as well as what remains of his creative retrievals. In this way, the critic “borders the chaos of memories” when she contemplates Neruda’s collection in a way that, through her collection of evidence, might lay bare other horizons than those en- visaged by Neruda for his collection, only approaching a faithful rendering of even just the habit of Neruda contemplating his collection in such a way that it could “appear as order.”

Collecting an Ars Poetica

Neruda published his translation of “Song of Myself”—“Pasto de llamas”—in Repertorio americano. Therein, we again see a communist poet whose politics, poetic praxis, and zeal for collection often produce contradictory impulses. Most importantly, perhaps, we see what is to be gained. In other words, as Neruda, via his translation of Leaves of Grass, collects and develops an ars poetica from Whitman, he translates in a way that brings Whitman, Whitman’s poetics, his worldview, and the world’s view of Whitman closer to Neruda’s own. As in the case of Benjamin’s “true collector[,] the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth” (Benjamin 61). In Neruda’s striking translation of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” he radically shifts the emphasis from Whitman’s “I” onto the pueblo and (his own) poetic voice. Whit- man’s conglomeration of registers accommodates and assimilates difference within his “me,” “me myself,” and “I.” Contrarily, Neruda’s translation creates distinct and oftentimes vexed resonances that speak to his desire to set forth a voice that har- monizes in hymn-like fashion, elevating all. His call is “to see the people’s level of comprehension raised so that it can penetrate with the poet into all the richness of the interior world” (as quoted in Schidlowsky 418–19). In so doing, Neruda makes translation choices that—apart from a central movement from individualism to social solidarity—grapple with the place of materialism for a poet whose very art springs from the practice of translation. Moreover, Neruda’s creation does not end with his poetic translation. He returns to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass collection to rework sections that he did not previously translate, plucking pearls for his Canto general. Saúl Yurkievich’s compelling essay on Neruda, “Mito e historia: dos generadores del Canto general,” places one of Canto general’s sections, “La tierra se llama Juan,” at the extreme end of Neruda’s impulse toward “una poesía utilitaria, herramienta o arma de la revolución, una poesía proletaria” (Yurkievich 247) [a ultilitarian poetry, a tool or weapon for the revolution, a proletarian poetry]. In pointing to a “vo-

54 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 cabulario reducido” (247) [reduced vocabulary], Yurkievich perceptively chronicles the qualities of Neruda’s verse in this section, but he mistakes, in part, their origin. Namely, Neruda employs a literary strategy that both invokes and redeploys Whitman’s discordant diction. In short, what Yurkievich characterizes as some of Neruda’s most invective and vehemently political poetry has a literary genealogy born in part from the sedimented layers of Neruda’s translation and collecting practices. Neruda dialogues with “Song of Myself” to cast Whitman’s catalogues and his poetic practice, especially the variation in tone and levels of diction, in the service of Neruda’s communist conviction. He turns the table and ultimately uses Whitman’s tools to critique the very sympathy for the United States that Whit- man creates. He invokes this transformation through a translation of the final line of a series of Whitman’s questions in “Song of Myself”: “have you reckon’d the earth much?” (30) becomes “¿Has pensado que la tierra era mucho?” (265) [Have you thought that the earth was a lot?]—an interrogative that prizes the object of thought over thought itself. Indeed, in the series “La tierra se llama Juan,” the word “tierra” [earth] poetically articulates Neruda’s convictions on such diverse themes as a patria plagued by tyranny, death, and poverty, and the earth’s symbolic and material role for the pueblo in terms of communism, collectivization, and inheritance. Neruda’s translations of Whitman’s questions to the reader resurface in “La tierra se llama Juan” in a new form that pluralizes the addressee, using the second-person plural “Habéis” instead of the second-person singular “Has” in the fourth poem of the section, “Olegario Sepúlveda (Zapatero, Talcahuano)” [“Olegario Sepúlveda (Shoemaker, Talcahuano)”]:6

Habéis llegado del sombrío Pacífico, de noche, al puerto? Habéis tocado entre las pústulas la mano del niño, la rosa salpicada de sal y orina? Habéis levantado los ojos por los escalones torcidos? Habéis visto la limosnera como un alambre en la basura temblar, levantar las rodillas y mirar desde el fondo donde ya no quedan lágrimas ni odio? (Obras 666–67)

(Have you come from the somber Pacific, at night, to the seaport? Have you touched, amid the pustules,

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 55 the child’s hand, the rose spattered by salt and urine? Have you raised your eyes through the tortuous steps? Have you seen the beggar woman tremble like wire in the garbage, rise from her hands and knees and gaze up from the bottom where there are no more tears or hatred left? Canto[ 240–41])

Neruda places the questions not in the mouth of the poet’s persona, but in the voice of Olegario Sepúlveda—a man whose lengthy address distinguishes him from one among many in Whitman’s lengthy catalogues. Neruda’s persona questions from a space that dramatizes the aftermath of el gran terremoto [the great earthquake] even as the earth drowned his voice: “Allí grité dos días, / pero la boca se me llenó de tierra” and “una montaña de polvo / enterró mis palabras” (Obras 666) [“I shouted for two days, / but my mouth filled with earth” and “a mountain of dust / buried my words” (Canto 240, translation modified)]. In so doing, Neruda revises the meta-poetic stance of his translation of “Song of Myself” to account for an earth that is immeasurable rather than quantifiable, that drowns out calls for help, and that shuttles the poetic voice. Neruda achieves this final displacement when Olegario Sepúlveda asks questions that confront the reader and the poet that go unanswered; he ends with a supplication that Neruda return when he can to reply to the questions that testify to a failure of language on the part of the poet. Neruda both echoes and confronts the efficacy of Whitman’s questions, calling them into question at their limits of articulation and reckoning. Neruda not only copes with the potential for destruction imbedded in the land, but also reinvokes the hope that Whitman’s promise of land will be fulfilled: Neruda repeatedly responds to Whit- man’s Jeffersonian ideal of land ownership with his own utopian (communist) gestures “a defender / la tierra del pobre” (Obras, “Jesús Gutiérrez (Agrista)” 664) [“to defend / the earth of the poor” (Canto 238, translation modified)]. In short, Neruda re-writes Whitman, carrying on his work of translation, and explicitly names the pueblo as the inheritor of Whitman’s promised land, an inheritance that, although inevitable, is as likely to bury them as to repatriate them. Although “Arturo Carrión (Navegante, Iquique)” [“Arturo Carrión (Seaman, Iquique)”], the fifth poem in the section, is a letter from a sailor to his wife that takes advantage of its epistolary form to give a historically-based account of the oppression of the poor and Communists from Greece to Chile, land is at the center of his poem. Indeed, Neruda’s poem repeats many of the gestures of the thirty-fourth section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a section where Whitman addresses the

56 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 conflict with Mexico (a section excised from Neruda’s translation, but unearthed here). It draws, as well, on Whitman’s comments on the war with Mexico that are collected in Whitman’s The Gathering of Forces, a part of Neruda’s own Whitman collection, only to turn these tools against the worldwide oppression of communists while condemning U.S. involvement in the war with Mexico, all the while maintaining an awareness of the complicity of certain Latin Americans in the war. Neruda’s poem cannot simply be read as a realist, historical account since its very rhetoric and form echoes, while simultaneously transforming and questioning, Whitman’s recounting of the massacre by the Mexican army of Captain Fannin and his company of Texans after their surrender at Goliad, 27 March 1836.

Now I will tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth, (I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,) ’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men. [. . .] They were the glory of the race of rangers, Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship, Large turbulent, generous, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate, Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters, Not a single one over thirty years of age.

The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer, The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight. None obey’d the command to kneel. [. . .] A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him, The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood.

At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies; That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men. (Leaves, “Song of Myself” 68–69)

Whitman’s “I,” in characteristic fashion, weaves a tale of surrender—boys taken as prisoners of war—in which the defeated demonstrate their heroism and the conquerors demonstrate their cowardice with “the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men” and punctuates his tale with pathos by repeating

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 57 (almost verbatim) his description of the icy, homicidal scene. In turn, Neruda’s “Arturo Carrión (Navegante, Iquique)” echoes Whitman by numbering the “doscientos setenta y tres muchachos” (Obras 667) [two-hundred seventy-three young men] killed in Athens, suggesting the hypocrisy of the literary tradition of a country that counts only its own dead, and recognizes only its own survivors. Whitman writes: “Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo.” Moreover, Neruda distances himself from Whitman by constructing the persona “Carrión” and thus places the burden to produce truth on the witness rather than on himself.

Cuando me embarqué en el Glenfoster pensé en ti, te escribí desde Cádiz, allí fusilaban a gusto, luego fue más triste en Atenas, aquella mañana en la cárcel a bala mataron a doscientos setenta y tres muchachos: la sangre corría fuera del muro, vimos salir a los oficiales griegos con los jefes norteamericanos, venían riéndose: la sangre del pueblo les gusta, Pero había como un humo negro en la ciudad, estaba escondido el llanto, el dolor, el luto, te compré un tarjetero, allí conocí a un paisano chilote, tiene un pequeño restaurante, me dijo están mal las cosas, hay odio [. . .] dicen que en Pisagua hay dos mil, yo pregunto qué le pasa al mundo. (Obras 667–68)

(When I shipped out on the Glenfoster I thought about you, I wrote you from Cádiz, where they executed at will, then it was grimmer in Athens, that morning in the jail they shot two hundred seventy-three youths to death. The blood ran outside the wall, we saw Greek officers with American commanders come out laughing: they enjoy the people’s blood, but there was something like a pall of smoke

58 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 in the city, the weeping, anguish and mourning were hidden, I bought you a card file, there I met a countryman from Chiloé who owns a little restaurant, he told me that things are bad, there’s hatred [. . .] they say they’re two thousand in Pisagua, I wonder what’s happening to the world. [Canto 241–42])

The passage evokes several historical events of great ideological import for Neruda. First, Neruda’s epistolary persona bears witness to the repression of communist in- surrections in Franco’s Spain and then it testifies to the imprisonment and murder of Communist Party members by the Greek government (trained, in part, by the United States), contributing to the eventual end of the revolution. Next, he bears witness to the results of Chile’s “Law for the Defense of Democracy,” which barred Communists from public life, denied them voting privileges, and landed many in prison in Pisagua. Yurkievich is right to assert that the “enemigo es claramente iden- tificado—el imperialismo con sus agentes locales y foráneos—y enjuiciado” (248) [enemy is clearly identified—imperialism with its local and foreign agents—and judged], yet he fails to take into account Neruda’s self-conscious uses of Whitma- nian strategies to achieve the aims Yurkievich describes. At the center of Neruda’s epistolary poem is a statement of hope: “fue mejor en Hungría, / los campesinos tienen tierra, / reparten libros, en Nueva York / encontré tu carta” (Obras 668) [“it was better in Hungary, / the campesinos have land, / they pass out books, in New York / I found your letter” (Canto 241, translation modified)]. The break of the line after New York points toward Whitman’s Brooklyn in a way that attempts to differentiate Neruda’s ideal from that of Whitman’s with his use of a “vocabulario reducido” (Yurkievich 247) [reduced vocabulary], when he echoes the essence of Whitman’s article of 23 September 1847, “When Will the War Be Ended?” In this work Whitman lays out the following communal prophecy:

Our prophecy from the beginning has been: place 30,000 disciplined troops at Mexico; and as many more on the lines of communication with Vera Cruz and the Rio Grande. Under the protection of these let the peace treaty (which embraces the best part of the citizens, though they dare not speak as matters stand now) establish a government, whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country will find its way, as soon as its owners can be assured it will be free from seizure and forced loans. Agriculture will develop the natural resources of the country, really one of the finest in the world, after all; and the increase of

Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 59 products and of trade will react in the increase of enterprise and of an active and business population from abroad. Then at the end of this will come an increase of printing presses, papers, books, education and general intelligence, and lastly, the happiness of the masses now so sunk in ignorance and superstition. (Gathering 262–63)

Neruda’s “Arturo Carrión (Navegante, Iquique)” complicates any straightforward historical reading by invoking Whitman and exposing the vested interests of the literary and ideological codes that prop up U.S. imperialism. It signals that Neruda self-consciously and courageously opens his poetry to similar ideological critiques and offers an equally deeply felt conviction that negates the orthodox and globalizing authority of a Whitmanian poetic vision while embedding Neruda’s poetry within the paradoxes of his own collecting practices. By way of conclusion, it is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s use of the metaphor of the pearl diver to refer to Benjamin as collector, in order to stress this essay’s desire to circumvent a pitfall in the criticism of Neruda’s poetic process: the overlooking of the seminal importance of Neruda’s collecting and translation practices to both his own poetry and his creative translations. Although, in this vein, Neruda’s practice can be conceptualized as, in part, that of the diver—wresting a treasure from the sediment for his prized collection—he is more aptly understood, within the context of this allegory, as a collector of pearls and sediment, for he in- fuses his own poetry and translations with gems mined to illuminate and rework the history and politics (or sediment) of the literary canon of the western hemi- sphere.

u University of Chicago

Notes

1 Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 2 In a comparable fashion, Neruda’s memoirs relate that his friend, Julian Huxley, asked for him upon arriving in Chile. The journalist responded, “El poeta Neruda?” [The poet?], and Huxley replied, “No. No conozco a ningún poeta Neruda. Quiero hablar con el malacólogo Neruda” (Confieso 277) [No, I don’t know any poet named Neruda, I want to speak with Neruda, the malacologist]. Neruda’s seashells, his library, and his personae are intimately intertwined with each other and at the same time their distinction, in the end, relies on the understanding of a joke that rests on his renown as a poet. 3 All translations of material from Canto general by Jack Schmitt. 4 All translations of Guibert’s interview by Frances Partridge. The original interviews remain unpublished at this time. 5 This interpretation follows the lead of Rainer Schulte’s and John Biguenet’s “Introduc-

60 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 tion” in Theories of Translation, which focuses on the process-oriented methods of interpretation in Translation Studies in order to revitalize literary studies as a whole: “The methodologies employed by the translator can become a model by which we interpret literary texts in general. Translation thinking is always concerned with the reconstruction of processes, and therefore constitutes a form of dynamic rather than static interpretation. Thus, translation and translation research function as an organizing principle that refocuses the interpretation of a text from a content-oriented to a process-oriented way of seeing texts and situations. Disciplines have had a tendency to separate subject matters that by their very nature are intricately connected. The reconstruction of the translation process reaffirms that interconnectedness, since the problem-solving character of translation forces the translator to include a variety of disciplines and interdisciplines to respond to the specific needs of a text which make a translation possible. In that sense, translation activities are always interdisciplinary and present themselves today as an integrating force in a fragmentary and discontinu- ous world” (9–10). 6 This particular mode of address finds its antecedent in Neruda’s translation of “Salut au monde.” Whereas Whitman aspires to sing both high and low alike in “divine rapport,” and Gregorio Gasman’s translation (a translation housed in Neruda’s library) envisions a Liberal fraternity, Neruda’s interpretations and transformations make of Whitman’s poem a world-wide brotherhood of the oppressed. This vision is most striking in the concluding stanzas of Neruda’s translation where he favors a collective “you.” Gasman translates the lines where Whitman calls out to the people of the world with the anaphoric “you” by choosing to switch between singular and plural second person addresses (tú and vosotros). Neruda, true to form, purposefully and methodi- cally pluralizes the “you,” consistently calling on a collective “vosotros.” In this way, translation becomes the creative mode through which Neruda establishes a cornerstone of his poetic repertoire and politic.

Works Cited

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Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet 61 Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert. Trans. Frances Partridge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. 3–78. Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978. Neruda, Pablo. Confieso que he vivido: memorias. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1974. ———.Obras completas. Ed. Hernán Loyola. Barcelona: Galaxia Gútenberg, 1999. ———.Canto general. Trans. Jack Schmitt. Introd. Roberto González Echevarría. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Schidlowsky, David. Las furias y las penas: Una biografía de Pablo Neruda 1904–1943. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999. Schor, Naomi. “Collecting Paris.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. 252–74. Schulte, Rainer and John Biguenet. “Introduction.” In Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 1–10. Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of Forces. Vol. 1. Eds. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920. ———.Leaves of Grass. Eds. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973. ———. “Pasto de llamas.” Trans. Pablo Neruda.Repertorio americano. 922 (20 Sep. 1941): 265. ———.Saludo al mundo. Trans. and intro. Gregorio Gasman. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de Librería Neira, 1949. ———.Saludo Mundial. Trans. Pablo Neruda. Santiago: La Gaceta de Chile #2, 1955. Yurkievich, Saúl. Suma crítica. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997.

62 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Linda M. Steer Photographic Appropriation, Ethnography, and the Surrealist Other

In September 1929, two photographs appeared on a page in Documents, a review associated with French surrealism and the avant-garde. At the top of the page, in the first photograph, a group of costumed, white women dance in front of a se- quined curtain on a dark stage (Figure 1). There are three rows of women, and all arch their backs, stretching their arms up to form circles in the air. The women in the last two rows, about seven in each row, wear two-piece white satin outfits that look like bathing costumes, along with tap shoes and cap hats. The two blond women in the front row wear sparkly one-piece outfits that end in shorts, and white low-heeled dance shoes. Cascades of dark feathers fall from their helmet-like caps to the floor. Bessie Love, the actor playing the dancer who appears at the left of the front row, smiles coyly, tilts her head and casts a glance at her female dance partner. The caption reads: “Bessie Love dans le film parlant ‘Broadway Melody’ qui passera incessammant au Madeleine-Cinéma” (“Bessie” 219) [Bessie Love in the talkie “Broadway Melody” that will play soon at the Madeleine Cinéma].1 Below the Hollywood film still, on the bottom half of the page, there is another photograph, equal in dimensions, that is much more somber in tone (Figure 1). The photograph pictures a group of young Melanesian boys who stand along the edge of a cliff. Their bodies form a line that, from left to right, decreases in height; they are arranged from tallest to smallest. They stand with their chins up, shoulders back, legs together and face the camera at equal distance from one another, their feet splayed in the same pose. Each boy holds what appears to be a wooden model of a rifle close to his left side. Their expressions are serious. A French soldier takes an identical stance (minus the rifle) at the end of the line, on the far right, next to the smallest boy. The sky in the top third of the photograph is bright in contrast to the darker foliage and mountains behind the children. The caption of this second photograph states: “Enfants de L’École de Bacouya, Bourail. (Albums de photographies de E. Robin, 1869–1871.—Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro)” (Robin, “Enfants” 219) [Children at the Bacouya School, Bourail. (Photography Albums of E. Robin, 1869–1871.—Trocadero Ethnographic Museum)]. It is an ethnographic photograph taken by Ernest Robin who photographed the Kanak people of New Caledonia in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

63 Figure 1. “Bessie Love dans le film parlant ‘Broadway Melody’ qui passera incessammant au Madeleine-Cinéma” and “Enfants de L’École de Bacouya, Bourail. (Albums de photographies de E. Robin, 1869–1871.— Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro)” [Bessie Love in the talkie “Broadway Melody” that will play soon at the Madeleine Cinéma and Children at the Bacouya School, Bourail. (Photography Albums of E. Robin, 1869–1871.—Trocadero Ethnographic Museum)]. Documents 4 (Sep. 1929): 219.

There is a marked contrast between the flailing arms, twisted bodies and playful expressions of the adult female dancers and the rigid, ordered bodies and serious expressions of the schoolboys. At the same time, the photographs echo one another, for both present groups of relatively equal-sized bodies that stretch across the centre of the picture plane. In terms of color and contrast, the images reflect each other: light bodies against a dark background/dark bodies against a light background. These deliberate visual relationships, not at all subtle, create conceptual relationships between the two images. Why, then, did the editors of Documents construct this visual relationship between a Hollywood chorus line and a line up of Melanesian schoolchildren?

64 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 For James Clifford, the term “ethnography” in Documents denoted a “radical questioning of norms” (Clifford 129). He argues that both the subject of the photographs as well as the way they were organized in the review contributed to this questioning, which positioned the review as subversive. As the collecting of culture, Documents was “a kind of ethnographic display of images, texts, objects, labels, a playful museum that simultaneously collects and reclassifies its specimens” (Clif- ford 132). While I accept Clifford’s notion of ethnographic surrealism, I want to expand it to explore one photograph in the collection, the photograph of the Melane- sian schoolboys. Clifford is concerned with the relationship between the review, its contributors and the emerging field of twentieth-century ethnography in France. I wish to explore the ways in which a nineteenth-century ethnographic document was collected and made surreal by its publication in the review. This transformation reveals both the instability of photographic representation, a representation that appears to be fixed, as well as the radical nature of the review. The publication of the photograph of the schoolboys inDocuments marked two levels of appropriation and two practices of collecting that cut across disciplinary fields and discourses. In the first instance, the image of the schoolboys was appropriated by a French photographer and collected by a French ethnographic institution. In the second instance, the editor of Documents appropriated a nineteenth- century ethnographic photograph and placed it on a page with a twentieth-century film still. Through its inclusion and placement in the review, new meaning for the ethnographic photograph is constructed, pinned down and held in place through surrealist discourse. This meaning, however, is not stable, not complete. It shifts. When looking at the juxtaposed photographs in Documents and attempting to decipher their potential relationships to each other and to the texts, several interpretations arise. If we consider Robin’s photograph simply as an ethnographic document, we might think of it as an appropriation of the Kanak people that designates them as colonized Other. It is important, however, to read this image of Kanak schoolchildren as a second-level appropriation. In its original discursive frame, in Robin’s album that belonged to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, the photograph is an example of appropriation as colonial practice. Its appearance here in Documents, however, marks another level of appropriation, appropriation as avant-garde revolutionary practice, and we must consider the photograph as it appeared in an art publication, almost sixty years after it was taken. This second-level act of appropriation, the shifting of discursive frames, along with the placement of the photograph next to the dissonant image of the dancers creates a state of agitation. The image itself—that is to say, what is depicted in the image—is neither disorientating nor agitating. It is one of thousands of ethnographic photographs taken by French photographers and collected by museums in the 1800s. The surrealist act of appropriation and the subsequent re-framing of the

The Surrealist Other 65 image, however, created a sense of disorientation. In a collection of photographic documents that depict the colonization of New Caledonia, this photograph makes sense. It fits within the discourses of nineteenth-century French ethnographic photography and museum collecting practices. Removed from the place of Robin’s album, the meaning of the photograph is not clear—we are unable to read it. It has exceeded the discursive frame of ethnographic collection, and has become an object in a collection of a different kind. This excess destroys the illusion of complete- ness, revealing that photographic meaning is not contained within the image. Thus, the second-level appropriation undermines institutional power and reveals photographic meaning as unstable, as something that must be instituted through discourse. Yet, at the same time, the appropriated photograph resists interpretation.

Photography, Ethnography, and Discourse

William-Fréderic Edwards, a naturalist, founded the Société Ethnologique de Paris in 1838, one year before Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre patented his photographic process. Twenty years later, in 1859, two new societies formed, each with its own focus. Neurologist and physical anthropologist Paul Broca established the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, and Léon de Rosny formed the Société d’Ethnographie de Paris. In the most general sense, by the third quarter of the nineteenth-century in France, ethnology, a field that comprised philosophers, historians and linguists as well as scientists was concerned with studying all aspects of humans, including culture and society, whereas anthropology concerned itself with studying the anatomical characteristics of the races. Each of these words—ethnology, ethnography, anthropology—denotes an attitude and approach to studying human beings. According to Broca, ethnology, the science of races, was a part of anthropology, whereas ethnography, a description of races was not a science (Dias 22–23). Ethnog- raphy, then, was to be practiced by a diverse group of people including amateurs, whereas anthropology and ethnology were the territories of science. Documents from the Société d’Ethnographie de Paris, however, established its practice as the science of civilizations (Dias 53). Through the course of the nineteenth century, there was considerable debate over the meaning of these terms and the accepted domains of study. While it is not possible to outline them here, these debates demonstrate the interconnected nature of the theories, aims and practices of the three fields. Despite their differences, each of these societies existed for the purpose of studying of the world’s people, an interest that was born from a desire to understand races and cultures that were newly “discovered” by French explorers. Thus, the practices of the nineteenth-century human sciences were inextricably linked to the discourses of colonization and imperialism. In addition, the practice of ethnog-

66 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 raphy, a field that relied on the collection of objects, was made possible by colonization and the resulting easy access to objects of study. Nineteenth-century human sciences, therefore, utilized power dynamics, rooted in colonialism, that made non- European people subject and submissive to science.2 These emerging fields of the human sciences in France depended upon the -in vention and promulgation of photography. From its inception, the practice of photography was linked to science and was valued for its supposed ability to capture the real. Daguerre’s method of capturing and fixing the image in the camera obscura was announced at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in January 1839. Like the new sciences it supported, the invention of photography was situated within the positivist ideal of observation, an ideal that had become a central feature of European knowledge in the nineteenth century. Photography was valued as an objective, rational tool that accurately recorded what the scientist observed, producing scientific data.3 Nineteenth-century anthropologists and ethnologists aimed to build a universal scientific method that would allow scientists to learn about and analyze all of the world’s people (Jehel 9). Photography was an appropriate tool for this goal, for it allowed scientists to see and record physical traits that they could then easily classify and categorize. In this sense, the practice of collecting photographs reduced individual human beings to types and worked to create racial “knowledge.” The study of human beings in France in the nineteenth century developed tangentially to another institution, the museum, with its discourses of exhibition, display and world expositions. In 1855, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle created a Chair of Anthropology. At the same time, new structures for studying humans were instituted including laboratories and teaching areas (Jehel 15). In 1878, following the Universal Exposition in Paris, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle founded the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. In addition to scientific research, anthropological and ethnographic study at the museum took on a new role—education. The museums focused on teaching the French population about so-called primitive cultures through the organization of public exhibitions. Like the discourse of the human sciences, the discourse of museums and public display operated in a complex relationship with French colonial rule. Ethnographic exhibitions sought to teach the French about the colonial Other, but at the same time they functioned as tools that maintained colonial rule and power and created French identity and nationalism by setting up an opposition between self and Other. The Muséum had used photography for research since its very beginnings, and Etienne Serres, the museum’s director from 1839–1855, bought one of Daguerre’s cameras to “make the first ‘ethnic portraits’” (Hamy qtd. in Jehel 16). By the end of the nineteenth century, French museums had amassed considerable archives of photographs of non-European people.

The Surrealist Other 67 Although the ethnographic photograph of the Kanak schoolboys that appeared in Documents belonged to a museum collection, it was taken by an amateur eth- nographer. In September 1866, Ernest Robin, a Frenchman who was born in Le Havre, arrived in Nouméa, New Caledonia (Kakou 56). Although Robin’s hope of making a living solely by photography was not realized, for fifteen years he photographed the indigenous people of New Caledonia and the development of the new French colony, including views of the town of Nouméa, the penal colony of Île de Nou and the development of a system of delivery of potable water (Kakou 56–57, 169). Some of his photographic portraits of Kanak people were used as the source of drawings for the illustrated French periodical Le Tour de Monde in 1878 (Kakou 155–56). Robin’s photographs, while not taken explicitly for scientific purposes, were collected and preserved by scientific institutions. In 1889, Robin donated his photographs and negatives to the Société de Géographie de Paris, which today reside in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The photographs published in Documents belonged to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, which, in 1937, became the Musée de l’Homme and, in 2006, was reinvented as the Musée du Quai Branly.4 Robin’s collections of photographs read like visual travel diaries of the places he visited, rather than anthropological studies of human form. An album in the Département des Estampes et de la Photographie at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for example, contains many more photographs of landscapes, villages and other scenes, than of people. When it depicts people, the album shows both colo- nizers and colonized, usually at work in the new colony (Robin, Souvenirs). While this album likely belonged to Robin’s personal collection (Kakou 169), the photographs differ little from those that were donated to the Society of Geography. These images are ethnographic rather than anthropological, for they are not concerned with classifying races according to physical characteristics. Rather, they describe the conditions of daily social and cultural life in New Caledonia, a colony that had only been occupied by France since 1853. Robin has been credited, however, with capturing some of the first photographs of the indigenous people of northern New Caledonia (Kakou 146–47). Because he worked as a commercial photographer, Robin’s images depict scenes that might have been of interest to travelers or to people who lived in the colony. An image entitled Pirogue de la rivière de Monéo, 1867, for example, pictures two Kanak men on a long wooden boat that floats leisurely along a wide river, heavily forested on both banks (Kakou 58–59). The river, reflecting the foliage on either side, stretches across the centre of the photograph, while two small mountains rise up in the background and a piece of driftwood twists artfully in the left foreground. It is indeed a lovely photograph. Although many of Robin’s images of New Caledonia and of its people are pic- turesque, his photographs are not neutral depictions of everyday life. Despite its reputation at the time, such photography was neither neutral nor objective. As John

68 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Tagg has demonstrated, nineteenth-century photographic practices in France and Britain were clearly bound up with newly developing institutions of state power, and “[a]t the time of photography’s development, the functions of the state were expanding and diversifying in forms that were both more visible and more rigorous” (Tagg, “Evidence” 61). As I have shown, Ernest Robin’s depictions of New Caledonian life in the 1860s and 1870s existed at the intersection of several new institutions of knowledge that developed in mid-nineteenth century France. In an attempt to know the Other, all of these institutions—anthropology, ethnology, museums—collected images of indigenous people. As records, documents, and tools of learning, photographs, then, functioned as evidence of the differences between European and non-European people. The meaning of Robin’s photographs was contrived through their collection by these emerging institutions of knowledge. Institutional collecting is a discursive practice, and the act of collecting Robin’s photographs projected meaning onto them, a meaning that both instituted and supported colonial power.

Appropriation

Appropriation is a form of collecting. The first appropriation of the Kanak schoolboys by Robin, his camera and a French ethnographic institution served to collect visual information about colonized people to produce knowledge. Roland Barthes, writing about his reluctance with having his portrait taken, claims that a photograph turns a subject into an object (13–15). His hesitation derives from the ambiguity of ownership, and he wonders, “to whom does the photograph belong?” (13). While Barthes’ uneasiness stems from his desire for an “authentic” portrait, it also arises from photography’s potential to disempower through appropriation. This potential is even greater when the subjects are children, indigenous and subject to colonial rule. In this form of appropriation, the action of the camera and the taking of the photograph signify colonial power and mark the attempted capture of indigenous identity by a European gaze. As part of a larger collection, the meaning of Robin’s photograph is determined by its relationship to other objects in the collection. Its place in the collection of Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro marks it as an ethnographic object, for its meaning is anchored by the word “ethnographic,” its location in the educational space of the museum and its status as scientific document. The power of this meaning comes both from ownership as well as from the opacity of the process of appropriation and the functioning of discourse. As part of the ethnographic collection, the photograph stood as evidence in a system of knowledge. While the taking of the photograph and its assimilation to nineteenth-century museological ideals is certainly a significant form of appropriation and collecting,

The Surrealist Other 69 the second-level appropriation interests me here, for it reveals something about the first-level appropriation and surrealist practice, as well as the nature of photographic meaning in general. The placement of these two photographs, one of dancers and one of schoolchildren, on the page marks a typical surrealist visual strategy that creates meaning through the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate images. This visual strategy, however, is augmented by the use of appropriated photographs. Par- alleling other surrealist visual strategies such as collage and exquisite corpse, the gesture of appropriation was crucial for surrealist practice as it made possible an attack on reason through the disruption of traditional pictorial practices as they are attached to cultural norms.5 The appropriation of photographs from ethnographic collections and their subsequent re-framing in what was essentially an avant-garde art review was significant because it created a destabilizing effect that had revolutionary potential. It was this destabilizing effect that allowed Bataille and his collaborators to situate themselves outside traditional French culture, and position themselves as alien, as Other to the French norm. Surrealist appropriation was destabilizing in two ways: first, it revealed the workings of photography, contesting the illusion of representation as a window either to the real or to the surreal; and, second, it revealed the instability of photographic meaning, disturbing what John Tagg calls “the discursive frame” that holds meanings in place (“Discourse” 351–73). Both disturbances derive from what we might call a confrontation with the frame (Tagg, “Discourse” 358). By tearing a photograph from its “original” discursive frame and forcing it into another, surrealist appropriation de-naturalized the discursive frame and struck at the foundations of traditional notions of representation. In this way, appropriation allows us to see the hidden ways in which meaning is instituted through discourse and projected onto an image. This is significant, for it interfered with the photograph’s power to function as evidence within an ethnographic collection and disturbed the notion that meaning is held within the edges of the picture. Because the act of appropriation shifted an image from one presentational space to another, incommensurable, presentational place, it disrupted the accepted notion that photographs represent the real—that the photograph carries meaning through its indexical relationship to a stable, unchanging referent. If a photograph can be both a document in a late nineteenth-century French ethnographic study that records the lives of the recently colonized Kanak people of French New Caledonia, as well as an illustration in an avant-garde art magazine, what is its meaning? Does it present the ordered bodies of schoolchildren as a lesson in imperial and racial domination, and as a document of lives made better, more “civilized” by colonial rule? Or, by placing it next to the undulating bodies of Hollywood dancers, does it criticize the very notion of civilization? By removing Robin’s photograph from its place in a collection of photographs that belonged to an ethnographic museum in Paris, and re-placing

70 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 the image in an avant-garde cultural review, the editors of Documents revealed the workings of ethnographic discourse, turned it on its head, and used it to create a new, subversive aesthetic that drew on the practice of collecting. Surrealist collecting, however, was not the imperial practice of collecting to possess; it was collecting as a process that sought to disrupt.

From Ethnographic Document to Surrealist Intervention

In 1929, the publisher, art collector and director of the Parisian Gazette des beaux- arts, Georges Wildenstein, founded a new journal called Documents. For the first three issues, its subtitle was Doctrines, archéologie, beaux-arts, éthnographie, after which doctrines was removed and variétés was added to the end. An editorial board composed of representatives of various museums was listed on the review’s mast- head.6 Although Georges Bataille was listed as “secretary-general,” he was actually the de facto editor (Bataille, “Notes” 31; Hollier 4; Leiris “From the Impossible” 240– 41). While the makeup of the editorial board appears to have favored academic and institutional affiliations, the list of contributors reveals somewhat different intellectual leanings. Men associated with the academy still appeared, but individuals such as Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, Georges Limbour, and Michel Leiris who were associated primarily with the surrealist movement also appeared. In fact, these men were recent refugees from the renowned disagreements that had begun to plague André Breton’s group in the late 1920s. Indeed, Documents has been called “a place for erstwhile surrealists” (Champagne 10).7 Surrealism was a revolutionary avant-garde art movement that was launched in Paris in 1924 by André Breton and others. Because the surrealists wanted to free thought from the confines of reason, they were particularly frustrated with traditional French culture, a culture they saw as rooted in such Enlightenment values as rationalism, progress and order. According to the surrealists, French social norms were oppressive, and the best method for eradicating them was an attack on reason. Often, this attack on reason necessitated an attack on French institutions, including the Catholic Church, marriage, French literature, and—to a lesser degree— colonialism. In 1929, the surrealist revolution was in the midst of a crisis. Various members had left the movement or had been excommunicated by Breton after bitter arguments. Relations with the French Communist Party, while always strained, became even more difficult. The future direction of the movement was uncertain. In -Feb ruary, Breton sent a questionnaire to all those who had participated in surrealism, asking about future collaborative endeavors. Georges Bataille replied, “Too many fucking idealists” (Nadeau 156). This was, perhaps, the beginning of the famous

The Surrealist Other 71 rivalry between the two men that was played out in public.8 For Bataille, Breton and the Bretonian surrealists did not take their criticism of French culture far enough. However, in Documents, Bataille uses an aesthetic strategy that is decidedly surrealist. This is not surprising, though, because many of his collaborators had recently left Breton’s flock, or were about to be expelled from the official surrealist group.9 Documents published photographs from a wide variety of sources, including the work of surrealist photographer Jacques-André Boiffard; stock photographs from picture agencies; photographs of art objects; film stills and publicity shots; and photographs of artifacts from popular culture. In addition, Documents published many photographs taken from ethnographic studies, such as the images of Haida totem poles in Canada or the photographs of W. B. Seabrook’s initiation into Voodoo (1.6: 335; 2.1: 51–52). Documents was a significant publication for it marked a convergence of art, popular culture and ethnography. Indeed, for many of Docu- ments’ contributors, modern culture was to be studied as an ethnographic document (Clifford, 129–33). This convergence was constructed and made visible by the collection of photographs and their subsequent creative and systematic use in the review. One only needs to glance at a few pages of a contemporary mainstream art publication such as the Gazette des Beaux Arts to see how very differentDocuments was. Robin’s image of the Melanesian schoolboys was only one of the large, unruly collection of photographs that comprised Documents. To decipher the meaning of “Children at the Bacouya School” as it appears in Documents, it is necessary to look at it in relation to other photographs as well as to the written texts that appear in its proximity. “Children at the Bacouya School” was not the only photograph by Ernest Robin that appeared in issue number four of Documents. In total, five photographs from Robin’s Trocadéro album were appropriated and published in the September 1929 issue of the review. These five photographs appeared in the first half of the seventeen- page section called “Chronique” [Chronicles]. A selection of shorter articles, news items and reviews, “Chronique” was a regular feature of Documents and appeared at the end of each issue following the longer articles. For example, in the first issue, “Chronique” contained a short review of the work of contemporary artist Paul Klee, an announcement about the reorganization of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Tro- cadéro, a brief description of medieval manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, a review of an exhibition of Chinese art in Berlin, and a longer discussion of the work of composer Igor Stravinsky. The “Dictionnaire Critique,” [Criti- cal Dictionary] a sub-section of “Chronique,” premiered in the second issue.10 The “Dictionnaire” was a collection of definitions of seemingly unrelated terms: man, spit, factory chimney, eye, architecture, metaphor. By the time Robin’s photographs

72 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 appeared in issue four, the format was well established; “Chronique” began with the section entitled “Dictionnaire” and ended with shorter pieces on art and culture. In addition to the photograph of the schoolboys, which appears on page 219, there are four other photographs attributed to Robin that appear later in the section. The first photograph depicts a group of Kanak workers on a break (223). This image heads up an article by André Schaeffner about an African-American jazz troupe, entitled “Les ‘Lew Leslie’s Black Birds’ au Moulin Rouge” [“Lew Leslie’s Black Birds” at the Moulin Rouge]. The next two photographs appear on a full-page display of four photographs portraying people of color (224). Two portrait photographs of Kanak people are interspersed with an image of an African-American girl and a photograph by Nadar of an elegant African-French woman who wears a riding costume. The fourth photograph by Robin depicts a group of prison guards (225). It appears directly above another group photograph, a publicity shot of the American Black Birds seated on the deck of a ship. Because these last three photographs appear immediately following André Schaeffner’s article on the Black Birds, and the first appeared immediately above it, scholars have read Robin’s other four images alongside the article. Although she does not mention Robin’s photograph of the schoolboys, Mary Drach McInnes reads the photographs surrounding Schaeffner’s article as depictions of racial stereotypes that represent the “conflation of the African-American with the ‘primitive’” (75). She argues that placing images of jazz musicians and colonized Melanesians in the same section of the same issue of the review not only draws connections between the two, but equates them, reinforcing the racist notion of African-Americans as the “modern primitive” (75). Similarly, in Negrophilia, Petrine Archer-Straw also discusses Robin’s photographs in Documents. Archer-Straw reads the juxtaposition of Robin’s photographs with the jazz musicians and consigns them to the same fate:

[there is] a picture that appeared on a following page, “Canaques de Kroua, Kroua-oua, côte est,” a photograph of an African [sic] group in which the native blacks are shown resting easily in the bush. The bold title of the article immediately beneath the picture reads “Les ‘Lew Leslie’s Black Birds’ au Moulin Rouge,” a juxtaposition of text and image that implies that the Black Birds are nothing more than savages (these savages?) beneath their urban garb (153).11

Both Archer-Straw and McInnes argue that the use of Robin’s photographs and their juxtaposition with images of African-Americans allowed the editors of Docu- ments to situate themselves as outsiders and as transgressive. Both writers claim that it was the association with outsiders (blacks in 1920s Paris) that made these images subversive. However, as Archer-Straw clearly shows throughout her book, there was

The Surrealist Other 73 a mania for “blackness” in 1920s Paris. Thus, the publication of these images can hardly be construed as subversive. It was not the content of the photographs that transgressed borders but, rather, it was the ways in which the photographs were used and their relationship to each other and to the articles in “Chronique” that was subversive. If Bataille, as editor, sought to equate African-Americans with the so-called primitive people of New Caledonia through the use of juxtaposed images, as Mc- Innes and Archer-Straw claim, it is certainly likely that the correspondence he wanted to draw was one that critiqued the imperial power of France and colonial rule. It is quite clear that for both surrealists and the movement’s dissidents an attack on France’s traditional institutions of knowledge, power and control was at stake. Though it is well known that in 1929, Bataille and Breton were not friendly, the two men operated within the same intellectual, social, and political milieu. It is important, then, to read Robin’s images in Documents within the context of the intellectual left politics of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which included anti- colonial and anti-racist sentiments. Less than two years after Robin’s photographs appeared in Documents, the Bretonian surrealists would stage a counter-exhibition during the 1931 Paris Expo- sition Coloniale Internationale. Where the Paris Expo Coloniale celebrated French colonialism by showing the reach of French imperial power across the world, the surrealist counter-exhibition endeavoured to show the “truth of the colonies,” which was the epithet for their display. Photographs of the surrealist counter-exposition were published in the surrealist review Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution (n.p.).12 The photographs depict a collection of objects grouped to demonstrate an undeniably anti-colonial, anti-imperial and anti-racist message. For instance, one photograph shows a group of statues on a table—one of a South Pacific girl wearing a grass skirt; another of barefoot, black child begging for money; and the third of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus—with the heading “Fétiches Européens.” Another photograph that documents a gallery of African art is placed below a Karl Marx quotation that is painted on the wall. The quotation states: “un people qui en opprime d’autres ne saurait être libre” (Lot 5369) [a people that oppresses others knows not how to be free]. Given these politics—politics that were at the heart of the surrealist endeavour—it becomes clear that the juxtaposition of Robin’s ethnographic photographs with the words “Black Birds” and a collection of photographs of African-Americans consciously criticized the ways in which European imperial domination and colonial rule oppressed people of color. Although Bataille was not explicitly involved in the counter exhibition, it is fair to say that he and those working on Documents participated in the same intellectual milieu. Indeed, Bataille went to the Paris Exposition Coloniale and, in a letter to Michel Leiris dated 1931,

74 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 wrote that he saw black dancers there “enter on an elevated platform like cows in a wagon” (Letter 62–63). His disgust with the spectacle is apparent. It was anti-colonial, anti-racist politics, rather than an affinity for jazz music and black entertainers as Archer-Straw claims, that set the surrealists, both dissident and official, apart from contemporary French society. Theirs was a politics of refusal—a refusal to accept social and cultural norms. However, although the result of appropriating and reframing Robin’s photographs in La Révolution sur- réaliste was an attack on French colonial power, it is important to note that such acts were not always altruistic and were, to a certain extent, self-serving. The use of photographs of people subject to French colonial rule did little for those people, but the gesture did indeed help the avant-garde to achieve its goals. In the 1931 letter to Leiris, Bataille was able to distance himself from the European organizers of the Expo Coloniale and state that if he did not feel categorically excluded from the spectacle at the Trocadéro, he would have become completely agitated. In a 1929 journal entry, Leiris wrote about an evening with Bataille: “la Revue nègre and what it symbolizes is always the centre of our preoccupations” (208). Leiris’s editor notes that the entry referred to Lew Leslie’s Black Birds, and that, in another entry, Leiris had called the revue an “admirable spectacle” (219). It is clear, then, that while Bataille eschewed the spectacle of black dancers at the Expo coloniale, he was obsessed with the performance of African-Americans in Paris. For Bataille and Leiris, la Revue nègre was important for the development of their ideas. Although both Archer-Straw and McInnes simplify this interest, it was, to a certain extent, motivated by intellectual rather than political concerns. At the same time, however, for both Bataille and Leiris, intellectual concerns were political, and Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds played a pivotal role in the development of a subversive anti-bourgeois intellectual climate.13 Understanding surrealist politics, however, does not fully explain the meaning of “Children at the Bacouya School, Bourail” as it appeared in Documents. Cer- tainly the photograph can be read visually alongside Robin’s other photographs in the December 1929 issue of the review because all were taken by the same photographer. However, only “Children at the Bacouya School, Bourail” bears a caption that credits it to the Trocadéro. The visual-textual relationship of the photograph is complicated. Because the page with the photograph of the schoolboys and of the Hollywood dancers appears several pages before Schaeffner’s article and because its caption differentiates it from Robin’s other photographs, it does not obviously belong with the Black Birds. It falls at the end of the “Critical Dictionary,” which, in this issue, contains three entries: “Black Birds,” “Homme,” [Man] and “Oeil” [Eye]. However, there is no definitive connection between either “Children at the Bacouya School, Bourail” or “Bessie Love in the talkie ‘Broadway Melody.’” Other images in

The Surrealist Other 75 this section, such as, for example, Grandville’s drawing of giant eyes chasing a man to his death, are more clearly linked to the dictionary entries. The page under question falls at the end of the “Dictionary,” between two series of images that clearly illustrate the entry “Oeil.” None of the entries, including “Oeil,” however, refers to New Caledonia or to Bessie Love and Hollywood talkies. It is difficult to make a definitive link between image and text. Robin’s photograph resists interpretation in part because of the absence of editorial records which were lost in the Second World War. It also resists interpretation through its placement in Documents whose context was determined by the surrealist pictorial practice of juxtaposition. The photograph’s meaning is fragmentary and elusive. Because it is placed below the photograph of the Hollywood dancers, the viewer attempts to draw a connection between the two images. The apparent relationship, however, stymies the viewer’s expectations. According to the discourse of the nineteenth- century human sciences, one would expect to see the young Kanak boys presented as “savages” and the white, American women as “civilized.” The placement of the two photographs and their visual relationship to one another, however, suggests a different reading. The contrast and contradiction between the expected relationship and the represented relationship highlights the peculiarity of the concepts of “civilized” and “savage,” revealing these concepts as constructed in discourse. It is plau- sible, then, to read these images in conjunction with Michel Leiris’s article “Civiliza- tion” that appears two pages after the page with the photographs of the schoolboys and the Hollywood dancers (221–22), for it deals with these very issues. In the article that is, in effect, a review of the Black Birds production of Porgy, Leiris questions the continued existence of “civilization.” Using an image of the earth’s crust unable to contain its molten core, Leiris outlines the fragility of civilization and criticizes European culture’s idealization of it. For Leiris, civilization is ready to crumble at any moment, “allowing our horrifying primitiveness to appear in the interstices” (19).14 This revelation, Leiris believes, is the point of theater, whose purpose should be the erasure of any distinction between reality and fantasy. Indeed, he cites Giacometti’s suggestion that in the “only possible theater piece” a fireman would come onstage, shout “fire!”, and the audience would run, panicking, out of the theater (22). Theater, Leiris claimed, should bring us closer to our Stone Age roots (23). Leiris refers both to circus-performer Diavolina’s “leap of death” and the Black Birds production of Porgy as examples of theater that bring the audience closer to death, something that we all unconsciously desire (22–23). For Leiris, early twentieth-century “civilized” society could barely contain the fire underneath, a bright, raging fire that was ready to burst through to the surface, a fire in which, perhaps, Hollywood chorus girls danced. This barely contained fire, however, cannot be seen in Robin’s photograph of the schoolboys. Does the image,

76 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 as it is placed in Documents, show “primitiveness” beneath the surface of civilization, or does it show the savageness of civilizing colonization? Is it to be read in opposition to the photograph of the Hollywood dancers, or in conjunction with it? The photograph’s meaning in Documents remains ambiguous, for the relationship between the images and the article is not clear. While the juxtaposition of the two photographs makes sense visually, it forces intellectual connections that continu- ously break down. Further ambiguity ensues when trying to link the photograph to a third article on the Black Birds that appeared in “Chroniques” in issue number four of Docu- ments. In a brief dictionary entry entitled “Black Birds,” Georges Bataille describes the American troupe’s performance as an “intoxicating insanity” where “the Ameri- can blacks who are civilized like us and today who sing and dance” free us from a depression that has kept us all imprisoned in our homes, homes that are a great “communal grave” (215).15 Are the Hollywood dancers to be equated with the Black Birds? Are the schoolboys imprisoned in the communal grave of civilization? It is difficult to see the photograph of either the schoolboys or the Hollywood dancers related to the words “intoxicating” or as “peals of laughter” that Bataille uses in his article. The meaning of Robin’s photograph remains undecidable, a characteristic of its status as an object in a surrealist collection.

Conclusion

Surrealist appropriation is never complete, for it is impossible to erase the meaning instituted through the original discursive frame. There is always a remainder. As it stands, here in Documents Robin’s photograph “Children at the Bacouya School, Bourail” remains a fragment, a fragment both of the original collection of photographs in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and of the collection of disparate objects that shaped the politics and the aesthetics of the review. It ceases to be an ethnographic document, but it resists full annexation to a cultural review. The undecidability of the image derives from its position in a collection made through the strategy of appropriation, where, torn from their first presentational place, photographs do what photographs are forbidden to do—they escape, if only for an instant, the limits and boundaries that inscribe their meaning and keep them in their place. As a kind of outlaw collecting that disrupted the rules of discourse, the appropriation of Robin’s photographs in Documents functioned as an attack on the viewer, destabilizing his or her sense of order. Removed from the discursive frame of ethnography, the photograph was not presented as a rational, ordered study that claimed to know the Other. It became part of a collection of another kind, a collection that included a photograph of Hollywood dancers, as well as images of mod-

The Surrealist Other 77 ern art, obscure engravings, and pages from tabloid comics. It destabilized that rational, ordered collecting that French ethnography was; it called into question an ethnography that sought to know and to organize the humans it helped colonize. It was the act of photographic appropriation and the re-framing of the Robin photograph that was subversive, rather than the content of the image. Functioning as a transgression, the photographic appropriation in Documents positioned the review as Other, as outside traditional culture, as confrontational and threatening. By positioning themselves outside traditional culture, Georges Bataille and his collaborators forged a place from which they could confront what they saw as the oppressive nature of contemporary French norms and the idealism and rationalism inherent in that dominant culture.

u Brock University

Notes

1 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Broadway Melody was an early Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical, directed by Harry Beaumont and released in 1929. It was one of the first talkie musicals produced in Hollywood. 2 European people were made to submit to science and photography through other newly developing discourses, particularly psychiatry and forensics. In L’Uomo delin- quente, 1876, for example, Cesare Lombroso used photographs of those who were supposedly born criminals, and, in isolating their facial features and comparing them to those of university students, he produced the image of the criminal type. Other new uses for photography, including the Bertillon Card identification system for criminals, sought to scrutinize, classify and organize human beings of all races. 3 Because it was based on the camera obscura, a tool that aided in the rendition of perspective drawings, the photographic apparatus, like the perspectival system, presup- posed a singular point of view that put both photographer and viewer at the centre of the world and arranged that same world according to a rational, ordered system. 4 In 1994, the collection of the photothèque of the Musée de l’Homme contained 125 photographs of New Caledonia and its people taken by Ernest Robin between 1867 and 1879 that were donated in 1889 (Jehel 109). Jehel lists the contents of a book of photographs by Ernest Robin that belongs to the Musée de l’Homme, but there is no description of a photograph like the one published in Documents (109). However, the Documents photograph, credited to the Trocadéro, that belonged to the Musée de l’Homme, today belongs to the Musée du Quai Branly and is available digitally on the museum’s “iconothèque” under the inventory number PP0048995. (To access the digi- tal file, go to www.quaibranly.fr/cc/pod/recherche.aspx?b=2&t=1.) 5 Exquisite corpse was a surrealist game that drew on the collective participation of the players to make an image or a sentence. Each participant would write a word or draw part of an image, usually a human figure, on a piece of paper, fold it, and pass it to the next person who would then add his or her word or portion of the image. The product

78 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 would be a collaborative work transmitted directly from the collective unconscious of those who wrote it. 6 While there were board members who did not fit into this category, seven of eleven board members were affiliated with museums. These included the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, the Louvre, and the Cabinet de Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, all of which were established collecting institutions. 7 In his preface to the re-edition of Documents that is translated as “The Use-Value of the Impossible” and published in October, Denis Hollier uses the term “dissenting surrealists” (7). 8 For example: Breton dedicated several pages to an attempt to undermine Bataille’s intellectual credibility in the “Second manifest du surréalisme” that was published in the twelfth and final issue ofLa Révolution surréaliste (15 Dec. 1929). Bataille, along with his Documents collaborators, published a scathing broadside entitled “Un Cadavre” (1930) that announced the “death” of Breton and pictured him as a Christ-figure, an insult to the leader of an anti-clerical movement. Although Georges Bataille was interested in disrupting traditional French culture, he also reserved a certain criticism for the surrealist revolution and its leader, whom he dismissed as “Icarian” and lost in the poetic (Bataille, “Old Mole” 41). 9 Bataille and his work in Documents apparently threatened Breton because in the “Sec- ond manifest du surréalisme,” he accused Bataille of gathering the ex-members of his group (Breton 132). 10 While the title “Chronique,” does not appear in the second issue, it reappears in issue number three. 11 Archer-Straw’s error in calling the Melanesian men “Africans” is significant. 12 This journal has been reprinted in a collection as Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution: Collection complète. Paris: J.-M. Place, 1976. The original copies of these images are among André Breton’s papers in André Breton, 42 rue Fontaine. Lot 5369 contains four photographs of the surrealist counter-exposition. 13 It is also important to make a distinction between a display of colonized blacks placed in an ethnographic museum during an Exposition that was, in effect, an ode to colonialism, and a performance that, while still a spectacle, managed to promote African- American culture. While not ideal, the intellectual and social climate in Paris in the 1920s did provide more opportunities for African-American writers, artists and per- formers than did that of the United States. Archer-Straw herself acknowledges this fact when she writes that the image of blacks in Paris “was changing to accommodate an increased awareness of urban African-American culture” (107). 14 I cite the translated version of “Civilization” in Leiris’s anthology Brisées: Broken Branches. 15 Archer-Straw insists that despite the anti-colonial sentiments of the contributors to Documents, the review idealized primitivism in way that denied blacks any “reality other than a historical one” and “established racist presumptions concerning savagery, sexuality and suppressed violence” (153, 153). While there are certainly racist elements to Documents’ idealization of primitivism, it is not clear that the review sought to equate all blacks with primitivism or that the notion of primitivism was even limited

The Surrealist Other 79 to blacks. Certainly, in Bataille’s article and others, distinctions are made between so- called “primitive” cultures and black American culture.

Works Cited

Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bataille, Georges. “Black Birds.” Documents 4 (Sep. 1929): 215. ———. Letter to Michel Leiris. 1931.Choix de Lettres, 1917–1962. Ed. Michel Surya. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. 62–63. ———. “Notes on the Publication of ‘Un Cadavre’.”The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Trans. Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 1994. 30–33. ———. “The Old Mole and the PrefixSur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. and Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 32–44. “Bessie Love dans le film parlant ‘Broadway Melody’ qui passera incessammant au Madeleine-Cinéma.” Anonymous photograph. Documents 4 (Sep. 1929): 219. Breton, André. “Second manifest du surréalisme” (1929). Manifestes du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. 67–137. Champagne, Roland A. Georges Bataille. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Clifford, James.The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Dias, Nélia. Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, 1878–1908: anthropologie et muséologie en France. Paris: Éditions de cnrs, 1991. Hollier, Denis. “The Use-Value of the Impossible.” Trans. Liesl Ollman.October 60 (Spring 1992): 3–24. Jehel, Pierre-Jèrôme. Photographie et anthropoligie en France au XIXe siècle. DEA thesis Université Paris VII Saint-Denis, 1994–1995. Atelier des mots et du regard. http://www .a-m-e-r.com/Recherches/dea/photo_anth19e.pdf (accessed 24 Jan. 08). Kakou, Serge. Découverte photographique de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. Paris: Actes Sud, 1998. Leiris, Michel. “Civilization.” Brisées: Broken Branches. Trans. Lydia Davis. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989: 19–24. ———. “From the Impossible Bataille to the ImpossibleDocuments .” Brisées: Broken Branches. Trans. Lydia Davis. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989: 237–47. ———.Journal 1922–1989. Ed. and annotated Jean Jamin. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Lot 5369. “La verité sur les colonies.” Anonymous photographs. André Breton, 42 rue Fontaine. Ed. Laurence Calmels. dvd-rom. Paris: Calmels Cohen, 2003. McInnes, Mary Drach. “Taboo and Transgression: The Subversive Aesthetics of Georges Bataille and Documents.” Diss. Boston University, 1994. Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism (1944). Trans. Richard Howard. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1989. Robin, E[rnest]. “Enfants de L’École de Bacouya, Bourail. Albums de photographies de

80 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 E. Robin, 1869–1871.—Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro.” Photograph. Documents 4 (Sep. 1929): 219. ———.Souvenirs de la Nouvelle Caledonie. Photographic Album. Bibliothéque nationale de France. Vh 182 (4°). Le surréalisme au service de la revolution 4 (Dec. 1931): n.p. Tagg, John. “A Discourse (with Shape of Reason Missing).” Art History 15.3 (Sep. 1992): 351–73. ———. “Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State.” The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 60–65.

The Surrealist Other 81 Janet A. Walker Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan”

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was one of the many European and American artists working in the context of Japonisme—the movement that, beginning in the early 1870s and running its course by around 1900, encouraged the appreciation and systematic study of Japanese art. These artists were influenced, some of them profoundly, by Japanese subject matter as well as by Japanese aesthetics.1 Van Gogh was one of the most avid lovers and students of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world), as well as of Japanese albums created for export. His appropriation of techniques and images from Japanese art in the process of his evolution of an aesthetics has been well studied and evaluated.2 My goal in this exploration is, therefore, not to revisit the question of the influence of Japanese prints on the Dutch artist but, rather, to examine van Gogh’s imaginative relationship to Japan. I will explore that relationship through the artist—both as a student who was objectively interested in Japanese aesthetics and Japanese culture, and as a person and artist who, like his contemporaries, constellated his projections and longings around Japan, a then little-known country and culture, to create a dreamed Japan, a japon rêvé, to use Brigitte Koyama-Richard’s suggestive term. I will consider van Gogh in the framework of two cultural practices: collecting and painting. Van Gogh, as a collector of Japanese prints, engaged in nineteenth- century practices of material collecting in the context of imperialism; through his material collecting, and along with other Europeans of his time, he also collected, in a metaphorical manner, images of the exotic—in van Gogh’s case, images of what I shall call “Japan” to emphasize the imaginative and idealizing nature of the artist’s construction of Japan. From the mid-1880s onward van Gogh formulated an image of Japan, and an image of an ideal self in relation to Japan, that were based on his collecting of Japanese prints and influenced by his reading of magazine articles on Japan and novels that constructed idealized images of Japan as a primitive land whose people, and artists, still lived close to nature. Second, as a painter in Arles in the spring of 1888, the artist constructed an image of “Japan” as nature through a collection of paintings of flowering trees. In that series of paintings he expressed his idea of “Japan” through a natural image that he had come to value as a specifically Japanese image from perusing Japanese woodblock and album prints in his and his brother Theo’s collection. I view the image of the flowering tree as the site of the coming together of the artist’s practices of collecting Japanese prints and

82 images of “Japan” and of painting with the goal of collecting “Japan” and expressing “Japan” as a personal symbol under the aegis of Symbolism.

Van Gogh’s Collecting of Japanese Prints and Images of Japan

Van Gogh practiced what one might call metaphorical collecting. He carried out his collecting in ways that were “at once psychological and social” (Elsner and Cardi- nal 5),3 expressing personal and professional ideals and desires that were grounded in a specific time and place. Van Gogh became a systematic collector of Japanese woodblock prints in the mid-1880s in Paris. His position as both a citizen of one imperialist nation, The Netherlands, and a resident of another, France, allowed him to become acquainted with, appreciate, and appropriate the non-Western world— whether in the form of material objects, images, or aesthetic productions. By the time van Gogh and his brother Theo (Theodorus, 1857–1891) began their systematic collecting of Japanese prints, the earlier European curiosity about exotic objects of every kind and quality from the non-Western world had developed into a keen interest in non-Western, and specifically in Japanese art. A large number of Japa- nese woodblock prints had been brought to Europe from 1854 onward. The demand for Japanese prints at this time can be gauged by the fact that Tadamasa Hayashi (1856?–1906), connoisseur of and dealer in Japanese art in Paris after 1878, imported over an eleven-year period 156,487 Japanese prints into France in 218 deliveries from Yokohama (Aitken and Delafond 16). Moreover, a series of exhibitions held in major European cities, beginning with the Exposition Universelle held at Paris in 1867, made Japanese art more widely available to European artists. But it was not until Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi (the latter the founder of a noted museum of Asian art in Paris) returned from a tour of the Orient (1871–1873) “laden with art,” that Japonisme became a major movement in the European art world (Ives 13). The major founders of modern European art, including Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Rodin, Bonnard, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cassatt, and Toulouse-Lautrec, were all involved with Japonisme, and they all purchased and studied Japanese prints at some point during the last forty years of the nineteenth century.4 Around the beginning of March 1886, van Gogh traveled from The Nether- lands to Paris, where he moved in with his younger brother Theo in an apartment in Montmartre. Although he already had purchased a few Japanese prints while living in Antwerp in the winter of 1885–86, it was during the winter of 1886–87 that Vincent, along with Theo, began to systematically collect Japanese prints; Theo, as an art-dealer, influenced Vincent considerably on which prints to buy (Wich- mann 12). The brothers found a large supply of prints in a boutique that had been opened in 1875 at 19, rue Chauchat, by Siegfried (born Samuel) Bing (1838–1905), a

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 83 German from Hamburg who had taken out French citizenship in 1871 (Koyama- Richard 15).5 The shop was located conveniently just “a short walk” from the van Gogh brothers’ apartment at 54, rue Lepic (Walther and Metzger 286). The brothers were also allowed to visit Bing’s residence, where, in his attic, he had, as Vincent noted, surely exaggerating, “millions of prints piled up: landscape and figures, and old prints too” (Letter #510; Letters II, 611). Van Gogh went frequently to Bing’s attic “to study, acquire, or take on commission Japanese prints” (Welsh-Ovcharov, “Chronologie” 30 [my translation]); particularly during the last quarter of 1887, he went often to both Bing’s shop and home to study and collect Japanese prints (Welsh-Ovcharov, “Chronologie” 33). It is estimated that Vincent and Theo collected “some four hundred Japanese prints” during four or five visits to Bing’s attic (Welsh-Ovcharov, “Introduction” 18 [my translation]). This collection is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Van Gogh and his contemporaries collected Japanese prints because, as artists of their time, they wished to learn from them new forms, techniques, and ideas. It is generally agreed that “by the middle of the century the principles of Greco-Roman art which underlay European art had lost most of their vitality” and that European art was ripe for a change (Needham 115). European artists of the time, denigrating the “complex lighting and illusionistic devices” of Renaissance art and the “virtuosity and finesse of the salon styles” favored by the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, looked backward to their own pre-Renaissance traditions, praising the art of the “fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italians and Flemings” for its “vigor and expressive power” (Rubin 2). At the same time, they looked for artistic inspiration outside of Europe, to the lands that had recently come under European influence, and especially to Japan. John M. MacKenzie views the second half of the nineteenth century as a time of crisis for European art—when “the western arts in fact sought contamination at every turn, restlessly seeking renewal and reinvigoration through contacts with other traditions” (209). Thus, European artists, including van Gogh, collected and studied Japanese prints with the purpose of revitalizing the tradition of European painting. The study of Japanese woodblock prints, in some cases facilitated through collecting them and having them close at hand as sources of artistic inspiration, enabled artists working in France and elsewhere in the last forty years of the nineteenth century to “discover . . . within themselves . . . possibilities for expression which lay dormant in their tradition”; furthermore, by acting on that discovery, artists were able to effect a revolution in European art (Nagai 182). But there was, in addition, a psychological side to van Gogh’s collecting: the artist collected Japanese prints not only as an artist, but as a collector who was interested in collecting, in a metaphorical way, images of the non-Western Other that had a personal resonance for him in his time and place. James Clifford contends that Western people from the time of imperialism and

84 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 colonialism have viewed the non-Western Other as “a knitted-together collective representation figuring a geographically and historically vague but symbolically sharp exotic world” (136). In one of the more recent periods in which “the West has thought itself [and imagined itself] through its articulation of a set of ideas” (Hayot ix) named Japan, van Gogh and his fellow European artists in the late nineteenth century used “Japan” as what Hayot calls a “dream-space” (xii) in which to imagine a new sense of themselves and their art. The images of Japan that van Gogh collected, in a metaphorical sense, were of a place different from the geographically and historically defined country of Japan—an exotic place of which he knew very little. In reality, the Japan of the last forty years of the nineteenth century was a country in the process of rapid industrialization and modernization. Its cities of Tokyo (then called Edo) and Osaka had already started developing into large economic centers beginning in the late seventeenth century. During the 1880s and later, just at the time that European artists were intrigued by Japanese woodblock prints depicting an earlier Japan, Tokyo and Osaka were becoming modern metropolises with the technological accoutrements of European cities of the time, and the countryside was becoming crisscrossed by railroads. But the relative lack of knowledge of Japan was not an obstacle for van Gogh and his fellow artists, since their goal was not “the description, not even the interpretation of a reality, but the formulation of an ideal, desired reality” (van Alphen 3).6 Van Gogh, along with other artists of his time, filtered his view of Japan through the contemporary discourse of primitivism. Primitivism, which received its most influential formulation in Rousseau’s Discours sur les origines de l’inégalité (1762), praised “man’s fuller life in an earlier, simpler state” and “derided the benefits of organized society” (Varnedoe 180). In the late nineteenth century, under the psychological and social pressure of the advances in industrialization and urbanization, European intellectuals and artists praised what they considered as less sophisticated non-Western societies—societies as diverse as those of Tahiti and Japan—seeing in these imagined primitive spaces “the possible advantages of a life untouched by the conventions of European civilization” (Varnedoe 180). That view was accompanied by nostalgia for a simpler European life, experienced but also partly imagined, that artists perceived as having been lost with the advance of Western “civilization”—a civilization that severed human beings’ ties with nature and religion and fettered them in increasingly complex systems of social and political organization. In a context in which Europeans wished to use a foreign space to construct their own ideal, desired reality, “any shred” of a foreign “culture could effectively sum- mon a complete world of dreams and possibilities” (Clifford 136–37). One “shred” of Japanese culture that enabled van Gogh to crystallize around the “geopolitical space” (Hayot ix) of Japan a “complete world of dreams and possibilities” was the idea of Japan as a sunlit southern land. The artist had read the novel of Edmond

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 85 and Jules de Goncourt entitled Manette Salomon (1867), which presented an image of Japan as a land of sunlight—an antidote to the gray Parisian winter. Van Gogh may well have read the 1 May 1886 issue of Paris Illustré, sub-titled Le Japon, which was edited by the connoisseur of Japanese art Tadamasa Hayashi, since the artist later traced, and made the basis of one of his paintings (Japonaiserie: Oiran [after Kesaї {sic} Eisen]), an image of a geisha that was on the cover of that issue, a copy of which he owned. In Le Japon, Hayashi described Japan glowingly, in terms similar to those in which the Goncourt brothers had described it: as a land of sunlight and warmth. Significantly, Hayashi also compared the climate of Japan to that of South- ern Europe, particularly to that of Italy.7 At this time, a discourse of “the South” [le Midi], an area that embraced “a vast geography of warm climates,” including Japan, suggested to Northern Europeans that Southern lands (including Italy) possessed “creative potential” for them (Druick and Zegers 97). Under the influence of this discourse, by the winter of 1887–88 van Gogh had formulated an imaginary idea of Japan as a southern land of sunlight, and considered the south of France, where several fellow artists were already working, as “the equivalent of Japan” (Letter #500; Letters II, 589). His arrival in Arles, in the south of France, in late February of 1888 landed him squarely in a place that resonated with his “dream-space” “Japan.” The “discours du Midi,” which constructed lands with warm climates as spaces with creative potential for Northern European artists, dovetailed with the discourse of primitivism, in that the southern lands idealized by European artists were viewed also as, like Japan, areas relatively untouched by the evils of modernization, areas where people lived closer to nature. Another important “shred” of Japan that summoned up a “complex world of dreams and possibilities” for van Gogh, and the one that most seemed to conjure a land characterized by a primitive way of life was the Japanese woodblock prints themselves. In this regard, it is significant that the prints in the van Gogh brothers’ collection were from the early to mid-nineteenth century, a period pre-dating the period in which European artists collected them. These were prints depicting a world pre-dating the last four decades of the nineteenth century, an era in which the burdens of modernity were especially felt in Europe; they also depicted a world pre-dating the era of modernization in Japan, which hit its full stride only in the 1880s. Unlike the Yokohama prints of the late nineteenth century, which featured Western-style buildings, streetcars, gas street lights, and people in Western dress, demonstrating the penetration of modern Western civilization and technology, these prints focused on a pre-modern world. Furthermore, the prints largely depicted either subjects linked to the world of entertainment, or landscapes—the image of Japan that they presented was that of a land where people, and especially artists, lived and worked close to nature. This was a world where farmers and artisans worked at traditional tasks and where middle- and upper-class people engaged in leisurely outings to view flowering trees. Thus, for

86 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 van Gogh, viewing and reading the prints in the mid-1880s as representing Japan, Japanese prints must have seemed to depict a country where time had stopped and where modernity had not occurred, a place that seemed to him to provide a refuge from the highly organized, industrialized, and modernizing metropolises of European colonial empires. Without visiting the country himself, without reading about the history of contemporary Japan, and relying on books such as Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (1887), which presented an exoticized view of Japan, van Gogh depended on idealized artistic images that presented Japan as a pre-modern land as he constructed his own image of Japan. Through the discourse of primitivism, and based on his collecting and viewing of Japanese woodblock prints, van Gogh not only constructed an image of an ideal primitive Japan—he also fashioned an ideal primitive self in relation to Japan. Following Marianna Torgovnick’s argument, in reference to modern people, that “we imagine ourselves through the primitive” (18), I would suggest that the artist imagined himself through the primitive as mediated by his Japanese prints; the Japanese woodblock prints that he collected had a personal resonance for him in that they portrayed a primitive world on which he could project his longings for a primitive existence. From the winter of 1885–86 in Antwerp, when he purchased Japanese prints and “pinned a lot of little Japanese prints on the walls” of his room (Letter #437; Letters II, 453), the artist divorced the prints from their original function and made them relative to himself (Baudrillard 7), collecting objects that were an image of his ideal primitive self. He became a “conscious collector of identity, projecting . . . [his] taste onto the objects . . . [he] . . . [chose] to live with” (Elsner and Cardinal 3). The Japanese prints in his and his brother’s collection, especially the ones that he hung on the walls of his dwellings and looked at on a daily basis, became sites where he could communicate with Japan as he imagined it. Following Susan M. Pearce’s formulation, the Japanese woodblock prints that he collected and viewed “represent[ed] and remind[ed] . . . [him] of the variety of experiences which . . . [he] . . . [had] or might have, and the motives and goals which seemed to be open to . . . [him]” (Pearce 166).8 Through looking at the “material symbol” of Japan in the Japanese prints, van Gogh was reminded of a different way of feeling, experiencing, and living that he associated with “Japan”—a “primitive” world where people still lived simply, close to nature. As such, the prints were a reminder of a goal he hoped to achieve by moving to the south of France, which he imagined as the equivalent of Japan. As he wrote to Theo in late summer 1888, after he had already moved to Arles, “here my life will become more and more like a Japanese painter’s, living close to nature like a petty tradesman” (Letter #540; Letters III, 47). Van Gogh expressed his mature view of Japan as a primitive space and “Japanese man” as the ideal primitive man, in Letter #542, which was written probably in Au- gust 1888 in Arles:

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 87 If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying Bismarck’s policy? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure [. . .]. Come now, isn’t it almost a true religion which these simple Japanese teach us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers? And you cannot study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming much gayer and happier, and we must also return to nature, in spite of our education and our work in a world of convention. (Letters III, 55)

Following primitivist discourse, and reflecting what Ernst van Alphen calls exoti- cism, or the culture of the observer’s assigning superior value to another culture (2), van Gogh idealized “Japan” as superior to European cultures in that it had not (yet) transformed into an industrialized society and, thus, did not (yet) possess the so-called “civilized” but, in truth, decadent features of such a society. In van Gogh’s “primitive” Japan, the “Japanese man” is constructed as a person living before, or immune to the scientific revolution: he is not a scientist of the nineteenth-century European variety engaged in “studying the distance between the earth and the moon.” In addition, van Gogh idealizes Japanese man as a person uninterested in contemporary politics: he is not a late-nineteenth-century European political man “studying Bismarck’s policy.” Rather, the Japanese man concentrates on studying “a single blade of grass,” finding in that blade the knowledge to understand it and his place in nature, and through that knowledge constructing his art (Letters III, 55). In this letter van Gogh idealizes the daily life of the Japanese in primitivist terms, viewing them as living “amidst nature as though they themselves were flowers.” The discourse of primitivism allowed van Gogh to place Japan in a primitive space from which he was able to regenerate a self burdened by the so-called civilization of Europe and to create an art that expressed a “primitive” awareness of life. Furthermore, it enabled van Gogh the artist to redirect his artistic impulses to create new art which, although it was inspired by Japonisme, was firmly grounded in his desire for “Japan.” Thus, “Japan” as viewed through the lens of primitivism, and mediated by the woodblock prints in his collection, was the ideal that brought into existence a new self and a new art.9 What transcends the discourse of primitivism in the above letter, however, a letter written after he had already painted the series of flowering trees that is the subject of the next section, is van Gogh’s inti- mation of the Japanese closeness to nature as a “true religion.” In the final lines of the quotation, van Gogh urges his fellow Europeans to return to nature to find a “true religion,” like the Japanese as he imagines them. These lines suggest that, for

88 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 the artist, Japan represented a land whose religious sense was firmly grounded in nature and whose people had a stable moral and spiritual relationship with nature. Such a land, he sensed, would provide a refuge from the over-civilized Europe of the nineteenth century, which was rapidly losing its religious moorings and its connection to nature in the wake of industrialization and urbanization. As he painted the series of flowering trees in Arles in spring 1888, van Gogh looked to “Japan” as a place possessing a religion of nature—an imagined space that would inspire him to create an art oriented around nature that had some of the characteristics of a “true religion.”

Van Gogh’s Collecting of “Japan” in the Arles Paintings of Flowering Trees

From the late 1880s, from the time when he and Theo systematically collected Japa- nese prints, van Gogh had painted various images of “Japan” as an ideal that he dreamed of realizing. In the fall of 1887 the artist traced three Japanese prints, two of which were in the van Gogh brothers’ collection, as an attempt both to learn Japanese aesthetic techniques and to convey his colorful image of Japan as a primitive space.10 During the winter of 1887–88, he made one drawing and two paintings of his Parisian paint dealer, Julien Tanguy, as a Japanese artist and a “primitive socialist” (Kōdera, “Van Gogh’s Japonisme” 39) living close to nature. In July 1888 he painted a young French girl as a musume, or young Japanese girl (Portrait of a Mousmé), and he painted himself as a Japanese monk (Self-Portrait as a Bonze) in September 1888. Furthermore, he painted Japanese prints, which he and Theo had collected and which he found in magazines of the time, into the backgrounds of portraits of various people he knew: he incorporated those prints depicting his ideal primitive world into his three portraits of Père Tanguy, and into the painting Woman Sitting in the Café du Tambourin (spring 1887), which depicts the owner of the Café du Tambourin, Agostina Segatori. Contemporary works on Japan such as Louis Gonse’s L’Art Japonais (1883), with which van Gogh was familiar, portrayed Japanese art as having a “passion for nature” and being focused on “the natural and truth” (ii). Such views fitted nicely into primitivist discourse, which imagined the non-Western world and its art as being close to nature. Influenced by the contemporary view of Japanese art as focused on nature, the artist demonstrated his growing interest in Japanese nature through his insertion of natural phenomena inspired by Japanese prints, such as Mt. Fuji, frogs, and lotuses, into the paintings of Père Tanguy and into the painting Woman Sitting in the Café du Tambourin.11 In numerous paintings, the artist also painted natural phenomena other than those with specifically Japanese associations, but even in those paintings, he used Japa- nese aesthetics derived from ukiyo-e and album prints.

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 89 Thus, “Japan” in the form of various images, as well as artistic techniques, made its way into his paintings from the time when he and Theo collected Japanese prints. From his insertion of “Japanese” natural phenomena into his paintings, it is clear that van Gogh was intensely interested in nature as constructed in Japanese art. But it is in his series of paintings of flowering trees produced in Arles in spring 1888 that he communicated more strongly than in any other works of art his image of Japan as nature. Indeed, I suggest that the “Japanese” flowering tree, for a time, became for the artist the image of Japan par excellence. Van Gogh’s paintings of flowering trees were sites where the artist negotiated an idea of nature as mediated by Japan, and an idea of Japan as communicating the vitality of nature—both of these through a concrete image of a natural phenomenon representing “nature.” If one of the major characteristics of collecting is that it is done in series, through his series of paintings of flowering trees, the artist was accumulating a collection of powerful images of “Japan”—a “Japan” that he had imagined or dreamed based on his collecting of Japanese woodblock prints as well as on his reading about Japan as a land where people lived close to nature. In a context where the artist was seeking a “true religion” in Japanese nature, the flowering tree became a powerful, personally meaningful religious symbol of the vitality of nature for van Gogh, as it was for the Japanese. From late February to April of 1888, during the first few months of his stay in Arles, van Gogh painted fourteen canvases depicting various flowering trees. Ac- cording to Ronald Pickvance’s chronology, the artist painted “two small studies of an almond branch” in late February, soon after he arrived in Arles. Almond trees were the first to flower in that area, but that year, due to the unusually heavy and frequent snowfalls, the almond trees were late to bloom. Therefore the artist clipped a small almond branch and placed it in a glass on a table in his room to force it to flower. Due to the snow, van Gogh was at first unable to go outside to paint directly from nature, as was his custom; however, beginning in March of 1888, when the weather became warmer, he went frequently to a specific orchard to paint apricot, peach, plum, cherry, pear, and apple trees in blossom (Pickvance 45). The artist wrote in a letter to his brother Theo dated March 24 that he had completed “his first canvas of a blossoming orchard of apricot trees” (qtd. in Pickvance 41). At the end of March, van Gogh began “four or five more paintings [of blossoming orchards]” and had also “completed a study of two peach trees” (qtd. in Pickvance 42). By April 9 the artist was “still working furiously on orchards in bloom—one canvas of apricot trees, another of plum.” By this time van Gogh had already completed eight canvases and “planned ten more.” In mid-April he spent “one morning working on an orchard of plum trees during a fierce mistral” (qtd. in Pickvance 42). By April 20, the blossoming of the fruit trees was virtually finished (Pickvance 42) and, with the end of nature’s spring cycle, the artist’s series of paintings of

90 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 flowering trees also came to an end. In painting most of the studies of flowering trees, van Gogh worked outside, following Impressionist practice; he also worked “in one recognizable orchard” (Pickvance 45), which provided a variety of trees blooming at different times. All but one of the paintings of this period focus on one or several flowering trees of a particular kind, with only one “allowing a glimpse beyond the orchard, showing an adjacent field with willows and a ploughman, as well as a factory chimney” (Pickvance 45)—i.e., situating the trees in a world beyond that of the orchard. Most of the paintings of the series can be called landscapes, or depictions of a specific, real place in which the flowering trees are part of a composition that includes buildings, fences, and other vegetation in the particular orchard that the artist was using. But van Gogh’s paintings of flowering trees include two other types of organization: one in which two intertwined flowering trees are the focus of the painting, with little or no “background” interference; and one in which a small flowering tree is the focus of the painting. Although Pickvance called all fourteen of the Arles flowering tree paintings “immense still lifes of blossom [sic] en plein air” (45), these four paintings suggest the intense concentration of focus of the European still life; two of these paintings depict one small individual flowering tree, one painting of a plum and the other of an almond. The other two, which are larger canvases, create a composition in which two flowering trees, one behind the other, give the impression of one vast and vibrant flowering tree. I shall discuss one painting of each kind—namely, the paintings where the image of the flowering tree resonates as image, the background material constituting the mere trace of the original location of the act of painting. I argue that these trees are sites where van Gogh negotiated his personal symbol of “Japan” as nature. A small pear tree with a few large blossoms dominates the composition in van Gogh’s painting Pear Tree in Blossom (Figure 1). Although the artist had painted or drawn trees with unusual shapes even before he began collecting Japanese prints and Japanese images (see, for example, Autumn Landscape with Four Trees, November 1885), his decision here to paint the pear tree’s trunk in a diagonal line from lower left to upper right and to crop the tree’s branches in the upper right section of the work shows the influence of Japanese aesthetic composition. In the larger painting of the two versions of flowering trees,Pink Peach Trees (Souvenir de Mauve), two peach trees in flower virtually fill the top two-thirds of the painting; the positioning of one tree behind the other strengthens the density of the blossoms, making the two trees seem like one very luxuriant flowering tree (Figure 2). Anyone looking at these paintings who has a knowledge of Japanese or Chinese monochrome paintings of flowering trees will think that there is some relation between van Gogh’s paintings of flowering trees, especially these two, and the Sino- Japanese tradition of painting nature. In 1978, one scholar, Fred Orton, recognizing the “Japanese” motif in the Arles paintings of flowering trees, argued that in van

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 91 Figure 1. Vincent van Gogh “Pear Tree in Blossom” Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Gogh’s orchard series, “only the motif is Japanese, and then purely by affinity” (19); his comments suggest a merely accidental correspondence between the Japanese motif of flowering trees and van Gogh’s motif. From the late 1970s, several studies of Japonisme in European and American art had appeared in Europe and America, and scholars had become more aware of the influence of Japanese art on the Impressionists and other late-nineteenth-century artists. Thus, in 1984 Ronald Pickvance was able to state, with more authority than would have been possible before the late 1970s, in reference to the series of paintings of flowering trees that “the motif of blooming orchards is related to Japanese prints” (46). I would go even further than that, to suggest that van Gogh derived the idea of painting the series of paintings of flowering trees in Arles from Japanese prints and, specifically, from the prints and other materials in his and Theo’s collection that de-

92 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Figure 2. Vincent van Gogh “Pink Peach Trees (Souvenir de Mauve)” Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands

picted flowering trees. The artist might also have seen paintings of flowering trees in a number of other contemporary works, including Louis Gonse’s two-volume L’Art Japonais, which provided a history of Japanese art accompanied by copious illustrations. His own prints were available to him on a daily basis, however, and it is more likely that the artist became attracted to the image of the flowering tree from viewing the prints that he and Theo had collected. Considering the 352 prints shown or described in Japanese Prints Collected by Vincent van Gogh, forty of those contain images of flowering cherry trees, fifteen contain images of flowering plum trees, and an additional thirteen contain images of “flowers,” or hana, in Japanese, which could be either cherry or plum blossoms but which, in accordance with Japa- nese poetic tradition, probably mean cherry blossoms. That makes a total of sixty- eight prints in the van Gogh brothers’ collection that contain images of flowering cherry or plum trees.12 It is impossible, of course, to prove where van Gogh derived the idea of painting flowering trees—he might simply have been moved to paint flowering trees since they were the first natural phenomena that he noticed after his arrival in Arles. What is certain, however, is that van Gogh would have derived the idea that the flowering tree was an important image of vital nature in Japanese art and culture simply by perusing his and his brothers’ collection of Japanese prints;

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 93 Figure 3. Utagawa Kunisada “View of the Spring Rain” (left one of triptych) Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

this idea might have influenced him as he turned his hand to painting the flowering trees in Arles. The brothers’ Japanese prints depict flowering cherry or plum trees in various forms. In the left print of the three prints of a triptych by Utagawa Kunisada (1786– 1864) entitled View of the Spring Rain (1820s) [Harusame no kei], one large female figure, a geisha, is the central focus of the print, while blossoming plum trees project upward from beneath the veranda into the second-story room in which the female figure is sitting (Figure 3). Together, the flowering trees and the geisha suggest a strong link between human beings and nature, and the flowering tree provides a powerful sense of the vitality of nature in its spring embodiment. The print on the left of another triptych in the brothers’ collection entitledThree Women by Utagawa Yoshitora (1845–1880) focuses on three female figures who are most likely geisha; small flowering trees whose blossoms are depicted as whitish fluffy balls, almost like cotton candy, occupy the far distance (Figure 4). That van Gogh responded

94 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Figure 4. Utagawa Yoshitora “Three Women” (left one of triptych) Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

artistically to this particular triptych is clear from his having painted the blossoms of the flowering plum trees in the style of Yoshitora in his painting modeled on a print by Utagawa Hiroshige, Japonaiserie: Flowering Plum Tree. Another print, from Utagawa Hiroshige’s series Famous Views of the Fifty-Three Stations Along the Tōkaidō entitled Ishiyakushi: The Yoshitsune Cherry Tree Near the Noriyori Shrine [Isyihakushi Yoshitsune sakura Noriyori no hokora], 1855, contains a large flowering cherry tree whose branches spread from the left side of the print to the right and take up most of the space in the top half of the print (Figure 5). Again, that van Gogh felt an aesthetic resonance to this print is evidenced by the fact that he painted this Hiroshige print in the right background of the portrait of Père Tanguy that is owned by the Musée Rodin. In his fall 1887 painting Japonaiserie: Flowering Plum Tree, van Gogh actually copied an image of a flowering tree that he found in his and Theo’s collection of Japanese prints; he traced the image in an attempt to learn to paint lines in the

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 95 Figure 5. Utagawa Hiroshige “Ishiyakushi: The Yoshitsune Cherry Tree Near the Noriyori Shrine” Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Japanese fashion as well as to learn Japanese methods of composition. This was the image of flowering plum trees found in Utagawa Hiroshige’s The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido [Kameido umeyashiki], a print from the series A Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo [Tokyo] (1857) (Figure 6). It is likely that the position of the prominent flowering plum tree in the foreground of the Hiroshige print is what primarily interested van Gogh as an artist, as he was experimenting with “contrast perspective,” a technique that he and other European artists of his time borrowed from Japanese prints. This technique placed “part of an enlarged object in the foreground in order to contrast it with the background” (Kōdera, “Van Gogh’s Japonisme 40). However, I would also suggest that the artist was fascinated by the tree itself as a vital natural image. Hiroshige presents to the viewer, whom the artist positions as sitting in a teahouse looking out at the tree, a large, gnarled plum tree that is putting forth pinkish-white blossoms in spite of its age. The album print is the last Japanese art form through which van Gogh became

96 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Figure 6. Utagawa Hiroshige “The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido” Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

familiar with the image of flowering trees. The album, which contained a series of prints, was the most common medium by which mid-to-late-nineteenth-century European artists became aware of Japanese depictions of nature. Significantly, the artist and his brother possessed a series of album prints by Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826–1869), each of which presented a composition containing a different bird and flower. One print, of cherry blossoms and a shrike, from the series entitled Glimpses of Newly Selected Flowers and Birds (1850s), depicts a shrike sitting on the branch of a blossoming cherry tree (Figure 7). The image of the flowering tree by Utagawa Hiroshige II occurs here in a composition consisting of two different natural phenomena, in contrast to the prints by Kunisada and Yoshitora, which depict natural images as backgrounds to human figures, and also in contrast to the Hiroshige print The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido, in which a large flowering plum tree is the central focus of a print that nevertheless has human figures in the background.

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 97 Figure 7. Utagawa Hiroshige II “Glimpses of Newly Selected Flowers and Birds” Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Significantly, in his series of paintings of flowering fruit trees, van Gogh used the image of the flowering tree differently than had the makers of the Japanese prints. While the album print portrayed a bird together with a branch of a flowering cherry, in the canonical Sino-Japanese genre of kachō-ga, or flower-and-bird paintings, van Gogh painted only one or two flowering trees. Similarly, while all of the other Japanese prints in his collection that depicted flowering trees either inserted them into a large-scale landscape that depicted the tree in relation to a village or a building, as in the Hiroshige print entitled Ishiyakushi: The Yoshitsune Cherry Tree Near the Noriyori Shrine, or in a composition that included a human figure or figures, van Gogh avoided any human figures and omitted any other images, or relegated them to the background, making the flowering trees the central focus of his paintings. Of all the Japanese prints containing flowering trees in his and Theo’s collection, only the one by Hiroshige entitled The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido focuses so intently on a flowering tree, making it central to the composition. That van Gogh traced this particular print in his fall 1887 painting Japonaiserie: Flower- ing Plum Tree suggests that the artist was attracted to the print not only as an artist,

98 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 but also as a person who was moved by the flowering plum tree as a vital natural image. Van Gogh’s admiration for the vital images of nature in Japanese art developed in the broader context of contemporary Impressionist interest in the depiction of nature in Japanese art. Some of his contemporaries had learned about the depiction of nature from the Manga, or “collections of thematic models” (Wildenstein 259) by the woodblock print artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). Parts of the Manga were available in the Bibliothèque Nationale as early as 1817, and it was there, in the Cabinet des Estampes, that Manet studied Hokusai’s works in 1858 (Floyd 118). At some point Van Gogh came across Louis Gonse’s L’Art Japonais; that book provided the first critical assessment of Japanese woodblock artists and singled out for special praise Hokusai, who was “still, in the early 1880s, the Japanese artist most highly esteemed by French critics” (Cate 53). Gonse also praised the at that time lesser known artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), characterizing him as “the greatest painter of landscapes” (qtd. in Cate 53). Significantly, both Hokusai and Hiroshige were artists of landscape, and van Gogh found a special resonance in the landscape prints of Hiroshige, of which he and his brother owned several. It is not known whether van Gogh had seen Hokusai’s manga of individual flowers and birds, but the album of kachō-ga in his and Theo’s collection by Utagawa Hiroshige II dating from the 1850s would have given him a sense of the beauty and vitality of small natural phenomena as depicted in Japanese art. That he appreciated Japanese artists’ sense of nature is clear from his praise of Japanese people as “simple Japanese who live amidst nature as though they were flowers” and also from his remark, in the same letter, that “we must also [like the Japanese] return to nature” (Letter #542, Letters III, 55). The fact that this view is clearly filtered through the primitivist discourse of the time does not invalidate the artist’s sincere emotional and aesthetic response to the Japanese nature that he saw depicted in Japanese woodblock and album prints. Viewing images of Japanese nature in Japanese prints and in Japanese art in general, including the image of the flowering tree, van Gogh became exposed to a foreign aesthetic and cultural tradition that had a particular attitude toward nature, one that he saw as different from contemporary Western attitudes toward nature with which he was familiar. In considering the artist’s relationship to Japanese art, it should be remembered that “Japanese art” has no fixed content; rather, it “gains content in relation to the values of the observer” (van Alphen 2 [summarizing Tzvetan Todorov]). Thus, van Gogh and his contemporaries, in conceptualizing Japanese art, lent it the value of a tradition that emphasized nature because they themselves desired to attain an art that was closer to nature. Keeping this in mind, it is nevertheless accurate to describe Japanese art as an aesthetic tradition that, though it valued other things also, especially valued nature, and in particular ways.

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 99 In Japan, a long tradition of reverence for nature was grounded in the indigenous animistic religion that was later called Shinto. In the Kamakura (1185–1333) and Muromachi (1336–1573) periods, Shinto became amalgamated with Buddhism and China-derived Daoism; as a result, nature was given a high religious value (see La Fleur). China-derived Neo-Confucianism, which combined the reverence for nature of Daoism and Shinto with the metaphysical concerns of Buddhism, provided a basis for the construction of a view of nature as both possessing a vital religious force and involving a strong moral relationship between natural phenomena and human beings.13 This view meant that Japanese ideologies of nature stipulated a religious connection between human beings and nature—a connection that was expressed in Japanese monochrome paintings of the Muromachi period. During the period from the late eighteenth century on, the period that brought forth the popular urban form of the woodblock print, the religious sense of the unity of human beings and nature that had informed monochrome landscape painting yielded somewhat to conventionalized depictions of a human figure with a flowering tree in the background, as in the prints of Yoshitora and Kunisada mentioned above, or to conventionalized depictions of a grand landscape containing a few small human figures. Yet album prints of the mid-nineteenth century that depicted natural phenomena alone, some of which Vincent and Theo had collected, seemed to still express the Sino-Japanese religious vision of the totality of nature. In addition, the later landscape prints of Hiroshige, including the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1858), of which van Gogh owned the print entitled The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido, discussed above, can be said to have maintained a sense of the earlier spiritual unity of human beings and nature. That human figures often appear, especially in this last series, only as tiny figures in the background and that natural phenomena are the main focus has perhaps led Henry D. Smith II to argue that, in this series of landscape prints “man seems as often as not to stand apart from the landscape” (Introduction 10). But Hiroshige can to some extent be viewed as an artist who, building on the religious sense of the totality of nature bequeathed by the earlier Sino-Japanese tradition, modernized it by presenting a landscape in more subjective terms, as viewed by a viewer—“an image of the natural world diffracted through the prism of human emotional perception” (Uspensky 17). Thus, in The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido, the invisible viewer sitting in the teahouse looking out at the magnificent old plum tree in blossom, in his viewing and appreciation provides a new, more subjective site where human beings and nature are linked. Van Gogh probably sensed and admired the important connection between human beings and nature in the Japanese prints that he came across. Like Hiro- shige, whose prints he especially admired, two of which he even traced to make original landscape paintings, the Dutch artist also made natural phenomena a

100 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 major focus of his paintings. Although he did not emulate the Japanese style in creating paintings that depicted a strong connection between man and nature, he clearly emulated the Japanese in striving to express the vitality of individual natural phenomena in his art. In doing so van Gogh could draw to a certain extent on his own Dutch tradition of depicting nature, as we will see later. Yet the Japanese aesthetic tradition, with its vital and quintessentially Japanese images such as frogs, lotuses, and the knotty branches of flowering trees, provided important inspiration for him in the mid-1880s. According to Akiko Mabuchi, European painters learning from the Japanese, including van Gogh, were impressed by the “depth of feeling in regard to nature that is reflected in birds and flowers painted by the Japanese.” She goes on to argue that “in the West, ‘still life’ suggests objects detached from nature—things brought inside that will die” and furthermore, that Japanese art “doesn’t avoid leaves that are going to wither or fall but these don’t suggest death— rather, the changing of the seasons” (40 [my translations]). From the beginning of his career, van Gogh had painted natural phenomena such as trees and flowers captured outside in the midst of their natural seasonal cycles. His paintings done before the influence of Japanese prints already gave evidence that he was interested in painting and drawing natural phenomena in the context of the totality of nature; already in these works he communicated what Walther and Metzger call the “vital force within things” (340)—not “things brought inside that will die,” as in West- ern still lifes. Under the influence of Impressionism, van Gogh had tried to give a strictly objective representation of natural phenomena, but Japanese prints encouraged him to paint natural phenomena with an attention to their vital energy. In the Arles paintings of flowering trees, the artist communicated this quality through a concentration on light, the bright light of Provence. In this way, the flowering trees in the paintings, including the two paintings under analysis, “appear to be lit from within, so to speak, and seem in a sense active, rather than passively immersed in sunlight” (Walther and Metzger 337). Thus, the artist translated a Japanese sense of the vitality of nature, or “Japan” as nature, into his Arles paintings of flowering trees. Van Gogh would have had no way of knowing that natural phenomena were religious symbols in Sino-Japanese art. As Mabuchi puts it: “However humble the treatment of flowers or animals, these are not considered outside of what nature represents as a whole; they recall this totality and symbolize it” (40 [my translation]). China and Japan have long traditions of colored and monochrome paintings of nature that recall and symbolize the totality of nature. In Japan, during the Muromachi period, monochrome landscape painting was permeated by the fundamental Buddhist tenet that “the Buddha Nature is inherent in all things of the empirical world, down to the most lowly ones, the stones and the animals” (Brinker and Kanazawa 56). It was the goal of this tradition of painting to express the abso-

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 101 lute, the religious, in a general sense, through the depiction of nature—whether an individual phenomenon or a large view. In painting the work, the artist expressed his experience of the absolute through the use of set natural phenomena that, because they were not individualized or localized, were held as better suited to express the absolute through their very abstractness. Within this tradition of landscape painting, natural phenomena, no matter what they were, were understood to reveal complete religious truth. In the course of the development of monochrome landscape painting, certain natural phenomena were used over and over again and eventually became symbols that depicted or pointed to the absolute. Such set symbols were, among others, the plum tree and the cherry tree. In the Sino-Japanese tradition of landscape painting, the development of the seasons was viewed in religious terms as the functioning of the absolute (nature) in time. Among the various flowering trees and bushes that marked the successive stages of spring, the plum tree and the cherry tree, the two most beloved flowering trees, possessed the force of symbols with religious and culturally determined meanings. The plum tree was the first flowering tree to blossom in spring in the Sino-Japanese cultural sphere. A tree located in the liminal space between winter and spring, the plum tree was viewed as a natural phenomenon that represented “the unbroken life force of nature,” as it remained “strong or even green in the midst of winter” and might even “burst into bloom under the weight of fresh snow” (Yamamoto 296). The Neo-Confucian tradition in China and Japan, which used natural images to allegorize human behavior and moral attitudes, viewed the blossoming plum tree of early spring and in particular, the plum tree blooming in the snow, as a symbol of human endurance or fortitude in the midst of adversity. An example of a painting of a flowering plum tree that communicates both the “unbroken life force of nature” and human endurance in the face of adversity is the left half of the paired screen composition entitled “Friends of the Cold Season” by the Japanese artist Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783–1856): Flowering Plum (Figure 8). By contrast, the cherry tree, which flowered at the height of spring, served as a natural phenomenon sought out by human beings when celebrating the renewal of the vitality of nature. However, because it only flowered briefly and then lost its blossoms, it also carried for humans the darker Buddhist meaning of the transience of things. Van Gogh was most likely unaware of what a potent traditional symbol the flowering tree, especially the plum tree and the cherry tree, was for the Japanese when he viewed the prints depicting these flowering trees in his and Theo’s collection. Admittedly, as a European artist with little knowledge of the intricacies of the Japanese aesthetic and religious traditions, van Gogh painted plum and cherry trees in flower along with other flowering trees, because they were there in an orchard near his place of residence and because they provided an interesting

102 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Figure 8. Yamamoto Baiitsu “Flowering Plum” Six-fold screen (left half of paired screen composition “Friends of the Cold Season”). Clark Family Collection, on Long Term Loan to the Clark Center for Japanese Art, Hanford, California aesthetic subject that had to be grasped and painted before it disappeared in the natural flow of the seasons. He did not seek out either plum or cherry trees with a deliberate intent to paint them as personal symbols—only one of his paintings is of a flowering plum tree. When he viewed and painted the flowering trees, it was no doubt with an awareness of the traditional Western meaning of flowering trees as allegorical comment and reflection on the “spring,” or blossoming phase, of a human being’s life. But I suggest that, while knowing little or nothing of the flowering tree’s symbolic meaning in Japanese tradition, the artist nevertheless sensed in the image of the flowering trees in Arles (which he may have viewed as “Japanese” trees, linking them to the prints of flowering trees in his and Theo’s collection) a natural phenomenon full of potential symbolic meaning. Based on the evidence, it is not possible to argue that van Gogh preferred the flowering tree as a personal symbol to other natural phenomena that he also painted numerous times—for example, sunflowers, wheat fields, and olive trees. Rather, I suggest that the symbol seemed important to him during a particular and limited period of his life. In the flowering tree, an image mediated by Japan, van Gogh found an important personal symbol. His discovery and use of that symbol was linked to his general openness to symbols as an artist, as well as to his interest in the contemporary movement of Symbolism. Charles Chetham argues that van Gogh was an artist who from the beginning of his career was “continually seeing symbols in everyday things and situations” (97). He ties van Gogh as a painter of symbols to a long tradition of British and European illustrated art that reached its peak in the 1870s. Ac- cording to Chetham, illustrated art operated using a “language of gesture that had developed since the romantic period and which was comprehensible to all” (97). For van Gogh, who was the son of a Protestant minister, symbols had a predominantly

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 103 Christian matrix, although he was open for a time to the late-nineteenth-century Christian Socialist context of what Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers call the sympathy for the “poor and downtrodden” (33). In his Paris years from 1886–88, van Gogh came under the influence of Symbolism, a movement uniting “writers, artists, and scholars” in which he learned how to articulate his personal vision of the world (Dorn 39). According to Robert Goldwater, Symbolism developed in an atmosphere in which standard symbols had gradually lost touch with the common tradition by which their power had been sustained; because artists could no longer use traditional symbols to capture feeling and move the viewer (5–6), they attempted to fill the void created by the decline in traditional symbols by generating their own symbols. Under the influence of Symbolist ideas, that new art presented the subjective ideals and feelings of the artist externally through objects selected by the artist; in turn, those objects functioned as personal symbols in the art. Thus, through the depiction of a particular phenomenon, an artist could depict both the object—although not in the Impressionist mode of objectivity—and his subjective emotions and ideals; and through a painting, an artist could communicate a meaning that would have some resonance with the public, although not a traditional resonance, as well as a subjective meaning. Living in Paris precisely at the height of the Symbolist movement, van Gogh was aware of the current issues in the world of ideas and art. As an artist experiencing the decline of the familiar Christian symbols that were so much a part of his background, van Gogh must have felt the need to generate new symbols in and through his art at this point in his life. Two particular aspects of the Symbolist movement must have had strong resonance for him. One of those was the contemporary desire on the part of painters “to make emotion meaningful, by connecting it with humanity at large and by seeing nature as its reflection” (Goldwater 6). In that regard, while living in Montmartre during the summer of 1886, the artist painted familiar natural phenomena in the order of their seasonal occurrence, im- buing them with his personal emotions and also attempting to communicate with humanity through what were new symbols for him. In the summer of 1886, van Gogh chose as subjects for his paintings familiar natural flowers such as carnations, gladioli, coleas, roses, chrysanthemums, daisies, zinnias, geraniums, viscaria, asters, salvia, lilac, cineraria, poppies, peonies, and hollyhocks (Walther and Metzger 158– 85). Including vegetables, in the spring of 1887 he painted sprouting bulbs, garlic, lemons, chives, and crocuses (Walther and Metzger 216–30); in autumn 1887 he painted fruits and vegetables: grapes, pears, lemons, red cabbages, onions (Walther and Metzger 279–83); and in autumn and winter 1887 he painted apples, pears, grapes, and lemons (Walther and Metzger 286–89). However, the sunflower is perhaps the best known of van Gogh’s personal symbols taken from nature, appearing in eleven paintings done between August–September 1887 and January 1889.

104 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 The sunflower was a natural phenomenon familiar to everyone in the Western world. The artist would have found sunflowers in The Netherlands, in the fields of Montmartre, and, later, in Arles. Furthermore, the sunflower had a traditional symbolic meaning of which he was aware. From the time the flower was “introduced into Europe from the New World early in the sixteenth century,” it was viewed in the light of Christianity; Druick and Zegers note how “its [the sunflower’s] respon- siveness to the sun’s movement was seen in terms of lowly nature’s attraction to the divine” (75). But Druick and Zegers also argue that the artist endowed the sunflower with a new personal meaning, making of it a personal symbol, writing that “both Vincent and Theo viewed the sunflower as a metaphor for the artist’s necessary but potentially perilous dedication to nature” (85). Whether or not one agrees with this interpretation, by painting so many images of the sunflower, van Gogh was clearly using a familiar Western natural phenomenon to create a new symbol that had personal meaning for him. In a similar way, the flowering tree was a traditional Western symbol of the burgeoning of new life and of rebirth, and it was a natural phenomenon familiar to everyone. But, there was a difference in quality between the sunflower and the flowering tree: whereas the sunflower was only a Western symbol, the flowering tree was a symbol in both the Western and Japa- nese aesthetic traditions. When van Gogh chose to depict the flowering tree as his own personal symbol, it took on, besides its traditional meaning, a further residue of meaning that linked it to the images of flowering trees that he had collected in viewing Japanese prints. Though the artist was unaware of the traditional Japanese symbolism of “sakura-ume,” or “cherry and plum” in the Japanese flowering trees that he viewed in woodblock and album prints, there was nevertheless a Japanese overlay in the symbol of the flowering tree that he discovered and expressed in Arles. “Japan,” for van Gogh, after all, represented the possibility of a “religion of nature,” and of a “return to nature” and to a simpler, more natural life. This “Japanese” overlay brought a dimension of depth and complexity to the image of the flowering tree in van Gogh’s oeuvre, as well as to the paintings of flowering trees themselves, that would not have been possible for an artist unfamiliar with the Japanese tradition. The second and related aspect of the Symbolist movement that must have had a powerful meaning for van Gogh was its connection with religion. In a context where Symbolists generated their own symbols in their art—symbols that, unlike allegory, go beyond the expression of personal emotion to “induce a reflective mood, to indicate a wider frame of reference” (Goldwater 5)—art itself became a new religion and the newly created symbols became symbols of a new, subjectively constructed religion. Van Gogh’s use of the flowering tree as a personal symbol at the beginning of his stay in Arles can thus be interpreted as one stage in his continued search for symbols with which to mediate and express what might be des-

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 105 ignated as religious feelings. Druick and Segers present the artist as a person who, “having found traditional religion inadequate to his needs and goals,” attempted to make art substitute for religion. Placing van Gogh’s decision to become a painter in the context of writings by Zola, Thomas Carlyle, and Ernest Renan, all of whom the artist had read and who had conceptualized artists as modern Christlike heroes, Druick and Segers argue that van Gogh gradually became convinced that by means of his paintings and drawings he would save not only himself, a modern person cut off from traditional symbolism, but also the viewers of his paintings, who were in the same position (9–37). Van Gogh in his early years had been exposed to the emblematic engravings of the four seasons utilized by the preachers and writers of the “nineteenth-century reform movement within Dutch Calvinism” known as the Groningen School; these engravings had shown him that there was “symbolic significance in every natural fact” (Druick and Zegers 11). Later he had read a revisionist work on seventeenth- century Dutch painting by Théophile Thoré (Willem Bürger) entitled Les Musées de la Hollande (1858–60). According to Druick and Zegers, Thoré’s work presented Rembrandt as a Dutch painter of the past who had practiced a “realism that pointed toward the infinite” (31); it also praised Dutch landscape painting in general as “ex- uding the latent symbolism . . . of great poetry” (16). It is significant that at a point when van Gogh, under the influence of Thoré’s study, had revisioned the depiction of nature in his own Dutch tradition as a “realism that pointed toward the infinite,” he became familiar with nature as depicted in Japanese landscape prints, both through collecting them and copying them. Consequently, he was able to redis- cover a similar religious mode of seeing and experiencing in his own artistic tradition through his discovery of vital Japanese nature and through his intuition of its religious aspect. As a Dutch painter, van Gogh was able to see the Japanese mode of apprehending nature and painting landscape as exercising “a realism that pointed toward the infinite,” like his own tradition, and, hence, to attempt to assimilate the Japanese mode of depicting nature into his own paintings.14 With this in mind, I would argue that van Gogh’s two paintings of flowering trees analyzed earlier reflect his attempts to use a natural phenomenon to communicate personal religious emotions. The pear tree in Figure 1 and the two peach trees in Figure 2 may be interpreted as symbols in the Symbolist vein that express the personal emotion of the artist, “induce a reflective mood” and “indicate a wider frame of reference” (Goldwater 5). The first painting depicts the small flowering pear tree in its quiddity, although encouraging an allegorical reading: a golden butterfly hovers above one of the branches of the pear tree, and the artist has inserted the stump of a cut-down pear tree next to the small pear tree.15 In the second painting, the two flowering peach trees, one behind the other, stand together.

106 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Although this “standing together” might be read allegorically as companionship, through their double mass of blossoms the two trees can more likely be interpreted as conveying a powerful symbol of nature’s vitality—nature conceived, in homage to the Japanese manner, as harboring important religious meanings. Yet the religious meanings were neither Christian nor Buddhist-Shinto-Daoist, but a hybrid mixture constructed on the basis of, and expressing van Gogh’s personal Symbolist religion. Is it important, at this point, to try to decode the meaning that the flowering tree had for van Gogh? Critics have attempted to situate van Gogh’s paintings of flowering trees in hermeneutic narratives of one sort or another. Ronald Pickvance views the series of paintings in biographical terms, noting that “after the death of the Paris winter, they symbolized his own rebirth. They were also vindications of his vision of Japan in the South” (45). Ingo Walther and Rainer Metzger also view the paintings of flowering trees biographically, as part of a brief period before the artist’s breakdown in late December 1888, when he was able to realize his dream of “Japan” as a “better world,” a “utopia” consisting of the attainment of “the unity of Art and Life” (321). And Tsukasa Kōdera signals the paintings of flowering trees as among the works done in Arles that enthusiastically celebrate van Gogh’s image of “Japan”: a warm, sunny land of the south equivalent to Japan; a country populated by simple people living close to nature; a socialist utopia; and a land where artists worked together in a friendly manner (“Van Gogh’s Japonisme” 37–45). Significantly, all of those interpretations include the artist’s attitude toward Japan as an important part of their interpretive framework, and I find them all insightful. I would like to bring all of these interpretations, which proceed centrifugally from the artist himself, back to the image of the flowering tree through which van Gogh communicated his image of “Japan” in Arles in the spring of 1888. All of the paintings depict actual trees in an actual orchard in the south, which was for the artist the equivalent of Japan. Although executed in different styles, all of the paintings pay attention to the southern, “Japanese” light, and to the pale pink and white blossoms that van Gogh noticed in the Japanese prints that he and Theo owned. The two paintings that I singled out for analysis depict flowering trees that, while they evolved as personal symbols for the artist in the context of the Symbolist movement, also partook of the latent religious symbolism of the Sino-Japanese aesthetic tradition, enabling the artist, in their execution, to approach the “true religion of nature” that he associated with Japan and Japanese art. Finally, the artist painted the trees outside, in nature, and in an awareness of the sacred natural cycle of birth, flourishing, and death—as nature was painted in the Sino-Japanese tradition. The flowering trees, then, were a personal symbol for the artist of “Japan” and also a means of communicating his dream of “Japan” to the public.

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 107 Conclusion

Van Gogh collected Japanese prints as a collector of material objects in the 1880s, during the age of imperialism. He collected techniques from the prints as an artist; and he collected images of Japan from the prints as a person, making the prints into images of an idealized self by hanging them on the walls of his living quarters. From the 1880s onward, the Japanese prints that the artist had collected functioned as symbolic objects, communicating with his self and reminding him, as symbolic objects do, of “the variety of experiences which we have or might have, and the motives and goals which seem to be open to us” (Pearce 166). At this point, what the Japanese prints reminded van Gogh of was his desire to live his life in the way he envisioned Japanese people and artists living their lives: close to nature. Sub- sequently, in the spring of 1888 in Arles, as a painter at an important moment of his career, van Gogh collected images from an orchard of flowering trees, viewing them through the lens of the flowering trees in his and Theo’s Japanese prints. The paintings of “Japanese” natural phenomena, the flowering trees that he produced in Arles, were the painterly equivalents of those earlier symbolic objects, his Japanese prints. The flowering trees in the paintings, functioning as personal symbols, communicated with the self of the artist who was painting them and put him in touch with a way of feeling and experiencing that he associated with “Japan.” Producing the paintings of flowering trees mediated by “Japan” enabled van Gogh to live out a deep-seated desire, also mediated by “Japan”: that his life would “become more and more like that of a Japanese painter living close to nature” (Letter #540; Letters III, 47). Thus, the collecting of “Japan” through the amassing of the Japanese prints, as well as through the collecting of images of the flowering tree, an image mediated by Japanese prints and “Japan,” was one of the important stimuli to van Gogh’s growth as a person and as an artist. The Japanese flowering tree provided van Gogh with a personal symbol that brought him in contact with the vitality and sacredness of nature as depicted in Japanese art and that reminded him of his own Dutch tradition’s sense of nature as a religious phenomenon. Furthermore, by choosing the familiar image of flowering trees, which was also a meaningful personal symbol, the artist was able to make emotion meaningful by connecting it to humanity at large. In this way, he was able to compensate somewhat for what he perceived as the loss of the communicative power of art caused by the decline of traditional symbols in his time. Finally, at a time when European political and cultural hegemony threatened to overwhelm non-Western cultures, van Gogh was able to create a powerful image of “Japan” that creatively assimilated Japanese aesthetic techniques and cultural beliefs. Thus “Japan” was a “dream-space” filled with European desires and longings of Euro- peans, but it was still viewed with respect and even reverence. Through his sym-

108 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 bolic interaction with the Japanese prints in his collection as material symbols and through his metaphorical collection of images of “Japan” based on those prints, van Gogh was able to translate “Japan” for his fellow Westerners, and thereby contribute to enlightened cultural interaction between Japan and Europe in the age of imperialism.

u Rutgers University

Notes

A version of this essay was presented as a lecture before the East Asian Seminar—Japan- ology and the Institute for Art History—East Asian History at the Free University of Ber- lin. I would like to express my warm gratitude to Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, of the East Asian Seminar, who invited me to give this lecture and who made valuable comments on it, and to Steve Walker, whose reading of an earlier draft of the essay was both enthusiastic and helpful. 1 European artists associated with every major movement from the 1860s to around 1900, including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, the Nabis, and Art Nouveau, were profoundly influenced by Japanese art. Major studies of European Japonisme include Ives; Weisberg, et al.; Whitford; and Wichmann. The latter two, unlike the former two, approach Japonisme on the basis of their extensive study of Japanese prints in their art historical context. See Lambourne for a study of Japonisme in the arts and culture that is geared to the general reader. 2 Frank Whitford (1977) singles out six techniques that van Gogh assimilated from Japa- nese color prints and monochrome sketchbooks: the use of large areas of a single color and the brightening of his palate (188); the use of color for decorative rather than descriptive purposes (191); the use of precise and sharp outlines; the flattening of perspective by means of a “strong diagonal that cuts across the lower third of the composition”; and the use of a “graphic, rhythmical system of brushmarks” (193). Siegfried Wichmann (1980, German original; English translation 1985) writes that “the Japanese influence on van Gogh’s portrait painting was of major importance” (44); however, he also argues for major Japanese influence in the areas of the use of color, and dedicates one whole chapter in his monumental Japonisme, entitled “Line and Dot in Van Gogh’s Drawings,” to van Gogh’s adaptation of sketching techniques taken from Hokusai’s Manga and other Sino-Japanese sketching manuals. See Wichmann (40–44 and 52–61. See Childs for a brief but valuable overview of the influence of Japonisme on van Gogh (119–30). 3 Studies on collecting that I have found especially valuable are Elsner and Cardinal, eds.; Pearce; and Baudrillard. 4 Ives writes that “the Goncourts, Manet, Whistler, Tissot Fantin-Latour, Baudelaire, Théodore Duret, and [Philippe] Burty” were among the early collectors of Japanese prints (13). Gérald van der Kemp adds to this list of collectors Félix Bracquemond, Zacharie Astruc, Jules Jacquemard, Millet, and Rodin (5). Degas, whose collection of Japanese prints was already mentioned, along with that of Monet, by Ernest Ches-

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 109 neau in an article written in 1878 (Aitken and Delafond 12), by the time of his death had collected over one hundred Japanese woodcuts and albums (Ives 34); these were sold posthumously in 1918 (Aitken and Delafond 10). Daniel Wildenstein writes that Gauguin had bought some Japanese prints “before he left Paris in late January 1888,” and that he carried some around with him on his travels “until his dying day” (362). Pierre Bonnard collected Japanese prints (Ives 57) and Camille Pissarro had ten or so prints (Aitken and Delafond 10). Monet is the only collector whose collection of Japanese prints has received full art historical treatment in a catalog. According to the authors of this catalog, Geneviève Aitken and Marianne Delafond, Monet’s collection contained 231 Japanese prints (9), all of which are illustrated in the catalog. The van Gogh brothers’ collection, which amounted to about 400 Japanese prints and albums, might have been the largest on the part of any contemporary artist. It is discussed, and prints from it are illustrated in Japanese Prints Collected by Vincent van Gogh, “Ukiyoe Collected by the Van Gogh Brothers,” and Japanese Prints: Catalogue of the Van Gogh Museum’s Collection. 5 For the names of the several Paris boutiques that sold Japanese prints at the time when van Gogh was collecting them, see Ives 21, f.n. 8 and Koyama-Richard 15. 6 I am especially indebted to Eric Hayot and to Ernst van Alphen for their insights into how and why the West constructed or dreamed images of the non-Western other. See also Corbey and Leerssen, ed., and Hallam and Street, ed. 7 For an analysis of the influence of the Goncourt novel and the essay by Tadamasa Hayashi on van Gogh’s formulation of an image of Japan, I am indebted to Kōdera, “Van Gogh’s Japonisme” 38–39 and Koyama-Richard 20, 59. 8 In what is the most comprehensive poetics of collecting, On Collecting, Susan M. Pearce puts forward J. P. Hewitt’s theory of symbolic interactionism as a way of theorizing the complex connections that are formed through people and material objects in the process of collecting. According to this theory, material objects are not inert and passive things divorced from human beings through their material existence; rather, they are part of the symbolic system, and thus communicate multiple meanings, as do ideas and words. Pearce characterizes Hewitt’s theory as drawing on the “pragmatic approach developed by figures like Charles Peirce, William Jones, John Dewey and George Herbert Meade” (165). See J. P. Hewitt’s Self and Society: A Symbolic Interaction- ist Social Psychology. 9 See the valuable discussions of van Gogh’s primitivism in Kōdera, “Van Gogh’s Japo- nisme 41–42 and Kōdera, “Van Gogh’s Utopian Japonisme” 35–38. 10 The three prints are Utagawa Hiroshige’s A Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo: The Plum Tree Teahouse at Kameido (1857), which van Gogh copied as Japonaiserie: Flowering Plum Tree; Utagawa Hiroshige’s Shower on the Ōhashi Bridge (1857), which the artist copied as Japonaiserie: Bridge under Rain; and Keisai Eisen’s (1790–1848) Oiran (high-ranking geisha), which van Gogh copied as Japonaiserie: Oiran. All of the van Gogh paintings are dated fall 1887. 11 Van Gogh painted whole prints from his and Theo’s collection, as well as natural elements from prints and other materials in their collection, into these paintings. For speculations on which prints, either prints owned by the van Gogh brothers or prints

110 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 van Gogh might have seen, were transformed either wholly or partially in the artist’s paintings, and discussions of how the artist transformed them, see Kōdera, “Van Gogh’s Japonisme” 38, Vincent Van Gogh and Japan 84, and Orton 16. 12 In making my calculation of how many prints in the van Gogh brothers’ collection contained images of flowering trees, I relied on the 1978 publication, Japanese Prints Collected by Vincent van Gogh, which contained descriptions and in many cases images of more than 352 prints. A more recent publication, Japanese Prints: Catalogue of the Van Gogh Museum’s Collection, contains descriptions and images of most of the more than 478 prints it treats. Since the focus of this later publication is the Van Gogh Mu- seum’s collection, which contains prints collected later and not just the prints originally collected by van Gogh himself, I continue to rely on the data in the earlier publication, which more accurately indicate the actual prints collected by the artist. In any case, I have calculated how many prints in van Gogh’s collection included images of flowering trees not to obtain an exact count but rather to indicate the preponderance of images of flowering trees in the prints in his collection. 13 For a discussion of the influence of the three religions/philosophies of Daoism, Bud- dhism, and Neo-Confucianism on Chan/Zen painting in China and Japan, as well as landscape painting in general in those lands, see Brinker and Kanazawa 17–21. 14 Debora Silverman argues that van Gogh developed “a modern sacred art embedded in nature, communication, and the steady, effortful process of the artist’s craft” (392), -re ferring to his last style of painting as “modernist religious realism” (419). Interestingly, Silverman only refers to the final year of van Gogh’s life here. Furthermore, although she describes van Gogh’s evolution of an artistic persona as one based on what he viewed as “the Japanese artist’s devotion to nature” (42), she does not link that artistic persona with the artist’s paintings of flowering trees. By contrast, I argue that van Gogh’s painting of sacred nature began already with his series of Japanese flowering trees, and in spring of 1888, more than two years before his suicide in July 1890. 15 Druick and Zegers interpret the butterfly in the painting, which was painted soon after van Gogh’s arrival in Arles, in Symbolist terms: as a personal symbol reflecting both the artist’s fears of leaving behind his old life as a painter and his questioning of what kind of a painter he was to become, to metamorphose into, in his new life in the south (104). Noting that van Gogh had read contemporary articles and books on Buddhism, a fashionable topic in Paris in the mid-1880s, Jacquelynn Baas argues that, as viewed from a Buddhist perspective, “the yellow butterfly and the yellow stump juxtaposed with the blooming tree suggest metamorphosis and regeneration” (28). Both interpretations focus on the butterfly and view it as linking the painting as a whole either to a biographical narrative of the artist or to a narrative suggesting a “wider frame of reference” than that of the artist’s life—in this case, a Buddhist narrative. Baas’ interpretation tends toward allegory, and Druick and Zegers’ interpretation goes in the direction of personal symbol, although the passage from caterpillar to butterfly that is implied in their narrative of metamorphosis also has allegorical aspects. But these interpretations, in their focus on the butterfly, neglect the flowering tree as a personal symbol.

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 111 Works Cited

Aitken, Geneviève and Marianne Delafond. La collection d’estampes japonaises de Claude Monet à Giverny. Lausanne: Bibliothèque des arts, 2003. Baas, Jacquelynn. Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Collecting.” Trans. Roger Cardinal.The Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. 7–24. Brinker, Helmut and Hiroshi Kanazawa. Zen: Masters of Meditation in Images and Writings. Trans. Andreas Leisinger. Artibus Asiae. Supplementum 40. Zürich: Artibus Asiae, 1996. Cate, Phillip Dennis. “Japanese Influence on French Prints 1883–1910.”Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910. Eds. Gabriel P. Weisberg, et al. Exhibition catalog. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975. 53–67. Chetham, Charles. The Role of Vincent van Gogh’s Copies in the Development of His Art. [Harvard University diss. 1960.] New York: Garland, 1976. Childs, Elizabeth C. “Seeking the Studio of the South: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Avant- Garde Identity.” Vincent van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard. Ed. Cornelia Homburg. Saint Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum in association with Rizzoli International, 2001. 113–52. Clifford, James.The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Corbey, Raymond and Joep Leerssen, eds. Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. Dorn, Ronald. “Van Gogh’s Fields: An Interview with Ronald Dorn.” Van Gogh: Fields: “The Field with Poppies” and the Artists’ Dispute. Eds. Wulf Herzogenrath and Dorothee Hansen. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002. 32–51. Druick, Douglas W. and Peter Kort Zegers, et al. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Elsner, John and Roger Cardinal. Introduction. The Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. 1–6. ———, eds.The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. Floyd, Phyllis. “Documentary Evidence for the Availability of Japanese Imagery in Europe in Nineteenth-Century Public Collections.” The Art Bulletin 68.1 (March 1986): 105–41. Goldwater, Robert John. Symbolism. Icon Editions. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Gonse, Louis. L’art japonais. 2 vols. Paris: A. Quantin, 1883. Hallam, Elizabeth and Brian V. Street, eds. Cultural Encounters: Representing “Otherness.” London: Routledge, 2000. Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. Hewitt, J. P. Self and Society: A Symbolic Interactionist Social Psychology. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1988. Ives, Colta Feller. The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974.

112 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Japanese Prints: Catalogue of the Van Gogh Museum’s Collection. Rev. ed. Charlotte van Rappard-Boon, Willem van Gulik, Keiko van Bremen-Ito. Introduction by Tsukasa Kōdera. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2006. Japanese Prints Collected by Vincent van Gogh. Catalog. Comp. Willem van Gulik. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, 1978. van der Kemp, Gérald. Préface. La Collection des estampes japonaises de Claude Monet à Giverny. Eds. Geneviève Aitken and Marianne Delafond. Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2003. 5–7. Kōdera, Tsukasa. “Van Gogh’s Japonisme: The Influence of Japanese Art and Japan as an Utopia.” Trans. Yūko Nihei. Vincent van Gogh and Japan [Gokh to nihon kan]. Exhibition catalog. Kyoto: The National Museum of Modern Art, 1992. 37–45. ———. “Van Gogh’s Utopian Japonisme.”Japanese Prints: Catalogue of the Van Gogh Museum’s Collection. Rev. ed. Charlotte van Rappard-Boon, Willem van Gulik, and Keiko van Bremen-Ito. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2006. 11–45. Koyama-Richard, Brigitte. Japon rêvé: Edmond de Goncourt et Hayashi Tadamasa. Paris: Hermann, 2001. LaFleur, William R. “Saigyō and the Buddhist Value of Nature.” [2-part article.] History of Religions 13.2 (November 1973): 93–128 and 13.3 (February 1974): 227–48. Lambourne, Lionel. Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West. London: Phaidon, 2005. Mabuchi, Akiko. “Japonisme et naturalisme.” Trans. [from Japanese] Estrellita Wassermann. Le Japonisme: [exposition] Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 17 mai – 15 août 1988: Musée national d’art occidental, Tokyo, 23 septembre – 11 décembre 1988. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988. 34–47. MacKenzie, John M. Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Nagai, Takanori. “Van Gogh’s Oil Paintings, Drawings and Japanese Art.” Trans. L. C. Lawrence. Vincent van Gogh and Japan [Van gokh to nihon kan]. Exhibition catalog. Kyoto: The National Museum of Modern Art, 1992. 182–91. Needham, Gerald. “Japanese Influence on French Painting 1854–1910.”Japonisme : Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910. Eds. Gabriel P. Weisberg, et al. Exhibition catalog. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975. 115–31. Orton, Fred. “Vincent van Gogh and Japanese Prints: An Introductory Essay.” Japanese Prints Collected by Vincent van Gogh. Catalog. Comp. Willem van Gulik. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, 1978. 14–23. Pearce, Susan M. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 1995. Pickvance, Ronald. Van Gogh in Arles. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art: H. N. Abrams, 1984. Rubin, William. “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction.” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. 2 vols. Ed. William Rubin. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984. 1–81. Silverman, Debora. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Van Gogh, Collector of “Japan” 113 Smith, Henry D. II. Introduction. Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Introductory Essays by Henry D. Smith II and Amy G. Poster. Commentaries on the Plates by Henry D. Smith II. Preface by Robert Buck. New York: G. Braziller, 1986. 9–13. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. “Ukiyoe Collected by the Van Gogh Brothers.” Vincent van Gogh and Japan [Gogh to nihon kan]. Exhibition catalog. Kyoto: The National Museum of Modern Art, 1992. 193–237. Uspensky, Mikhail. One Hundred Views of Edo: Woodblock Prints by Ando Hiroshige. Trans. Paul Williams. Bournemouth: Parkstone, 1997. van Alphen, Ernst. “The Other Within.”Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship. Eds. Raymond Corbey and Joep Leerssen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. 1–16. van Gogh, Vincent. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh: With Reproductions of All the Drawings in the Correspondence. 3 vols. Second Ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Varnedoe, Kirk. “Gauguin.” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. 2 vols. Ed. William Rubin. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984. 179–209. Vincent van Gogh and Japan [Gokh to nihon kan]. Exhibition catalog. Kyoto: The National Museum of Modern Art, 1992. Walther, Ingo and Rainer Metzger. Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings. 2 vols. Trans. Michael Hulse. Köln: Taschen, 1996. Weisberg, Gabriel P., et al. Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910. Exhibition catalog. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975. Welsh-Ovcharov, Bogomila. Chronologie. Van Gogh à Paris: [exposition] Musée d’Orsay, 2 février – 15 mai 1988. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988. 28–34. ———. Introduction.Van Gogh à Paris: [exposition] Musée d’Orsay, 2 février – 15 mai 1988. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988. 10–27. Whitford, Frank. Japanese Prints and Western Painters. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Wichmann, Siegfried. Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Park Lane, 1985. Wildenstein, Daniel. Gauguin: A Savage in the Making: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (1873–1888). Text and research by Sylvie Crussard. Documentation and Chronology by Martine Heudron. Trans. Chris Miller. 2 vols. Milan: Wildenstein Institute, 2002. Yamamoto, Hideo. “The ‘Three Wintry Friends’”: Pine, Bamboo, and Plum Tree in the Snow. Setsuri Sanyū.” Zen: Masters of Meditation in Images and Writings. Helmut Brinker and Hiroshi Kanazawa. Trans. Andreas Leisinger. Artibus Asiae. Supplementum 40. Zürich: Artibus Asiae, 1996. 296–97.

114 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Laura Sager Eidt Borges’s Translations of German Expressionist Poetry Spaniardizing Expressionism

Discussions of the Spanish avant-garde generally emphasize only its French surrealist orientation, the “dehumanized” and “hermetic” poesía pura and its (equally evasive) neo-populist and classicist tendencies.1 It tends to ignore other possible influences. Yet, in the 1920s, at a time when the Spanish image of Germany was still shaped by the romantic love and nature poetry of Goethe, Hölderlin, and Novalis, Jorge Luis Borges began translating and publishing recent German Expressionist poetry.2 Most literary histories, however, dismiss any impact of Expressionism on the Spanish literary scene. According to the editor of a book on Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon, Spain “remained quite unaffected by Expres- sionism” (Weisstein 31), and the Latin countries in general found Expressionism “uncongenial to their way of thinking” (30). Moreover, most literary dictionaries and encyclopedias define Expressionism as an exclusively Germanic phenomenon.3 Not surprisingly, then, Borges’s translations and commentaries of Expression- ist poetry are either left unnoticed, mentioned only in passing, or as an insignifi- cant influence in central studies of the Spanish avant-garde (e.g. Geist 61; Díez de Revenga, Poesia española 25; Videla 99–101).4 Even critics who do discuss Borges’s relationship to Expressionism are concerned more with his prose commentaries or his “Expressionist techniques” in his own early Ultraist poetry, rather than with the translations themselves,5 stressing what they see as Borges’s later distance from the movement, and the lack of further reception (e.g. Soria Olmedo 85; Gallego Roca 206; Maier, “Borges” 148). In this paper I will make the case for taking a new look at Borges’s versions of Expressionist poetry, viewing them as acculturations and rewritings as defined by André Lefevere (6–14). I will examine them as conscious transpositions of the social criticism and the linguistic innovations of German Ex- pressionism in terms of the Spanish aesthetic climate of Ultraism. These notions of rewriting and re-contextualizing are, in fact, closely connected to Borges’s own views on translation as exemplified in “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.”6 While Menard translates from and into the same language, and does so literally, a translator who works with two languages may need to take considerable liberties

115 with the language in order to preserve the sense of the original. Since no text is superior or definitive in Borges view, the translator may cut, add to, and edit the original for its own benefit. This process may result in a translation that highlights aspects of a text of which a reader of the original would be unaware (Kristal 8). Firmly opposed to literal translations, Borges believes that a translation, especially one of poetry, must be above all literary, that is, it must attempt to convey what the poet meant by recreating the work (cf. “Translation” 51–53). In “Las dos maneras de traducir,” he champions the translatability of poetry. In the essay “The Homeric Versions” Borges defines translation as “a long experimental game of chance played with omissions and emphasis” (69). In his discussion of the translations of the 1001 Nights, Borges regards those translations as successful which represent “un buen falseo,” that is, whose infidelities and falsifications actually improve on the original (Waisman 70). Thus, as Waisman underscores, translation for Borges is a “site for potentiality and gain—a gain clearly linked to the creative infidelities of the translator/creator” (72). Borges’s own work as translator confirms these notions of a liberal, rather than literal, concept of translation. As a translator, Borges generally “has no scruples about editing the original as he translated” (Kristal 2). Some of his most frequent practices, as Efraín Kristal has shown, are to remove redundant, superfluous or inconsequential words or phrases, to cut what might distract attention from another aspect he preferred to highlight, and to add a major or minor nuance not found in the original, such as changing the title (87). These tendencies are also present in the Borges Expressionist translations. In order to show how these changes contribute to Borges’s acculturation of Expressionism in Spain, I will compare three of Borges’s “versions” with their German originals, focusing on the points where the translations depart from the originals as well as from Borges’s own prose commentaries of these translations. Many of Borges’s translations appear to be “literal” translations (in the sense explained by Kristal) that “attempt [. . .] to maintain all the details of the original but change [. . .] the emphasis (understood as meanings, connotations, associations, and effects of the work)” (32). In short, Borges’s Expres- sionist poems must be considered as “versions.” It was his intention to provide “a text with relevant differences with respect to either the original or another translation of the same work” (32). Several critics have claimed that Borges’s changes in his German translations are errors due to insufficient knowledge of German (García, “Borges, traductor” n.p.; Vega 247–48; see also Olea Franco, “Borges” 440). Although he certainly spoke it less fluently than English and French, his relationship to German was a special one and, I believe, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that he spoke (or at least read) it fairly well. German was the first language he chose to learn, sparked by his reading of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (Rodríguez Monegal 136; Borges, “Essay” 216). In a

116 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 later poem dedicated to the German language, Borges singles German out from other languages offering him the pleasure of private yet fecund readings (“pero a ti, dulce lenguaje de Alemania, / te he elegido y buscado, solitario” (“Al idioma alemán,” Selected Poems 326, ll.8–9) [but to you, sweet language of Germany / you I have chosen and searched, alone]. Moreover, he felt that he possessed German in all its beauty and complexity (ll. 24–29). In fact, as he stresses in his “Autobiographical Essay,” he soon “worked [his] way into the loveliness of the language” (216) and read German philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the original. Furthermore, Kristal notes that Borges also translated the Romantic poet Novalis on several occasions (31). Although the Argentine poet may not have dominated German “a la perfección” (García, “Borges, traductor” n.p.) [perfectly] and may have made an error or two due to misunderstanding of the original text,7 most of his Expressionist translations (poems full of neologism and ellipses that pose difficulties even for native speakers) show that he did have a thorough grasp of the language. An analysis of his translations indicates that most of Borges’s changes are not due to insufficient knowledge of German, but instead represent a case of his “infidelidad creadora y feliz” (“Borges” 440 and passim) [creative and happy unfaithfulness], which Olea Franco has underscored as a defining principle of Borges’s translations. In my view, these infidelities represent a deliberate attempt on Borges’s part to disseminate Ex- pressionist poetics in Spain by making its aesthetics more congenial to Spanish poets and readers by amalgamating it with the contemporary avant-garde practices of Ultraist poetics. Ultraism, the central Spanish avant-garde movement, was emphatically anti- naturalist. Ultraist poets focus on striking imagery and daring metaphors that create a new reality beyond that of the external world. Their goal was “renova[r] [. . .] los medios de expresión” [to renew the means of expression] and “imponer facetas insospechadas al universo” (“Manifiesto” 105) [to impose unsuspected facets on the world]. They sought to create new worlds beyond, and independent of, human reality. In order to achieve this aesthetic renewal, these poets abolished not only all anecdotal content, but more importantly, reduced texts to their “elemento primordial” [primordial element], metaphor, often synthesizing several images in one, and deleting all connecting words or phrases (cf. Borges, “Ultraísmo”). Thus, causal relations are destroyed or even created between otherwise quite dissimilar things (Videla 95). This attitude toward language is comparable to that of the Expression- ists, who also share the Ultraist’s anti-naturalism and their sense of revolt. However, while the “grito de renovación” (“Ultra” 102) [scream for renovation] in the Spanish avant-garde movement is primarily aesthetic, it is also profoundly social. I will argue that it is this combination of aesthetic and social renewal that Borges sought to disseminate in Spain.

Spaniardizing Expressionism 117 While current Borges criticism has emphasized the need to situate Borges in the Argentine context rather than regard him as a universal or cosmopolitan writer (e.g. Olea Franco, El otro Borges; Sarlo; Waisman), I will exclusively deal with the very short and early period of Borges’s life when he lived in Europe and participated in, and significantly influenced, its avant-garde movements.8 Furthermore, I am primarily interested in Borges’s lasting influence on Spanish avant-garde poetics through his translations, rather than his identity as a cosmopolitan or Argentine writer. Because of my focus on this very short period in Borges’s life and the continuing influence of his translations in Spain, the “tensions” and “conflicts” within Borges’s oeuvre that Beatriz Sarlo considers so central to Borges’s identity (12–13), lie outside the scope of this article.9

Borges’s Translations: Propaganda for Expressionism

In the prose commentaries published alongside his translations,10 Borges emphasized his interest in the Expressionists’ attitude toward reality. His first short synthesis of Expressionism in the journal Grecia emphasizes this interest in what he sees as the Expressionists’ attempt to transcend surrounding reality by creating a “spiritual ultra-reality” (10). Borges praises the aesthetically and socially revolutionary nature of Expressionist journals such as Die Aktion and Der Sturm. Arguing against Naturalist and Impressionist concepts of literary representation, the short note in the Ultraist journal Ultra cites the anthology Aktions-Lyrik (1914–1916) in order to critique the concept of objective representation and champion the superiority of poetic imagination (“Horizontes”).11 Borges defines Ultraism as “la transmutación de la realidad palpable del mundo en realidad interior y emocional” (El ultraísmo 108) [the transmutation of the world’s palpable reality into an interior and emotional reality]. He sees such a transformation as quintessence of all poetry. Yet, the goal of Ultraism is an aesthetics that “redeems” (“Manifiesto” 104) art, not humanity. Highlighting the portrayal of solidarity and intense human feeling, Borges interprets the Expressionists’ relationship to the surrounding world as an expression of the movement’s concern with ethical, moral and social transformation. Although two later notes indicate his disappointment with Expressionism’s ultimate failure at achieving a real universal social revolution, Borges nevertheless praises the aesthetic revolution it initiated. In interviews in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in his “Autobiographical Essay” (1970), Borges continues to insist on the superiority of Expressionism over other avant-garde movements.12 In light of this positive assessment, how does Borges’s critical analysis of Ex- pressionism relate to his translations? Borges’s selections themselves represent the variety and hybridism of Expressionist poetic styles and themes, ranging from the

118 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 telegram style of August Stramm’s love poetry to the hymnal chorus of Johannes Becher’s calls for revolutionary activism. Given Expressionism’s frequent combination of unusual metaphoric and syntactical constructions with traditional stanza forms and rhyme, Borges’s preference for poems with free verse form and without rhyme must be seen as an Ultraist reinterpretation of Expressionism (cf. “Mosaico” 188; Videla 113). Accommodating Ultraist poetics, Borges translates the one poem with rhyming verse that he chooses, Stadler’s “Der Aufbruch,” without rhymes. Borges’s clear favorite is Wilhelm Klemm, to whom he dedicates one exclusive sketch in Grecia, and of whom he translates altogether seven poems.13 Klemm is closely followed by Kurt Heynicke, with five poems. These preferences and selections represent a curious juxtaposition of well-known and forgotten authors, and contrasts with the then contemporary as well as present-day German “canon” of Expressionist poets.14 What connected Borges to Klemm and Heynicke, representatives of Die Aktion and Der Sturm respectively, was not only his personal contact and correspondence with them (García, “Borges y el Expresionismo” 121), but more importantly, their use of images and metaphors, their anti-naturalist portrayal of nature, and their depiction of human desolation and solidarity with fellow suf- ferers. For Borges, these two poets were best suited to promote his agenda of social concerns to the Spanish avant-garde. However, Borges’s translations do not correspond completely to the principles outlined in his commentaries. Most notably, many of his versions do not portray the “ultra-reality” which he applauded in his notes. On the contrary, his use of definite articles and personal pronouns when the original leaves them out often transforms an elliptic, fragmentary world of disorientation into a tangible and concrete reality. For example, in Borges’s version of Wilhelm Klemm’s “Der Himmel besticht uns . . .” (“El cielo nos soborna,” published in the “Antología expresionista” in Cervantes, Oct. 1920), he inserts definite articles where the German conspicuously lacks them transforms the poem’s abstract, elusive reality into a graspable, tangible, anthropocentric vision. Similarly, in Klemm’s “Nacht im Cráter” (“Noche en el cráter” [Night in the Crater], published in the same journal), Borges adds pronouns (“para no sostenernos” (l. 6) [in order to not sustain us]; “para nosotros” (l. 19) [for us]) and anthropomorphizes images (“bostezan en mis costados las heridas de lanza” [yawn in my ribs the spear wounds] as opposed to Klemm’s “auf- klaffen . . . die Speerwunden,” (l. 4) [gape open . . . the spear-wounds]).15 Moreover, Borges extends and clarifies phrases (l. 10), changes, or “normalizes” the word order to make the poem less violent. The original, which foregrounds shocking images (“wie geblähter, aufgestochener Darm knallen die Gasgranaten,” [like bloated, lanced intestines bang/explode the gas-grenades]), whereas Borges’s version does not (“Las granadas de gas estallan como un intestino pinchado” (l. 9) [the gas grenades explode like pricked intestines]).

Spaniardizing Expressionism 119 Such changes transform the portrayed world of disorientation, fear and horror into syntactically normalized images that re-interpret the traumatic, unspeakable essence of war into a humanly comprehensible experience. In rendering Ernst Stadler’s famous “Der Aufbruch” (“El arranque” [The Departure] also in the “An- tología expresionista”), Borges inserts articles and pronouns, thereby intensifying the sense of a humanly defined, explicable, and straightforward world (e.g. “luego de pronto se detuvo la vida. Entre árboles viejos manaron las carreteras. / Nos seducían alcobas. [. . .] / Desnudar la realidad al cuerpo como de un uniforme polvoriento” (ll. 5–7, added emphasis) [then suddenly life stood still. Between old trees, the roads flowed. We were seduced by alcoves. [. . .] To undress reality from the body as from a dusty uniform]). Furthermore, he clarifies phrases and changes word order to emphasize the meaningfulness, rather than the cruelty of war (“y la música de la lluvia de balas fue para nosotros la más magnífica del universo” (l. 4) [and the music from the rain of bullets was for us the most wonderful in the universe] versus Klemm’s “Und die herrlichste Musik der Erde hieß uns Kugelregen” [And the most wonderful music on earth was for us the bullet-rain]). Borges frequently attenuates the intensity of expression, which in Expressionist discourse often means highly elliptical phrases, in favor of more grammatical sentences and word order.16 In other words, he often transforms a fragmentary, unspe- cific, timeless experience into a coherent and concrete one. In Johannes Becher’s “Lusitania” for example, the past tense forms and infinitives of the original become present tense and personalized verb forms, thus rendering the mystical, timeless experience of the German into something more concrete and tangible. Likewise, at the end of August Stramm’s “Vorübergehen” (“Al pasar” [Passing]), Borges makes a full, complex sentence out of asyndetic (i.e. without conjunctions between phrases or clauses), short phrases, thereby clarifying and concretizing the event for the reader (“La ceniza que lanzó el viento jadeante / se hiela en tu ventana” (ll. 11–12) [The ashes that the panting wind shot out / freezes in your window]). At other times Borges cuts and condenses words or phrases where the original repeats or expands them. In August Stramm’s “Liebeskampf” (“Lucha de amor” [Fight of Love]), Borges omits the repetitions of the original: “Und keucht und keucht/Und keucht . . .” (16–17) [And pants and pants/And pants] becomes a one- time “y jadea”; and “um und um/die runde runde hetze Welt” (52–53) [around and around/the round round rush17 world] becomes “alrededor / de la tierra redonda” [around / the round world]. By deleting the repetition, Borges emphasizes and in- tensifies the already elliptical, dense staccato of the German poem in his translation. Likewise, he reduces the extended “Ich / Will / Dich / Nicht!” (5–9) [I / Do / Not / Want / You] to two lines: “Yo / no te quiero!” (5–6) [I / do not love you]. The Span- ish rendition thus heightens the intense and explosive nature of the lover’s battle. Borges’s version of Kurt Heynicke’s poem “Ich fand” (literally “I found”; translated

120 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 as “Jardín amor” [Love Garden] in the journal Ultra) accelerates the poem’s pace by condensing verse eleven and twelve into one and by deleting the last verse entirely. Borges thus reduces the poem to short main clauses and concludes with a glorious encounter of eternity. Semantically, Borges often favors a word choice that underlines the sense of fraternity and collectivity among those facing the threat of war. For example, in Wilhelm Klemm’s “Schlacht an der Marne” (“Batalla en el Marne” [Battle in Marne] in “Acerca del Expresionismo”) “erstarren” [to congeal, to stiffen] becomes “brillan” [to shine], “kolossale Studen” [colossal, gargantuan] becomes “horas infinitas” [infinite hours] “zusammen” [together] becomes “reunidas” [united]. Moreover, Borges leaves out the last verse, which emphasizes the unbearable duration (“tagelang, wochenlang” [for days, for weeks]) of the “boiling” war. Eliminating the menacing elements, Borges heightens the contrast between war as an apocalyptic threat to the individual soldier and as a medium of human communication. Significant semantic changes in the above-mentioned poems by Wilhelm Klemm (“Nacht im Krater” / “Noche en el cráter”) and Ernst Stadler (“Der Aufbruch” / “El arranque”) also stress the contrast between the conflicted, threatening atmosphere of war and the portrayal of a glorious community of patriotic, enthusiastic soldiers (in the latter, for example, “entketten” [to remove chains] becomes “desnudar” [to undress]; “Trompeten-stöße klirren” [clank, chink] becomes “irradian las trom- petas” [the trumpets radiate] “die Schlafenden aufspringen” [get/jump up] becomes “Y los soldados cantan . . .” [and the soldiers sing]). Similarly, Kurt Heynicke’s “Hin- ter der Front” (“Detrás del frente” [Behind the Front]) becomes in Borges’s version a poem of an increasingly desolate isolated individual, when he changes “Abend” [evening] to “crepúsculo” [dawn] and emphasizes “la calma del desierto” [the quiet of the desert]. In brief, Borges modifies or reinterprets the poems he translates in order to demonstrate to his contemporaries that an anti-naturalist desire to surpass the surrounding reality can be effectively combined with profound humanism and social concerns. Of course, examples of completely literal translation, such as the “Gedichte” by Lothar Schreyer (“Poemas,” in “Antología expresionista”), also appear. Contem- poraneous with other poems in which changes are substantial, these literal translations serve to show that the modifications in the other poems were deliberate, rather than resulting from poetic license or an imperfect command of German. In other words, the coexistence of literal and liberal translations indicates that Borges saw these poems and translations as representative of an unambiguous aesthetic as well as a socio-political agenda that he wanted to highlight for his readers. In the space that remains, I will analyze three translations in greater detail, exemplifying the three main alterations (use of definite articles and personal pronouns where the original leaves them out; grammatical sentences and word order where the origi-

Spaniardizing Expressionism 121 nal is elliptical and fragmentary; the cutting and condensing of words or phrases where the original repeats or expands) in order to discuss the significance and impact of Expressionist poetry in Spain in the 1920s.

August Stramm’s “Wiedersehen”: Meeting or Leaving? My first example (“Antología” 108; see appendix) illustrates the three most significant changes that Borges effects in his translations: the “filling” of elliptical and fragmentary sentences, specification through pronouns and articles, and “condensation” for heightened intensity. August Stramm’s “Wiedersehen” [Reunion] renders the fleetingness of a momentary encounter through very short, elliptical lines. In Borges’s version of the poem (“Encuentro” [Encounter]), the undefined German “In Schauen” [In looking] becomes a specific, reciprocal gaze or exchange of looks between speaker and addressee (“Al vernos muere la mirada” [Upon seeing us/ourselves the look dies]). Similarly, in the German poem, the ending of the “Wiedersehen” (lit. “re-vision”), rather than the actual meeting, is emphasized through its elliptical staccato form. Each word in “Du / Wendest / Fort!” [You / Turn / Away!] is granted a line by itself, thereby extending the moment into a slow- motion movement. Borges, by contrast, accelerates time by compressing the phrase into two lines.18 Likewise, the absence in Stramm’s poem of the reflexive pronoun “dich” [yourself] in these lines (normally required in German) makes the phrase elliptical and emphasizes the abruptness, impersonality and distance of the ending. In contrast, Borges retains the reflexive pronoun, thereby underlining the intense personal encounter at close quarters.19 In other words, while Stramm emphasizes the lack of personal contact in what seems to be a fleeting “vision” rather than an actual “meeting,” Borges portrays tension and conflict of a close personal contact, highlighting the moment of “encounter” as an interpersonal collision. Stramm’s im- personal, ambiguous relationship thus becomes intensely conflicted, but intimately personalized in Borges’s version.

Mystical Time vs. Present Symbols: Becher’s “Lusitania” My second example illustrates Borges’s tendency to make an abstract, allusive reality explicit and specific through the use of tenses and verb forms. Johannes Becher’s “Lusitania” (Becher 79; see app.) refers to the bombing of a British liner by German torpedoes in May 1915 (Lehman-Srinivasan 112), an event hardly present in the minds of a Spanish audience five years later. Yet, in Borges’s translation (“An- tología,” 102), it becomes an incident of topical concern. Borges’s transformation of the archaic, Greek “Hetäre” into a more modern and common “cortesana” turns the ship as a symbol of a remote or lost glorious past into a concrete and familiar figure. Moreover, while the German wavers between present tense, past tense, infinitive and present participle, Borges uses only

122 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 present tense and participle forms. That is, he transforms past tense and infinitive into present tense and personalized verb forms, thereby rendering the ambiguous, indefinable and shifting time of the original as an immediate, present-day concern. This transformation is most notable in the line in parentheses (13), where he deletes both the temporal distance of the “einst” [once (long ago)] and the verb “weht” [blows] with its syntactically ambiguous spatial reference (“. . . where a ten- der stroke that once awoke you . . .”). Becher’s poem, by situating the process of drowning into an undefined temporal and spatial frame, mystifies and universalizes the experience throughout. Only the “resurrection” in the final stanza takes place exclusively in the present. By contrast, Borges’s preference of present tense and participle forms makes the bombed ship an actual immediate reality whose larger symbolic value is made explicit only in the final line. Paradoxically, then, while the German poem refers to a specific, recent historical event in abstract terms, the Spanish poem transforms the occurrence, which would be only remotely present to a Spanish audience of the twenties, into a current concern of larger significance.

Wilhelm Klemm’s “Der Himmel besticht uns” (1918): The Real Ultra-Reality My last example, Borges’s translation of Wilhelm Klemm’s “Der Himmel besticht uns” (Reso, Schlenstedt, and Wolter 414), “El cielo nos soborna” (“Antología” 106; see app.) [“The sky bribes us”], exemplifies Borges’s transformation of an abstract, elusive reality into a concrete, tangible one by inserting definite articles into an originally elliptical discourse. The German poem describes a disconcerting experience in nature, rendering it mysterious by leaving most nouns without an article. On the whole, the poem has only one indefinite and six definite articles, all but one in the first and last stanzas. Partly necessitated by the German composite nouns, which require a genitive phrase in Spanish, Borges’s translation adds a definite article to almost every noun, ending up with a total of fifteen definite articles. Thus, the German “Über gläserne Wäldermasken / Hängen Sonnenzügel // Nasses Feuer / Glutet in grünem Fell” (7–10) [Over glassy masks of woods / Hang reins of suns // wet fire / glows in green fur] becomes “Sobrelas vidriosas máscaras de los bosques / Las riendas del sol cuelgan / Fuego mojado / Arde en la piel verde” [Over the glassy masks of the woods / The reigns of the sun hang / Wet fire / Burns in the green fur]. The abstractions in the German original become real world references in the Spanish translation. In Klemm’s poem, the lack of articles combines with the personification of nature (the sky, trees) and the elusive metaphors to evoke a mysterious, autonomous nature, in which human beings play a subordinate role. For example, the “us” of the first line is more a registering, rather than an acting, subject. Moreover, the absence

Spaniardizing Expressionism 123 of definite articles and personal pronouns in the two middle stanzas indicates the speaking subject’s complete lack of orientation. Only in the final stanza does the poem return to a humanly definable, anthropomorphized world. Borges’s translation, by contrast, retains this graspable anthropocentric vision throughout. There is no danger for the speaker to be submerged by his surroundings, as there is for Klemm’s speaker. In the Spanish version, reality may be uncanny, yet its objects are clearly defined and, therefore, less threatening. By inserting strange elements into a tangible world of every-day life, this translation actually bridges the gap between the objects’ hostility and the familiarity Borges introduces in his version. Such a portrayal of nature as grotesquely deformed or threatening, yet still humanly defined and anthropomorphized, is familiar to Spanish poets and readers of Ultraist poetry (e.g. José de Ciria y Escalante’s “Angustia” [Díez de Revenga, Poesia española 94] or Cansinos-Asséns’ “Crepúsculo” [ibid. 88]). Likewise, Ultraist poems often combine the strange and the familiar or the abstract and concrete (Videla 96), as did Spanish Surrealist poems. In other words, Borges’s subtle shifts in his translations adapt Expressionism by merging it with avant-garde aesthetics that was familiar to a Spanish audience thanks to the various Ultraist manifestos (cf. Brihuega; Videla 173–219). By employing recognizable techniques (such as the deformation of nature, condensation of language, or enumeration of unconnected images), while highlighting the Expressionists’ concern for human isolation and anguish and the need for human solidarity, Borges’s translations point Spanish avant-garde poetics in a new direction.

Effects of Borges’s Efforts: Further Reception and Impact of Expressionism

Borges remained the only Spanish-language translator of Expressionist poetry until the fifties.20 His work inspired subsequent Spanish-language commentaries and translations of Expressionist novels and drama. His efforts to disseminate Ex- pressionist poetry were “applauded by luminaries of Spain’s literary milieu” (Kristal 43) such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Cansinos-Asséns, and Guillermo de Torre (the latter two themselves Ultraist poets) as the basis for aesthetic and social regeneration.21 Other Ultraist poets evinced an interest in Expressionist literature and visual arts by publishing commentaries and translations in their journals (Ander- son 216). Throughout the 1920s, several general survey notes on German literature (Paul Colin; Pablo Colin; Petriconi; Gullón; two anonymous articles) and art (Panxsaers; Alcántara; Richert) were published, all of which praise Expressionism as aesthetically and socially inspirational. Guillermo de Torre’s influential historical treatment, Literaturas Europeas de Vanguardia (1925), devotes a short chapter to Expression-

124 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 ism, under the heading “Otros horizontes,” an allusion to the anthology of contemporary world poetry, Les Cinq Continents, by the German poet Ivan Goll, who is himself an important theorist and spokesperson of Expressionism.22 Torre, citing Borges’s translations and notes, understands Expressionism as a meld of spiritual Zeitgeist (“espíritu de un tiempo”) and social engagement (“preocupación social” [354]).23 In 1927, a study of pictorial Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Ob- jectivity) by the prominent German art critic Franz Roh, was translated into Span- ish. This book, entitled Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei, analyzes primitivism in contemporary art as a withdrawal from the cerebralism of Cubism without retreating into a purely dream-like state of Surrealism. Reviewed immediately in all the important newspapers, this study had an “enorme repercusión” (Crispin 100) [huge repercussions]. However, Expressionism did not remain a purely abstract critical concept; rather, Expressionist art exhibitions, literary translations, and films were available to the public. Several important exhibitions disseminated Expressionist art. In 1926, the “Exposición del Grabado Alemán Contemporáneo” in Barcelona and Madrid, exhibited more than a dozen of the most famous German Expression- ist artists, including Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Pechstein (Bonet 132). A year later, at the “Exposición Multi-Nacional” in Madrid, some ten German Expressionist artists were represented, among them Max Beck- mann, George Grosz, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (ibid. 642). Other important Expressionist literary works became available in translation. Plays, in particular, were widely translated and reviewed (Anderson 216).24 As was the case in Germany, Georg Kaiser received the most attention and he was translated and performed more than any other German playwright. His Von morgens bis mitternachts (1916), one of the finest and most famous Expressionist dramas, was translated in the Revista de Occidente in 1926; two other dramas followed in 1928 and 1929.25 In the early thirties, the literary critic Ricardo Gullón published an enthusiastic critical analysis of Franz Werfel’s novels in the influential literary journal Literatura, indicating that three of the novels had already appeared in Spanish translation. German Expressionist films such asDas Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1919; El gabi- nete del doctor Caligari, 1921) were shown in the major movie theatres in Madrid and Barcelona. Other films by prominent directors such as F. W. Murnau (e.g. Tartufo, 1925), Erich von Stroheim (Avaricia, 1923–24), and Fritz Lang (Metrópo- lis, 1926) followed and were favorably received. The well-known film director Luis Buñuel, at that time film critic for La Gaceta Literaria, wrote approvingly of the lyricism and the photographic technique of Fritz Lang’s films (Anderson 217). By 1930, the number of German films shown in Spain ranked second only to American

Spaniardizing Expressionism 125 films, with a total of sixty-five. During the same period only twenty French films were shown (Morris 580). Not only did Spain offer a warm critical reception to Expressionism, it also was predisposed to embrace the movement by capitalizing on structural affinities and stylistic correspondences in contemporary Spanish literature and the visual arts. The Spanish painter José Gutiérrez Solana and the Belgian Expressionist James Ensor both used masques and distorted lines and figures to portray their vision of the modern grotesque.26 Using angular images similar to those of Kirchner, Solana also painted street scenes of alienation and the under-world of prostitution. Echo- ing German Expressionist paintings, Solana’s prostitutes in Las chicas de Claudia (1915–17), suggest no interaction either with each other or with the viewer’s outside world. In drama, as Jerez-Farrán and others have shown, Valle-Inclán’s “esperpentos,” (his “shock” or “nonsense” dramas) from the Comedias bárbaras (1907–22, publ. 1923) to Luces de Bohemia (1920) and Martes de carnaval (1921–26, publ. 1930), all reflect Expressionist characteristics, such as an anti-naturalistic setting, generic characters, and loosely connected juxtapositions of “stations.”27 Novels by Una- muno and Valle-Inclán, especially his Tirano Banderas (1926), have also been interpreted as Expressionist (Foster, “La estructura” and Unamuno; Dougherty). While García Lorca’s drama, just as his poetry, is generally seen as Surrealist, there have been a few attempts to reinterpret his later drama, especially El público (1931) and Asi que pasen cinco años (1929–30), in the context of Expressionism (Jerez-Farrán; Anderson). In poetry, Valle-Inclán’s later work, especially La pipa de Kif (1919) has been interpreted as reflecting Expressionist traits (González López). Finally, Gar- cía Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1929–30, publ. 1943), contains numerous features of Borges’s Expressionist translations, such as a portrayal of a hostile and threatening nature that is both anthropomorphized and humanly defined. Most of Gar- cía Lorca’s New York poems betray the presence of an anguished speaking subject striving for human solidarity. The portrayal of violence and brutality and the appeal for human sympathy is a crucial shared feature of German Expressionist poetry and García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York. This link was facilitated by Borges’s promotion of Expressionism in the early twenties.28

Conclusion: Borges—Godfather of a Spanish Expressionism

I have argued that Borges’s transformations of the German originals represent an overlooked and influential attempt to disseminate and promote Expression- ist poetry among Spanish-speaking readers and poets. By situating ominous and

126 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 mysterious elements in a concrete reality, by abstracting this reality as symbolic of shared human experience, or by intensifying an emotionally charged encounter with personal affect, Borges campaigned against the poetics of the poesía pura prevalent in Spain during the 1920s. At the same time he adapted Expressionist techniques to the “horizon of expectations” of his Spanish audience with translations that consistently transliterated the originals. The avant-garde movement Ultraism broke with past aesthetics by literally foregoing all rhyme and reason, dis- regarding fixed stanza forms, and employing bold combinations of images. These techniques served the creation of an autonomous poetic reality beyond that of the human world. Borges’s translations rendered the Expressionists’ concern for humanity and social regeneration more accessible to Spanish poets and readers by adapting the poems’ linguistic expression to discourse modes that were then prevalent in Spain. He underscored the creation of an “ultra” reality by merging the abstract and the concrete, the human and the non-human. He retained the daring imagery and metaphors, but recognized the need to sacrifice ellipsis and syntactical fragmentation in order to underscore what he saw as the essential contribution of Expressionism: its striving for socio-cosmic unity and a human community.29 Ultimately, Borges’s translations mediate between avant-garde poetic experiments and a poésie engagé. His amalgamation of Expressionism with the aesthetics of Ultraism and elements of Surrealism highlights the possibility of an effective social agenda for later Spanish avant-garde poetry. The widespread reception of Expressionism in all areas of culture and in a variety of adaptations suggests that Borges’s re-envisioning and portrayal of Expressionism resonated in the cultural milieu of his time. Later literary criticism, however, has not recognized Borges’s important role as mediator and advocate of German Expressionist aesthetics and ethics. Partly, I think this gap may be attributable, to the devaluation of Expressionism beginning with the Marxist critic George Lukács who attacked it as a misguided ideology that prepared the way for National Socialism.30 Moreover, the focus of Spanish literary criticism during and after the Franco dictatorship was either on the traditional, “classical” orientation of their generación del 27 and its “autonomy” and “purity,” or on a more psychologically-oriented Surrealist avant-garde and its focus on dreams and the subconscious. In other words, various factors have interfered with an ade- quate acknowledgement of a “Spanish” Expressionism. Critics emphasize that the introduction of social and political questions occurred from the margins, through Borges, an “outsider” in the Spanish avant-garde, dealing with a little-known language like German (Gallego Roca 201).31 To this day it seems that Spanish literary criticism wants to reject any association with a literary movement viewed historically as ideologically compromised and politically implicated.

Spaniardizing Expressionism 127 However, there are indications that this picture is slowly changing. Guillermo de Torre revised and enlarged his early (1925) survey of the European avant-gardes into a voluminous Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia (first edition 1965; re- edited 1971) in which the previously five-page chapter on Expressionism is extended to 36 pages (183–219). Dealing with the movement as a spiritual state intimately connected to the social reality and encompassing all arts, this extensive study testifies to Torre’s recognition of the importance, impact and contributions of Expressionism. In an explicit attempt to re-read the avant-gardes, Sánchez- Blosca has stressed the unjust neglect of Expressionism in comparison to Surreal- ism. Since the mid-eighties, Jerez-Farrán’s numerous studies on Valle-Inclán’s and García Lorca’s drama in the context of Expressionism have significantly helped refocus critical attention. The most recent supplement (1995) of Fransisco Rico’s authoritative Historia y crítica de la literatura española includes Jerez-Farrán’s 1986 essay on Lorca’s drama El público as Expressionist. This inclusion can be seen as one of the first official acknowledgements of an Expressionist presence in a leading writer of the Spanish avant-garde. Similarly, the re-edition in 1998 of Taléns and Keil’s earlier bilingual collection of poetry by Trakl, Stadler and Heym bears witness to this new critical climate.32 In short, Borges’s translations do not represent a merely marginal voice from the outside, nor are they simply his personal poetic playground. Rather, his was a purposeful aesthetic and a social campaign, intro- ducing Spain to what he saw as the “profound preoccupations” (qtd. in Modern, “Borges” 395) of Expressionism, and spreading its revolutionary and incendiary spirit to Spain.

u University of Dallas

Appendix

August Stramm: “Wiedersehen” J. L. Borges: “Encuentro” 1 Dein Schreiten bebt 1 Tu paso tiembla In Schauen stirbt der Blick Al vernos muere la mirada Der Wind El viento Spielt Juega 5 Blasse Bänder. 5 Cintas pálidas Du Tú Wendest Te das vuelta! Fort! El tiempo esta cortejando el espacio! Den Raum umwirbt die Zeit! [from: Du: Liebesgedichte. Berlin: [from: “Antologia expresionista.” Verlag der Sturm, 1915.] Cervantes (Oct. 1920): 108.]

128 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Johannes R. Becher: “Lusitania” J. L. Borges: “Lusitania” 1 Ein Maul von Stürzen Wassers 1 Las torres de agua cierran al ausgestopft! despeñarse una [boca. Dann keurz und quer verfahren die Atravesadas manipulan las lanchas. Schaluppen. Matrosen brüllend aus den Masten Marineros berreantes gotean de los tropfen. mástiles. Maikäferschütteln. Escarabajos sacudidos. 5 Gemecker der Sirenen. 5 Balidos de sirenas. Vom Mond bestrahlt taucht unter Radiante de luna se hunde la die Hetäre. cortesana Gebohrt von des Torpedos blankem Agujereada por la virilidad del Glied. torpedo. Die Wogen siedeten. Geschwüre. Hierven las olas. Ulceras. Die Plankenfüften Kraut des Meeres Plantas del mar untan las caderas schmiert. de tablas. 10 . . . Lusitania! Palast in die Gründe 10 . . . ¡Lusitania! Palacio en los geschwenkt! abismos flameado Bunte mit fließenden Gärten, den Abigarrado, con jardines Fackeln, [besteckt. chorreantes – ¡con [antorchas! Leib dein klarer von tobenden Tu claro cuerpo dislocado por Höllen verrenkt. delirantes [infiernos (. . . weht wo ein Streichen das einst (. . . hasta que una caricia te dich [erweckt . . .) despierte . . .) Aber der Wimpel, der Wimpel der Ya lame el bajo azul el gallardete knatterige [leckt 15 Niedern Azur . . . und der Sirenen! 15 y sirenas – ¡las sirenas resuenan! Sirenen [ertösen . . . Regenbogenschleime rings Viscosidad de arco iris tus despojos zerfließen die [Gekröse . . . devienen. O du erwachst! Durch die Ozeane ¡Oh te levantas! Por los oceanos fliegt vuela Dein Atem –: eine Säule Morgen Tu aliento. Una columna fresca es la frisch. mañana Die du erwachst! Ja –: du melodisch que tu despiertas . . . Hímnicamente wiegst: te meces, 20 Erneuter Menschheit heiliger Fisch! 20 Pez, ¡símbolo de las humanidades resurrectas! [from: An Europa: Neue Gedichte. [From: “Antologia expresionista.” Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1916. 79.] Cervantes (Oct. 1920): 102.]

Spaniardizing Expressionism 129 Wilhelm Klemm: “Der Himmel J. L. Borges: “El cielo nos soborna” besticht uns . . .” 1 Der Himmel besticht uns 1 El cielo nos soborna Mit etwas abgelegenen Augen con los ojos algo entronados Die Wipfel der Pappeln Las copas de los álamos Flüstern von Frieden und Wind. Dicen de la paz y del viento 5 Blanke Schwestern 5 Hermanas relucientes Ebnen hin im Grün Se tienden en la pradera Über gläserne Wäldermasken Sobre las vidriosas máscaras de los bosques Hängen Sonnenzügel. Las riendas del sol cuelgan Nasses Feuer Fuego mojado 10 Glutet in grünem Fell 10 Arde en la piel verde Erinnerungsfriede Paz del recuerdo Quillt unerschöpflich Mana sin tregua Ein brauner Bogen Un arco pardo Kehrt langsam zurück Lentamente vuelve 15 Die Brücke nimmt ihn auf, 15 Lo toma el puente Ehe der blaue Abend erscheint. Antes que la tarde azul aparezca. [from: Reso/Schlenstedt/Wolter. [from: “Antologia expresionista.” Expressionismus: Lyrik. Berlin and Cervantes (Oct. 1920): 106.] Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1969. 414. First printed in Die Aktion (1918).]

Notes

1 For these notions of the Spanish avant-garde see, for example, Debicki; Díez de Re- venga, Panorama and Poesía; García de la Concha; Havard; Lama. Further evidence of criticism of this view is provided by Morón Arroyo and Crespo. The notion of a “dehumanized” art harks back to Ortega y Gasset’s influentialLa deshumanización del arte (1925) in which he describes the new art as evasion of reality, as “arte artístico” en- closed upon itself that does not seek to communicate (with) a human reality and thus becomes obscure and hermetic. 2 The anthology of German poetry,Las cien mejores poesias líricas de la lengua alemana (1919), edited and translated by Fernando Maristany, devotes much space to the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with a large selection of poems by Goethe, Hölder- lin, Eichendorff, Heine, and Mörike. Rilke is probably the most translated twentieth- century poet, with translators as famous as Torrente-Ballester, Gerardo Diego, and J. M. Valverde. For an overview of translations see Hempel 1291–93. These translations, together with his enthusiastic commentaries, were published in leading avant-garde journals such as Grecia, Cervantes and Ultra in 1920 and 1921. 3 See, for example, Garland (213); Cudden (297). The Princeton Encyclopedia is one of 130 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 the few to emphasize the international atmosphere of Expressionism (Preminger 398). Interestingly, while Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s (highly idiosyncratic) Ismos (1943) does not even mention Expressionism, Juan-Eduardo Cirlot’s Diccionario de Ismos (1949) includes a lengthy survey of Expressionism and Expressionist manifestations in international art. 4 In her discussion of the influence of other European avant-garde movements on Ultra- ism, Gloria Videla mentions Expressionism as having influenced it only “en pequeña medida” (99), and indicates that it reached Ultraism solely through Borges’s translations. Implicit in Videla’s treatment of Expressionism, based exclusively on Borges’s introductions, is that Expressionism was too different from the other movements (of a “contenido ideológico y mayor preocupación social” and a “tono patético,” 101) to be easily assimilated and that Borges was the only one whose poems “revelan cierta influ- encia” (101). 5 Linda Maier’s article on Borges and Expressionism particularly highlights Borges’s merit in bringing Expressionism to Spain and surveys his critical statements. In a more recent book on Borges and the European Avant-garde (1996), Maier focuses on Borges’s own “Expressionist” style in his poetry and prose. Rodolfo Modern’s informative overview of Borges’s “serious and intense” (“Borges” 392) involvement with Expressionism stresses his “fidelidad esencial” (393) without much poetic analysis. Enriqueta Morillas surveys his translations with a focus on his theoretical stance, concluding that Borges’s own “aesthetic preoccupations” led to his interest in Expression- ism (“Borges y la marea”). Lehman-Srinivasan’s dissertation, Revolution in Writing: Borges’s Reading of the Expressionists, does analyze several of his translations in great detail, but focuses on his use of these poems for his own development as a poet. Jose Luis Vega’s essay on Borges’s translation of “Der Aufbruch,” by Ernst Stadler does not go beyond stating when and where Borges departs from the original, and concluding that his translations are mostly faithful with exceptions due to misunderstanding of the original (242; 247–48). There are two exceptions that do focus specifically on Borges’s translation practice. While Carlos García’s two short notes in Proa are more concerned with Borges’s personal involvement with the Expressionists and point out their impact on Borges’s ultraísmo, his two later essays focus on Borges’s errors and misunderstandings in his translations of Kurt Heynicke and Wilhelm Klemm. Efraín Kristal’s brief chapter on Expressionism in his insightful study on Borges as translator seems to be the only one to discuss how Borges’s changes “produce an effect different from the original” (44), such as a more apocalyptic and threatening vision of war (44– 45). 6 The fictitious author attempts to produce a work identical to Cervantes’sDon Quijote. Yet, due to the historical gap between the two writers, the text that Menard “translates” is very different from that of Cervantes. Thus, although literally copying the text verbatim, Menard automatically, and quite deliberately, contemporizes Cervantes’ work. 7 Carlos García cites Borges’s mistranslation of Klemm’s neologism “Absterbeordung” (order of dying out / of extinction), understanding it as “Afterbeordnung” and translating it involuntarily humorously as “colocación de los anos” (placement of the anuses). However, this misunderstanding is due to the older German writing of the letter ‘s’ as resembling an ‘f’: ‘ſ’, and since this word is a neologism, Borges’s misreading is itself

Spaniardizing Expressionism 131 quite creative. Moreover, the genitive error García cites as further indication of Borges’s difficulties with German grammar (“Borges, traductor” n.p.) does not seem sufficient proof to me; the genitive case is one of the most difficult aspects of German and not being able to produce it correctly is not equal to a general inability to comprehend complex German sentences. 8 In contrast, Olea Franco himself confines his highly pertinent argument—“que solo desde el ámbito de la realidad argentina—en su historia, en su literatura, en las in- flexiones de su lengua, etcétera—puede empezar a comprenderse la textualidad bor- geana” (El otro Borges 17)—to the period of 1923–42. 9 Thus, I am not concerned with the relationship between Borges’s time in Europe and the rest of his life, or between these translations and his later literary production in Argentina. Enriqueta Morillas has drawn a link between Borges’s Expressionist translations and his later fiction by emphasizing his interest in the “magical” element of Expressionism (“Borges, el expresionismo” 26–27). She does not analyze how this interest is manifested in the poetry translations themselves, how features of his translations relate to his later prose, or if and how it affected the Magical Realism of other writers. 10 These articles appeared inGrecia, Cervantes and Ultra in 1920 and 1921. Another short article appeared in the Argentine journal Inicial in 1923 (reprinted in Inquisiciones, 1925). A few unpublished translations are reprinted in Textos recobrados 1919–1932. 11 Borges starts this essay by distinguishing two strands of Expressionism, one mere “documental, histórico” and one “de muestrario del expresionismo lírico en sus albores.” Denouncing the latter as absurd overvaluation of objects over the comprehending subject, Borges goes on to stress the superiority of the subjective: “En el fondo, lo visto, lo sufrido, lo imaginado y lo soñado son igualmente reales, es decir, existen. La objetividad no es en última exégesis mas que una suerte de denominador común de muchas sensaciones subjetivas . . .” (1). 12 In 1962, for example, he sees Expressionism as containing “ya todo lo esencial de la literatura posterior. Me gusta mucho más que el surrealismo o el dadaísmo, que me parecen frívolos. El expresionismo es más serio y refleja toda una serie de preocupa- ciones profundas [. . .]” (qtd. in Morillas, “Borges y la marea” 78). A similar comparison is made in his “Autobiographical Essay” (1970): “I still think of it [Expressionism] as beyond other contemporary schools such as imagism, cubism, futurism, surrealism, and so on.” (216). Likewise, in an interview from 1970, he contrasts the pacifism of Expressionism with the formalism of the cubists (Morillas, “Borges y la marea” 78). Al- though no direct comparison is made in “Nota sobre el Ultraísmo” (1966), he indicates his particular fondness of the Expressionist poets stressing that “Al cabo de los años perduran en mi memoria líneas y estrofas de Johannes Becher o de WIlhelm Klemm” (qtd. in García, “Borges, traductor” n.p.). 13 Carlos García, one of the few to have discussed of Borges’ss translations of Expression- ist poems in various articles, asserts that he translated six poems as well as three fragments. The seven poems of which I am aware are: “Los sentidos” (in “Lírica expresionista: síntesis”), “Noche en el cráter” (“Antología expresionista”), “El cielo nos soborna” (“Antología expresionista”), “La ascensión” and “Extracto” (both in “Lírica expresionista: Wilhelm Klemm”), “Batalla en el Marne” (in Inicial, 1923, and with modifications

132 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 in the first five lines, in Inquisiciones, 1925), and “Madurez” (Cartas del fervor 174–75; originally in a letter to Jacobo Sureda). 14 Franz Werfel, for example, the favorite of the anthologist Kurt Pinthus, does not figure at all, nor do Georg Heym, Georg Trakl or Gottfried Benn, none of whom could not be omitted from an Expressionist anthology today. Moreover, as Carlos García notes, the poems by his favorite poet, Wilhelm Klemm, that Borges chooses to translate are not those which were to be the German author’s best known compositions (“Borges, traductor,” n.p.). 15 All English translations of the German poems are mine. They are literal rather than literary, with the sole purpose of clarifying the differences between the originals and the Spanish texts. 16 In August Stramm’s poems, Borges most notably cuts and condenses words or phrases to intensify the effect of the original. Characterized by extremely short lines and insistent word or phrase repetitions, these poems become even more condensed in the translations. Where many of the repetitions are omitted. 17 I have translated the German “hetze” as “rush” since the German word is a neologism, not an existing adjective, but alluding to the verb “hetzen” (of which possible adjectives would be “hetzig” or “gehetzt”) 18 Interestingly, in Klemm’s war poem “Schlacht an der Marne,” the opposite occurs when Borges’s slows time down, while the German accelerates it (Kristal 44-45). Yet, here too, he condenses lines, thereby rendering the “onslaught of the infantry [. . .] more focused and threatening” (45). 19 While the continental Spanish expression “dar la [o una] vuelta” does not require the reflexive pronoun, in Spanish America, the reflexive “darse vuelta” is possible (Slabý, Grossmann, and Illig 1163). 20 To my knowledge, it is only in 1958 that new translations appear in Spain: Rodolfo Modern ends his study of German Expressionist poetry with an appendix containing translations of some of the most important poets (El expresionismo). In 1973, a translation of Georg Trakl is published (Sánchez). In 1971 a bilingual anthology with poems by Trakl, Heym, and Stadler appeared, edited and translated by Jenaro Taléns and Ernst-Edmund Keil, which was revised and re-edited in 1981 with the collaboration of Vicente Forés, and then again amplified and re-edited in 1998. The third edition has a slightly altered title to emphasize the different nature of the book. Overall, the late nineties in Spain have witnessed signs of increasing interest in Georg Trakl (Min- gués; Modern, Trakl; Reina Palazón). 21 Cansinos-Asséns’ and Gómez de la Serna’s articles in praise of Borges’s translations are reprinted in Alazraki 38. According to Modern, Torre was the first to stress Borges’s merit in disseminating Expressionism (“Borges” 395). 22 Goll himself published a brief article, “El expresionismo alemán,” in the Ultraist journal Prisma in 1922. 23 An interesting proof of the authority of Borges’s transmission of Expressionism in Spain can be seen in the repetition of a curious error by two later critics. As did Borges in “Síntesis,” Torre oddly mentions Rilke as ancestor and precursor of Expressionism. More recently Gallego Roca, in his study of poetic translations between 1909 and 1939, includes Rilke translations under the subheading “Expresionismo” (103ff.).

Spaniardizing Expressionism 133 24 Although Anderson’s article focuses on three dramas by García Lorca, it includes a useful discussion of the Expressionism’s reception in Spain and its points of intersection with Spanish aesthetics. He rightly concludes that “el expresionismo recibió una difusión y una atención suficientes en la España de los años veinte” (217). 25 The Revista de Occidente published three translations, in 1926, 1928 and 1929 respectively: Von morgens bis mitternachts, Gas I, and Oktobertag (Anderson 216—for a list of the play’s performances see Anderson 216 and note 17 on pp. 223–24). The first of them has an introduction by Enrique Díez-Canedo. 26 A few critics have mentioned these similarities (Bozal 500; Jerez-Farrán, Expression- ism 65), but to my knowledge, there is as yet no study that directly compares the two artists. 27 See the studies by Jerez-Farrán; Andrés; Matilla Rivas; Sabaté Planes; Wentzlaff- Eggebert. 28 I have analyzed the (so far overlooked) similarities between García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York and German Expressionist poetry and their implications for the Spanish Avant-garde in a recent article in the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (Sager). 29 Rodolfo Modern, in his essay “El expresionismo alemán según Borges,” argues that Borges used Expressionism to expand the literary-cultural horizon of the Spanish- speaking world (69). His claim that the translations are faithful to the originals, whose style and ethics were “más que novedad para el mundo hispánico” (70) does not explain if and how these translations could influence current poetics. Hempel too emphasizes that German culture had the function of “impulsos e innovaciones” but claims that its influence or transmission in the twentieth century was scarce, with the exception of Rilke-translations (1292). 30 In 1937–38, Lukács started a bitter debate among leftist intellectuals (the so-called Ex- pressionismusdebatte), in the exile journal Das Wort. For a complete documentation of this attack, see Schmitt; part of the discussion is also in the collection edited by Anz and Stark. Rumold (110–37), Murphy (12–16), and Anz (196–99) discuss its implications for the Expressionist movement. 31 The number of Rilke-translators (cf. footnote 1 and Hempel 1292), however, suggests that German was not such an unknown language as is often claimed. 32 Defining Expressionism as purely Germanic, the introductory art guide for schools and colleges, Las claves del arte expresionista (González Rodríguez), is a regrettable exception here. While it does have a section on Expressionism outside of Germany, Spain is conspicuously absent. On the other hand, Carlos Areán’s study (1984) of Expres- sionist art in Spain, bears witness to widespread affinities, but is based on too broad a concept to be a useful as critical tool.

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138 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Stramm, August. “Wiedersehen.” Du: Liebesgedichte. Berlin: Verlag der Sturm, 1915. n.p. Taléns, Jenaro, ed., trans., and prol. Tres poetas expresionistas: Stadler, Heym, Trakl. Trans. Ernst-Edmund Keil and Vicente Forés. Madrid: Hiperión, 1998. ——— and Ernst-Edmund Keil, eds., trans., and prol.Stadler, Heym, Trakl: poesía expresionista alemana. Madrid: Hiperión, 1981. Torre, Guillermo de. Literaturas europeas de vanguardia. Madrid: Caro Raggio, 1925. ———.Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia. 2nd ed. Madrid: Guadarrama, 1971. “Ultra: Un manifiesto de la juventud literaria.” 1918.Manifiestos, proclamas, panfletos y textos doctrinales. (Las vanguardias artísticas en España: 1910–1931). Ed. Jaime Brihuega. Madrid: Cátedra, 1979. 102. [Signed by Xavier Bóveda, César A. Comet, Guillermo de Torre, Fernando Iglesias, Pedro Iglesias Caballero, Pedro Garfías, J. Rivas Panedas, J. de Aroca.] Vega, José Luis. “Der Aufbruch / El Arranque: Un ejemplo de las traducciones expresionistas de J. L. Borges.” Sendebar 5 (1994): 241–48. Videla, Gloria. El ultraísmo: estudios sobre movimientos poéticos de vanguardia en España. Madrid: Gredos, 1971. Waisman, Sergio G. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. Weisstein, Ulrich. “Expressionism: Style or Weltanschauung?” Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. Ed. Ulrich Weisstein. Paris: Didier, 1973. 29–44. Wentzlaff-Eggbert, Harald. “LasComedias bárbaras y el expresionismo dramático alemán.” Suma Valleinclaniana. Ed. John P. Gabriele. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1992. 251–67.

Spaniardizing Expressionism 139 Benjamin Boysen I Call That Patriotism Leopold Bloom and Cosmopolitan Caritas

There results a state of feeling in which friends, brothers, kinsmen, connections, fellow-citizens, and finally all human beings (since our belief is that all mankind are united in one society [unam societatem hominum esse]) are things desirable for their own sakes [propter se]. Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum V.xxiii.67

Joyce’s moral vision is quasi-religious because its essential principle, love (caritas) is fundamental to Judaism, the teachings of Christ and Paul, as well as to the scholas- tics. However—and this cannot be said too often—it is also based on premises that are entirely different from the religious realm, since it is grounded in a world that is not endowed with any theological or metaphysical spirituality. Joyce’s Jesuitical education taught him that the primary object of Scripture was to teach and live in accordance with caritas: “scripture enjoins nothing but love” (Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.36). To Augustine, love is understood as follows: “By love I mean the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy God on his own account and to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbour on account of God” (III.37). In strict contrast to this teaching, Joyce believed that love consists in loving things in their own right and presupposes a certain empathy and identification with things as they are in themselves. Contrary to the Christian love for which Augustine pleas, Joyce asserts that one should love things as an end in itself. This is precisely what Bloom does, and his moral superiority consists in his ability to endure and live with fundamental incertitude. He conquers through love despite any assuredness of meaning. To step forth bravely to face contingency seems to be the precondition for love and Bloom dares, indeed to do so. He is able to live with fundamental emptiness (the void).1 He acknowledges facts and refuses to idealize, sentimentalize, or pervert other human beings. If he judges people critically, he modifies his views immediately, letting his sympathy, empathy, and understanding embrace them. He thus achieves a greater understanding of their particular problems, restrictions, and difficulties. There is a good deal of irony in the fact that Bloom, a Jew, is the very embodi-

140 ment of the virtue, which Christians for centuries have accused the Jews of lacking. This paradox is most obvious in the “Cyclops” episode, where the Citizen confronts Bloom as Goliath to David or Polyphemos to Odysseus. It is significant that in all of these scenarios, it is the smallest figure who is victorious, not because he is the strongest, but because the strongest and most brutal are incapable of overcoming one whose soul is armed with courage, cunning, and strong convictions. Joyce had no confidence in the belief that purely material victories contributed to spiritual and moral superiority. In one of his school essays, Joyce writes that: “all subjugation by force, if carried out and prosecuted by force is only so far successful in breaking men’s spirits and aspirations [. . .] it is, in the extreme, productive of ill- will and rebellion” (Critical Writings 17). In Ulysses, Bloom correspondingly emphasizes the futility of force: “But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that” (12: 1481). Here Bloom is quite simply applying to history the two names by which Joyce had always characterized it. It’s no use. The Hegelian life-and-death struggle for existence, whose only valid premise is the force and the power to master the other, cannot offer subjects access to universality. Such a morality cannot constitute a stable, symbolic ground of identification, since there will always be someone who is stronger or more superior than another. In order to illustrate the absurdity and meaninglessness of the merciless logic of force, we need only to bring to mind Brue- ghel the Elder’s wonderful drawing, Big Fish Eat small Fish (1556). This work of art perfectly illustrates Bloom’s critical statement: “Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!” (8: 703). If we turn to Dubliners, we can observe how aggression and frustration are transferred downwards—as in the case of “Counterparts,” where the protagonist staggers home to beat his son as a response to his own humiliation and degradation at work. As Bloom observes, the mimetic violence just causes the wounded victim to humiliate the weaker in a downward spiral until everyone has been demoralized into utter negativity: “And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher. And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else” (7: 210–14; my emphasis). Bloom cannot accept the logic of force, for as he argues: “wouldn’t it be the same here if you put force against force?” (12: 1360–61). In a similar manner, Bloom refuses the logic of revolution in favor of a democratic evolution that follows in the wake of discourse. Although Joyce, perhaps, does not share Bloom’s optimism—the latter believes in the strength of love, compromise, and the victory of argumenta- tion—he nevertheless sympathizes with him. In the beginning of the twentieth century, pacifism was not as popular as it would become in certain communities in the West (and, of course, in the East in the remarkable and admirable figure of Gandhi). Bloom’s pacifism, which is one of the manifestations of his caritas, must have initially seemed even more ridiculous

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 141 than it does now. Bloom remains, however, an “unconquered hero” (11: 342) precisely because of his pacifism. It makes him neither a martyr nor a saint. It allows him to triumph without resorting to violence. He conquers by avoiding the ma- chismo that Joyce despised with all his heart. Joyce’s scorn for aggression is clearly expressed in 1916, when he writes a version of the ballad of Mr. Dooley—a popular song written in 1901 by Billy Jerome after a character invented by Finley Peter Dunne—in which he declares exactly what he feels about the necessity of the First World War, the patriotic engagement, homeland, noble ideals, Christianity, the state, and political ideologies:

Who is the man when all the gallant nations run to war Goes home to have his dinner by the very first cablecar And as he eats his cantaloupe contorts himself in mirth To read the blatant bulletins of the rulers of the earth? It’s Mr Dooley, Mr Dooley, The coolest chap our country ever knew “They are out to collar The dime and dollar” Says Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo. Who is the funny fellow who declines to go to church Since pope and priest and parson left the poor man in the lurch And taught their flocks the only way to save all human souls Was piercing human bodies through with dumdum bulletholes? It’s Mr Dooley, Mr Dooley, The mildest man our country ever knew “Who will release us From Jingo Jesus” Prays Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo. [. . .] Who is the tranquil gentleman who won’t salute the State Or serve Nabuchodonesor or proletariat But thinks that every son of man has quite enough to do To paddle down the stream of life his personal canoe? It’s Mr Dooley, Mr Dooley, The wisest wight our country ever knew “Poor Europe ambles Like sheep to shambles” Sighs Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo. (Critical Writings 246–48)

142 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Joyce’s parody constitutes a rejection or refusal—like that found in Dadaism and Surrealism—of an absurd and inhuman reality. There exists bravery in not being ashamed of one’s fears. It is this courageous cowardice that Bloom epitomizes. It is not surprising that, given his beliefs, Joyce came in conflict with Irish nationalists. Joyce was very annoyed by the movement of cultural reawakening, as manifested in the return to local Irish mythologies. In “Cyclops,” Joyce showed precisely what he thought about the intellectual aspect of Irish nationalism. In this chapter, he demonstrated his contempt for and the meaninglessness of a political movement that had no real ideological content. It is evident to the reader that the Citizen and those around him are utterly devoid of any shred of idealism since they are represented by the hate, brutality, and the one-eyed blindness of Polyphemos: They spend all of their energy on acting out their racial prejudices. The Citizen’s masculine nationalism is ultra-reactionary. He goads the group with his talk, while buying them drinks: Lenehan, alcoholics such as Bob Doran, or good-for-nothing loafers like O’Molloy are all mediocre, passive, and selfish. They are cheerfully compensating for their inferiority with stupid brutality. From the discussions that animate the Citizen’s anger, one can conclude that Joyce equates patriotism with intolerance and fanaticism. Although a great nationalist, the Citi- zen is a poor human being. He is only capable of seeing with one eye (the eye belonging to the fanatical Irishman who thirsts for independence). The other eye, the humane eye, is tightly closed. He is thus unable to see Bloom precisely because he is of Jewish descent. The Citizen claims, as Mr. Deasy did in “Nestor,” that the miseries of the country are caused by strangers and women. Joyce exposes the dominant and lurking forces of nationalism as both xenophobic and misogynic: “The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in. We brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here” (12: 1156–58). With nationalism thus determined by xenophobia and misogyny, it is clear that it embodies an ideology of hatred and hysterically rejects the Other. Bloom simply cannot perceive this logic as being anything but devoid of all rational potential. For this reason, he questions the appropriateness of such a political “morality”: “Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations” (12: 1417–18). Bloom strives to question nationalism as it is defined and constituted by hatred and violence: Can these notions really substantiate any ground for the future? He questions the perception of an absolute and unique Irish national character at the same time that he intimates that violence and oppression are universal and widespread, not solely reserved for the British: “But, says Bloom, isn’t discipline the same everywhere” (12: 1360–61)? Such a question appears subversive and is immediately rejected. The “cause” or the “legend” are inseparable in this half Hebraic, half Homeric, mythological scene, where Goliath and the Cyclops are blood brothers with Cuchu-

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 143 lain and Conchubar, Gaelic heroes whose achievements Yeats retold—in Deirdre (1907) and in The Green Helmet (1910). Joyce was fiercely opposed to Yeats’s romantic idealization of The Poor Old Woman (alias Ireland) in Cahtleen ni Houlihan, who slaughtered young men saying: “It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; [. . .] many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake, and for all that, they will think they are well paid” (86). As is the case with all authoritative ideologies, Irish nationalism demands that one is willing to sacrifice one’s very life for the “cause.” In close parallel with religious and political fanaticism potential victims justify their actions by evoking their future rewards in a paradise that will counterbalance and compensate for the actual losses suffered on earth. The Poor Old Woman, who represents Ireland, was also driven away by “many strangers in the house” (81) and now clings to the hope of driving them out in turn.2 Compared to nationalist dreams of battle and revolution, Bloom’s pragmatic cosmopolitism stresses mutual recognition. Bloom is a practical idealist who believes it possible to educate with kindness.3 But his pacifism and altruism are continually ridiculed. He believes that he is speaking common sense and that others will eventually share his views since they are self-evident and appropriate. Bloom is just perceived as a cod, a joke. No one pays attention to what he is saying. They find Bloom’s speech ridiculous because it is too Christian for the so-called Christian Citizen. Bloom is despised for his attempt to reason with them. He is seen to stand for neither one thing nor the other. The Citizen does not realize how right he really is when he says that there is some of the Christ in the Jewish Bloom. When Bloom reminds the inveterate anti- Semite that Jesus was a Jew, he makes himself guilty of the most despicable crime in the eyes of the nationalist. “By Jesus,” cries the Citizen, “I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will” (12: 1811–12). The irony of this passage could not be more clearly put: When the Citizen says that he will crucify Bloom (who is a Jew, like Christ), he is actually placing himself in the role, which he (and the Christians for centuries) have usually assigned to the Jews—that is, that of those who put the Christ to death. The end of the chapter provides an ironic apotheosis of Rabelaisian dimensions. Bloom—whom the Citizen has designated as a Judas—is called up to God as Elijah. As a Christ-figure, Bloom is the only hero who is not violent. He is contrasted to the Citizen, who (without even realizing it himself) tries to stone the messenger of his own divinity (like Poly- phemos throwing huge rocks at Odysseus):

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot,

144 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel. (12: 1910–18)

Bloom receives a folder in “Lestrygonians,” which he misreads with reference to Christ: “Bloo . . . Me? No. [. . .] Elijah is coming” (8: 8, 13). Through a misreading, Bloom is associated with both Christ and the prophet, Elijah. In “Cyclops,” he shifts from the role of the excluded, Mosaic scapegoat to the role as Christ. Bloom’s explicit identification with Elijah, a bridge figure between the Old and the New Tes- tament, reveals his function as a bridge between us and them, us and the strangers, whom he in vain tries to bring together.

Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it’s up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cos- mos? No. [. . .] Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. [. . .] Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. (15: 2195–201)

Bloom-Elijah pleas for the joyous devotion to the Other, whose universality binds everyone together. This ethics of love is not only joyous, but also marked by a universal (and Christian) solidarity. Everybody—Greeks as well as Jews—are brought together through love of the Other, through the possibility of giving and receiving what is given. The stranger becomes suspended in Bloom-Elijah’s universe of love. One has to love one’s neighbor, the Other, as one loves oneself. As opposed to what the nationalistic “Christians” might think, this neighbor is not simply understood as a particular individual but as a human being. As Augustine points out:

You are one person, your neighbors are many. In the first place, you see, you shouldn’t understand your neighbor as just being your brother, or relative, or one of your in-laws. Neighbor to every person is every single other person. Father and son, father-in-law and son-in-law are said to be neighbors. Nothing is so near, so much a neighbor, as one human being to another. (Sermons 399.3; see also On Christian Teaching)

Alienation toward the Other, as one who is an alien in terms of race, ethnicity, or nationality, etc., disappears in the Christian context. This Christian identification with the universal Other suspends alienation by bringing the strangers and the marginalized together: “Thus, your soul is not your own, but is shared by all these brethren whose souls are also yours, or, rather, whose souls form with yours not

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 145 souls, but one soul, the single soul of Christ” (Augustine, Letters 243.4, my emphasis). In complete contrast to the self-centered essentialism of nationalism—us self alone, which, as the literal meaning of the Irish nationalist motto sinn fein, reveals itself to be a collective, narcissistic hysteria—Bloom’s ethics of love takes as its point of departure Augustine and the New Testament. Bloom emphasizes how we do not belong to ourselves. In fact, no one belongs to him/herself, we are all given and granted being by the Other. Meaning, love, and a sense of being are not notions that we possess or master in our particularity, but these concepts are given to us from the outside in order to shape our decentered universality. Your soul is not your own. The unlimited aspect of love (caritas) transcends ordinary feelings because it is nurtured by the universal Other. It is not dependent on any narrow idea of mutu- ality or equality. It cannot be understood as being derived from any debt, depen- dency, or gratitude. Such love transcends ordinary economical logic because it is infinite; its universal configuration makes it transcend contingent particularity. It welcomes the Other and the stranger who are included in its universal nature:

But I always owe you love, the only thing which leaves us still in debt even when it has been repaid. For it is repaid when it is expended, but it is owed even after it has been repaid, since there is never a time when it does not have to be expended. [. . .] love, on the other hand, not only grows in the one who asks it back from the object of his love, even if he does not receive it, but the one from whom he receives it only begins to possess it when he pays it back. (Augustine, Letters 192.1–2)

As opposed to nationalists, who understand solidarity, meaning, and love in the economical terms of a gift-exchange, Augustine (who, as we shall see, is one of the sounding boards of Bloom’s discourse on love) teaches that the more one gives of oneself and the more one loses oneself in the Other, the more one becomes oneself. Love and identity are at stake here. They are possessions that one can only possess in the act of giving away. The question of love and this manner of comprehending love causes the hubbub in Barney Kiernan’s pub. Let us return, for a moment, to Bloom’s apotheosis as Elijah. Joyce rewrites Elijah’s Old Testament flight to heaven, fusing it with the dramatic, heavenly flight of Christ. It is through God’s intervention that the figure of Elijah and Christ con- verge. Their convergence is signaled by the cry Abba! Adonai! “Abba” is a Syrian- Greek name for father or God, while “Adonai” is a Hebrew name for God.4 This exclamation fuses together the divine and the human father-son relationship. In the Old Testament, the earthly son, Elisha, is left by his father: “And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind

146 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 into heaven. And Elisa saw it, and he cried, My father, my father” (2 Kings 2: 11–12).5 In the New Testament, the divine son, Christ, cries correspondingly: “And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14: 36). It is through Elijah that the transition from Moses to Christ occurs in the last lines of the Old Testament: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4: 5–6). Bloom’s heavenward flight replicates this movement from earthly to divine fatherhood. In this manner, Joyce supports the utopian vision of a redemptive love between fathers and sons. It is in this utopia where Stephen, who longs for a legitimate father figure, and Bloom, who bitterly misses a son, can come together. Both lack the generational succession that would guarantee meaning and continuity in their life. A utopian love, where the mirroring—“Substituting Stephen for Bloom” (17: 549)— would give each what they lack and would make the prophecy of Elijah come true. Stephen would be transformed into “Stoom” and Bloom would become “Blephen” (17: 549, 551). The prophecy affects a universal symbiosis across generations. As in Christian doctrine, Bloom affirms the universal prerogative of love: “And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that [hatred] that is really life. [. . .] Love” (12: 1482–85). This affirmation of the love’s importance is further elucidated:

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14 A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Ver- schoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. (12: 1493–501)

The sources of Bloom’s love loves to love love seem to be rather difficult to fathom. Ulysses Annotated explains the sentence as: “Sentimental adult child-talk” (364)! The editors, Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, also point to Augustine, who in his Confessions describes his ardent experiences of love from his youth with similarly confusing words as those uttered by Bloom: “I loved not yet, yet I loved to love [amare amabam], and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not” (III.1.1). Augustine’s apt specification of the Christian concept of love shows how love splits man between carnal and spiritual yearning: “Thus did my two wills [voluntates], one new and the other old, that carnal and this spiritual, try masteries

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 147 within me [confligebant inter se], and by their disagreeing [discordando] wasted out my soul” (VIII.5). However, while Augustine condemns the erroneous ways of his youth before he realized that God was the only true and worthy object of love, Bloom does not condemn sensual and earthly love. Where Augustine’s sentence (amare amabam) contains a negative denunciation of the sins of youth, Bloom’s love loves to love love affects a rather positive expression of the joyous and all- embracing universality of love—in spite of its parodic tone. It is true that we should turn our attention to Augustine, if we wish to discover the source of Bloom’s parody. It is not, however, in the Confessions, but rather in The Trinity as Jean Kimball has convincingly demonstrated.6 In this work, Augustine explains how one must understand God’s nature and very being as love. Here too, Augustine explains why amorous engagement becomes indispensable: “Embrace love, God, and embrace God by love” (VIII.8.12). Augustine reflects on the religious question of love quoting “these two commandments, love of God and love of neighbor” (VIII.7.10). These commandments are crucial. Augustine tells us we must not only love our neighbor, but as true Christians, we “must also love love itself above everything” (VIII.7.10). Since God is love, “he must needs love God above everything else” (VIII.7.10). It would be a sin to love one’s neighbor merely for his own sake, we must and should instead love him as a sign of the Creator. It is through the actual transference in love that one should love. This is why Augustine claims that he who loves his neighbor loves God because he loves love in itself. Love is from God and is God. Thus, Augustine concludes with the appeal that Joyce seems to accept:

For when we love love, then we love that which loves something, precisely because it loves something. What, therefore, does love love, that love itself may also be loved? For that which loves nothing is not love. But if it loves itself, it must love something in order that it may love itself as love. For, just as a word both indicates something and also indicates itself, but it does not indicate itself as a word, unless it indicates that it is indicating something, so, too, does love indeed love itself; but unless it loves itself as loving something, then it does not love itself as love. (VIII.8.12)

Augustine also repeats the absolute mutual correlation between love of God and love of one’s neighbor:

Therefore, when we love our brother from love, we love our brother from God; nor can it happen that we do not love above all else that same love by which we love our brother. From this we conclude that these two commandments cannot be without one another. For since “God is love,” he who loves love, surely loves God; but he must needs love love who loves his brother. (VIII.8.12)

148 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 One must certainly agree with Jean Kimball when she claims that The Trinity is much closer to Bloom’s statement than the Confessions (as Ulysses Annotated suggests). Bloom’s sentence equally deals with God’s love and love of one’s neighbor in words that are very similar to those of Augustine. Yet, the mixed and parodic list of who loves whom—which is entirely concrete and particular until we reach the final evocation notions of everybody and God—is here limited to heterosexual couples, and this natural and animal emphasis (it is not only human couples who are mentioned but also other members of the animal kingdom such as elephants) distances Bloom’s discourse from that of Augustine. Nature and sexuality are included in Bloom’s babbled praise of love and omitted in Augustine.7 The matrix of love is, therefore, spread out between the lover, the beloved, and love itself. When Augustine compares the situation of love with the relationship between the word, the thing, and the sign-relation itself, the lover and the beloved— like the word and the thing—do not possess or contain meaning in themselves. They are given love and meaning when they are put in relation to each other. For this reason, it is crucial to love love itself, which—as the foundation of the relation—gives the two particular entities their universal significance. We can add another word to this relationship, although it does not participate in the same kind of being as the entities it joins universally—the Other. It is the amorous power of the Other that Bloom celebrates. Through millennia, one of the names for this Other has been God. God does not seem to have any legitimate claim to existence anymore. How- ever, God designates as a metaphor for the universal Other, the omnipresent activity of love: God loves everybody. Like the Jews, who lived in captivity in Babylon and who yearned to return in freedom to Jerusalem, Augustine contrasts the city of freedom with the city of oppression: “We must know what Babylon is, this city by which we are enslaved, and also be aware of Jerusalem, whither we long to return” (Expositions of the Psalms 64.1). Augustine models his utopia on that of the Jews, an analogy that is unac- ceptable for nationalists. The Citizen asks Bloom fiercely: “Are you talking about the new Jerusalem?” (12: 1473). He thus hatefully mocks Jewish Zionism and its longing for a homeland centered around Jerusalem. This anti-Semitic maneuver, however, contains an obvious and unintended self-irony, since the sentence also— as the Citizen himself undoubtedly is unaware—refers to the ultimate, Christian utopia: “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride before her husband” (Revelation 21: 2, my emphasis). The nationalist is further unmasked when he describes Bloom as “a new apostle to the gentiles [. . .] Universal love” (12: 1489). Paul, similarly refers to himself as “a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity” (1 Timothy 2: 7) and his church actually consists of a community of strangers, whose universal command of love challenges national, ethnic, and political self-understanding:

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 149 Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh [. . .] That at that time ye were without Christ, being alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ [. . .] Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God. (Ephesians 2: 11–13, 19)

The universality of a love that does not demand the obliteration of differences en- closes heterogeneity under the universality of the Other:

Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3: 9–11)

The very essence of nationalist identity—i.e. the Christianity that they so eagerly assert—is actually falsified by their actions. They deny themselves when they deny Bloom. For it is Bloom, who is neither a Jew nor a Christian, who lets the Jewish messianism resonate in Christian universality when he proclaims “the new Bloo- musalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future” (15: 1544–45). The Jewish Bloom is, thus, more Christian than the Christians and more Irish than the Irish. His marginalization allows him to comprehend the universality of Christianity. His Semitic roots subject him to humiliation and oppression that parallel that expressed by the Irish. The captivity of Ireland parallels the exile of Israel, as Myles Crawford has emphasized with nationalistic and rhetorical virtuosity in “Eolus.” As he is increasingly put under pressure, Bloom defends himself as a Jew: “And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. [. . .] Right, says John Wyse [sic]. Stand up to it then with force like men” (12: 1467–75). However, like Christ, Bloom refuses to indulge in mimetic violence. His denial of this “masculine” line of action is one of the reasons why he is characterized as feminine. While he is away, his messianic identity is mocked: “That’s the new Messiah for Ireland! says the citizen” (12: 1642). Yet, as Cunningham remarks insightfully, the expectation of the Messiah’s arrival is shared by both Jews and the Christian Irish. His group nevertheless rejects the messianic Bloom—with special reference to his question- able virility: “Well, they’re still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that matter so are we. [. . .] Do you call that a man? says the citizen. —I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe. [. . .] One of those mixed middlings he is” (12: 1644–59). Hysterically rejecting their own immanent strangeness, they project it onto Bloom,

150 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 who finds it suitable and reasonable to paraphrase the words of Christ in Matthew 7: 3: “Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own” (12: 1237–38). Even though he has chosen to do without violence and embraces solidarity with others in need, even though he is socially marginalized as a Jew and exiled (in addition to the spiritual exile that Molly subjects him to on this particular day), Bloom assumes a Christian and Prophetic role in this chapter. After he has spent the entire day confronting various cultural and masculinist excesses, Bloom passes on to Stephen (as a kind of paternal inheritance) his reflections about men and women. He makes it clear that countries receive the rule they deserve. It is not strength and force, but good will and love that should guide a community: “But with a little goodwill all round. It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due installments plan” (16: 1098–101). Primitive patriarchy is, perhaps, the rule that most men deserve. Bloom, however, ever the great democrat, renounces patriarchy and its sexual aggression. He believes that it leads to emotional and social misery. Male self-assertion is meaningless, claims Bloom, because it does not serve any progressive purpose. On the contrary, it achieves nothing as it runs amok in regressive self-indulgence. Bloom’s democratic utopia is rather like a society populated with new womanly men, who have renounced the illusion of masculine supremacy. Bloom has no doubts that the political and individual catastrophes that seem to follow in the wake of modernity originate in the male body and psyche. Male spiritual overvaluation and overheated physical and hormonal impulses give rise to violent self-assertion: “All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, errone- ously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop” (16: 1111–15). Male competitive desire is hostile and greedy toward everything and everyone. It does not stop at anything. It is composed of an endless striving or hunger—for new land, new markets, or a new woman to conquer. In her monologue, Molly entirely agrees with her husband with regard to his aversions toward masculine politics; she revises his program for sexual and political development by proposing female political hegemony:

I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 151 gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them. (18: 1434–42, my emphasis)

As opposed to men, women understand when it is time to stop. The Blooms thus formulate a feminine politics of empathy as an antidote to the dominant, masculine politics of force. The idealistic Bloom dreams of a happy and well-organized world that is guided by love, a society composed of one single state consisting of “the same people living in the same place” (12: 1422–23). The capital of this nation would be Bloomusalem. Bloom’s new world stands in direct opposition to the historic and actual world of scapegoats, torture, aggression, violence, social injustice, chaos, and destruction. Bloom’s ideal world collides with the actual world in Barney Kiernan’s bar in Dub- lin. Bloom’s utopia incorporates freedom and universalism: “I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. [. . .] esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. [. . .] Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. [. . .] Mixed races and mixed marriage” (15: 1685–99). The new Bloomusalem is both socialistic and modern, but also Hellenistic and Stoic. Its universality is rooted in an era from two thousand years ago, when the kosmos was defined as the shelter for the stranger since we are all strangers in this world. In the first century, Meleager of Gadara wrote: “One single native country, stranger, it is the world (kosmos) that we inhabit; one single chaos has produced all the mortals” (Anthologie grecque V, # 417, my translation). Bloom affirms that a country consists of the same people living the same place. A people has no real essence beyond the contingent fact that they live in the same place. Such a nation tolerates heterogeneity. Univer- sality uniquely ensures freedom and integration of difference. Thus, Terence translates Menander’s famous dictum in the following manner: “homo sum humani nil a me alienum puto” (“The Self-Tormentor” I.1.77) [I am a human being: nothing human can be alien to me (my translation)]. Cosmopolitism originates with the Stoics. Their ethics were based on individual judgment and reason that is shared by everyone. The universal city-state is supposed to embrace the world. This ideal was embraced not only by logicians, poets, philosophers, thinkers, and moralists, but also by Bloom. “So, the state is also defined as a lawfully [nomou] managed number of people [plethos anthrôpôn] living in the same place” (Chrysostom, Ora- tions XXXVI.20, my translation). Like the community of the Stoics, Bloom’s ideal includes strangers who congregate round their common strangeness. As was the case with the Stoics, Bloom’s universality is grounded in reason and the community

152 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 of free conversation. Since human beings have access to common reason, they are capable of applying amor nostri and caritas to all mankind:

But in the whole moral sphere of which we are speaking there is nothing more glorious [nihil est tam illustre] nor of wider range than the solidarity of mankind [caritas generis humani], that species of alliance and partnership of interests and that actual affection which exists between man and man inter[ hominess hominum], which, coming into existence immediately upon our birth, owing to the fact that children are loved by their parents and the family as a whole is bound together by the ties of marriage and parenthood, gradually spreads its influence beyond the home, first by blood relationships, then by connections through marriage, later by friendships, afterwards by the bonds of neighborhood, then to fellow-citizens and political allies and friends, and lastly by embracing the whole of the human race [totius complexu gentis humanae]. (Cicero V.xxiii.65)

Bloom follows Stoic doctrine and it allows him to erase the differences between Greeks and barbarians, Irish and Jews, men and women, them and us. We are all subjected to the Other who gives us access to reason, understanding, and community: “All this universe which encompasses us is one, and it is God; we are his associates [socii]; we are his members” (Seneca 92.30). To this universalism he adds atheism. The absence of any transcendental hope necessitates our being taken care of in this earthly life, and as a logical consequence, the formation of a Welfare State that will ensure a better existence through the elimination of poverty and the leveling out of social and economical differences:

It’s in the dogma. Because if they didn’t believe they’d go straight to heaven when they die they’d try to live better [. . .] I want to see everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighbourhood of £ 300 per annum. That’s the vital issue at stake and it’s feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man. At least that’s my idea for what it’s worth. I call that patriotism. (16: 1129–38)

Bloom’s patriotism consists of social individualism enlightened by intelligence and dialogue. It is nurtured by a fundamental respect for the Other. The caring and dig- nified treatment of the Other ensures self-esteem. Mistreatment of the Other back- fires precisely because one degrades oneself in the process. As we learn in “Ithaca,” Bloom’s mind is filled with all sorts of pseudo-scientific thoughts that are meant to help and improve the human condition. He has a vision of a world in which individuals refrain from violence, an ideal social democracy satisfies the needs of its people, and love, perceived as cosmopolitan caritas, embraces all.

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 153 This respect for the Other’s otherness of the other suspends the self in the Other. The acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of each individual, this acknowledgement of individuality as such, derives from the realization that no one is merely a means, but everyone is a goal in him/herself: “there results a state of feeling in which friends, brothers, kinsmen, connections, fellow-citizens, and finally all human beings (since our belief is that all mankind are united in one society [unam societatem hominum esse]) are things desirable for their own sakes [propter se]” (Cicero V.xxiii.67). It is true that our differences, individuality, and self-consciousness in a certain sense separate us from each other. But if we share this knowledge and deal with it wholeheartedly, we can attain a sense of community. Compared with this authentic solidarity, xenophobia, intolerance, racism, and nationalism appear ridiculous and absurd. There is no alternative to love and the acknowledgement of the other—at least not in this world. This is the teaching that Joyce conveys through the character of Leopold Paula Bloom.

u University of Southern Denmark

Notes

1 Richard Ellmann has related the conversation between Joyce and Laubenstein, a friend of his son, Giorgio, of whom Joyce asked: “Which would you say was the greater power in holding people together, complete faith or doubt?” (Ellmann 557). Laubenstein responded faith. To this reply, Joyce answered: “No, doubt is the thing. Life is suspended in doubt like the world in the void” (557). 2 Ireland, alias the Old woman, appears in “Circe” too, where she still indulges in xenophobia: “Old gummy granny [. . .] Strangers in my house, bad manners to them!” (15: 4584–86). When Stephen fights with an English officer, she tellingly sides with En- gland and the Christian dio boia trying to murder him with the following words: “Old gummy granny (thrusts a dagger towards Stephen’s hand) Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. (she prays) O good God, take him!” (15: 4737–39). 3 Even though Joyce does not fully ascribe to Bloom’s optimistic idealism, he does share Bloom’s consequent dissociation from violence. Joyce used to say—apparently so frequently that the phrase “became a kind of refrain”—“You know, Budgen, I am not a bloodyminded man” (Budgen 263). 4 See Gifford 381. 5 All biblical quotations are from The Bible: Authorized King James Version With Apocry- pha, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 6 He makes the point abundantly clear: “I would like to point out that there is a much closer model for the parody than St. Thomas, and that is St. Augustine in Book 8 ofOn the Trinity” (Kimball 375). 7 What Bloom and Stephen have in common is their lack of faith in orthodox, religious,

154 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 national, social, and moral doctrines. They do, however, and this cannot be stressed too often, believe in mutual, heterosexual attraction: “Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism” (17: 22– 26). Stephen’s pessimistic and gloomy melancholy would, with regard to heterosexual attraction, accentuate the purely sexual and beastly attraction inspired by the Greek notion of eros. Bloom’s optimistic and humanistic idealism also accentuates engaged and spiritual love. As such, it draws on the Christian concept of agape. It is, at any rate, extremely important to note that the only credo that these two widely different representatives of modern man can profess is heterosexual love and sexuality. Needless to say, Joyce shared this credo.

Works Cited Anthologie grecque. Eds. Pierre Waltz, et al. Paris: Société d’éditions “Les belles letters,” 1928–. Augustine. Confessions. 2 vols. Trans. William Watts. The Loeb Classical Library 26 and 27. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–61. ———.On Christian Teaching. Trans. R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———.Expositions of the Psalms, 51–72. Ed. John Rotelle. Trans. Maria Boulding. The Works of Saint Augustine, Part 3, Vol. 17. Brooklyn: New City Press, 2001. ———.Letters, Volume IV (164–203). Trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons. The Fathers of the Church 30. Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1977. ———.Letters, Volume V (204–270). Trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons. The Fathers of the Church 32. Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1977. ———.Sermons 341–400. Ed. John Rotelle. Trans. Edmund Hill. The Works of Saint Augustine, Part 3, Vol. 10. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1995. ———.The Trinity. Trans. Stephen McKenna. The Fathers of the Church 45. Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Cicero. Cicero, XVII, Philosophical Treatises: On Ends. Trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library 40. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931. Chrysostom, Dio. Orations VII, XII, and XXXVI. Ed. D. A. Russel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman, eds. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Revised and expanded edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966. ———.Ulysses . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Kimball, Jean. “St. Augustine and Love in Bloom.” James Joyce Quarterly 25.3 (1988): 375–78.

Leopold Bloom and the Cosmopolitan Caritas 155 Seneca. Seneca IV: Epistles 1–65. Trans. Richard M. Gummere. The Loeb Classical Library 75. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Terence. “The Self-Tormentor.” InTerence I: The Lady of Andros, The Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch. Trans. John Sargeaunt. The Loeb Classical Library 22. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1966.

156 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Ahmed Farouk Elbeshlawy The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America

Every human being has the right to pursue happiness. That much seems to be certain. Jefferson’s iconic words, which became the cornerstone of the law upon which an independent America was founded, “hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain [inherent and] inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Jefferson 24). Out of these three notions, however, it is the “pursuit of happiness” that presents the greatest challenge to the human condition. It not only assumes that man knows what “happiness” is, but also presupposes that he knows how to pursue it. On one level, this concept seems to connote a process of acculturation, a liberation from culture, or a demolition of the idea of culture as differ- entia. On another, it may be thought of as an end to discourse as such, an end of the thinking process itself, or an end of the philosophical quest. The very indefinability of the idea seems to confront the symbolic mandate of man as a construct of language without indulging him as the ever questioning being about the desire of the big Other or, to put it in another way, as the very denial of existence by way of contemplating the reason behind existence. Yet, it is this non-indulgence in the philosophical discourse itself that makes the idea of the pursuit of happiness so appeal- ing. Its attraction stems from its call to sacrifice reflection on the ontological self in order to develop further the animate self through quotidian existential challenges. When V. S. Naipaul writes about the idea of the pursuit of happiness in his essay “Our Universal Civilization,” he seems to be fascinated by something that remains elusive, and indefinable. It cannot possibly be talked about in any way other than through generalization: “It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit” (par. 53). Naipaul then tries to pin- point meaning by assembling together a group of sundry, but specific, concepts: “So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement” (par. 53). But the question is, cannot such a list be extended endlessly? What about the idea of the family, companionship, integrity, freedom, love, desire, the life of the body, vacation, etc.? Not surprisingly, Naipaul quickly returns to the safety of general statements: “It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away” (par. 53). It cannot be denied, however, that, viewed

157 today outside of its historical social context, the mystery and the indefinable excess of the Jeffersonian ideal also seems to mark a certain discursive drive toward cultural death. What seems to be certain is that the pursuit of happiness started within a specific historical and cultural context: an America that was tearing itself free from British imperial rule and ended in an ever-changing and imaginative discourse regarding a largely symbolic America. As the leader of the happiness-pursuing modern world, symbolic America (as a philosophical concept) provokes certain negative associations. America is perceived as exceptional, assertively religious, multi-cultural, the most advanced, most democratic, most powerful, most enlightened, most tolerant, freest, and richest. The superlatives attributed to the master signifier America create an excessiveness of all sorts. This very multi-faceted excessiveness seems to point to a kind of absolut- ism concerning America that sets it apart as a historical civilization. These heterogeneous traits, despite various differences, seem to confer upon America the role as the ultimate realization of human experience: a finality that a humanist would perceive in the mass culture and technology that destroys intellectual and cultural traditions; that a Marxist would call capitalism and imperialism, (both completely canceling out the agency of the human subject); that a nationalist would call the globalism that oblivates nations and countries, abolishing their cultures as well as their local economic potentials; and a postmodernist would call the hyper-real, the cinematic, the fictitious, or the simulacrum. Yet somehow America remains ineffable. This very fact, at the base of which lies a huge corpus of literature that seeks to articulate America, seems to elevate it to a status of an idiosyncratic power. This power is not just political, economic, military, or even cultural. At the core of America’s invented symbolic images lies what I call the fiction of its castrating power. Symbolic America as a castrating power seems to be the main rhetoric that lies behind America’s many interpretations. It is also the most interesting of all thoughtful manipulations, since it seems to extend across various discourses regarding America. In these discourses, it can be argued that however America is conceptualized, including the most optimistic and positive ways, the shadow of a castrating figure emerges in the background. Even the liberal democratic view, contributes what can be seen as an after-castration world of melancholy, a seemingly-contented but actually desexualized world in which eroticism becomes a thing of the past. For example, who is Fukuyama’s citizen of liberal democracy or “that individual who . . . gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation” (301), if not Hork- heimer’s and Adorno’s “sacrificial victim . . . the self which incessantly suppresses its impulses” (43)? One needs to add the word “erotic” to “impulses,” for all impulses are necessarily erotic. What is eroticism, if not the egoistic love/hate relationship between the subject and what it sees as part of itself in others, that which is mea-

158 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 sured by nothing but a “prideful belief in his or her own superior worth”? What is Fukuyama’s “comfortable self-preservation” in such a case, if not a total annulment of the self? In what follows, I will focus on three texts. Two of them are written by Ameri- can writers who seem to have more or less the same concern: to reveal how non- Americans perceive America and how certain texts about America invent their own “America” and, therefore, communicate to their readers an unreliable message. I will argue that these texts that seek to reveal misconceptions regarding America themselves fall into certain misconceptions. There are texts that perceive America and texts that perceive how America is perceived. The goal of this present essay is to realize that both kinds of texts contribute to the discourse of a symbolic America in which America’s fictitious castrating power is expressed. This argument will then be fleshed out in a nuanced examination of a third text, which was written as pure fiction and explicitly perceives America as a castrating power: Kafka’s Amerika. I argue that Amerika, perhaps the most innocent and unassuming of Kafka’s works, presents various readings of America. I will focus, in particular, on a number of issues: immigrant assimilation, emulation of America’s progress and achievements, and the perception of America as it has been encountered by a variety writers. I will conclude that the discourse of America’s fictitious castrating power is strengthened by our author’s very resistance to it. In his thesis America in France’s Hopes and Fears, 1890–1920, Charles W. Brooks illustrates how French intellectuals created a stereotype of America before World War I and continued to feed that stereotype for years to come. Brooks’s thesis looks at different works of French literature on America in order to show how a French- perceived image of America turned out to reveal more about France than America. Brooks argues that, for the French, America was “a place where they could cast, and witness the ravages of, their own sins and excesses, while they themselves remained in their own eyes fair and pure” (Brooks 1: 41). The symbolic image that is created out of America in this account is nothing more than a receptacle for French des- peration over what they considered to be their own flaws. The image is, of course, negative. The America created by French literature on America in that period is, according to Brooks, a source of more fear than hope for France. Brooks argues that this stereotype the French constructed of “America” before the war “remained largely and serenely impervious to vastly improved international communications and mutual understanding.” The French kept the image they created of America untouched and unaffected by any new knowledge (1: 17). In fact, Brooks notices that, although there is a huge corpus of French literature on America, most of it appears “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” because it is “second-hand and derivative” (1: 28). A series of articles entitled Outre-Mer, which was written by Paul Bourget during a visit to America in 1893 and published in book form in

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 159 1895, remained the main source of information for other French writers writing on America. Once the French stereotype of America was created, literature kept feed- ing into it despite increased communication and data refuting it. What de Tocqueville saw in America sixty years prior to Bourget was a model of democracy that Europe was bound to follow because it was “coming under the imminent and inevitable dominion of the principle of democracy” that was “already complete” in America. What Bourget expected to see in America was a possible escape from Europe’s “irreconcilable antagonism of races.” This escape did not occur because, Bourget claimed, the New World has not “escaped it to any greater degree” than Europe. Brooks concluded from Bourget’s assessment that “it was the European, and not the American, racial antagonism that he had in mind” (1: 93), what Brooks had described earlier as “a place where they could cast, and witness the ravages of, their own sins and excesses” (1: 41). In short, the other is (mis)recognized as the self—a self that is perceived as lacking on all the necessary levels, a self that casts its shadow on the other in order to deny difference except in only negative terms. Brooks seems to suggest that a constructed image of America that praises American ideology is positive, while a critical assessment of America is a stereotype. According to Brooks, de Tocqueville “saw and sought the Old World’s destiny in the new” (65); that is to say, in positive terms that indicated how America was a great democratic, practical, and progressive model that France was bound to learn from and emulate. Although implying that France would inevitably have to follow the American model, Ernest Renan also pointed to French traditional resistance which Renan saw as “unavailing” (68): “‘The world [and of course France] is marching towards a kind of Americanism (une sorte d’américanisme) which wounds our delicate susceptibilities but which, once we get over the initial shock, will, in regard to the one thing needful, namely the emancipation and progress of the human mind, be no worse than the order which it replaces’” (66–67). It seems that Renan—and I think Brooks in conformity with Renan—thought of American- ization as a bitter yet necessary medicine for France’s ills. The French-invented symbolic image of America presented in Brooks’s work seems to a certain extent determined by how far Americanization was accepted by the French. The French stereotypes of America, however, should not be con- fused with the symbolic image that the French created—and continue to create—of America. They are, in fact, two separate things. The stereotype, as Brooks correctly argues, is consistent, flat, unaffected by changes, and, above all, altogether manageable. Stereotyping is a way of articulating the other from a privileged position of what seems to be “true subjectivity.” Examples of stereotyping are abundant in Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. One of the best examples is the picture he draws of Renan himself as an Orientalist who surveys “as if from a peculiarly suited

160 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 vantage point the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East, then going on to articulate the East, making the Orient deliver up its secrets under the learned authority of a philologist whose power derives from the ability to unlock secret, esoteric languages” (Said 138). As opposed to the stereotype, the symbol is its opposite: contingent, changeful, restless, and, above all, completely unmanageable. It is both always dreaded and simultaneously recognized as a model by its inventor. It is not difficult to see that the point from which Renan surveys the East is -au thoritatively different from the point from which he perceives America. While the stereotype serves as a confirmation of its author’s subjectivity, the symbolic image is an invention that has the power of putting its inventor’s subjectivity into question, and thus, destabilizing his very being. Simone de Beauvoir puts it beautifully in her diary America Day by Day. Sitting on a bench overlooking Brooklyn in 1947, Beauvoir’s existence appears more threatened by a preconceived notion of America than by being simply lost in an American city: “Brooklyn exists, as does Manhattan with its skyscrapers and all of America on the horizon. As for me, I no longer exist” (13). While the stereotype may be easily discarded as dead material, the symbolic is an ever-living fantasy by which the self deceptively answers the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” with regard to the desire of the Other (Lacan, “Subversion” 345–46). In the case of the stereotype, for example, the Orientalist’s East, the desire of the Other is not only marginalized but also not even considered or questioned. In the case of America, however, it can be argued that Renan responded to the initial speculation of what America desired by articulating what France should do. This is not to say that “what America wants” is something clearly defined. What America wants, in the imagination of its perceiver, must be unclear. Since what it wants is evoked only by the “Che vuoi?” question and, therefore, exists only as an answer to that question. The answer to the question of “what does the Other want of me?” can only be articulated in a phantasmic way. Accordingly, the created image of America fits into the Lacanian formula of fantasy. The function of this fantasy is that it relieves the perceiver from the anxiety of “Che vuoi?” It is not accidental that the formula of fantasy, in Lacan’s completed graph of desire, brings the subject back toward—but not at all in—the imaginary realm. The stereotype belongs completely to the imaginary. Why? Because it exists mainly as a deformation that holds no power over its creator. The stereotype is not a phantasmic response to the anxious “Che Vuoi?” As previously noted, in the case of the stereotype, questioning the desire of the Other is not even at issue. By accentuating the stereotype to show how it reflects French psychic turbulences Brooks elevates it to the status of the symbolic image. Another idiosyncratic study in the early nineties was made by the American writer David Shambaugh on how China perceived America between 1972 and 1990. At the time Shambaugh wrote his study, China had “multiple sources of informa-

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 161 tion and intelligence about the United States emanating from a sprawling community of approximately six hundred to seven hundred America Watchers spread throughout a complex civilian and military bureaucracy” (7). The study defines an “America Watcher” as “an individual whose full-time professional occupation is to study and interpret events in the United States or American foreign relations for China’s concerned elite or mass public” (5). According to Shambaugh, Chinese (mis)perceptions of America came chiefly from the study and interpretation of it by this group of individuals. He argues that the image of America as a political superpower that was created by its Chinese “Watchers” reflects a kind of detached admiration mixed with deep suspicion of America’s imperial intentions. As a society, the Chinese image of America reflects a “respect for American industrial and technological prowess” mixed with “depictions of a society beset by immorality, inequality, and racism” (137). Shambaugh concludes his study by stating that “no matter how well Chinese leaders understand the internal workings of the United States, its external behavior worldwide (and particularly toward China) will always be viewed with a great deal of suspicion. Given their historical experience and this perception of American hegemony, Chinese leaders simply do not trust American motives” (301). He then sums up the core idea of the study by coming full cycle back to its title, which is meant to encapsulate the “ambivalence—admiration and denigration—that distinguishes Chinese perceptions of the United States”: “For the Chinese, the United States remains a Beautiful Imperialist” (3, 303). Yet, it can be argued that the Chinese image of America that Shambaugh’s study highlights, rather than being ambivalent, is, in fact, dialogic. This difference is crucial. While ambivalence fluctuates between two opposites in search for a harmo- nious synthesis, the dialogic position embraces extreme opposites. Ambivalence is marked by dialogue and can be illustrated through discourse, while dialogism stands in opposition to dialogue. Paul de Man illuminated this idea in his discussion of Bakhtin’s thoughts on the novel in “Dialogue and Dialogism.” De Man argues that dialogism is a “principle of radical otherness” the function of which, “far from aspiring to the telos of a synthesis or a resolution, as could be said to be the case in dialectical systems, . . . is to sustain and think through the radical exteriority or heterogeneity of one voice with regard to any other” (109). Dialogism is about the radical acceptance of disharmony within the same discourse. Shambaugh’s study aims to show how China is impressed, baffled, and simultaneously alarmed by America. Even though the ambivalent perception is represented as the core idea, the study leaves the reader in no doubt that it is America’s imperialism that worries China. “Beautiful Imperialist” manages to communicate a final message: that the America perceived as an imperialist by the Chinese Watchers is the main issue for China, while the observation of America the “beautiful” is secondary. “Beautiful” is the contestable adjective that may or may not apply. Beauty is marginalized; it

162 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 is dealt with as something that is altogether manageable, while imperialism is depicted as the dangerous threat. Yet, if America can really be seen as an imperialist, then it must be the most surreal imperialism that human history has ever produced. The last half century of American power has demonstrated a capacity for destruction, even self-destruction. At the same time, it has also demonstrated America’s inability to alter either by force or coercion, what it considers inferior. In most arguments concerning the American empire, something fundamental seems to be missing—the exhibition- ist character of America’s relation to the world—what Jean Baudrillard called the “power museum” America, which the rest of the world observes (27). It is not just that the unrestrained military spending cannot be directly transformed or translated into power. What is more important is that recent American wars seem to be about staging a certain spectacle. What matters is the presentation and contextualization of the act of war: ultimately, we have the image of saving the world from “evil communism,” or the image of combating “global terrorism,” or the image of “finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction.” To say that China is not aware of all this would be naïve. Today, America is socially and economically penetrated by the Chinese more than China’s society or economy are penetrated by America. The Chinese, whether they be Marxists or non-Marxists, proponents of China’s callous capitalistic drive toward cultural death, seem to be fixated on its ascent to world superpower status. After history completes a certain cycle, China will pull the carpet out from underneath America’s feet. To put it in a Žižekan way, instead of being “passive through the other” or relinquishing to the other the factor of passive enjoyment, China will literally be enjoying in the other’s place (Plague 115). It does not seem to be the case, as Sham- baugh’s study argues, that China’s perception of America is an ambivalent given or that it acknowledges a certain fatal beauty in America that mitigates the dangers of its “imperialism.” The issue is much deeper. It is America’s imperialism that is invented in various ways by China as a defense mechanism against the real threat of America’s marginalized symbolic beauty—its drive beyond the principle of the good toward cultural death. Given China’s new form of capitalism, Shambaugh’s study seems to downplay the fact that China is more inspired by America than susceptible to its imperialism. China’s approach to America with moral and critical prudence is combined with a real commitment to America’s ugliest principles—its merciless capitalism. China is also fascinated by its perceived image of America just as the theater audience is fascinated by Antigone—Lacan’s Antigone, the one dimensional ultimate martyr of uncompromising desire for death. It is America’s symbolic incar- nation of the Western concept of nihilism that constitutes its dreaded beauty. It is precisely the beauty of the inhumanity of looking death in the face. This nihil-

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 163 ism appears as an anti-life force. It simultaneously gives life in Western culture its only meaning. American cinematic imagination’s obsession with the idea of self-destruction adds substantially to its infatuation with the figure of Antigone. Numerous Hollywood films illustrate various scenarios of America’s devastation, showing how cinematic America, like Antigone, lives “a life that is about to turn into certain death, a death lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death” (Lacan, “Antigone” 248). It can be argued thus that the symbolic America perceived by the Chinese “Watchers” is more of an imperial beauty than a beautiful imperialist. One is lured to follow it in order to achieve what Baudrillard calls the American “power of unculture” (78). At the heart of the Chinese symbolic image of America is something that negates all criticism. There is beauty to be perceived in America’s theatrical ability to repudiate the good and appear as if it is crossing beyond the threshold of power and obviating any need to defend the seat of power. In America’s image as a “beautiful imperialist,” it is the beautiful, that additional adjective, that “dangerous supplement,” that really counts (Derrida 141–64). It is the beautiful that, according to Lacan, is “closer to evil than to the good” and which constitutes China’s fundamental problem in perceiving America (“Death Drive” 217). China’s unresolved position does not waver between the view of America as an imperialist and as a model of economic and technological success. China stands at the limit of the good, secure in the knowledge that it will eventually occupy an unrivalled position there. It is faced with a critical question concerning itself, not America. The overriding question then becomes: Will China be able to project itself, like America? Will it be able to live its imagined death? Can Antigone put on a Chinese face? The Chinese uncertainty that Shambaugh’s work brings to light (and yet, interprets inaccurately) is not about how America is perceived at all; instead, it is about what exactly awaits China. What is more important than analyzing any text about America is looking at why there is an entire idiosyncratic literature concerning America in the first place. The question is not how different cultures, nations, or individuals perceive America. It is not even about whether any perceived image relates to something real. Texts about America, including—one is tempted to say “particularly”—texts written with the specific aim of showing how other texts about America consciously or unconsciously communicate an unreliable message, always communicate an unreliable message. Either telling the “truth” about America or inventing a “deformed image” of it seems to be subordinated to a fundamental concern with inaccessibility. We come face to face with one of Lacan’s major concepts here: language “doesn’t itself know what it is saying when it lies” (“Moral Law” 82). Literature about America seems to be getting at something that is never really understood. European colonial powers saw themselves as a type of mobile “enlightenment,”

164 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 reaching out in all directions to illuminate the “dark” places on earth. Such was the law. Joseph Conrad showed how that enlightenment was as much a form of castration as a process of illumination:

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. (17)

It can be argued that with all the European dreams, achievements, successes, and failures finally put to rest, America, perceived as “utopia achieved” (Baudrillard 75), represents this same castrating enlightenment. However, in its case, it absorbs rather than penetrates. The sword resides next to the torch. It is significant that Kafka’s Amerika begins with Karl Rossman entering New York harbor, greeted by a statue of Liberty whose “Arm mit dem Schwert ragte wie neuerdings empor” (9) [“arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft” (1)]. The implicit idea behind the arm “newly stretched aloft” is that it does so in order to castrate another newcomer. It is as if this castration is the most natural requirement that the immigrant must undergo before entering the most mytholo- gized country on earth. It is ironic that this castration occurs before the immigrant himself penetrates the love object of his dreams. It serves as the precondition to a much sought after and over valued assimilation. We also find here the melancholic notion of the very disappearance of the immigrant as a subject. The discourse of the castrating power of America seems to relate to what Lacan calls the Freudian “Verwerfung” (“Rejection” 149; “Marginal” 131). In order to be American, the immigrant is required not only to annul his cultural history but, more importantly, to annul the memory that he had to annul his cultural history. In other words, the immigrant must completely reject or deny—not merely repress—the threat of America’s castrating power. The immigrant cannot simply repress the castration because that would entail a return of the repressed. If there is one certain proof to Lacan’s assertion that the castration complex “is not a myth” (“Subversion” 351), it is precisely the fact that it is not simply repressed by the subject but completely rejected. Going to America is a total inscription into a completely different reality and a wholly distinct register. Karl’s suffering in America can be seen as his refusal of the very conditions by which he is admitted to the country. Karl’s situation is in this instance similar to the Lacanian subject who “refuses access to his symbolic world to something that he has nevertheless experienced, which in this case is nothing other than the threat of castration” (“Psychoses” 12). It is not surprising that Kafka, the writer of Vor dem Gesetz [Before the Law], could sense the law of castration in

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 165 a completely imagined America. Like his hero, the countryman who spent his life before the law dreaming about admittance to it without ever being admitted by its doorkeeper, Kafka must have dreamt about being admitted to America. Yet, looking at the very image he created out of America, he knew precisely what would be at stake, were he given that chance. Klaus Mann’s preface to Kafka’sAmerika was written with the aim to demonstrate that Prague was Kafka’s permanent nightmare and that America was a beautiful dream and a hope for the future. However, the text also reveals how the symbolic America in Kafka’s mind provided a powerful figure of castration. Mann writes: “He suffered not only from his disease, but from life itself—life as a Jew, in Prague, in the tumultuous period of World War and Revolution” (vi). Mann seems to suggest that Kafka’s far-seeing thoughts on the law, human destiny, and unexplained suffering stem from his living conditions in Prague and that his dream to go to the New World emerges as an escape from the city to the open spaces of America. Thus Mann confidently writes: “The city of Prague meant to him, in a weird and definite way, the microcosm in which he recognized the tragedy and struggle of mankind. Prague was actually all he knew—his entire world, his paradise and his prison. He yearned for other landscapes, for a lighter and brighter beauty” (vi). The argument suggests that the visually correct landscape of America imagined in Kafka’s mind stood for freedom in contrast to the tiny prison of Prague. Mann claims that although an atmosphere of solitude prevails in Amerika as in The Castle and The Trial, “Amerika . . . is the only one of Kafka’s fragmentary novels on the last pages of which a confident mood prevails” (x). He then concludes his essay by demonstrating how Kafka’s dream of going to America ends with his writing the last pages of the novel, after which his mind sadly returns to Prague:

Kafka’s excursion to the New World has come to an end. The gloomy streets of Prague, the familiar background of his suffering, welcomes her prodigal son: Here you are—our son, our prisoner, our poet; this is Europe—your chain, your curse and your love. Here, you must continue your writing, your meditations and prayers; seeking and fearing God. Here you must bear the torments of your religious persecution mania, and must transform your constant agonies into the brittle beauty of your lucid prose. Bow your head! Recognize your fate! There is no escape. (x)

However, Kafka’sAmerika can also be seen as the gloomiest of Kafka’s works. While other works focus on the question of the law, Der Verschollene [“The Unheard Of,” or, “The Man who Disappeared”], later entitledAmerika , creates a fantasy by which the question of law is repressed. The subject’s amazement before the symbolic mandate that he cannot even begin to understand, that we find in The Castle or The Trial, is replaced here by an unquestioning submission to what is perceived as the

166 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 castrating power of America. While K. can ask himself the erotic “Che Vuoi?,” Karl Rossman’s relation to America seems to be devoid of any erotic questions. He does not ask himself why he is there because he thinks that he wants to be there. His desire has been disciplined by the master signifier that is America. While K.’s desire transforms itself into a query about the desire of the Other, Karl is taught what to desire. Kafka’s solitary heroes can still enjoy a certain kind of eroticism in their relation to the law despite their gloomy solitude and suffering: the masochistic enjoyment in playing the victim of the law. In fact, this eroticism may be one reason why Kafka’s readers enjoy his works so much. K.’s role is always to play a role for the big Other. The fact that he does not even know what role exactly he is supposed to play adds to the arbitrariness of the big Other’s mandate and its capricious demands. Yet, it must be made clear that K.’s being-for-the-Other can also be a form of being for himself. K. fits into the structure of hysterical neurosis in which the subject, according to Žižek, “is himself already symbolically identified with the gaze for which he is playing his role” (Žižek, Sublime 106). Karl, as a Kafkaesque hero, seems to be fundamentally different. In spite of all his hardships, America does not seem to be more eager to impose any specific role on him than to dumbfound him by its very heterogeneity. From all the choices it offers him, he is unable to choose anything. K. suffers under the ultimate dictatorship: a dictatorship of total authority that holds him absolutely still and uncomprehending as to what exactly is required of him. Karl, to his astonishment, suffers in what seems to be a total democracy. The concluding chapter, entitled by Max Brod as “Das Naturtheater von Okla- homa” [“The Nature Theater of Oklahoma”], arguably contains the lightest and most optimistic prose ever written by Kafka. The Theater in which Karl finds a new job and a new life stands for a promising America. In his essay “The States and the Statue: Kafka on America,” Jeremy Tambling discusses how Kafka’s Statue of Liberty is both a feminine figure of castration where “liberty and justice meet contradictorily in one goddesslike single figure who asserts the impossibility of both or of either,” and a sign pointing to the “interpretation of signs—which includes interpreting the Statue of Liberty—as European paranoia” (Tambling 187, 194). This double reading of the Statue of Liberty allows for two contradictory and irreconcilable points of view. However, looking at the issue from the point of view of “European paranoia” does not effectively cancel out reading America as a castrating power. Commenting on the last chapter, Tambling argues that “plural narratives and the two possible fates of Karl Rossman imply several Americas . . . that which, under the pressure to compete with Europe, has tried to play out a dream of everything being better and nothing impossible, while being at the same time subtly coercive” and “the America whose difference from Europe questions it with the possibility

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 167 of a minor literature” (197). It is the first America that concerns the present context. Of it, Tambling continues: “The first America creates a utopia that seems to promise reconciliation, yet always, in its bourgeois construction, it has exclusionary principles behind it, implied in the Statue of Liberty’s sword and glanced at in the implications behind Rossman’s irrevocable change of name to ‘Negro’” (197). So, America as utopia, in this particular reading, is still conditioned by a castrating law. I would argue though that even the America invented by Kafka still lives by principles of inclusion, however problematic they may be, rather than exclusionary ones. More precisely, it is not that Karl is excluded from what constitutes an “Ameri- can community,” but that the sense of solitude in a festive world is what defines everyone in that community. It seems, however, that Klaus Mann wrote his preface to Amerika with an uncompromising view that saw America’s historical welcoming of all European immigrants only in positive terms. So, Karl “arrives in New York, welcomed by ‘the free breezes’ of America and a Statue of Liberty furnished most surprisingly with an upraised sword” (viii). As if this “most surprising” image does not quite fit with what Mann interprets as Kafka’s most optimistic literary work. Quoting Kafka himself, Mann writes: “With an enigmatic smile he declared that his young hero, Karl Rossman, might well find again, ‘in this almost boundless theatre,’ his profession, his security and freedom, and perhaps even his homeland and parents—‘as by a celestial spell’” (ix). One could imagine Kafka with this “enigmatic smile” on his face and wonder what it really meant. Did it only mean that Kafka was optimistic about Karl’s future in America or was there something deeper than that behind his smile? Could Kafka’s smile also have signified Karl’s final resignation to the castrating power of America or a total identification with it? It is, indeed significant that Kafka -“de clared” that Karl might find profession, security, freedom, homeland, and parents, but not particularly love. It is curious that we also do not find a beautiful wife or a sexual partner among the good promises that await Karl in the future. Kafka’s words, backed by an “enigmatic smile,” promises Karl mainly economic stability, yet this seems to be conditioned by the cruelest of all deprivations: the economy of desire is to be sacrificed for the economic. Kafka’s enigmatic smile in such a view would not be one of simple optimism, and his look upon his hero would not be that of tenderness. It is true that he re- lieved Karl from his suffering, but only by pushing him over into an abyss where the erotic becomes a thing of the past. Karl’s whole experience in the Theater of Oklahoma seems to be written in order to be interpreted as a dream. At the end of chapter seven, he falls asleep in Brunelda’s house. At the beginning of chapter eight we see him in a different world where everything appears to be an hallucination. The most interesting moment in that dream is when the female appears. Fanny, an

168 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 old friend of Karl’s, stands on a high pedestal, dressed as an angel in a white robe with great wings on her shoulder. The pedestal and the ladder leading up to it are concealed by the long draperies of the robe she is wearing so that she appears to be unnaturally tall. In a potential representation of sexual intercourse, Kafka describes how Fanny “schlug die Tücher auseinander” (226) [“parted her draperies” (256)] for Karl to come up the ladder. After a brief chat, Karl climbs down the ladder and arranges the robe over the ladder again as it had been before. Fanny nods her thanks for his gesture. Even if the language, the gestures, and the movements all suggest sexual activity, the image of the female as a winged angel and a sublime being, whose lower part is depicted as an instrumental apparatus, creates a de- pressingly asexual atmosphere, removing any erotic potency from this supposedly sexual dream. According to Max Brod, “Ganz unerwarteterweise unterbrach Kafka plötzlich die Arbeit an dem Roman. Er blieb unvollendet” (260) [“Kafka broke off his work on this novel with unexpected suddenness. It remained unfinished” (277)]. If we read the last chapter as being written as a dream, we are not given the privilege to know how Karl felt after waking up. Would not what was experienced as a happy dream actually seem to be a nightmare when pondered in waking life? Concerning the chapter entitled “Das Naturtheater von Oklahoma,” Max Brod wrote that it was “ein Kapitel, dessen Einleitung Kafka besonders liebte und herzer- greifend schön vorlas” (260) [“[a chapter that] particularly delighted Kafka, so that he used to read it aloud with great effect” (277)]. Kafka and Karl obviously had the same dream. Yet, he “broke off his work on this novel with unexpected suddenness.” Why would Kafka break off his work suddenly and unexpectedly on a novel which made him “cheerful and confident” (Mann vii)? Why would he discontinue writing that particular chapter of which he was “especially fond”? Perhaps Kafka realized that as the dream progressed towards its end, the dreamer approached with acceler- ating speed an encounter with the real of his desire manifested in his dream before he wakes up—terrified. For the dream, to quote Lacan, is “essentially . . . an act of homage to the missed reality—the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening” (“Repetition 58). To rephrase Lacan, the dream is a compensation for that which cannot be articulated or symbolized in waking life thanks to the metonymic structure of desire. So, Kafka dreamt of going to America and, as Karl, he did go to his own version of it in his dream. Yet, at some point, his dream seems to have turned into a nightmare. What started with a powerful and playful image in “Der Heizer” [“The Stoker”] about the castrating power of America—the Statue of Liberty equipped with an upraised sword—ended with what could be felt or even experienced as real castration: total disappearance and loss of identity and cultural or even sexual death in “Das Natur- theater von Oklahoma.” Kafka stopped writing his “Amerikanischen Roman” (Brod 260), as he used to call his Der Verschollene. He “broke off his work on this novel

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 169 with unexpected suddenness” (Brod 277). Even though in his letter of November 11, 1912 Kafka wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer that Der Verschollene is a “Geschichte, die allerdings ins Endlose angelegt ist” (Briefe an Felice 86) [(letter written) “in such a manner that it will never be completed” (Letters 35)]. Max Brod’s line seems to suggest that the lack of closure was not intentional. It seems that Kafka could not go on dreaming. The image that he created finally got to him. On the chapter entitled “Ein Asyl” [“A Refuge”], where Karl suffers from his servitude and humiliation in Brunelda’s house, Mann writes:

The grand and appalling chapter, describing Karl’s humiliation as a servant of two ghastly crooks and their prodigious mistress, represents the burlesque and moving climax of the adventurous story. But as though the author found it intolerable to continue this macabre report, he suddenly breaks off his narrative, and when Karl re-appears—months, perhaps years later—he is looking for a new job, and finds one inThe Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. (ix)

But macabre tales are not exactly alien to Kafka. The Kafka of “Ein Asyl” is the writer as he is widely known and read. It is the Kafka of “Das Naturtheater von Oklahoma” who does not seem to be himself. If Der Verschollene is a dream of going to America, “Das Naturtheater von Oklahoma” is a dream within a dream. It sounds particularly uncharacteristic of Kafka to break off his narrative in Bru- nelda’s house because he “found it intolerable.” It is, in fact, the seemingly democratic and festive world of the Theater of Oklahoma, built at the expense of total castration, that even Kafka found intolerable. He was completely destabilized by the America he invented without ever leaving Prague. “Mein Roman geht ja wenn auch langsam vorwärts,” wrote Kafka once to Felice about Der Verschollene, “nur ist sein Gesicht dem meinen schrecklich gleich” (emphasis mine, Briefe an Felice 179) [“My novel is progressing, though slowly . . . the only thing is that it looks terrifyingly like me” (emphasis mine, Complete Novels 464)]. Out of Kafka’s works, it isAmerika , the one text written about a place which he never really experienced, that looked like him—terrifyingly. It is as if in his other works, Kafka was writing texts from which he could more or less detach himself as a creative writer exercising full mastery over his narratives. In the case of Amerika, however, the text he invented seemed to look back at him with the terrifying threat of fulfilling the real of his desire. Perhaps, some readers will conclude that America has nothing to do with the subject of this essay. I can neither totally agree nor disagree with such an assessment. Yes, America has nothing to do with the focus of this study. However, saying that America has everything to do with the focus of this study is equally true. In fact, this double optic is precisely why there is a corpus of literature about America in which the distinctions between America, textual America, symbolic America, cinematic America, etc., cannot be clearly defined. Making these apparently pain-

170 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 less distinctions do not seem to me to be effortless or trouble-free. Perhaps other readers will say: “America is only a signifier for Kafka” or that “Kafka’s problems remain his and, if they speak to us, as they do, there are valid reasons for that.” I am in complete agreement with these statements. However, I think that to say with absolute assurance that America as a master signifier holds no power over Brooks, Shambaugh, Tambling, Beauvoir, Baudrillard, and the writer or the readers of the present work simply cannot be true. It is not only that the castrating power of America is fictitious; it is also that writers on America somehow do not seem to be able to escape its fictitious power. Is America’s power thus only for show? Such a notion would be as erroneous as stating that America “is actually a castrating power.” Perceptions of America may differ, yet there remains a discourse of irresolution on how America is to be perceived. America is beautiful, but also imperialistic. America is a source of hope, but also one of fear. America is an attraction, but also a danger. On the surface, it is not difficult to see how this doubled nature nicely fits in the structure of the castrating figure in psychoanalysis. The figure of castration is a model to be admired and at the same time an adversary. The father is “the castrating father, on the one hand, and the father as origin of the superego, on the other” (Lacan, “Moral Goals” 307). On castration as such, Lacan says that it “conditions the narcissistic fear. To accept castration the subject must pay as elevated a price as this reworking of the whole of reality” (“Phallus” 312). Does not going to America also require a reworking of the whole of reality? The law of castration in this sense is that it conditions access to a certain symbolic world where the immigrant never attains the status of being consistent with his own place in it. But America, as previously elaborated, seems to be even more complicated than that. If there is anything we can conclude from the texts written on America, including the present text, it is that America belongs more to the imagination than to reality. A confession by the French-American writer Jean-Philippe Mathy indicates that the “rhetoric of America” is something that survives even beyond the experience of the country itself. In his essay “The Rhetoric of ‘America,’” Mathy writes:

As a French man living in the United States, I could not deny that my study reflects a personal experience of uprooting and acculturation. Still, the question of the specificity, of the “exceptionalism” of American society and culture started to puzzle and interest me long before I decided to live in this country. Once I did emigrate, however, I experienced what many travelers, immigrants, and exiles have gone through. (14)

One might expect that what follows will refer to how the writer had preconceived ideas about America that changed after living there for a long time. One might expect that the “uprooting and acculturation” eventually resulted in assimilation. Yet,

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 171 Mathy continues: “As I was revising the long held views and familiar clichés I had inherited from my French upbringing, American culture, paradoxically, became more foreign to me, although I was growing accustomed to it and was even getting better at living in the midst of it” (14). Is there a stronger testimony than this one that the whole world, including America itself, imagines America all the time? What is perceived as the castrating power of America does not belong to it as a country or even as a political and economic superpower. It has nothing to do with what is commonly referred to as America’s ahistoricism or even with what Baudrillard calls its “power of unculture” (78). The fiction of America’s castrating power seems to be generated and sustained by its multifarious symbolic images that are invented and reinvented in innumerable imaginations, including the imagination of its founding fathers themselves, who were occupied by the idea of a country more than the country itself as a reality. As Peter Conrad puts it, “they saw the new kind of state they were creating not as a fact but as a formula, not a natural growth of history but the actualization of an idea” (3). The fact that this idea belongs to language, and, in America’s case, is perceived as a particularly ideological, pragmatic, and chillingly rational language, gives the sense of a melancholic castrating mandate that conditions inscription into America’s registers. Yet, in spite of the powerful fiction of America’s castrating power, symbolic America remains a certain problem, a certain unrealized being, or a certain forbidden knowledge. It persists. It remains even for the totally American (immigrant). Once it occupies the mind, which is something that does not even require going to America at all, the mind never really regains its freedom, even after becoming totally “American.”

u The University of Hong Kong

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988. Brod, Max. “Nachwort zur ersten Ausgabe.” Amerika: Roman Herausgegeben von Max Brod. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979. 260–62. ———. “Afterword.” AmerikaIn , by Franz Kafka. Trans. Edwin Muir. New York: New Directions Books, 1946. 276–77. Brooks, Charles W. America in France’s Hopes and Fears, 1890–1920. 2 vols. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary. Ed. Robert Hampson. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Conrad, Peter. Imagining America. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1980. De Beauvoir, Simone. America Day by Day. Trans. Carol Cosman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. De Man, Paul. “Dialogue and Dialogism.” Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges.

172 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Eds. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989. 105–14. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno.Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Jefferson, Thomas. “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.” In The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. 23–104. Kafka, Franz.Amerika: Roman Herausgegeben von Max Brod. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979. ———.Amerika . [Published as Franz Kafka’s Amerika.] Trans. Edwin Muir. Preface by Klaus Mann. Afterword by Max Brod. New York: New Directions Books, 1946. ———.Briefe an Felice, und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit. Germany: S. Fischer Verlag, 1967. ———.Letters to Felice. Eds. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born. Trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. London: Secker & Warburg, 1974. ———.The Complete Novels: The Trial, America, The Castle. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. London: Vintage, 1999. Lacan, Jacques. “The Death Drive.”The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques- Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 205–17. ———. “Introduction to the Question of the Psychoses.”The Psychoses 1955–1956. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 3–15. ———. “Marginal Comments.”The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques- Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 128–38. ———. “The Moral Goals of Psychoanalysis.”The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 302–10. ———. “On the Moral Law.”The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 71–84. ———. “On the Rejection of a Primordial Signifier.”The Psychoses 1955–1956. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 143–57. ———. “The Phallus and the Meteor.”The Psychoses 1955–1956. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 310–23. ———. “The Splendor of Antigone.”The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques- Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 243–56. ———. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1989. 323–60. ———. “The Unconscious and Repetition.”The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998. 17–64.

The Fiction of the Castrating Power of America 173 Mann, Klaus. “Preface.” In Amerika, by Franz Kafka. Trans. Edwin Muir. New York: New Directions Books, 1946. iii–x. Mathy, Jean-Philippe. “The Rhetoric of ‘America.’”Extrême Occident: French Intellectuals and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 1–17. Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad. “Our Universal Civilization.” City Journal 1.4 (Summer 1991). Accessed 21 Mar. 2007 from www.city-journal.org/article02.php?aid=1597. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Shambaugh, David L. Beautiful Imperialist: China Perceives America, 1972–1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Tambling, Jeremy. “The States and the Statue: Kafka on America.”Lost in the American City: Dickens, James, and Kafka. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 181–98. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. ———.The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

174 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Irina Anisimova Masks of Authenticity Failed Quests for the People in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and The Silver Dove by Andrei Belyi

Quicksand (1927) by Nella Larsen and The Silver Dove (1910) by Andrei Belyi focus on the failures of Helga Crane and Petr Dar’ial’skii, members respectively of Afri- can American and Russian elites, to make contact with the common people. As both of these intellectuals immerse themselves in the lower classes, they make a deliberate effort to refashion their identities in accordance with their notions of folk authenticity. After an initial period of self-delusion, however, their desire to join the people results in bitter disappointment. They try to escape their new, “authentic” lifestyles, but their failure to return to their original social milieu leads to feelings of entrapment and, ultimately, to their moral and physical destruction. In the end, the protagonists’ failed quests serve to reveal the constructedness of racial and national identities and to challenge the associated discourses of racial and national authenticity. By the beginning of the twentieth century, African American and Russian intellectuals had developed discourses of ethnic authenticity that relied on romantic notions of the rural folk. However, these discourses were challenged by social change, the relocation of rural populations, and the increased visibility of the changing folk culture. Both the migration of the rural Southern blacks after World War I to the Northern urban centers and the labor migration of Russian peasants to the industrializing cities during the last decades of the nineteenth century influenced the intelligentsia’s perception of the lower classes. In Russia as well as in the U.S., the intellectuals’ reaction to the new visibility of the poor can be characterized as a “moral panic,” defined by Stanley Cohen as an episode in which part of the population responds briefly, suddenly, and intensely to some new feature of lower- class behavior (9). New forms of the popular culture and non-conformity of the lower classes undermined traditional notions of authenticity and ethnic identity. Written at the beginning of the twentieth century, these novels can both be situated in this context. In Quicksand and The Silver Dove, authenticity turns into a form of self-delusion or masquerade, while the lower-class body is represented through the imagery of minstrels or of an inscrutable mask.1

175 Larsen

The Rural Folk as the Primitive Quicksand focuses on the instability of racial identity and presents the tension between racial essentialism and the conception of race as a social construction. Quicksand dramatizes an unresolved tension between the seductions of consumerism, associated with whiteness, and the attraction of racial authenticity, represented by the black folk. Although Helga never passes for white, her geographic and social wandering is informed by the desire for material comfort and personal acceptance. Helga’s desire for “authentic” racial identity at the end of the novel presents race as “the irresistible tie” (92) that ends her search for identity and results in her eventual death. In Quicksand, folk authenticity becomes related to essentialism, and even to primitivism. Paradoxically, Larsen both exposes the work of primitivism, especially in the Denmark section of the novel and, at the same time, subscribes to certain primitivist presentations of the folk. Chip Rhodes claims that primitivism can be seen as “the purest expression” of “ideological tension between performativity and essentialism” (17). This tension is vividly illustrated by discrepancies between the protagonist’s performances in the Danish upper-class circles and the narrator’s presentation of Helga’s life among rural Alabama folk. The text ofQuicksand creates an uncanny connection between folk identity and forms of sexual expression that are often degraded. Deborah McDowell writes that Larsen’s treatment of sexuality is linked to an imagery of descent and animalism, suggesting “inner degradation” (xxii). However, the same images that, according to McDowell, are connected to sexuality—the Harlem cabaret, the storefront church, and the deep South—are also associated with the black folk.2 In addition, there are parallels between Helga’s primitivist image, constructed by her white relatives and the famous Danish painter Olsen, and Larsen’s presentation of the rural women. For example, the description of Clementine Richards as “a strapping black beauty of magnificent Amazon proportions and bold shining eyes of jet-like hardness” (119) is a lower-class version of Helga’s primitivist image in Denmark. Whereas Helga wears “dresses of velvet and chiffon in screaming colors,” “a leopard-skin coat,” and “turban-like hats of metallic silks” (74), Clementine is “all chains, strings of beads, jingling bracelets, flying ribbons, feathery neckpieces, and flowery hats” (119). Unlike Helga’s self-presentation in Denmark, this image is not influenced by a European artist, but corresponds to Clementine’s personal taste, which is highly ironic. Furthermore, the Southern woman is alternately described as “the grotesque ebony figure” (112), and “little bronze figure” (125). By connecting the woman’s color to materials used in the production of artifacts, the narrator associates them with the objects of art. “Ebony figure” can especially be seen as a reference to African sculptures. Here Larsen’s presentation approximates that of European modernists

176 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 who expressed their fascination with the famous African-American performer Josephine Baker by comparing her to African sculptures.3 Whereas Europeans believed that they could find their id in African art and Baker’s dance, Larsen seems to imply that African-American intellectuals can realize their repressed sexuality among the folk. When Helga’s sexual desire cannot be realized among the Harlem bourgeoisie, she turns to a more “authentic” outlet for her emotions.4 Ironically, it is possible to establish parallels between European associations of sexuality with the black body that Larsen depicts through Helga’s life in Denmark and Larsen’s own association of sexuality with Southern black folk.

Critique of the Authentic South Helga’s initial encounter with the Southern traditions occurs in a storefront church. Although the meeting takes place in New York, it is representative of Southern folk traditions. Helga’s experience in the church becomes for her a life-changing event. Rejected by Dr. Anderson, a member of the upper-class Harlem circle, she rushes out of her hotel room and is forced by a storm to take shelter in an improvised church meeting. At first, she watches the service from a certain distance, as if it were a theater performance. Ironically, the description of the church revival parallels the description to the black vaudeville performance witnessed by Helga in Denmark: “Men and women were swaying and clapping their hands, shouting and stamping their feet to the frankly irreverent melody of the song” (112). Helga initially regards the service as a show, and thus, listening to the preacher praying for her soul, Helga Crane is “amused, angry,” and “disdainful.” In spite of her disdain, she feels “too well entertained to leave” (113). However, in marked difference to the vaudeville show, Helga is eventually transformed from a spectator to a participant. The action fas- cinates her. She finds herself gradually drawn into participating. Helga’s initially passive role turns into imitation or mimetic spectatorship. In fact, she becomes an integral part of the service. Because of her red dress, hastily chosen before leaving the hotel, and her unconventional behavior upon entering the church, the congregation reads her as a “scarlet ’oman” and “los’ Jezebel” (112). Therefore, her presence gives the service the higher purpose of converting a sinner. Larsen emphasizes the Dionysian aspects of the service: “Little by little the performance took on an almost Bacchic vehemence. Behind her, before her, beside her, frenzied women gesticulated, screamed, wept, and tottered to the praying of the preacher, which had gradually become a cadenced chant” (113). Although the narrator emphasizes the corporeal aspect of the service, it increasingly affects the protagonist’s psyche. As if in a dream, Helga cannot act according to her will. Although she wants to leave, she cannot move and is restrained by the spectacle: “gradually a curious influence penetrated her; she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in her own heart; she felt

Masks of Authenticity 177 herself possessed by the same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to shout and to sling herself about” (113). This Dionysian orgy with its sexual overtones erases Helga’s separation from the folk and changes her role from that of a spectator to a participant:

And in that moment she was lost—or saved. The yelling figures about her pressed forward, closing her in on all sides. Maddened, she grasped at the railing, and with no previous intention began to yell like one insane, drowning every other clamor, while torrents of tears streamed down her face. She was unconscious of the words she uttered, or their meaning: “Oh, God, mercy, mercy. Have mercy on me!” (113–14)

The protagonist’s behavior is described as a capitulation of her will to unconscious desires. Thus, Helga’s unity with the people is possible only at the price of a temporary lapse in sanity and a loss of the self. Significantly, the parishioners see Helga in a completely new light: due to her self-negation and her acceptance of their God, she becomes their “unfortunate sister” (114). The change in Helga’s perspective is emphasized by the growing distance between her reactions and the increasing irony of the narrator. Although the narrator still stresses the inhuman and even animalistic aspects of the service—arms are “stretched toward her with savage frenzy” and the women crawl “over the floor like reptiles, sobbing and pulling their hair and tearing off their clothing” (114)—the protagonist is no longer repulsed by the people and the proximity of their bodies. On the contrary, her aversion turns into a feeling of contentment and she becomes happy and serene as she feels a sense of belonging to this community: “A miraculous calm came upon her. Life seemed to expand, and to become very easy” (114). The desire for simple happiness, “a happiness unburdened by the complexities of the lives she had known” (114), drives her into the arms of the rural preacher, symbolically named Pleasant Green. Claudia Tate suggests that Pleasant Green becomes a displacement for “Helga’s sexual, paternal, and racial longings” (138). Equally important are Green’s humble background and closeness to the people, which lend him an air of authenticity. At the same time, however, her seduction of Green is presented as a descent and an act of abandon. Recognizing his reaction to their physical contact, she thinks: “No. She couldn’t. It would be too awful. Just the same, what or who was there to hold her back? Nothing. Simply nothing” (115). Ironically, Helga’s attempt at assuming a folk identity is based on deception and performance. Contemplating her desire to marry Green and the possibility of rejection, she thinks: “How could he, a naive creature like that, hold out against her? If she pretended to distress? To fear? To remorse? He couldn’t. It would be useless for him even to try. She screwed up her face into a little grin, remembering that even if protestations were to fail there were other ways” (117). However, her performance

178 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 quickly turns into self-delusion, facilitated by her awakened sexuality. In a highly ironic presentation of Helga’s conversion, Larsen suggests that Helga mistakes her sexuality for religious feelings: “And she had her religion, which in her new status as a preacher’s wife had of necessity become real to her. She believed in it. Be- cause in its coming it had brought this other thing, this anæsthetic satisfaction for her senses” (118). Helga’s sexuality facilitates her self-delusion and overpowers her taste for comfort: “And night came at the end of every day. Emotional, palpitating, amorous, all that was living in her sprang like rank weeds at the tingling thought of night, with a vitality so strong that it devoured all shoots of reason” (122). Tellingly, the narrator equates sexuality with uncultivated vegetation—weeds—and draws a distinction between passion and reason. Helga’s awakened sexual desire allows her to disregard the poverty, the bad manners of her husband, and “the atmosphere of self-satisfaction which poured from him like gas from a leaking pipe” (122). Part of Larsen’s critique of the black intellectuals is that their romantic presentation of the folk was hypocritical and was not grounded in reality. However, Helga’s life among the Southern black folk can equally be interpreted as a satire of romanticized presentations of the people. For example, Mr. Pleasant Green expounds with verbal extravagance “the gospel of blood and love, hell and heaven, [and] fire and gold streets, [while] pounding with clenched fists the frail table before him” (122). He shakes his fists “in the faces of the congregation like direct personal threats, . . . pac- ing wildly back and forth and even sometimes shedding great tears as he besought them to repent” (122). In this pose, he can be compared to James Weldon Johnson’s traditional preacher in God’s Trombones who preached “a personal and anthropo- morphic God, a sure-enough heaven and a red-hot hell” and whose “imagination was bold and unfettered” (5). Unlike Johnson, however, Larsen sees very little value in folk religion or the traditional preacher, so that Mr. Green, in fact, can be seen as an ironic rewriting of Johnson’s romantic presentation. Upon arriving in rural Alabama, Helga romanticizes the folk, idealizes traditional religion, and subscribes to the ideology of Racial Uplift that she had so vehemently opposed earlier. Her paternalistic attitude puts her in disfavor with local women, who think of her as “dat uppity, meddlin’ No’the’nah” (119). The disconnect between reality and Helga’s perceptions underscoring her initial romantic view of the folk, is emphasized with increasing irony by the narrator.

Authentic Embodiment In Quicksand, folk identity is associated with spirituality, yet, on closer inspection, this spirituality is inseparable from sexual gratification. For Helga, this gratification of sexual desire leads to the loss of control over her body. Sexual fulfilment results in a descent into poverty and a departure from urban sophistication. The South where Helga’s sexual desire is fully realized turns into a trap out of which the

Masks of Authenticity 179 heroine cannot escape—the metaphoric quicksand of the title. Helga’s conversion and subsequent marriage to a Southern preacher is a departure from urban consumerism, which until then had been an important part of her life. Following her conversion, she thinks, “all I’ve ever had in life has been things—except just this one time. . . . Things, she realized, hadn’t been, weren’t, enough for her. She’d have to have something else besides” (116). Yet, this rejection of consumerism quickly turns into an increased recognition of the materiality of the body. Like the lives of other rural Southern women, Helga’s existence becomes determined by the body. Gold- smith suggests that in the final section of the novel Larsen emphasizes the contrast between the material self-fashioning of the black urban female body, represented by Helga’s previous lifestyle, and the bodily realities of black rural women (107). As a result of her multiple pregnancies, Helga regards her body in a completely different manner: “For she, who had never thought of her body save as something on which to hang lovely fabrics, had now constantly to think of it. It had persis- tently to be pampered to secure from it even a little service” (123). The folk identity becomes associated with the materiality of the body. Moreover, Helga’s life among rural folk is predicated on particular gender performances, which are markedly different from those of the black bourgeoisie.5 Many critics claim that in depicting the dire consequences of Helga’s life in the South with Mr. Pleasant Green, Larsen criticizes the destructive effects of the institution of marriage on women’s lives. It is also important to point out that other marriages in the novel are not presented in a similar manner. Bourgeois marriages seem childless and sexless. For example, Anne Gray, Helga’s friend and a member of the Harlem Elite to which Helga previously belonged, thinks about her recent marriage to Dr. Anderson as an arrange- ment that would rule out any expression of irrational passions. Anne’s belief that “in a large measure it was the voice of Robert Anderson’s inexorable conscience that had been the chief factor in bringing about her second marriage—his ascetic protest against the sensuous, the physical” (94) is not self-deception, but rather is endorsed by the logic of the novel. Only Helga’s marriage results in the nightmare of childbearing. At the end of the novel, Helga dreams of returning to the pleasures of consumerism: “It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities, about clothes and books, about the sweet mingled smell of Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless music. It was so hard to think out a feasible way of retrieving all these agreeable, desired things” (135). An identity based on self-fashioning through modern consumerism proves more desirable than an “authentic” folk identity. In spite of the realization of her mistake and her apparent desire to escape, any such change proves impossible. Ironically, Helga’s self-inscription into folk identity destroys the possibility of any subsequent performances. She becomes trapped in the

180 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 quicksand of authenticity, reinforced by the biological functions of the body. Quick- sand illustrates the danger of acquiring the essentialized identity that, for Larsen, is symbolized by Southern rural black folk. In her biography of Nella Larsen, Thadi- ous Davis explains that Larsen distinguished herself from the masses of African- Americans and tried to distance herself from them. She suggests that “in part, her attitude stemmed from a fear of being absorbed into the masses, which she viewed as having the potential to extinguish a concrete, autonomous, and productive self” (247). Helga’s fate among the Southern black folk can be interpreted as an expression of Larsen’s anxiety. The ironic distance of the narrator at the end of the novel is an attempt to dissociate both the narrator and the author from the protagonist’s personal choices.

Belyi

Performing Peasant Identity In Quicksand and The Silver Dove, the intellectuals’ unity with the folk results in a symbolic physicality or a victory of matter over mind and spirit. In both novels, the immersion into a low-class milieu is associated with unrestrained sexuality as well as the loss of control over one’s own life and body. The heroine of Quicksand is subjected to multiple childbirths that lead to her metaphorical death as an autonomous individual. In The Silver Dove, the protagonist loses his will by becoming subservient to the rural sect of the Doves and experiences a violent death. In both Quicksand and The Silver Dove, folk identities are expressed through the metaphors of entrapment and asphyxiation, as conveyed in the title of Larsen’s novel and in the repetition of the imagery of suffocation in The Silver Dove. Like Helga Crane, the protagonist of The Silver Dove, Petr Dar’ial’skii, attempts to take on the folk lifestyle and is eventually killed by the members of the sect that he wanted to join. Helga Crane’s understanding of authentic blackness is largely based on her role as a spectator whose interpretation of racial authenticity is founded on preconceived notions and cultural stereotypes. Similarly, Dar’ial’skii’s self-fashioned peasant identity is based on his construction of the life and culture. Both protagonists’ immersion in folk communities is described as a delusion or a masquerade. In spite of these similarities, it is important to note the differences in the presentation of the masses in The Silver Dove and Quicksand. The novels have different gender dynamics: whereas in Quicksand the folk identity becomes associated with the loss of control over the heroine’s body, in The Silver Dove it is associated with the protagonist’s symbolic feminization. Another important difference can be explained by the unique discourse regarding the people developed by Russian and African-American intellectuals. Relying on the history of Russian Populism, Belyi draws attention to the constructed or even mythical understanding of folk authen-

Masks of Authenticity 181 ticity. Thus Dar’ial’skii creates a parallel between Russian folk life and pastoral ancient Greece. This myth of the people can be explained by the protagonist’s distance from the peasant masses, which he tries to overcome. In an attempt to change his social status, Dar’ial’skii wears peasant clothes and uses lower-class dialect. He even joins the folk sect of the Doves and becomes an assistant to the sect’s leader, the carpenter Kudeiarov. The failure of Dar’ial’skii’s social masquerade reveals Belyi’s uncertainty concerning the role of the Russian intellectual, his disappointment with Populist ideology, and his ambivalence towards the masses. Like Larsen, Belyi seems to distrust the discourse of ethnic authenticity that relies on the peasant or the common people as its foundation. Populism, a social and philosophical movement dating back to the 1870s, was most influential in creating the Russian intelligentsia’s idealization of the peasant. In The Silver Dove, Belyi criticizes a version of the Populist ideology current in the 1900s, known as Mys- tical Populism. The Silver Dove expresses Belyi’s sense of disappointment with the Populist ideals that followed the 1905 revolution. According to Maria Carlson, “The idealized and romanticized Populist stereotypes projected on the peasantry before 1905 did not coincide with the reality of peasant disturbances, violence, burning, and looting” (91). Through Dar’ial’skii’s experience, Belyi shows that going to the people, the central premise of Populism, is a difficult and sometimes even deadly endeavor. In spite of the self-conscious changes in his clothes, manners, and lifestyle, Dar’ial’skii is unable to become a part of the folk. On the contrary, his Populist persona appears to onlookers as a combination of incongruous elements: “from the creak of his blacked peasant boots and the strong peasant words that peppered his speech to his sudden demonstration of knowledge and his evident leaning for earnest and abstruse discussion—everything about Daryalsky grated on people, just as everything around him grated on him, repelled him” (118). People around Dar’ial’skii see his peasant persona as a performance; they perceive his speech as “a totally needless play-acting,” (lomanie) and “a pantomime” (risovka) (118). Although unlike the English translation, the original does not convey the notion of theatrical performance, it indicates that Dar’ial’skii’s behavior is perceived as unnatural and as contradictory to his social status. Through his performance, the protagonist manages to alienate himself from other members of the elite, but cannot become a part of the folk community. In spite of all his attempts to be closer to peasants, they feel no affinity with him. When Dar’ial’skii makes his final Populist move and leaves his aristocratic fiancée, Katia, he encounters a group of peasants, who see in him nothing but a parasite (143). In spite of the protagonist’s desire to belong to the “people,” they see him not only as an oddity, but even as a disruption of the established way of life. The peasants believe that his presence

182 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 brings bad luck and portends misfortune: “neighbour once again set fire to neighbour; the red cockerel was at large in the district; and it was expected any day in our village too. ‘This is the red squire’s doing!’ decent people frowned; it wasn’t for nothing that the red squire had taken to prowling round the village like a wolf” (166). Reflecting the history of Populism, peasants perceive Dar’ial’skii as an alien outsider, who threatens the stability of their community. The peasants call him the “red squire,” referring to his red peasant shirt. Like Helga’s clothes, Dar’ial’skii’s clothes acquire an iconic quality. His red peasant shirt is quite remarkable: it is a peasant shirt, which is nevertheless made of silk. While this type of shirt shows the protagonist’s desire to belong to the peasantry, the material of the shirt clearly sets him apart as a wealthier individual with some aesthetic refinement and artistic preoccupations. Significantly, when Dar’ial’skii decides to return to the city life of an intellectual he changes his clothes. His new appearance immediately arouses respect in the lower-class sectarians, who until then did not give him any notice. For example, the Tinsmith, Sukhorukov, feels extraordinary agitation because he does not recognize in Petr “the ragamuffin of yesterday,” since he is wearing a somewhat crumpled, but still well-fitting jacket, a starched collar, a grey-colored overcoat, and a wide-brimmed hat, and clutches a stick with an ivory knob in his gloved hand (285).6 The effect produced by the change of Dar’ial’skii’s clothes underscores a theatrical element in his immersion among the folk. At the same time, his life with the Doves is presented as a delusion and a loss of the self. As in Quicksand, the people in The Silver Dove are associated with the degraded sexuality that the author associates with the feminine. Dar’ial’skii’s change of the social status leads to his feminization: he loses control over his life and becomes a pawn in the hands of strangers and outside forces. Traditionally, the peasants were seen as being close to nature. Through the analogy between nature and woman, certain feminine characteristics such as irrationality and passivity were ascribed to the peasants. The association between the “people” and femininity was apparently a recognizable trope readily accepted by contemporary criticism. For example, in his analysis of The Silver Dove, Nikolai Berdyaev praises Belyi’s true presentation of “the spell of the feminine popular element” (187). Berdyaev claims that Dar’ial’skii fails because of his lack of manliness and inability to master the feminine elements (187). When Dar’ial’skii leaves Gugolevo and Katia, he hears a song that tells of a bride who is forced to marry to an “unsavoury groom.” Through this allusion, Dar’ial’skii is compared to a girl, whose life “has been ruined for nothing” (144).7 Comparing Dar’ial’skii’s love for Katia with his love for Matrena, a peasant woman and a member of the “Dove” sect, the narrator states that, with the latter, the protagonist becomes both like a woman and a child:

Masks of Authenticity 183 With the first love you are a gentle, though masterful man; but with the second? Nothing of the sort, you’re not a man at all, but a child: a capricious child, all your life you will follow in the wake of this second love, and no one will ever understand you, indeed you too will never understand that what you have between you is not love, but the undeciphered immensity of a mystery that crushes you. (169)

Matrena symbolizes Dar’ial’skii’s moral disintegration: “a day, a glance, a moment of the pockmarked peasant woman—and his light, his way, his soul’s nobility, had turned to forest, night, to marsh and putrid swamp” (96). In its fascination with moral descent, The Silver Dove resembles a gothic novel. This resemblance is reinforced by the abundance of gothic imagery.8 Dar’ial’skii’s love for Matrena is connected to a victory of the “secret enemy” invoked by Schmidt, the protagonist’s intellectual friend: “An unaccountable premonition told him that if he came to love a peasant woman—he was done for; then the secret enemy would overcome him” (119). Dar’ial’skii has to choose between the world of the intelligentsia and the world of the “people.” Matrena and Katia represent these polar opposites. Matrena’s open sexuality is contrasted to the child-like innocence of Katia. Thus, the text creates a dichotomy between the idealized women of the upper classes and over-sexualized peasant women. Like Larsen, Belyi seems to suggest that the protagonist possesses a certain quality that attracts her/him to the Dionysian passions of the folk. Matrena serves as a medium for Kudeiarov, who exploits her erotic appeal. She is able to attract Dar’ial’skii, as John Elsworth suggests, he has within him some quality that predis- poses him to succumb to temptation of the Doves (Andrey 76). Matrena’s image is connected to the protagonist’s repressed past. From his student years, Dar’ial’skii recalls that his nervous breakdown was preceded by a disturbing vision of a “shameless woman,” that he remembers as identical to Matrena: “He remembered that after the swoon it had seemed to him that there, outside the window, some woman was standing: . . . but that pock-marked face was twisted in such a horrid smile, and such vileness distorted that face, which gazed at him without a trace of shame, and hauntingly invited him to wantonness” (98). Belyi traces Dar’ial’skii’s suppressed feelings to his childhood. After his first encounter with Matrena, during his symbolic meandering in the forest, Dar’ial’skii thinks that from his “earliest childhood days” his “gaze was fixed on the darkness” (95). The memory of a woman identical to Matrena comes from the unconscious. It is uncanny to the protagonist’s conscious mind.9 Matrena’s sexuality, then, can be interpreted as a repression of Dar’ial’skii’s unconscious desires of a return to a primitive state of being. Yet, in addition to associations with Dar’ial’skii’s childhood recollections, the image of Matrena is connected to a more remote past. Just before his vision of a woman

184 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 identical to Matrena, the protagonist is apparently reading a textbook on old Sla- vonic. He “remembered raising his head from his book and memorizing the phrase: ‘Wolf in Slavonic is v”lk’” (97).This Slavonic allusion connects the Russian past, to the Populists’ fascination with the Russian history before the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great and their view of the peasant as representative of that “authenti- cally Russian” past. Dar’ial’skii’s attraction to Matrena is presented as the mysterious longing of his soul. Contemplating the effect that both Matrena and the unknown woman produce on his psyche, Dar’ial’skii wonders: “But why did that face contain his secret? Could it be that his soul’s secret held a foul and unchaste meaning, when his soul smiled at the bright rays of the dawn? Yes, the dawn had both lit and sullied the face he had thought he’d seen outside the window” (98). Dawn (zaria) denotes the red coloration of the skyline at either dusk or dawn. The red color can signify either hope and new beginnings, or impending danger and gloom. This association between dawn and Matrena further reflects Dar’ial’skii’s ambivalence towards her as well as Belyi’s ambivalence towards the masses.

Grotesque Bodies Larsen’s presentation of the lower-class body as less attractive and mask-like corresponds to a similar representation in The Silver Dove. Not only Dar’ial’skii’s attempt to acquire folk identity can be seen as a masquerade, but the folk identity itself also appears as a mystery and an undecipherable mask. The sect of the Doves and minor peasant disturbances are associated with the chaotic East; their bodies become a part of this disorder. For example, the color red, associated in the novel with revolutionary unrest and Dionysian imagery, is a prevalent color in the descriptions of the members of the Dove sect. Matrena has red hair, red blemishes and “crimson lips.” Other members of the sect, Annushka and Ivan the Fire, minor characters of the novel, are also marked out with the color red. Annushka has red braids; and what is most unpleasant about the face of Ivan the Fire is “not the fact that it was lupine,” but that, “this face ended with a tuft of horrifying red hair below and a shock of horrifying red hair above” (87). Like Dar’ial’skii’s red peasant shirt these red marks symbolize chaos, but unlike the shirt these signs are permanent and cannot be removed at will. Similarly, minor peasant disturbances symbolize chaos and become associated with grotesque and unruly crowds. Describing the modernists’ reactions and interpretations of the crowd phenomena, Robert Nye claims that by the 1890s the crowds became “dramatic representations of powerful social and cultural forces in the modern nation-state” (46). A minor disturbance on the estate of Baroness Todrabe-Graaben, Katia’s grandmother, acquires just such a symbolic significance. The text emphasizes generational differences among the peasants. While the older

Masks of Authenticity 185 peasants are traditional in their attitudes, treating the Baroness as their powerful benefactor, younger peasants are disrespectful of the prevalent social rules and thus present a threat of future revolution. While the cause of the disturbance (the peasants are oppressed by the villainous manager of the estate) is somewhat sympathetically described by the author, its political or humanitarian considerations are submerged by the symbolism of chaos and misrule. Disorder is expressed in the fragmentation of peasants’ bodies: “Noses were pointed upwards, unkempt beards were fingered, colossal fists gesticulated in the air, throats were cleared, noses blown; suddenly a heavy, acrid smell wafted over from the peasants” (122). The smell rising from the crowd alludes to unsanitary conditions among peasants, and reflects a prevalent attitude toward the countryside. Stephen Frank writes that in fin-de-siècle Russia the peasantry came to be gradually associated with degeneracy. The situation was exacerbated after the revolution of 1905, when, according to Frank, a theoretical discourse of degeneration, similar to the critique of the lower classes in Europe, had developed. The press propagated this impression by publishing regular columns on the darker aspects of the Rus- sian countryside, and the imminent threat of peasant degeneration (75–90). Belyi’s description of the members of the “Dove” sect was apparently influenced by this discourse. In the notes to The Silver Dove, Elsworth suggests that Kudeiarov’s possession of supernumerary fingers and the unequal development of the two halves of his face are stigmatas betraying degeneration (308). The same interpretation can be applied to Matrena’s blemishes and crossed eyes. The faces of the members of the Dove sect are marked by their difference from the norm and are aesthetically displeasing. They are differentiated, by blemishes, distortions or paleness, and stand in sharp contrast to Dar’ial’skii’s with “the velvet sheen of his dark eyes” and “his shock of wavy, ash-blond curls” (44), or the idealized face of his fiancée, Katia. The bodies of the members of the “Dove” sect are close to the gothic or what Low calls the “colonial uncanny,” “that which reflects back to the colonial identity another image of itself based on the inversion of its normal structure: a home that turns out not to be a home and a self that turns out to be some other being” (114). In the world of The Silver Dove, a familiar pastoral paradise turns into an uncanny and precarious reality that threatens the stability of the protagonist’s self. According to Freud, heimlich denotes ambivalence and can coincide with its opposite, unheimlich. “Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich” (226). Reflecting this ambivalence, most members of the Dove sect have distorted and mutating faces that are perceived as both familiar and uncanny, heimlich and unheimlich. Matrena’s face transforms from repulsive to attractive and vice versa: “The objects in the room, every one, stared silently at Pyotr at that moment; in

186 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 front of him in the faint green light was the white, sweating face of Matryona Sem- yonovna with sunken eyes and glinting teeth, bared by her opened lips: the white face in the faint green light was like the green corpse of a witch sitting before him” (171). Here, Matrena’s sexuality is associated with witchcraft and even death. The claustrophobic room with its staring objects reinforces Matrena’s uncanny appearance. However, when Matrena is moved by Dar’ial’skii’s tears, her face changes, “and a change came about her; she was no longer a wild animal; those big, familiar eyes, her tear-filled eyes swam away into his soul; and the face that bent over him was not crumpled with the rushing storm of passion, but was somehow fragrant” (171). In a similar manner, Kudeiarov’s face is often described as “a kind of blur” raz( - vody kakie-to) (52), which is one of the main symbols of chaos in the novel. His face is constantly changing its color from gray to white and from “translucent as vapour” (89) to radiant, “shining with an unbearable, blinding light” (231).

And the carpenter? His face seemed to have fallen from him, like the sloughed- off skin of a cockroach; his terrible, terrible, rarefied face, with the glasses that slipped to the end of his nose, glanced in a new way from under that empty, transparent skin: the carpenter’s face was terrible and uncanny; there was a terrible and uncanny atmosphere in the cottage; the air between the objects here was strangely tensed, like the fabric of some spiritual force; and that fabric shone and crackled: sparks shot about the room, dry crackling sounds, and lights, as though a spider were spinning from itself a gleaming web. (230)

Here, Kudeiarov is simultaneously rendered superhuman, due to his power of hypnosis, and inhuman, by being compared to an insect.10 Kudeiarov’s presence affects even inanimate objects, so that his cottage can change from a traditional peasant household into a supernatural space. His face is also divided into two unequal parts, which suggests degeneration or demonism. Seeing Kudeiarov for the last time, Dar’ial’skii decides that he has finally deciphered the mystery of his face, “a cross between an icon-painter’s work and a pig’s breakfast” (277). In accordance with gothic conventions, the mutability of these faces can be simultaneously interpreted as the manifestation of the occult, or a reflection of Dar’ial’skii’s inner feelings. The reader is not always sure whether these ever- changing faces reflect a change in the characters or Dar’ial’skii’s attitude as it shifts from attraction to disgust. The gothic imagery eventually culminates in Dar’ial’skii’s death. The protagonist’s death also reflects Belyi’s ambivalence. It can either be -in terpreted as a redemptive sacrifice or as a senseless murder. Dar’ial’skii’s delusion and imminent death parallels Helga’s physical and moral destruction in the South. His murder also parallels Larsen’s theme of suffocation and its association with rural life. When the group of the Doves enter the room to

Masks of Authenticity 187 murder him, Dar’ial’skii sees “a large dark blob, pattering along on eight legs, edge into the room” (303). In the symbolism of Dar’ial’skii’s death, the people appear as the spider that allures and strangles its victims. Yet, Dar’ial’skii’s death acquires additional significance, as it can be interpreted as the intelligentsia’s redemptive sacrifice for the masses. This interpretation, however, would stress Populist views on the role of the intelligentsia and Dar’ial’skii’s messianic role in the salvation of Russia. Critics have noticed the Dionysian and Christian symbolism surrounding not only the protagonist’s death but also his life among the “Doves.” For example, before joining the “Doves,” Dar’ial’skii feels a sudden desire “to break a fir branch, tie its ends together, and put it on in place of a hat, and so he did, and, crowned with this thorny green wreath, with a frondose horn rising over his brow, with green plumage stretching the length of his back, he had a wild and proud appearance, alien even to himself” (161). Carlson notices that this fir wreath likens Dar’ial’skii to Diony- sus Dendritis, Osiris in Egyptian mythology, and to Christ, donning the wreath of thorns in anticipation of his passions (81). I would argue that while Dar’il’skii’s life with the Doves and the circumstances of his death are surrounded with sacrificial imagery, these Dionysian and Christian symbols are often created by the protagonist himself and can be seen as a part of his performance. He fashions himself after these sacrificial figures. For example, on his way to the Annexe, the place of his murder, Dar’ial’skii chooses to keep the cane that Carlson compares to the rod of Dionysus or the Christian cross (82), and leave his revolver behind. It is Dar’ial’skii himself who dramatizes his death as a Dionysian or Christian sacrifice. Also in the premonition of his death, it is the protagonist himself who sees his murder as a crucifixion. “He who is doomed to pain and crucifixion, which can no longer be in any way avoided, endeavors yet to bless that crucifixion; so too the man who is suffering from toothache: he is ready to smash his jaw against a stone, just to increase the pain: and in that aggravation of his pain lies all the sweetness for him, and all the sensuality” (268). The passage also presents even a certain masochistic desire for suffering. As in Larsen’s novel, so too for Belyi there is a certain determinism in the protagonist’s death. In spite of his desire to return to his previous life, Dar’ial’skii is unable to escape. However, unlike Quicksand, The Silver Dove does present the possibility of a redemptive or sacrificial interpretation of the protagonist’s life and the intelligentsia’s role. In spite of Belyi’s critique of Populist ideology and his bleak view of the masses, he cannot completely abandon the dream of authenticity and unity with the folk. Moreover, it is important that the protagonist’s death is caused by an act of violence. Dar’ial’skii is killed by the members of the “Dove” sect, who actively plot his murder. As opposed to Quicksand, the masses in The Silver Dove

188 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 appear much more threatening and consciously commit harm. Here Belyi reflects the sentiments of many members of Russian Elite, who, as a privileged social group, felt threatened by the masses that, at the time of revolutionary upheavals, were seen as an enemy class.

Conclusion

Larsen’s and Belyi’s texts bring out important inconsistencies in contemporary discourses regarding the lower classes. Indeed, both texts challenge the very notion of an authentic folk culture. Helga’s understanding of authentic blackness is largely based on her role as a spectator, whose interpretation of racial authenticity depends upon preconceived notions and cultural stereotypes. Similarly, Dar’ial’skii’s self-fashioned peasant identity grows out of his mythical vision of folk life and culture. Both texts illustrate the constructed nature of the “people” as a concept and reveal the futility of basing one’s identity on romantic ideologies of folk authenticity. At the same time, these two novels portray the anxieties of the educated African American and Russian elites in their respective early twentieth-century contexts. Here Quicksand and The Silver Dove diverge from Laura Doyle’s observation that the self-identification of dominant groups with mind or spirit and their portrayal of subordinate groups in terms of body or matter often involve a racial emphasis. Although contrasting body images are significant, racial difference per se is not a factor for either Larsen or Belyi. In Quicksand, the darker bodies of the rural women are opposed to the lighter-skinned Harlem middle class. In The Silver Dove, the members of the Doves evoke images of disorder, chaos, and gothic horror as opposed to Dar’ial’skii’s and Katia’s idealized features. The latter motif reflects the ambivalence that some members of the Russian intelligentsia felt toward the masses between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

u University of South Carolina

Notes

1 This paper contributes to the comparative research that draws parallels between Afri- can American and Russian cultural production. My approach is close to that developed by Dale Peterson in Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul. I analyze thematic similarities in the representations of the lower classes in the works of Russian and African American authors, which resulted from historically distinct yet related trends in the development of both cultures. However, whereas Peterson emphasizes the formation of the “folk soul” in Russian and African American literature, I focus on the contradictions and ambivalences in the construc-

Masks of Authenticity 189 tion of the “folk” by Russian and African American writers, represented in this paper by Nella Larsen and Andrei Belyi. 2 Carby situates Quicksand in the context of a “moral panic” over the large-scale migration of black people into urban areas and northern states in the early twentieth century. Social and political problems of migration were discussed largely in terms of the working-class black women’s sexual behavior, which was characterized as degenerate (117). 3 For example, for the dance critic André Levinson, Baker “evoked all the prestige of the best Negro sculpture. The plastic sense of a race of sculptors and the vigor of the Afri- can Eros caught us in its grip” (qtd. in Lemke 99). 4 Martin Favor states that “Insistent desire (the recognition of, and urge to, satisfy natural sexual impulses), implies the narrator, disqualifies Helga from the black bourgeoisie, forcing her to turn elsewhere in search of a discursive space” (107). 5 Favor contrasts gender expectations of the folk to that of black bourgeoisie. He argues that although Helga is not an equal to men within bourgeois society, she comes closer to realizing an independence there than among the southern folk (95). 6 According to Frierson, the populists found out that peasants correlated one’s clothes with one’s respectability and social status. Initially, the populists believed that the surest way to win peasants’ trust was to dress as a similarly impoverished peasant. However, they were soon disappointed in their assumptions, “Dressed as beggars, the radicals were met by cautious suspicion and became sensitive to a distressing respect among the narod for hierarchy in society” (43). 7 According to Elsworth, in the narrative of the novel, songs are often used as an external comment on actions (“Introduction” 21). 8 In the introduction to Gothic Modernisms, Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace argue that “The interest in the amoral is historically grounded in a series of shared knowledges between the late Victorian Gothic and the modernist text” (3). 9 Freud’s theory seems especially applicable here because his understanding of the uncanny was based on his interpretation of Hoffmann, whose works influenced Gogol’ and subsequently Belyi. 10 Carlson suggests that Kudeiarov’s name is related to the Russian word (kudel’ pauka) spider web (71). Descriptions of his hypnotism are also often associated with a spider web.

Works Cited Belyi, Andrei. Serebrianyi Golub.’ Moskva: Sovremennik, 1990. ———.The Silver Dove. Ed. and trans. John D. Elsworth. London: Angel, 2000. Berdyaev, Nikolai. “Russia’s Temptation: On Bely’s Silver Dove.” The Noise of Change: Russian Literature and the Critics (1891–1917). Ed. and trans. Stanley J. Rabinowitz. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986. 183–96. Carby, Hazel V. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Identities. Eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 115–32.

190 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Carlson, Maria. “The Silver Dove.”Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism. Ed. John E. Malmstad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. 60–95. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: Mac Gibbon and Kee, 1972. Davis, Thadious M.Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Elsworth, John D. Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. “Introduction.”The Silver Dove. By Andrey Bely. Ed. and trans. John D. Elsworth. London: Angel, 2000. 7–25. ———. “Notes.”The Silver Dove. By Andrey Bely. Ed. and trans. John D. Elsworth. London: Angel, 2000. 307–17. Favor, J. Martin. Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Frank, Stephen P. “Confronting the Domestic Other: Rural Popular Culture and its Enemies in Fin-De-Siècle Russia.” Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia. Eds. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 74–107. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth, 1953. 219–56. Frierson, Cathy A. Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late 19th Century Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Goldsmith, Meredith. “Shopping to Pass, Passing to Shop: Bodily Self-Fashioning in the Fiction of Nella Larsen.” Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. Eds. and Intro. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 97–120. Johnson, James Weldon. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. New York: Penguin, 1990. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Low, Gail Ching-Liang. White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1996. McDowell, Deborah E. “Introduction.” Quicksand and Passing. By Nella Larsen. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. ix-xxxvii. Nye, Robert. “Savage Crowds, Modernism, and Modern Politics.” Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. Eds. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 42–55. Peterson, Dale E. Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Masks of Authenticity 191 Rhodes, Chip. Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Discourse in American Modernism. London: Verso, 1998. Smith, Andrew and Jeff Wallace. “Introduction: Gothic Modernisms: History, Culture and Aesthetics.” Gothic Modernisms. Eds. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 1–10. Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

192 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Review Essays

Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture; Volume II: Forms and Themes Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, x + 916 and x + 950 pp.

Weighing in at slightly under two thousand pages in this two-volume English- language edition (it filled five volumes in the original Italian), The Novel poses a challenge midway between Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Proust’s Recherche, to name only two of the famous novels that it addresses. Or, to take an analogy closer to home, this collection of just over one hundred pieces on topics from pre-literate oral narrative to the impact of computers on fiction equals roughly ten years ofThe Comparatist. Edited by Franco Moretti, the former director of Stanford University’s Center for the Study of the Novel, this book gives the impression of carrying out the research program outlined in Moretti’s 2000 manifesto, “Conjectures on World Literature.” Arguing that since no one scholar could do justice to the fiction produced worldwide in its temporal, geographical, and cultural scope, he proposed that the next best approach would have to involve “a patchwork of other people’s research” (57). Such scholarship would bring together the best work by specialists in the many relevant fields, and by attempting to synthesize their work would develop the more ambitious conclusions needed for a worldwide subject. As a means to this end, The Novel assembles a wide range of writings on the novel, packaging them in manageable forms that range from brief six-to-eight page “vignettes” concerning specific novels to forty-page chapters on major issues. Moretti himself provides only a two-page set of introductory remarks before launching the reader on a voyage of exploration and discovery that groups the chapters into ten units, with nine sections of vignettes attached to many of the units.1 The result is multifaceted, and comparatists studying fiction from whatever time or place will value this book’s contributions to the theory of the novel, to a broad cross-cultural history of the genre, and to debate about the novel’s place in world literature. The Novel also teems with intriguing literary criticism, some of which stands out as models of differing comparative approaches. None of us, to be sure, is likely in our courses to cover a terrain as expansive as the one that Moretti lays out. But even a selective reading of this monumental project should alter our basic assumptions about the novels we teach, at the very least by alerting us to other

193 kinds of long fiction and to different historical contexts from the ones that we have become accustomed to in our specialties. The Novel should also encourage us to range more widely and imaginatively as readers of fiction. Among the theoretical issues addressed by The Novel, perhaps the most interesting ones focus on the genre’s gradual emergence, in a variety of settings throughout the world, out of a wide array of discourses ranging from legends and folktales to historical writings and epics. Thus an informative and thought-provoking section in Volume I examines “The Semantic Field of ‘Narrative’” in short essays on such broadly Western terms as “midrash,” “mythos,” and “romance,” as well as Japa- nese “monogatori,” Chinese “xiaoshuo,” Arab “qiṣṣa,” and Russian “povest’.” Another such section on “Prototypes” looks back over two millennia with vignettes of ten influential novels that founded subgenres, from Greek romance, Arab maqāmāt, and the picaresque novel to the feuilleton novel, science fiction, and magical realism. Longer chapters scattered through both volumes examine in fuller detail such allied topics as the rise of the Chinese novel (Andrew H. Plaks), the kinds of hostile criticism directed at the emergent novel in the West (Walter Siti), and the interaction between epic and novel as generic designations (Massimo Fusillo). Especially striking in realigning thought about narrative in general is the chapter that opens Volume I. Anthropologist Jack Goody relies on field work among contemporary oral cultures in Africa to argue that “narrative, and in particular fictional narrative, is not a predominant characteristic in purely oral (nonliterate) cultures” (31). As a result he casts doubt both on Albert Lord’s influential theory regarding the oral origins of the epic (in The Singer of Tales) and on more recent work that hypothesizes that narrativity is a basic category of the human mind. Goody’s counterpart at the beginning of Volume II is Thomas Pavel’s essay “The Novel in Search of Itself: A Historical Morphology.” This chapter is a tour-de-force of incisive exposition that lays out the ebbs and flows of the genre over the longue durée; it would make excellent background reading in any fiction course. Other notable chapters in this theoretical vein include Mieke Bal’s proposal for a “descriptology” of fiction to supplement or replace narratology, with major implications for comparatists who work on verbal/visual interactions, and Alex Woloch’s discussion of minor characters. Along with opening up this poorly studied issue, Woloch polemi- cizes gently but persuasively with the tendency among many literary theorists to neglect characterization. In “Forms of the Supernatural in Narrative,” finally, Fran- cesco Orlando puts forward a typology like the one expounded in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, but with a more finely calibrated set of categories and a wider range of illustrations. Several less academic but generally stimulating sections of The Novel consist of bird’s-eye-views of mostly non-canonical novels from around the world. The point seems to be to communicate a more concrete sense of literary histories from outside

194 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 the mainstream in this book’s account of the genre, which is mainly Anglo-French, with the addition of models from the classics (especially Heliodorus’s Aethiopica) and from the Spanish Golden Age. Thus, to diversify our sense of Don Quixote, the Princesse de Clèves, or Robinson Crusoe as “first novels,” a section that is somewhat misleadingly called “Traditions in Contact” gives short accounts for non-specialists of putative first novels in Arabic, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, and Persian, as well as one written in English by a black South African. Similar sections are devoted to novels with political themes (Multatuli, Lu Xun, Gladkov, Achebe, Vargas Llosa, etc.) or to ones set in modern metropoli (Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Lagos, Cairo, Havana, Bombay, and Istanbul). In kaleidoscopic fashion these short essays do suggest cross-cultural connections worldwide, mostly with insights to be gleaned by readers from suggestive parallels or contrasts. But even more they invite, tantalize, or challenge us to read more widely while also dramatizing one of Moretti’s basic points concerning the study of the novel—that no one will ever have time to read all the most interesting, significant works. In a similar spirit of broader coverage, but in the more academically searching chapter format, The Novel surveys a number of distinctive national traditions, usually emphasizing foundational periods or key transitions. Thus Jonathan Zwicker questions whether the shift from indigenous to Western forms of fiction in late nineteenth-century Japan was either as thorough or as painful as often portrayed. In a packed, incisive chapter that the editor places last in a unit on “The European Acceleration,” presumably to indicate that the Russian novel is the cul- minating event in that trend, William Todd III describes the rise of that novel in the early nineteenth century with Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov. Another notable chapter, by Andreas Gailus, provides a case study that contrasts with Todd’s, despite its appearing in the other volume in a unit on “Uncertain Boundaries.” Gailus examines the parallel rise of the German novella in roughly the same decades, stressing how the social conditions that favored the novella also account for the relative weakness of the nineteenth-century novel in German-speaking countries. Finally, in a chapter that Moretti himself singles out for comment in his brief foreword, Eileen Julien discusses the “extroverted African novel,” by which she means the African fiction best known in the West. These are novels whose major purposes are to address audiences across Africa and to explain Africa to the rest of the world rather than, like most previous novels throughout the world, to appeal to a local readership defined in national or even ethnic terms. Other such chapters deal with the early fortunes of the novel in India (Meenakshi Mukherjee), with the Latin American sense of reality (Gerald Martin), with Golden-Age Spain (Joan Ramon Resina), and—most arrestingly—with the fallacies of the modern/postmodern distinction in periodizing twentieth-century fiction (John Brenkman). The last unit in Volume I is entitled “Toward World Literature,” a phrase that

Review Essays 195 highlights what seems to be Moretti’s conception of this much-discussed term. In contrast to the new anthologies and courses that take world literature to mean writings that have been chosen from all over the world and that go back to the origins of literacy, we have the contention that world literature as such does not yet exist. However, as it begins to come into existence during the twentieth century, its vehicle has been the novel. Implicit in this position is the idea of an increasingly globalized readership that sees itself as living in a secularized world—though whether it is comfortable with that perception is another question. Moretti’s reason for not considering the worldwide literature of the past to be world literature is clear. It stems from The Novel’s strong awareness of historical diversity: witness the many words for narrative, the many different “first novels,” or the many dates of origin already suggested in this review. It also seems significant that Auerbach’s Mimesis should receive such high praise (see especially two comments in Moretti’s own essay “Seri- ous Century,” I: 368, 390); despite its narrower emphasis on the Western tradition, that book conveyed an equally strong sense of sheer variety in time and place. Within its insistence, then, on world literature as an emergent rather than an achieved category, The Novel isolates two phases, the second and less surprising one being the vogue for magical realism that emerged so forcefully in the 1960s. In identifying an earlier, preparatory phase, however, Michael Denning touches what for some will be a raw nerve. In “The Novelists’ International,” he traces the series of worldwide movements of “engaged” or “committed” literature, often sponsored by international socialist or communist organizations and generally identified as “realist.” Denning contends that together these writers made up “the first self-conscious attempt to create a world literature” (I: 704) and that these movements deserve more thoughtful attention from critics. At the very least, as he points out, in its later phases the Novelists’ International provided a point of departure for many magical realists. In counterpoint, however, to this “realist” genealogy for world literature at the end of Volume I, Volume II closes by saluting twentieth-century experiments in fiction, doing so in another series of novelistic vignettes that runs from Rilke, Stein, and Woolf to Joyce, Beckett, and Cortázar. The list ends somewhat oddly, and pre- maturely, with Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novelGravity’s Rainbow, which earlier in the same unit had been roundly criticized by Brenkman in favor of works by Rushdie, Kundera, Calvino, and Pamuk. As a whole, of course, The Novel is comparative in the sense of practicing genre criticism on the grandest scale. However, comparatists may have a special interest in the exemplary comparative essays of other kinds—interlinguistic, interdisciplinary, or informed by major theoretical concerns—to be found throughout both volumes. Somewhat unexpectedly, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht provides a cross- cultural, interlingual essay classically identified with Western comparativism. In “The Roads of the Novel,” he analyzes the modalities of this topos from the ancient

196 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 classics through the medieval period to Zola and Faulkner. This essay’s affinities with Bakhtin become explicit in the next chapter, on “The Chronotopes of the Sea” by Margaret Cohen, Moretti’s successor as director of the Center for the Study of the Novel. Cohen draws insightful distinctions among six such chronotopes: those involving blue, brown, or white water along with islands, shores, and ships. The final essay in this unit on “Space and Story,” Philip Fisher’s “Torn Space: Joyce’s Ulysses,” is comparatist in another sense, that of crossing disciplinary rather than linguistic lines, here by correlating Joyce’s novel and urban history with admirable precision. Interdisciplinarity rejoins cross-cultural literary criticism in the unit on “Writ- ing Prose,” in Michal Peled Ginsburg and Lorri G. Nandrea’s jointly authored essay “The Prose of the World.” In a sensitively nuanced reply to Hegel’s aesthetics, they discuss specimen passages from Cervantes, Flaubert, and Israeli novelist Ya’akov Shabtai along with English-language novels from Godwin and Hardy to James and Fitzgerald. In “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism,” Frederic Jameson (a member of the project’s Editorial Board with Vargas Llosa, Abdelfattah Kilito of Morocco, Ernesto Franco of Einaudi Publishers, and Pier Vincenzo Men- galdo of the University of Padua) melds high theory with cross-cultural criticism in his inimitably pointed and broadly speculative manner. In yet another approach, Alessandro Portelli’s fascinating chapter on the interplay between orality and literacy in U.S. literature and culture enlarges the comparative repertoire by adding the relations between different linguistic modalities to the traditional focus on differences in language. Also worth mention are the two most ambitious vignettes of single novels, Roberto Schwarz’s discussion of Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and April Alliston’s essay on Eliza Haywood’s Love in Ex- cess. The first stands out for its rigor in relating formal experiment to the limits of explicit social commentary in later nineteenth-century Brazil, the second for bringing women’s history to bear on why Haywood’s best-selling novel, linked back to French women’s fiction of the previous century, ended up being eclipsed by its contemporaries, Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Three miscellaneous items require comment as well. Among The Novel’s contributors are two well-known novelists, both of whom evoke their sense of passionate admiration, even against their better judgment, for specific French novels. For A. S. Byatt the topic is Balzac’s would-be poet and failed parvenu Lucien de Rubempré, while Umberto Eco discusses Victor Hugo’s Ninety-three, which concerns an episode of rural revolt against the French Revolution. Given Vargas Llosa’s similarly strong feelings for Madame Bovary (see his book The Perpetual Orgy), was it he who commissioned these chapters on fiction’s power to mesmerize its readers? At the entirely different level of the book trade and the history of reading is the section on “The Market for Novels—Some Statistical Profiles.” Focusing on the later nineteenth century in Spain, Italy, India, and Japan, but using some earlier

Review Essays 197 data from Britain and the United States while turning to the later twentieth century for Nigeria, these seven case studies aim at broader conclusions about the kinds of fiction that were actually being read. By analyzing the relative numbers of works in various novelistic subgenres, the proportion of translated versus native-language works, or the rise and fall in the reputations of specific authors, they raise questions for further research and suggest revisions in literary histories that are limited to canonical works from national traditions treated in isolation. Perhaps inevitably in a work of this scale, the book’s production values can leave something to be desired. One encounters more than the usual number of typo- graphical errors, and with several translated essays it is all too easy to glimpse the French or Italian version through the English. With the titles of novels, the translators can forget that the title named in an essay is itself a translation. For example, Hugo’s Ninety-three in Eco’s essay is rendered as Novantatré at one point (II: 279), thereby glossing over its true, historically graphic title of Quatrevingt-treize. These problems, of course, are minor. Overall, The Novel is an unusually innovative, even inspiring work of collective scholarship. It stands out as an impressive model for just how much a well-conceived group project can enlarge our intellectual horizons, especially in a field like comparative literature that aspires to such great breadth. To my knowledge, this book’s only real rivals are the cross-cultural research projects in literary history sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, such as the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, co-edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope, a former editor of this journal, and John Neubauer. Working apparently without this level of assistance from a scholarly society but relying on his own reputation as a critic and possibly on university support (it would have been interesting to learn something about how such an ambitious collective project was initiated and brought to completion), Franco Moretti is to be congratulated for a remarkable achievement. Readers of this book will most likely never read, teach, or write about the novel in the same way again.

John Burt Foster u George Mason University

Note

1 Volume I, on “History, Geography, and Culture,” consists of the following units: “The Struggle for Space”; “Polygenesis,” with a section on “The Semantic Field of ‘Narra- tive’” attached; “The European Acceleration”; “The Circle Widens,” with “The Market for Novels” attached; and “Toward World Literature,” with “Traditions in Contact” and “Americas” attached. Volume II, on “Forms and Themes,” consists of “The Long Dura- tion,” with “Prototypes” attached; “Writing Prose”; “Themes, Figures,” with “Narrating Politics” and “The Death of the Heroine” attached; “Space and Story,” with “The New

198 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Metropolis” attached; and “Uncertain Boundaries,” with “A Century of Experiments” attached.

Works Cited

Lord, Albert Bates. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, second series, 1 (Jan./ Feb. 2000): 54–68. Also available at http://newleftreview.org/A2094. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

Michael D. Garval, “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004, 266 pp.

Cassandra L. Hamrick and Suzanne Nash, eds., Sculpture et poétique: Sculpture and Literature in France, 1789–1859 Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century French Studies 35.1 (Fall 2006), 309 pp.

In his foreword to Sculpture et poétique: Sculpture and Literature in France, 1789– 1859, Marshall C. Olds, general editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, remarks that the journal “does not, as a general rule, publish special issues” (11). The decision to proceed otherwise in the case of this collection of essays might already be taken as an indication of the current research interest in the relationship between sculpture and literature. By focusing on an area of investigation that has received, up to now, far less critical attention than the relation between literature and painting—as special issue editors Cassandra L. Hamrick and Suzanne Nash note (12)—both texts under review in this essay bring a welcome measure of balance to the field of comparative literary and visual studies. Unlike Garval’s “A Dream of Stone,” which covers the entire nineteenth century, the Ncfs volume centers on the first half of the century, 1789–1859, a period of particular importance in the field of sculpture as a transition between classical and modern aesthetics as initially formulated by Baudelaire in his 1859 Salon. The collective volume is divided in two groups of six essays written for the most part in French (nine out of twelve) and gathered under the following headings: 1) Sculp- ture and Poetic Space Before 1859, and 2) Translating Sculpture Into Poetic Space. The first part, which “serve(s) to establish the terms of the artistic debates of the time with respect to the state of the sculptural arts” (12), opens with a contribution on the neo-classical theories of Johann Joachim Winkelmann, Germaine de

Review Essays 199 Staël, and Victor Cousin. Seeking to nuance the dichotomy that has traditionally opposed Classicism to Romanticism, Michel Brix recasts it as a division within the Romantic camp itself, as an opposition between those who adhered to Winckel- mann’s ideas—Madame de Staël and Victor Cousin—and those who rejected his neo-classical legacy—Stendhal, Balzac, and Gautier. The next article, “Beau comme l’antique, vrai comme la nature” [As Beautiful as Ancient Art, As True as Nature] adds an important technical dimension to the aesthetic debate on neo-Classicism and Romanticism by focusing on sculpture as a labor-intensive art form in which the choice of material plays a capital role. While underscoring, like Brix, the impossibility of approaching sculpture—and aesthetic discourse on it—in terms of terms of radical oppositions, Isabelle Leroy-Jay Lemaistre, who heads the department of Sculpture at the Louvre museum, contrasts the exclusive neo-classical focus on marble to the Romantic predilection for bronze from 1831 onward. (That is, for a medium that allows for more detail and expression.) Jean Starobinsky’s article “An- dré Chénier parmi les statues” [André Chénier Among the Statues] also highlights the complexity of neo-classical aesthetics. Examining Chénier’s poetry, and in particular poems that compare the poet’s and the sculptor’s activities, the well-known critic defines the revolutionary poet’s neo-Classicism “as a yearning for energies instead of forms” (54), or more specifically for “the diffuse energy of desire and the tactile appetite of perception” (58). Paradoxically perhaps, it is the modernity of Chateaubriand’s neo-classical conception of sculpture that Jean-Marie Roulin emphasizes in “Chateaubriand ou les espaces de la sculpture” [Chateaubriand or the Space of Sculpture] New in Chateaubriand’s approach to sculpture, Roulin argues, is first the notion that the beauty of a sculpture manifests itself in relation to a space—“a building as in the case of a funerary monument in a chapel, or a town where a statue is erected” (74); and second, the link Chateaubriand establishes between sculpture, death, memory, and history through the association between sculpture and public space. In “Dela- croix and Sculpture,” Michele Hannoosh examines the painter’s writings on sculpture, his famous Journal, where he “rails against the poverty of modern sculpture” (95), but also “two notebooks discovered in a private collection” and written around 1857 in which Delacroix treats “the question of the modern beautiful . . . in terms of a comparison between the arts—the ‘essentially modern’ arts of painting and music on the one hand, the ‘essentially ancient’ art of sculpture on the other” (96). Han- noosh’s analysis of these notebooks reveals that the painter overcame his pessimism regarding the future of sculpture once he was able to conceive of a “paradoxically ‘modern’ sculpture, one which strikes the imagination with a force equal to that of the ancients” (97). It also documents how this new conception of sculpture in turn influenced Delacroix’s painting. In “Baudelaire et la sculpture ennuyeuse de son temps” [Baudelaire and the Boring Sculpture of his Time] L. Cassandra Hamrick

200 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 obverses a similar reversal of opinion, this time in the case of Baudelaire who quali- fied sculpture as a boring art form in his 1846 Salon only to praise its “‘divine role’ thirteen years later in his ‘Salon de 1859’” (111). Following a brief account of Baude- laire’s change of mind—by 1859 imagination has become the cornerstone of his aesthetics—the article centers on the perception of sculpture as boring found not only in Baudelaire’s pre-1859 writings, but also in Gautier’s in the 1830s and 1840s. The second part of the volume, Translating Sculpture into Poetic Form, opens with an essay on the influence of sculpture on poetic theory and practice, “Ten- sions dynamiques: Le rapport sculpture/poétique en France, 1829–1859” [Dynamic Tensions: The Relation Between Sculpture and Poetics in France, 1829–1859]. In it, David Scott shows that if the gap between sculptural and poetic aesthetics only truly narrowed in the 1860s, sculpture nonetheless had a definite influence on poetry earlier on. Already during the first half of the century, Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, and Baudelaire turned to sculpture “not only as a thematic source of inspiration, but also as an aesthetic model to which they [the poets] tr[ied] to find a prosodic equivalent” (144). In an essay entitled “Lire la pierre: Pouvoir politique et sexuel dans la sculpture littéraire du XIXème siècle” [Reading Stones: Political and Sexual Power in Nineteenth Century Literary Sculpture] Rosemary Lloyd examines the recurrent image of the statue in French prose in a variety of settings: as a cliché used to connote paleness or immobility; as a realist detail in the depiction of bourgeois households and public spaces; and as a privileged site of the romantic imagination in works by Musset, Mérimée, Hugo, Flaubert, Nerval, the Goncourt, Huys- mans, and Laforgue, who are inspired by the myth of Pygmalion and the theme of the quest for the perfect women. According to Wendy Nolan Joyce, it is precisely the voyeuristic rapport to the statue of the female nude that informs many of these writings that Auguste Clésinger’s Femme piquée par un serpent (1847) frustrated and challenged “by calling attention to abstract qualities of form and craftsman- ship” (168). In an article devoted to the examination of Clésinger’s statue, Nolan Joyce begins by pointing out that Gautier already viewed in it “the first work of sculpture . . . to capture the spirit of womanhood and . . . a rich source of poetic inspiration” (167). She also underscores its significance as a turning point in sculptural aesthetics on several other grounds: its new subject matter—“the tangible pleasures of a living woman rather than any dramatic incident from ancient history or myth” (167); its new conception of the model—Appollonie Sabatier rather than a professional model; the realism of portrait and pose (173); and finally, the disruption of the relationship between viewer and object of gaze (180). In “Casting Hugo into History,” Suzanne Nash examines the friendship between the poet and sculptor David d’Angers from the time of their first encounter as young leaders of the Romantic movement in 1827 to the second Republic and their respective exiles. Nash convincingly argues that in spite of their “mutual respect

Review Essays 201 and loyalty” (190), the two artists disagreed in their respective artistic visions as well as in the values and functions they ascribed to poetry and sculpture. In “Poé- tique de la ligne: Autour des colonnes sculptées” [Poetics of the Line: Concerning Sculptured Columns] Stamos Metzidakis shows that poetic descriptions of columns, and particularly those of public monuments, moved away from “the most static sculptural line, the ancient column” (207) and gained in movement during the first half of the century as poets like Chénier, Hugo, Gautier, and Baudelaire sought to define a new, modern, aesthetics of the line. The last essay of the volume, Patrizia Lombardo’s “Stendhal et l’idéal moderne” [Stendhal’s Modern Ideal], seeks to account for the novelist’s dislike of sculpture. In Stendhal’s eyes, Lombardo argues, sculpture lacked the ability to express what mattered most to him, not the sensuality of the human body, but “la vie de l’âme” (228) [the life of the soul]s, the true source of the viewer’s emotional response—hence his admiration for only one sculptor, Canova. Published two years earlier than Sculpture et poétique, Michael Garval’s “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture deals with a particular phenomenon, “France’s culture of monumentality,” as well as with its “rich confluence with literary culture” (15). As Garval notes, the monument played a central role in the construction of literary greatness in nineteenth-century France not only as a rhetorical figure—the literary work as a monument—but also as a concrete tribute to “great men” in the form of public sculptures and monuments. The introduction, “Literary Greatness and the Monu- ment” (13–33), offers a reflection on “commemorative fervor” (14) in nineteenth- century France and a short history of “civic sculpture” (22). Garval remarks that from the Enlightenment onward, it was the writer who best encapsulated the ideal of “the great man,” a phenomenon that found its most striking expression during the French Revolution when the church of Sainte-Geneviève was transformed into the Pantheon, “a national temple of renown honoring great men” (25). During the nineteenth-century, when political instability made it difficult for political leaders to epitomize national greatness, writers continued to play that role as attested by the increasing number of Parisian monuments devoted to grands hommes, most of them writers: there were twenty-six constructed between 1815 and 1870, while there were 150 between 1870 and 1914. Once the embodiment of the king’s religious and political power, statues offered the vision of nation and of a republic built upon the accomplishments of its citizens, of great men as “the virtuous conscience of the French nation” (32). For Garval, however, “this quest for monumentality” also stands out as an attempt to compensate for the “ephemerals of modern culture” (14), a dream of per- manence and solidity in the face of instability, and in that sense, as an illusion. The first chapter, “Dream of Stone”—a phrase coined by Baudelaire—examines three

202 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 facets of this construction: “the literary work as monument” (34–46); “the author as monument” (46–50); and “the ideal synthesis of writer, work, and monument” (50–61) as a male construct (“The Manliness of Letters” [61–78]). Garval shows that the metaphor of the literary work as a monument was common during the nineteenth century and that the analogy imposed itself for a number of reasons: the usually voluminous size of these literary products; the writer’s sweeping vision of his oeuvre and his self-understanding “as a heroic monument builder” (38). If the writer himself came to be seen as a monument—in Baudelaire’s words: “mon triste cerveau est une pyramide” [my sad brain is a pyramid]—this “literary statuemania” also offered an “ideal synthesis” (50) through the “vision of lasting literary glory as a seamless fusion of writer, work, and monument” (51). Contrasting two represen- tational modes of fame—the monument, which expressed enduring fame, and the caricature, which encapsulated momentary celebrity—Garval discusses Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Machine à gloire (1874) as a critique of the “excesses of modern fame culture” (55), as well as texts by Arsène Houssaye and others questioning “the necessity of erecting monuments” (58) to writers on the ground that their work alone should be their claim to fame (59). Finally, the perception of literature and of the monument “as masculine, even phallic” (61) is documented through an examination of the recurrent image of the obelisk in Flaubert’s Correspondence and Dic- tionnaire des idées reçues and of the textual and visual representations of Balzac’s famous cane. In Chapter 2, “Honoré de Balzac: Writing the Monument,” Garval deals with issues of identities concerning the man, “Balzac” (79–82) and the writer, “Forging Identities” (82–89), arguing that The Human Comedy proceeded “from its author’s compensatory masquerade as ‘Balzac’”(79). The next section, “The Archival Rival” (89–96), concerns Balzac’s project of “concurrencer l’état civil” [competing with vital records] and the significant role it played in the construction of the Bal- zacian literary monument. As opposed to the first part of the chapter, which at times is unconvincing and lacking in originality, the second part brings numerous new insights as Garval discusses the “mortuary dimension of fame” (96) in “Life and Death Writing” (96–103); the Human Comedy as a fame-generating “textual necropolis” modeled on the biographical dictionary and the cemetery in “Balzac’s fame machine” (103–06); and the double dimension of canonization—“consecrating a body of writing as scripture, and consecrating a person as a saint” (106)—that informs and monumentalizes Balzac’s work in “Canonization” (106–11). The third chapter, “George Sand: Visions of the Great Women Writer” (112–57) stands out as the richest and most innovative chapter in “A Dream of Stone.” The central question it raises is that of the possibility of women becoming famous in a culture that genders fame as male. Not only did the most prestigious kind of fame, monumental fame, appear essentially gendered as male, Garval argues, but

Review Essays 203 “the very idea of representing an outstanding woman writer through sculpture conflict[ed] with the tradition of statuary depiction of women available to the nineteenth-century artist” (117–18): women as sexual objects, goddesses, saints, vir- gins, or allegorical figures. Garval begins by providing textual evidence of George Sand’s fame in her own life-time. According to Paul Meurice, for example, “d’autres sont les grands hommes, elle est la grande femme” (110) [the others are the great men, she is the great woman]. Then, drawing from “a substantial yet neglected body of iconographical evidence,” he compares visual representations of Sand with those of “her less successful female peers” and shows how Sand “challenged contemporaries to think of her as a great writer in the monumental mode usually reserved for men” (112). In “La ‘grande femme’” (119–23) he shows that “depictions of Sand constantly distinguished her from the crowd of contemporary women authors, while remaining much more ambivalent about the question of her fame living on” (118). Even in caricatures, she was “likely to be treated as a distinct individual” instead of a typical bas-bleu. The second part of the chapter addresses the issue of the transformation of Sand’s public image from the early “protean” representations of her as “muse, mother and whore of the 1848 revolution” (125–31) to “the stolid, benevolent ‘bonne dame de Nohant’” (131–39). Garval’s analysis of iconographic representations of Sand in the press of the period (L’illustration, Le Trombinoscope) convincingly questions three well-accepted critical tenets: 1) that this transformation was complete by the 1850s—he argues that it didn’t occur until the fin-de-siècle; 2) how much control Sand herself had over this process (less than previously thought); and by extension also 3) Naomi Schor’s previous claim that the bonne dame image emerged from Sand’s work itself, or more precisely from the realist/idealist dichotomy that, in her view, informs it. Garval also points out that although the second phase of Sand’s life corresponded to a period of “hardening and intolerance” toward women that “helped plunge Sand into depths of critical disfavor” (124), she was, in a sense, honored like a man, since, after her death, two statues of her were erected. The chapter ends on a discussion of these two sculptures and a comparison with monuments devoted to Victor Hugo. In the fourth chapter, “Victor Hugo: The Writer as Monument” (158–206), Gar- val argues that Hugo, as opposed to Sand, was a master at creating and managing his own public image (160). The biographical approach already employed in the chapter on Balzac—but not on Sand—reveals this time that Hugo’s insatiable need for glory originated in an inferiority complex toward his brothers (“Growing Pains” [171–77]). The approach also reveals that the poet capitalized on his exile to expand his renown during the Second Empire (“Glorious Exile” [177–91]). A well- documented and informative section on the poet’s “Preposthumous Apotheosis” (191–97) deals with Hugo’s glory as the embodiment of France and of the Third

204 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Republic. What makes this chapter particularly insightful, though, is the demonstration that Hugo’s case represents both the culmination of the cultural phenomenon on which the books focuses—monumental commemoration—and its demise. On the one hand, in spite of the poet’s enduring glory, few monuments to him were raised after his death. On the other hand, his death marks the beginning of a new era characterized the proliferation of non-monumental forms of commemoration, namely, of memorabilia. The conclusion, “The Dream Crumbles (207–40), documents this drastic change in the culture of commemoration—the “dream of stone’s disintegration, his mysterious disappearance” (207)—in numerous ways: as discussed by Sartre’s La Nausée, in the public’s reactions to Rodin’s sculptures of Balzac (209–14), in the treatment of Zola in caricature, and in the commemoration of the centennial and bicentennial of Hugo’s birth. Garval also suggests interesting interpretations regarding the meaning of this shift. Throughout the book, Garval’s point is that “in nineteenth-century France authors were largely understood through images” (116). While making for a fascinating study, this thesis also has a clear disadvantage: emphasis on fame and strategies of distinction necessarily entails a de-emphasis of what made the writers examined in his book fame-worthy in the first place: their literary work. The problem is particularly acute in the otherwise outstanding chapter on George Sand since, as opposed to the chapters on Balzac and Hugo, it includes scant references to her abundant literary work. In spite of this weakness, “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture, is certainly worth reading and represents a major scholarly achievement. Surprisingly perhaps, one finds only one reference to it in Sculpture et poétique (found in Lloyd’s essay). Nonetheless, the two works complement each other well—in particular, Roulin’s essay on Chateaubriand and Nash’s article on Hugo—and are worth reading in tan- dem. Richly illustrated and full of new insights, these two works make a number of significant contributions to our understanding of the relationship between sculpture and literature in nineteenth-century France.

Marie-Pierre Le Hir u The University of Arizona

Review Essays 205 Reviews

Edited by Mechthild Cranston, with an afterword by Roger Asselineau, this bilingual (or rather, multilingual) edition by seasoned poet and translator Philip Cranston not only demonstrates the variety of his talents, but also invites us to fresh readings of some familiar and beloved poems as well as acquaintance with lesser-known ones. As the title indicates, and the “Translator’s Note” explains in more detail, this is a collection of sixty-four poems, in some cases excerpts, in five languages with facing translations ranging from faithful to free and written over a period of more than fifty years. The introductory essay is of interest not only because of its explanation of the choice of poems, but also because of its insights into the mind of the translator. For example: “The right translation, for me, comes from close attention to the word—but also close communion with the syntax, the rhythms, the cadences, the heart-beat, the breathing intervals of the original” (14). Professor Cranston is particularly adept at explaining how he renders meter, rhythm, and sounds from the original language to English. He also offers some interesting comparisons of his translations to previous ones. The poems are arranged in chronological order, beginning with classical Latin, followed by medieval and Renaissance French, Italian and Spanish, then classical, Romantic, and modernist French, German, Italian, and Spanish, ending with fourteen poems by Jules Supervielle, of whom Cranston is the major translator, and one by René Char. In two of the translations from the Latin, one from the Aeneid and one from the Acts of the Apostles, Cranston actually adds rhyme where none existed, creating a different sort of English poem from the original text. In a non- rhymed translation, his rendering of one of the most famous lines in Virgil, “forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” (20) [“Perchance, one day, remembrance of these sorrows / (Yes, even these) will help and strengthen you” (21)] demonstrates the difference between economical Latin and discursive English: the parenthetical “yes, even these” effectively translates “et haec.”

206 In his translation of the well-known and often-translated monologue of Francesca da Rimini in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno, Cranston, unlike other translators, manages to be faithful to the original while writing in a mellifluous English terza rima. Consider his rendering of the famous lines: “Nessun maggior dolore, / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore” (36) [“The greatest of all woes / Is to remember those our happy days / In time of sorrow: that thy master knows” (37)]. If the internal rhyme maggior/dolore is not retained, the dolorous rhythm of the line is, as well as the enjambment and the end rhyme in an almost literal translation. Cranston is equally skilled in replicating the rhyme schemes of Dantean and Petrarchan sonnets. In this book he translates more poems by Petrarch than by any other poet except Supervieille. As a poet who has written light verse himself, Philip Cranston displays a light and amusing touch in translating lesser known poems such as Gil Vicente’s “Dicen que me case yo” (“Cassandra’s song”), Mellin de Saint-Gelais’s naughty “Tandis que madame dormait” (“Madame in the arms of sleep”), and Charles Dufresny’s “Phyllis et Lisandre.” He brings us a literary curiosity with his translation of Vol- taire’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be.” Three selections by Goethe, from Faust I, Iphigenie auf Tauris, and the short lyric “Wandrers Nachtlied” represent in a brief space something of the breadth of Goethe’s poetic styles. The first two are rendered masterfully in a majestic iambic pentameter that replicates the original; the last one, in its utter simplicity, is perhaps the most difficult to translate. The rhythm of the poem’s peaceful ending—“Warte nur, balde / Ruhest du auch” (84) is not to my ear successfully replicated in “Wait, before long / You too will find rest” (85). Perhaps this is not possible in English. Lyrics by Ugo Foscolo, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Giacomo Leopardi on the themes of evening and ending are well placed together, and Cranston successfully captures each distinctive poetic voice. The translations of such staples of French literature as Baudelaire’s “Correspon- dances” and “L’Invitation au voyage” and Mallarmé’s “Brise marine” and “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” are surprising both in their originality and their faithfulness. The latter first line, “The lively, lovely, virginal today,” by slightly trans- posing the adjectives, creates its own alliteration and the same sensation as Mallar- mé’s. Cranston’s rendition of the first three lines of “L’Invitation,” “Mon enfant, ma soeur, / Songe à la douceur / D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!” (104) [“My sister, my child, / Dream, gently beguiled, / Of going away, we two” (105)], is far superior to Roy Campbell’s “My daughter, my sister, / Consider the vista / Of living out there, you and I,” in tone, meter, and rhyme. Perhaps Cranston’s greatest success is in capturing in English the voice of the French modernist Jules Supervieille, the poet to whom he feels closest. Super- vieille’s octosyllables in “Dieu se souvient de son premier arbre” (138) are effectively

Reviews 207 transposed into jaunty iambic tetrameter in “God remembers his first tree” (139) and Cranston’s off-rhymes, replacing Supervieille’s full rhymes, seem appropriate. Supervieille’s particular blend of the colloquial and the poetic comes across beautifully in the only free-verse poem translated here, “Le désir” (“Desire”). In the last translation in the volume, that of René Char’s “Le bois de l’Epte,” (“Clearing”), Cranston attempts something quite different—a rendering of Char’s eighteen lines of free verse into what he calls a “near sonnet” of fourteen rhymed lines, as well as a radical change of the ending. Although this is the most extreme example, some of the other poems are also closer to what Robert Lowell called “imitations” than to close translations. To read this volume, back and forth between the original texts and the always interesting and often genial translations, is to be reminded that the act of translating poetry can also be an act of comparative literature.

Mary Ann Frese Witt u North Carolina State University

Alain Montandon, Le Baiser des Lumières Clermond-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2004, 214 pp.

Alain Montandon, Le Baiser: Le corps au bord des lèvres Paris: Editions Autrement, 2005, 123 pp.

In his Diary of a Seducer, Soren Kierkegaard expressed regret about the lack of a good study of “the kiss.” It seems that since the publication of the Diary in 1843, the philosopher’s wish has been fulfilled beyond his wildest dreams, with numerous books about the kiss published over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including several published very recently. In the past decade, for example, the kiss has been the central topic of art exhibits, academic colloquia, and books. Academics, scientists, artists, and the popular media have shown an increasing interest in kissing, which accounts for the downright surge in publication of encyclopedias, histories, photograph albums, anthologies, and self-help manuals dedicated to this apparently banal gesture. Among the plethora of recent titles, a few works stand out by their academic approach and by the fact that they require from their readers a deeper and more sophisticated literary knowledge. I am, of course, referring to Alain Montandon’s two recent offerings: Le Baiser des Lumières, a collective work published in 2004, and Le Baiser: Le corps au bord des lèvres, published in 2005. Yet before we discuss these books, let us back up a step in order to survey the context from which they emerge. Some historical perspective will permit us to

208 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 better evaluate Montandon’s contributions. To begin, we should note in a general way that the kiss has not always had the social functions and visible place in social life that it now has. Western civilization is currently so inundated with kissing imagery that it is easy to forget that the functions, codes, and symbolisms attached to kissing are not universal or even “natural.” What now can occur without scandal in broad daylight used to take place only behind the drapes of closed carriages, dense foliage, or in the intimacy of a boudoir. There was a time when moral rules either banned or limited the length of a kiss in movies, whereas nowadays long, passionate embraces are usually only build-up to something more. And, if we reach back further into history, representations of kissing used to have a “sacred” function, not an erotic one. Such contextualization is necessary to learn how to decrypt images of kissing “on the mouth” (and often between males) in the Christian tradition, for example, and in order to avoid erotic or homoerotic anachronism. Most of the recent titles (The Book of Kisses, The Book of the Kiss, The Kiss, The Encyclopedia of Kissing, etc.) are thus not properly historical: they tend to provide an amalgam of anecdotes, dictionary entries, and literary quotes, ranging from western antiquity to the troubadours, various myths to uncanny rituals, Renais- sance poetry to naturalist novels. In this category, one might mention The Litera- ture of Kissing, published in 1876 by C.C. Bombaugh, an anonymous study published in Nancy in 1888 entitled Le Baiser, étude littéraire et historique, and The Kiss and Its History, written in 1901 by the Romance studies scholar Chistopher Nyrop. These books might be considered the “ur-texts” of kissing studies since they are among the most quoted (often without fact-checking) and since their vocabulary, historiographic method, and even their anecdotes have produced a kind of kissing “folklore.” Most books on the kiss seem to feel the need to repeat the Latin vocabulary of embracing (osculum, basium, and suavium), make reference to Mon- taigne’s comments on the kissing etiquette of his time, and so on. Adding a new twist to this tradition, Martine Mairal’s anthology, Le Livre du baiser (published in 2000), creates kissing categories and invites the readers to fill in the blanks with their own memories and personal experiences. Since Freud, it is hard to tear the kiss apart from certain vital functions, especially from the nutritive function. Often the kiss is included (as in Claude Olivenstein’s Ecrit sur la bouche) somewhere between breastfeeding and going to the dentist. A text that breaks with this tradition is Adam Phillips’s On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1993), where the kiss is no longer plays a role in Freud’s “oral stage,” but now acquires a more uncertain status. Phillips rightly underscores the fact that the kiss has only a marginal focus in Freud’s writings. Distancing themselves even more from psychoanalysis are two excellent studies, one written by Nicolas James Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, which is followed at forty years distance by a book with a similar scope, Le Baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age by Yannick Carré. Very well documented and based on

Reviews 209 an impressive amount of research, they also differ from all the long and indistinct list of anthologies and self-help books. Which brings us back to Montandon’s recent books. Author of several books on politeness, savoir-vivre and hospitality, Montandon pushes the study of “manners” one step further with the analysis of the kiss, its practice and its representations in the eighteenth century. In a way, this collective work is a continuation of Perella’s work: The Kiss Sacred and Profane ended with some brief references to the eighteenth century and, of course, to the famous “acrid kisses” that Saint-Preux receives from Julie in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Montandon’s collective work picks up this historical thread. Like previous studies, the articles in Montandon’s volume delineate various “types” of kisses. What separates these articles from Perella’s or Carré’s studies, however, is the fact that most of the contributors draw their examples from literary sources. The Kiss Sacred and Profane as well as Le Baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age included only a few literary references; their main focus is on historical chronicles, contracts, theological treatises, or sermons. Montandon’s Le Baiser des Lumières is entirely a literary study consisting of eighteenth-century French authors such as Fontenelle, Diderot, Voltaire, Dorat, Sade, or Marivaux. What makes Le Baiser des Lumières an important book is that it tracks a pivotal moment in the history of kissing: the moment it begins to shed its sacred function and begins to become intensely eroticized. The predominance of the private, erotic dimensions—suggested even by the illustrations of the text: embracing cherubs, stolen kisses from young girls, etc.—is thus fully justified by the timeframe of the book. In the century of the Enlightenment the kiss belongs more and more to the private sphere, and its sacred or political meanings are increasingly muted or limited. The book, thus, begins with social and cultural phenomena emerging at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Each chapter focuses on one type of kiss and its literary representation, and by doing so, the book sheds new light on specific French Enlightenment categories, such as “galanterie,” “libertinage,” or “sensibilité.” In other words, types of kisses, such as the “baiser galant,” are examined not only as a literary themes, but also as conceptual windows onto the broader context of eighteenth-century French society. The disposition of the chapters is chronological and thematic: the first article starts with 1700 and with the “baiser galant” followed by an analysis of the “baiser transport” in the first half of the century. The next chapter encompasses a wider area with a study of kisses and geometry, followed by a chapter on Dorat’s literary kisses, on theatrical kisses, and on the libertine discourses of Sade and Casanova. To take just one example of the historical approach of the book, the chapter “Le baiser dans la tourmente révolutionnaire: effu- sions et épanchements d’une aristocratie victime” by Carole Dornier focuses on the kisses mentioned in the Mémoires of the Duchess of Turzel or of Mme. Campan and analyzes what the gesture reveals about French society at the end of the Ancien

210 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Régime. Dornier delineates several categories, such as proximity and distance, affection, noblesse, sensitivity, etc., and shows, for example, how the “noble” kiss, becomes symptomatic of a sociological evolution and a concomitant moral blurring as this type of kiss crosses the social/class boundaries of the time. By describing noble and affectionate embraces as going out of fashion, theMémoires portray this gesture both as a defensive act of a vanishing aristocracy and as the announcement of an emerging new order. Montandon ends the book with an analysis of the narrative strategies of the kiss in Pigault-Lebrun, however his chapter does not serve as a conclusion per se; rather, it opens an enticing perspective on kisses and writing that remains to be explored. Alain Montandon’s second book on this topic, Le Baiser: Le corps au bord des lèvres, seems like a response to his open-ended chapter in Le Baiser des Lumières while, at the same time, it fits perfectly into the collection “Le corps plus que jamais” (The body more than ever), marking, as it does, one more step in the modernization and eroticization of the kiss. The comments, personal meditations, and literary quotes take the reader far from Perella’s book on the “holy” or “spiritual” kiss. However, one should not be fooled by the author’s humorous, witty, and apparently whimsical tone: Montandon is an expert guide who leads the reader through the labyrinth of numerous literary representations, commercials, personal récits, and songs. From the traditional vocabulary of the kiss mentioned by older anthologies, to psychoanalytical perspectives of the bite-like kiss, from treatises of civil manners to the sexual practices of the Melanesians, this whirlwind tour through the history of the kiss and though the history of its representations misses neither the now well-know Latin vocabulary of the kiss, nor the references to all the anthological embraces mentioned by the studies since Nyrop. In this, as in the Baiser des Lu- mières, Montandon does not attempt to synthesize history into a single image of the kiss, but rather cleverly leaves matters open for future exploration and reflection.

Anca Sprenger u Brigham Young University

Zahi Zalloua, Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2005, 191 pp.

Zahi Zalloua’s Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism combines the best of the “poeticist” and the “contextualist” schools of Montaigne scholarship. As an antidote to the dilemma of choosing between analyses of the text or its historical context, Zalloua suggests that we need to get “outside” of this binary, and to examine the moi of the Essais “as emerging in a dynamic space situated precisely at the intersection of textuality and referentiality” (5). The book’s focus is the relation between ethics

Reviews 211 and a notion of the self as it is conceived skeptically in terms of multiple “others” presented in the Essais: Socrates, la Boétie, and the figure of the Amerindian “cannibal.” Zalloua’s thesis, which echoes scholars as diverse as Foucault, Levinas, La Capra, and Greenblatt, is that Montaigne’s “care” of these others is primarily ethical, and is essential to the essayist’s skeptical self- fashioning both within and as the writing of his text. The first chapter applies this thesis to Montaigne’s “essaying” of Socrates: since one cannot definitively characterize the other in or as a fixed language, one is forced to “take care” of the often contradictory and inconclusive representations of the other, and of the self as other (31–32). Skeptical doubt hence characterizes Mon- taigne’s project of fashioning and taking care of himself, which in Zalloua’s reading becomes a hermeneutic fashioning and care of the exemplary other in/as the Essais. In other words, the essayistic practice of skepticism—the belief that knowledge is unattainable—leads to an ethics of self-care that accepts the self in its alterity, modeled upon the paradoxical alterity and familiarity of Socrates as an exemplary figure. Chapter two examines Montaigne’s exemplary friendship with la Boétie. It analyzes two key metaphors for the lost friend: that of a mystical or Neo-Platonic “divine liaison,” and the topos of the friend as “another self,” borrowed from Aris- totle and Cicero (78–81). The crucial passage of “De l’amitié” (par ce que c’estoit luy, par ce que c’estoit moy) represents the culmination of Montaigne’s “essaying” of his friendship, i.e., his attempt to “think differently” about la Boétie by juxtaposing their relationship with a series of exemplary others, and then transcending these discursive figures in order to express this “extra-discursive” emotion. Montaigne thus configures in writing the alterity of his friend while demonstrating the importance of this classically-mediated representation for the fashioning of his own writing self. Within this ethical/skeptical paradigm, chapter three considers readings of Montaigne’s famous essays on Amerindian culture as an allegory for the French Wars of Religion. Zalloua sees “Des cannibales” and “Des coches” as moving beyond this kind of appropriation of the other in the rhetorical and cultural terms of the self. Montaigne’s move is rather to problematize the notion of the relation between self and other by recognizing the irreducibly polysemic nature of the Amer- indians (124–25). Hence, while the chapter relates the essayist’s complex account of trauma among the invaded populations to his own traumatic context, it rejects the simple identification with these others that has been read in these essays in favor of a “desirable empathy” that Montaigne seeks to provoke in his readers. The conclusion describes the essayist’s “semantic reversals and transformations” of the figure of the cannibal as an attempt to “alter” his readers as skeptical/ethical subjects.

212 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Zalloua’s conclusion briefly examines Montaigne’s tenure as mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585. It argues that Montaigne’s skeptical ethics enabled him to nego- tiate with relative success the difficult tensions that characterized these turbulent years. Zalloua sees Montaigne’s existence at this time as a consequence of his conception both of himself and of others within the skeptical “dialectic” of the Essais: “Montaigne the esprit genereux moves beyond the ancient ideal of self-mastery, making the respect for the other—for alterity in its diverse manifestations—central to his ethics of care” (163). On the whole, Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism offers a reading of theEssais that demonstrates both extensive historical knowledge and broad familiarity with (post) modern theory. As such, it is a significant addition to the vast literature on Montaigne.

David LaGuardia u Dartmouth College

Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns, The Target, Translated and with an essay by Ben Stoltzfus Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006, 115 pp.

A painting by Jasper Johns of a bulls-eye, aptly if unimaginatively entitled “The Target,” appears on the dust jacket of a book with the same title. The book contains eight color plates of paintings exhibited in a 1978 Johns show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, accompanied by a short fictional narrative written for the exhibit catalogue by New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. That narrative, entitled “La Cible,” is translated here as “The Target.” Robbe-Grillet’s text was unorthodox, to say the least: “La Cible” no more “introduced” the exhibit than Johns’s paintings “illustrated” the text. Rather, Robbe-Grillet used the paintings as jumping off points or “generators” for his own inventions, which he also incorporated into a full-length novel, Souvenirs du triangle d’or.1 In The Target, as in the original catalogue, neither the paintings nor the fiction is subordinated, nor are the two simply juxtaposed. Instead, verbal and visual texts are placed into dialogue, which is what makes this volume particularly useful to comparatists. This virtual conversation between Robbe-Grillet and Johns is not comparative in any traditional or obvious sense, but fortunately, the discussion has a wise and informed moderator. Already the author of several studies of Robbe-Grillet and here at once translator, editor, and exegete, Ben Stoltzfus mobilizes an impressive array of critical approaches to unpack the many-layered connections between Johns’s paintings and Robbe-Grillet’s text. In his “Jasper Johns and Alain Robbe-Grillet: An Interarts Essay,” Stoltzfus traces Robbe-Grillet’s creative genealogy through Pop

Reviews 213 Art to the Surrealists and beyond. He also selected fifty additional black-and-white reproductions of Johns’s works for inclusion in the volume to accompany his essay. The Target can profitably be read as a companion volume toLa Belle Captive (1975), a novel in which Robbe-Grillet was similarly inspired by a series of paintings by René Magritte. In that case too, Stoltzfus provided both translation and enlightenment in the form of another critical study, “The Elusive Heroine: An Interarts Essay.”2 Stoltzfus uses linguistic and semiotic analysis to argue that Robbe-Grillet’s text and Johns’s paintings approach their respective media in analogous ways. Highly ironic and self-reflexive, both artists work in a meta-artistic frame to draw attention away from mimesis in order instead to engage the reader/viewer in the process of creating meaning. Both are aware (to cite a formula from Robbe-Grillet’s fellow New Novelist Jean Ricardou) that creation is not only the story of an adventure but also and simultaneously the adventure of a story. That story emerges from reorganization of familiar material into new configu- rations, a process (an adventure) that Stoltzfus elucidates with the help of psychoanalysis and chaos theory. Special attention is given to the notion of “strange attractors,” which resemble unconscious or hidden generators of images and text. Stoltzfus identifies core motifs that Robbe-Grillet adapts from Johns, and he traces both artists’ focus on objects such as targets and cells in all their various manifestations, including psychic processes and organic forms. By manipulating these and other motifs, the two artists activate and recycle cultural myths, bringing them to the surface of consciousness. Finally, Stoltzfus argues compellingly for the political implications and even the overt revolutionary potential of Johns’s and Robbe-Grillet’s experimental artistic production. By breaking the rules of realistic representation and radically reorder- ing received realities, he maintains, the two artists demonstrate the malleability of the world and our power to transform it. In showing “that it is possible to deviate from a culture’s prescribed order” (76) art has the capacity to “dislocate the codes” (93) and to “alter our habits and expectations” (97). It can challenge consumer culture, for example, by engaging the reader/viewer’s active participation and thus showing that the point of art is “not to consume meaning, but to produce it” (79). Stoltzfus bravely takes on Robbe-Grillet’s notorious misogyny and asks whether it parodies or simply recreates the dominant social images, but he is only able to conclude that the “indeterminacy” of Robbe-Grillet’s texts (and Johns’s images) might serve to destabilize established gender and erotic codes. I wish he had pursued the ideological implications of this theme and connected it to the problems of freedom that he so forcefully and effectively raises elsewhere in the essay. The Target is a beautiful volume and an exemplary work of comparative study. Like all first-rate critical writing, Stoltzfus’s essay is both sophisticated and clear; it

214 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 is valuable for specialists and accessible to the uninitiated. The essay’s pedagogical effectiveness—its careful explanation of critical concepts, its integrated discussion of bibliography, its blend of methodological discussion with exploratory speculation—make it an excellent point of departure for study of metafiction and the powers of experimental art in two media. Only the volume’s price might deter its use in the classroom.

Lynn A. Higgins u Dartmouth College

Notes

1 Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Souvenirs du triangle d’or: Roman. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1978. 2 Robbe-Grillet, Alain. La Belle Captive: A Novel. Trans. Ben Stoltzfus. Essay by Ben Stoltzfus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, eds.,Crowds Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, 439 pp.

“The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language” (77). Such is the central claim of Elias Canetti’s fascinating and highly idiosyncratic work, Crowds and Power (1960). Canetti attempts to dissect the crowd almost as if it were a physics problem, elaborating his own schema to judge its form, density, and acceleration. Despite the fact that Canetti won the Nobel Prize partially on the strength of this book, his ahistorical approach would probably not withstand rigorous academic scrutiny today. Studies of the crowd published after Canetti’s work such as George Rudé’s The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England (1964), Serge Moscovici’s The Age of the Crowd (1981), and Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (1981) by Susanna Barrows, to name a few, offer more historical depth but are scattered across different disciplines (history, sociology, literature) that do not always seem in conversation with each other. The book Crowds, edited by Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Tiews and the product of five years of collaborative research at the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, is entirely new in that it combines the best aspects of both approaches: it retains the creativity and enthusiasm of Canetti’s project without neglecting the historical context that gives a particular crowd its significance. Among the topics addressed by scholars from different disciplines are sports crowds, movie audiences, crowds in visual art, Chinese crowds, crowds of pilgrims, and revolutionary French masses.

Reviews 215 To compliment these diverse studies of the crowd, shorter pieces that examine the etymological roots of the word in various languages and personal testimonies about crowd experiences are included in the side margins. This design choice, which suggests hypertext or internet page layouts, results in surprising and occasionally humorous juxtapositions. Schapp’s opening essay titled “Mob Porn,” which analyzes the manipulation of crowd images in an Italian fascist magazine from the 1930s, is paired with Michael Hardt’s effusive prose on his experience of Whitman-esque love at World Bank and imf protests in 2001 and 2003. The chapter on “Market Crowds” by Urs Stäheli about how stockbrokers attempt to use crowd psychology to their advantage is playfully linked with Jessica Burstein’s entertaining account of the predatory habits of the avid shopper during the Barney’s New York Warehouse sale. Crowds does not seem to have an overarching thesis, although one hypothesis is tentatively advanced. In the introduction, Schnapp notes that “the defining collec- tivities of the new millennium” seem to be based upon electronic communication and the creation of virtual communities rather than upon the heaving masses that appear in nineteenth century literature (xvi). To this end, the book is associated with an impressive multimedia website that elaborates and illustrates the essays it contains, as well as providing new material on the subject. In principle, interested scholars and artists can also join this virtual community by contributing to the existing gallery of images and text. Ultimately, however, Schapp and Katherine Hayles agree that “physical congre- gations and electronic gatherings” are not mutually exclusive but rather “participate in a dynamic media ecology” together (377). Crowds is an exemplary work of collaborative scholarship and would be useful not only to those who interested in the history of the representation of crowds, but to anyone who is teaching modernism more generally.

Martha Kuhlman u Bryant University

Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, 424 pp.

At the end of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze gestures at what has come to be called the Neobaroque: “Something has changed in the situation of monads, between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings, and the new model invoked by Tony Smith, the sealed car speeding down the dark high-

216 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 way” (136–371). In the late twentieth century, that is, monadology became “nomadology” and the Baroque was free, albeit with new tensions and complications, to re- invent itself in new places, times, and forms. Part of the brilliance of The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction consists in locating this shift in geographic, historical, and cultural places that Deleuze ignores. Latin America’s rich genealogy of the Baroque, as Parkinson Zamora masterfully shows, spans centuries and ultimately defies any attempt to equate the Neobaroque and New World Baroque with the relativism typically associated with postmodernity. Often lavish (not only because of the many illustrations) and always acute, The Inordinate Eye balances the claims of formalism and historicism as it navigates the interactions and analogies between verbal and visual arts in the Baroque(s). Read- ing, and I mean this in the broadest sense of the term, the art of the Aztecs, Rivera, Kahlo, Carpentier, Garro, Galeano, García Márquez, and Borges, the book shuttles between cultural theory and intellectual history to chart “transcultural energies in relation to New World Baroque aesthetics and ideology” (xv). Relying throughout on the conceptual lens of the “inordinate,” it furnishes a cornucopia of insights about the objective forms, subjective motivations, and expressive limits found in the Baroque’s various incarnations. This is an exemplary comparatist work—accessible to the general reader yet keenly engaged in the on-going task of mapping how the Baroque creates and de- creates meaning and aesthetic feelings. Like recent books by Christopher Braider, Rebecca Zorach, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, The Inordinate Eye rethinks received hermeneutics of the Baroque(s) with marvelous results. Blurring disciplinary boundaries between art history and literary criticism, it shows how cardinal “inordinate” qualities of the Baroque follow a curious logic of translation, whereby elements of indigenous culture, colonial and European painting and architecture, as well as aspects of Mexican mural and oil painting re-circulate in Latin American fiction. In part this result is due to the fact that historical phenomena maintain a certain “spiritual” efficacy, such that in the wake of the seventeenth-century Euro- pean and colonial Baroque, the twentieth-century Neo-Baroque and New World Baroque emerge almost with a sense of inevitability. Such inevitability comes, though, in myriad forms; thus “to encompass this variety, it is important to allow for play among terms, techniques, and intentions” (286). Allied with admirable rigor, such “play” shapes, for instance, a reading of Mesoamerican codices alongside contemporary Latin American fiction such that Parkinson Zamora discovers how time is given “inordinate spatial relation” in both forms; it likewise helps her rethink Carpentier’s originary vision of the New World Baroque in the chiaroscuro light of his debts to the visual and musical arts, Spenglerian theories of history, and insistence on the unique nature of Latin American totalidad. Exemplary also is the

Reviews 217 chapter entitled “Baroque Self: Kahlo and García Márquez,” which locates “conti- nuities” and “discontinuities” between “European Baroque modes of rendering subjectivity . . . and Latin American modes of self-representation” (168). Simply put, this book remaps a field. I wonder, though, if it doesn’t give excessive weight to a visual hermeneutic of literature at moments when the topic at hand is, admittedly, the ineffable, the sublime, or simply a text whose rhetoric (its energeia) tends to outstrip visualization (its enargeia). The conceptual folds of the Baroque conceit, the vertiginous narrative devices in Borges’s prose, or the material copia and hyperbolic repetitions in García Márquez’s novels may be more resistant to a “visual” reading than Parkinson Zamora sometimes allows. Another quibble is that, notwithstanding the attention given to the catastrophic legacy of the conquista and the Baroque’s horror vacui, the inordinate all too frequently becomes exuberant and “celebratory” (164). Benjamin’s vision of the melancholic, ruinous aspects of Baroque subjectivity is also refracted in the Neobarroco, for instance, in José Lezama Lima’s Plutonian dialectic of eros and thanatos that drives his solipsistic masterpiece, Paradiso. And Don Quixote is, for Foucault in Les mots et les choses, a “celui qui s’est aliené dans l’analogie” (63) [man alienated in analogy].2 For Parkin- son Zamora, on the contrary, analogy liberates authors, texts, and works of art from their historical and spatial isolation; indeed, it becomes the engine of her comparatist method. Yet as seductive as analogy was and is as a conceptual framework, the question remains (with apologies to Maxwell): are there real analogies between historical periods? The answer, Parkinson Zamora eloquently asserts, echoing Eugenio D’Ors and Severo Sarduy’s notion of a non-causal rétombée, is yes: “the Baroque is not just a historical period but also a spirit, a way of knowing and being in the world that recuperates dormant cultural energies and sometimes entire cultures” (168). But when does recuperation become appropriation? The ironic appro- priations of the Baroque that Parkinson Zamora discovers in the fiction of García Márquez and Borges can inform comparatist methods as well. Contemplating the Neobaroque, Deleuze observes that it is unable to share “Leibniz’s optimism” (68), for as the stories of Borges taught him, chance and incompossibility may also be operative principles.

Christopher Johnson u Harvard University

Notes

1 Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 2 Paris: Gallimard, 1966.

218 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, 186 pp.

Each of the ten essays in Ronald Bogue’s latest exploration of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy creatively charts ways in which connections might be discovered between seemingly incommunicable regions of art and life. The collection is valuable as much as an example of Deleuze’s method as it is as an exploration of his thought: each essay can stand alone, but the reader will find in their inter-relationships a practical unfolding of the very system of Deleuzian “ways” that are traced in each. Bogue examines the transverse as the means whereby communication is made possible, in multiple ways, between disparate areas of life and thought which initially appear to be closed in upon themselves. This way of considering the world is thus not only creative but also has social and political implications: it connects the realms of the aesthetic and the ethical and suggests new modes of perceiving what is possible in life. Each essay is, then, both an example and exploration of the manner in which the transverse way unfolds new, beneficial pathways of communication between seemingly unconnected domains. Since a discrete ethical system was never formally developed by Deleuze in his philosophy, the essays in this collection are particularly valuable in examining the ways in which ethics permeates his philosophical thought. Moving from the opening essay’s presentation of the immanent nature of the ethical, Bogue explores how the “territories” of the “minor” in literature and music afford possibilities for developing a new collectivity—what Deleuze and his colleague Félix Guattari had called the “people to come.” In the following chapter, several forms of heavy metal music are examined as examples of the relationship between violence and art in contemporary popular culture, wonderfully delineat- ing the Deleuzian way one might be capable of “thinking otherwise.” In the following two essays, Bogue examines a “pedagogy of images” where learning to “think otherwise” is equated with learning to perceive, and thus conceive of, existence in new ways. An education in reading the semiotics of life is explored in relationship to Deleuze’s study of Proust’s textuality, and the visual and aural relationships within Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic aesthetic are presented as a pedagogical primer for viewing and hearing beyond the banally habitual in life. The type of “people to come” that such a pedagogy of signs might realize is developed by examining the Deleuzian reconception of Henri Bergson’s idea of “fabulation” in the following two chapters. The first considers “myth-making” as the ethical capacity

Reviews 219 to create new truths and to falsify accepted realities; the second develops Deleuze’s idea of “fabulation” in his study of Sacher-Mascoch. Each examines the primacy given in Deleuze’s philosophy to the visual over narrative and suggests various ways in which new futures might be made possible in an “untimely” fashion. The final three essays explore the Deleuzian concept of “nomadism” considered as an example of transverse ways between and within different cultural spheres. If the preceding essays in the collection are of value to the comparatist in suggesting a methodological approach, these three essays actively engage with possible reno- vations within the comparatist field. In the first, the role of gypsy music in popular culture and European modernism is presented as evidence of nomadic practice connecting different cultural elements and regions. With the second essay Bogue offers suggestions for a “transcultural poetics,” a cultural studies program deploy- ing a model of “nomadic globalism” as distinct from the practices of western- dominated globalization. In the concluding chapter Bogue reviews an analysis by Christopher L. Miller critical of Deleuzian “nomadology” and underlines the commitment of the transverse to ethical responsibility and to the value inherent in for- mulating new perspectives upon life. In each individual chapter in this collection, Bogue has readily demonstrated such a commitment, both in terms of his always- insightful commentary on Deleuze’s transverse method and also through his artful demonstrations of that selfsame method in action.

Paul Fox u Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Gail Pool, Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007, x + 172 pp.

Faint Praise provides an insightful overview of the history and state of book reviewing in America. Given that there is no other book on this topic, Gail Pool’s study is an important intervention. Book reviews raise a host of intriguing questions situated at the intersection of the economic, political, and intellectual dimensions of American culture. For example, why is it that books from larger commercial publishing houses are more often reviewed than books from small and university presses? Why is it that books on some topics just never seem to be reviewed? Why is it that the vast majority of book reviews are positive? Pool’s study touches on each of these questions as well as a number of others. She draws on her experience as former editor of the Boston Review and as book col- umnist for the Christian Science Monitor, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the San Diego Union-Tribune to address these matters with practical insight and useful suggestions. Her experience as a professional book reviewer and former book review

220 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 editor provides a rare, extended, inside look at a neglected dimension of American book culture. Rather than following the standard “tired tale” of the “perpetual decline” (140) of book reviewing in America—a perception that Pool notes has been around since the institution’s inception at the end of the eighteenth century—she aims to provide a realistic set of suggestions “to improve a trade so unruly, so dependent on individuals, and so constrained by obstacles that lie outside its control” (125). Still, though her study points out several improvements needed in the book reviewing trade, it provides far too little working detail as to how to actually bring about these improvements. Her first and most “essential” suggestion for improvement is that “we need to devise a better means of choosing books for review” (125). “Our current system inevitably leads to overlooking good books, overpraising bad ones, and undermining the book page” (125). Her point is a valid one—and indeed one of the major problems facing book reviewing in America today. It is complicated even more by an increase in the number of titles published coupled by a decrease in review venues. However, while she points out several efforts to address the oversight of titles by reviews, such as that of Kirkus, which launched an effort in 2004 to review any book for a fee (126), Pool concludes that these projects are headed in the wrong direction. She rightly points out that “the selling of reviews” “divests reviewing of one of its central functions: meaningful selection” (127). If the current efforts at reform are flawed, what then would provide a better means of choosing books for review? Pool does not provide a compelling response to this question. Pool’s study would have benefited by directing more of the responsibility to not overlook good books for review and to refrain from publishing reviews that overpraise bad books toward the editors of book reviews themselves. While Pool’s study leads in this direction, it falls short of ultimately placing these responsibilities in the hands of editors. A book review editor has the power to both reject reviews that overpraise bad books as well as to set up mechanisms within their book review process to avoid as much as possible overlooking good books. One such mechanism to aid this process is a well-rounded group of knowledgeable associate editors and reviewers that can advise the book review editor—that is, provide the editor with a broader and more in-depth vantage point on forthcoming and new books. No editor can remain aware of all of the “good” books on the horizon that merit review, though they can gain more insight on noteworthy books through the sage advice of their colleagues and peers. Pool’s second suggestion is that “we need to find better ways to reward reviewers” (127). Again, while this point is relevant, Pool offers little insight as to how to effect this change, particularly given the economic woes of book reviews across the country and the increase in books published and decrease in review venues. More-

Reviews 221 over, if reviewers are willing to write good reviews for lower rates (and Pool does not indicate that this is not the case), then what motivation is there for publications to pay more for their reviews? Also, while some might be inclined to write a better review if they were paid more, one would like to believe that there are others who would write a quality review regardless of the fee. Reviewing is, as Pool says, “skilled work deserving of compensation” (127). How- ever, if the rate of compensation is directly proportional to the quality of the reviews, then the publication needs to either pay their reviewers enough to produce quality reviews or find new reviewers—or to cease publishing reviews. There are many potentially excellent reviewers in America; however, identifying them takes time, patience, and luck. It should be a priority among editors to identify and men- tor the next generation of reviewers. Not only will this action diversify the mix of voices commenting on books in America, it will also help solidify the trade for generations to come. It should be noted that though Pool’s comments regarding increasing the rewards for reviewers are aimed primarily at “professional” reviewers—that is to say, those who aim to make at least a part of their living by writing reviews—they are also relevant to “non-professional” reviewers, such as those who write reviews for scholarly publications (such as The Comparatist). Here, too, the reward system has been lacking, and the effects of this deficit also negatively affect scholarly book reviewing in America. There is, however, some reason to believe that this situation may change. While only about 400 words, the section of the recent “Report of the mla Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion” on book reviews (Part III “The Mechanics of the Tenure Review,” Section 4 “Reviews of Scholarly Books,” 55–56) had some very significant comments and recommendations concerning reviews of scholarly books. The report comments that “the best published reviews constitute an important scholarly activity that helps direct, alter, and sustain ongoing conversations in the field” (55). In addition, it recommends that “book reviews should be an important element of tenure evaluations” (55). Both comments serve as a wake-up call for those who have relegated the book review to second-tier scholarly activity status. In its recommendations, the report encourages “senior scholars” to write reviews that will not only “help identify significant new work,” but that will also serve as models of critically engaged reviewing (56). It also recommends that journal editors “cultivate a more critical culture of reviewing” (56)—perhaps the most controversial statement about book reviewing in the report. While scholarly reviewing has arguably become a genre marked by increasing degrees of politeness and summation—that is to say, its critical edge has been getting duller—one wonders if pushing in the opposite direction will only serve to “discourage” more people in our

222 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 profession from reviewing. It is more difficult—and dangerous—to write a critical review. The most obvious reason for this danger is that a critical review justifiably raises the specter of retaliation from the reviewed author and their associates. Still, the mla report’s comments and recommendations on book reviews are a major step in the right direction. Moreover, its “summary recommendation” that “the profession as a whole should encourage scholars at all levels to write substantive book reviews” (63) is right on the mark. Unfortunately, there is no such document like the mla Report to bolster the reward system for professional reviewers. Nevertheless, one hopes that its impact will reach into both the scholarly and professional reviewing arenas. Pool’s third and final suggestion for improving the book reviewing trade is that “we need to better train . . . reviewers and review editors, better preparing them for the technical constraints and demands of the genre and, more broadly, alerting them to critical and ethical issues in the field” (128). Again, this is a fine suggestion, though the specifics of implementation are vague in Pool’s study. There are no academic (or non-academic) programs of study for review editors or reviewers (37), even if there are some general guidelines followed by most editors and reviewers. Excellence in reviewing and review editing comes from a variety of sources. Men- toring by experienced editors is perhaps the best way to nurture latent talent. The strongest suggestion in Pool’s study is also perhaps the most controversial one. Writes Pool, “praise rather than nastiness has generally been the central problem in American reviewing” (47). She advises editors “to look for writers who are above all critics” (135). “It’s time to abandon the tradition of accepting and even seeking out reviewers because they’ve published fiction or written on subjects that have nothing to do with the books at hand—unless they prove themselves to be critics as well” (135). Pool rightly contends that readers of book reviews “want hon- est opinions,” “not an objective judgment or a grand statement for all time” of the book under review (137). Critics say “what they actually think about a book in a way that is more interesting, vital, and real” (137), whereas mere reviewers “are far likely to be mildly praising or noncommittal” (57). Though Pool avoids making a formal distinction between critics and reviewers, feeling that distinctions like this are “too vague to be useful” (8), it is clear throughout her study that she favors reviewing replete with critical insight over reviewing tempered by “faint praise.” Pool’s study is must reading for editors of book reviews. Its value is found in her passion for raising the status and quality of book reviewing in America. While the depth of her approach to the central issues confronting book reviewing in America will be found wanting by those seeking a nuanced response to the economic and political challenges facing book reviews today, and there is little discussion of scholarly (non-professional) book reviewing, Faint Praise is still an excellent primer on the book reviewing trade. With over 150,000 books published in America each year,

Reviews 223 and a shrinking number of venues for book reviews, she rightly points out that the need for “book reviewing that plays ‘a filtering role’” is all the more important (14). However, just how book editors and reviewers will accomplish this task under the increasingly difficult economic conditions facing America’s book reviews is a challenge perhaps better addressed by another study.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo u University of Houston, Victoria

Work Cited

“Report of the mla Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.” Profession 2007. New York: Modern Language Association of America. 9–71.

224 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 Book Notes

Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005, 332 pp.

The translation of Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania enhances the existing approach to the formation of ideological extremisms throughout the twentieth century, regardless of their left or right orientation. This oversight of Romania’s geopolitical crisis in the Balkans calls into question the role that the interwar Romanian intelligentsia played in the elabora- tion of the doctrine of the “Iron Guard” (right extremist movement), also known as the “Legion of the Archangel Michael.” Alimented by the discussion of “Romanianism,” a term that sums up a constant quest for identity often seen as the burden of belonging to a downtrodden country, Petreu’s insightful work conjoins an ethical personal drive to account for an “infamous” historical heritage and the epistemological imperative to contribute to the worldwide scholarship on the birth of violent ideologies in general. Furthermore, as Norman Manea notes in his foreword, the close examination of the Iron Guard’s highly problematic claim to ground its political agenda of self-sacrifice in Chris- tian Orthodox spirituality sheds new light on fundamentalist religious terrorism at large. Accordingly, in a passage added to the American edition, Marta Petreu compares the “Legionnaire’s death” confined only to Romanian territory with today’s borderless “suicide bombers” (45). While serving the immediate purpose of capturing the attention of the reader preoccupied by the currently unequal dynamics of power in the world, this parallel needs to be carefully contextualized. Thus, Petreu orchestrates an impressive series of sources (newspaper articles, letters, pamphlets, unpublished personal archives, historical and philosophical writings of both European and Romanian thinkers) on a minutely detailed historical background. To further illustrate her argument, she places at the center of her inquiry the Romanian and French philosopher E. M. Cioran. In so doing, Petreu develops her case study from the vantage point of a work enshrouded by contro- versy—The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and several newspaper articles and personal letters that testify to the ups and downs of Cioran’s support of the far right between 1933 and 1941. Petreu thus sets forth the extent to which Cioran’s biogra-

225 phy echoes the dialectical process of transfiguration that the young philosopher wanted for his “primitive” country. Convinced that all his personal achievements were conditioned by the national failure to equal the other leading European countries in power, Cioran believed that the far right violence against older politicians and intellectuals would save him from collective mediocrity. Thus, the Iron Guard’s vision of a dictatorial regime in Romania was in accordance with his plea for a dialectical leap into History, as opposed to a gradual adaptation to the Western European standards preferred by the older generation. Not only does Marta Petreu bring us closer to the parallel between Cioran’s personal turmoil and the political instability of interwar Romania, but she also highlights the significance of his “heretical” stands (pro-Occidentalist and anti-Christian Orthodox) within a group that eventually ceased to acknowledge him as one of its own. Moreover, her analysis of Cioran’s controversial stance regarding Romania’s minorities, especially Jewish and Hungarian minorities, further enriches our understanding of nationhood. In sum, this study is a remarkable and long-awaited attempt to fill in several epistemological ruptures still in place within post-Soviet identity narratives. With this in mind, Marta Petreu first lays the philosophical foundation for Cioran’s view on history as tributary to Spengler’s vitalism, as well as to Hegelian dialectics. Sec- ond, by establishing a close connection between Cioran’s “national collectivism” (a mixture of “state socialism” and the Bolshevik agenda) and Ceausescu’s dictatorship, she unravels the continuity between Romania’s Communist regime and the doctrines promoted by the autochthon intelligentsia. Third, by reading the apoliti- cal French Cioran in the light of his endorsement of the Iron Guard, Petreu rightly traces his gradual process of disenchantment and detachment from his early political views in Romania, which culminates in his disapproval of any form of action. Last but not least, if we are to consider Marta Petreu’s own contribution to “Ro- manianism” from the perspective of Cioran’s unfortunate flirtation with ideology, her incentive to question the foundations of any imagined community is noteworthy, especially in the larger context of the “new” Europe.

Otilia Baraboi u University of Washington

Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006, 301 pp.

Action Writing should appeal to scholars of postwar American and international literature and to those particularly interested in Kerouac’s style. The book is an unusual but effective study—part biography, part literary analysis, part cultural critique—encompassing a variety of literary, aesthetic, and cultural sources. Literary

226 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 sources include Keroauc’s work, particularly his letters, On The Road, and Visions of Cody, as well as writers who influenced Kerouac (Wolfe, Miller, Celine) and whom Hrebeniak associates with Kerouac’s work due to analogous philosophical ideas (Charles Olson, Michael McClure). For aesthetic sources, Hrebeniak focuses on two nonverbal wellsprings of Kerouac’s inspiration: jazz (especially Charlie Parker) and modern painting (especially Jackson Pollock). These heterogeneous sources indicate both a conscious and direct as well subconscious or associative connection to Kerouac’s work. Given that Kerouac’s work “is born of a transdisciplinary poetics” (2), it makes sense that the sources in Action Writing are transdisciplinary as well. Hrebeniak posits Kerouac’s “wild” form as “a prolongation of ecstasy to counter- act the enervation of sanctioned narratives” (50). He views Kerouac’s subversive desire to topple convention—i.e., literary prescriptions and cultural oppression— as Dionysian. Action or “orgiastic” (49) writing is about the eradication of “disciplinary borders and cliques . . . in the push to access the widest range of experience possible” (234). Hrebeniak regards Neal Cassady as the ascendant Dionysian arche- type or force in Kerouac’s fiction. His analysis ofOn The Road in particular achieves a fascinating blend of archetypal and cultural criticism. Hrebeniak sees jazz in the same essential Dionysian terms as it influenced Kerouac’s style: “A progressive quest for freedom marks every point of renewal in jazz, a crusade to increase the capacity for expression” (198). But the flip side is Dionysian excess, destruction, and loss or waste. Hrebeniak fittingly explores the negative side in the binary manifestation of Dionysius as both creator and destroyer: “Kerouac’s ambivalence [in On The Road] toward mythic America, a sequence of optimism and defeat that eventually settles on withdrawal” (125). Both the positive and the negative aspects of the Dionysian pattern are woven into not only Kerouac’s characterization and narratives but also into the author’s life and poetics as well. Action Writing offers an engaging analysis and perspicacious exploration of Kerouac’s works, style, and literary art. Examinations of the historical context are generally informed, but occasionally Hrebeniak demonstrates a tendency to simplify in reductive terms. For example, when it comes to politics, he assumes that a government (or State) is a singular entity rather than a complex conglomeration of conflicting cultures, sub-cultures, and interests. In Gramscian discourse, a government or State is in reality not so much a collective unity as a competitive, contradictory battleground. But like Regina Weinrich’s pioneering Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics (1987), Hrebeniak’s book makes a compelling argument to rescue Kerouac from the margin, where he is often dismissed as merely a “popular” writer—or simply understood as a (perhaps the) seminal figure in the Beat movement—claiming instead that he should be regarded as a major writer of international stature. Like its subject and hero, Action Writing is inconsistently profound, but it

Book Notes 227 manages to beautifully capture and analyze the genius, madness, accomplish- ment, naivety, disillusionment, displacement, failure, bitterness, magnetism, and energy—“He’s got it, see?”—that is Kerouac. Action Writing examines the desire for Dionysian generation at the root of Kerouac’s fiction—of destroying or supplanting the tried and worn in order to explore new terra incognita. This same desire also lies at the root of Hrebeniak’s articulate and substantive study. Kerouac’s fiction proved to be trailblazing, and Hrebeniak’s study proves no less trailblazing for Kerouac scholarship.

Keith Cavedo u University of South Florida

Colleen Glenney Boggs, Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773–1892 New York: Routledge, 2007, xii + 200 pp.

In this book, Colleen Glenney Boggs makes a startlingly powerful and original case for “the intrinsic transnationalism of American literature” (3). While other critics consider transnationalism primarily as a spatial or political phenomenon, Glenney Boggs focuses our attention on evidence of linguistic variety in the pages of Ameri- can works themselves: a significant angle so far overlooked by those who habitually equate national print culture with monolingualism. She persuasively argues that American texts have always been multilingual and that “the practice of linguistic translation” actually helped rather than hindered American authors in their quest for artistic innovation (3). In her study of the ways in which “American writers conceptualized and practiced translation as American literature” (6), Glenney Boggs investigates the work of several authors whose commitment to translation demonstrated both their linguistic flexibility and their belief in the value of intercultural dialogue. Phillis Wheatley and Charlotte Forten Grimké used translation to question the monolingual white culture from which they were excluded as African-Americans and to carve out distinctive literary spaces of their own. James Fenimore Cooper endowed his fictional hero Natty Bumppo—traditionally read as a hyper-nationalized “American Adam”—with a talent for translation, but restricted such multilingual privileges to white figures in his novels. Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and Henry Wads- worth Longfellow—the first American comparatist—all envisioned an American literature that benefited imaginatively from cross-cultural conversations initiated in translation. In contrast, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe argued for a monolingual American literature that was “self-referential” in its “lin-

228 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 guistic exceptionalism” (13, 10): a cultural system that defied translation even as it depended upon a multilingual reading public for its survival. As Glenney Boggs incisively observes, the fact that a monolingual concept of national literature eventually won out—and definitively so, as only “‘3 percent of books published in the United States . . . [are] translations, compared with 40 to 50 percent in Western European countries’”—must not prevent us from understanding “the profound relevance of and engagement with translation that historically informed American literature” (149). With the help of her provocative, expansive, yet theoretically grounded work, that important process has already begun.

Leslie Eckel u Suffolk University

Book Notes 229 Books Received

Adams, Jessica, Michael P. Bibler, and Cecile Accilien. Just Below South Intercultural Per- formance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Armstrong, John. Love, Life, Goethe Lessons of the Imagination: From the Great German Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Bautz, Annika. The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudi- nal Study. New York: Continuum, 2007. Berry, R. M. and Jeffrey R. Di Leo.Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. Albany, NY: suny Press, 2007. Brinton, Ian. Dickens’ Great Expectations. London: Continuum, 2007. Brown, Frederick. Flaubert A Biography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Bruster, Douglas. To Be or Not to Be. New York: Continuum, 2007. Casteel, Sarah Phillips. Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writ- ing of the Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Childs, Peter. Modernism and the Postcolonial. London: Continuum, 2007. Cohen, Barbara L. and Dragan Kujundzic, eds. Provocations to Reading Discourses for a Democracy to Come. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Cornwell, Neil. The Absurd in Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. D’haen, Theo, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Zamora, eds.How Far is America From Here? Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. D’hulst, Lieven, Jean-Marc Moura, Liesbeth De Bleeker, and Nadia Lee, eds. Caribbean Interfaces. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Daems, Jim. Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture. New York: Continuum, 2006. Davies, Lloyd H. Projections of Peronism in Argentine Biography. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007. Davis, Phillip. Shakespeare Thinking. New York: Continuum, 2007. Douglas, Mary. Thinking in Circles an Essay on Ring Composition. New Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 2007. Dubois, Thomas A.Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Enslin, Astrid. Canonizing Hypertexts Explorations and Constructions. New York: Con- tinuum, 2007. Franco, Dean J. Ethnic American Literature Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Galloway, Andrew. Medieval Literature and Culture. New York: Continuum, 2006. Garraway, Doris Lorraine. The Libertine Colony Creolization in the Early French Carib- bean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

230 Hamilton, Paul. Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic. New York: Continuum, 2007. Handley, George B. New World Poetics Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Hans, James S. Socrates and the Irrational. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Hawes, Donald. Charles Dickens. London: Continuum, 2007. Hawthorn, Jeremy. Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. London: Continuum, 2007. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Echolalias on the Forgetting of Language. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Hewitt, Andrew. Social Choreography Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hopkins, Lisa, and Matthew Steggle. Renaissance Literature and Culture. New York: Con- tinuum, 2006. Hosp, David. Innocence. New York: Warner Books, 2007. Jansohn, Christa, and Dieter Mehl, eds. The Reception of D.H. Lawrence in Europe. Lon- don: Continuum, 2007. Klages, Mary. Literary Theory a Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum, 2006. Kuortti, Joel, and Jopi Nyman, eds. Reconstructing Hybridity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Levith, Murray J. Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts: Intertextuality and Sources. New York: Continuum, 2007. Lounsbery, Anne. Thin Culture, High Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Lucey, Michael. Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Mallin, Eric Scott. Godless Shakespeare. New York: Continuum, 2007. Mandal, Anthony and Brian Southam. The Receptions of Jane Austen in Europe. New York: Continuum, 2007. Mandel, Naomi. Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. McLean, Paul D. The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renais- sance Florence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Melas, Natalie. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Compari- son. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Monroe, Martin. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Moran, Maureen. Victorian Literature and Culture. New York: Continuum, 2006. Munch, Marc-Mathieu. L’Effet De Vie. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004. Murray, Alex. Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. New York: Continuum, 2007. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Odum, Howard Washington. Wings on My Feet: Black Ulysses At the Wars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Okamoto, Kidåo, and Ian Macdonald. The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi De- tective Stories of Old Edo. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

Books Received 231 Ortega, Julio. Transatlantic Translations. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Pittock, Murray. The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe. New York: Continuum, 2007. Radford, Andrew. The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination 1850– 1930. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Ramirez, Luz Elena. British Representations of Latin America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Rayner, Timothy. Foucault’s Heidegger, Philosophy and Transformative Experience. New York: Continuum, 2007. Redfield, Marc.Legacies of Paul De Man. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Rigby, Catherine E. Topographies of the Sacred the Poetics of Place in European Romanti- cism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Riva, Massimo. Italian Tales an Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Rizal, Josâe. El Filibusterismo Subversion: A Sequel to Noli Me Tangere. Trans. Ma. Soleda Lacson-Locsin and Raul L. Locsin. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. Roberts, Jonathan. William Blake’s Poetry. London: Continuum, 2007. Scott-Douglass, Amy. Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars. New York: Continuum, 2007. Sharkey, E. Joseph. Idling the Engine Linguistic Skepticism in and Around Cortazar, Kafka, and Joyce. Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Simmons, Allan. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. London: Continuum, 2007. Temple, Christel N. Literary Spaces: Introduction to Comparative Black Literature. Dur- ham: Carolina Academic Press, 2007. Tew, Philip, and Rod Mengham. British Fiction Today. New York: Continuum, 2006. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2007. Tredell, Nicolas. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. London: Continuum, 2007. Valkeakari, Tuire. Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Weiss, Peter, and Joachim Neugroschel. The Aesthetics of Resistance. Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 2005.

232 The Comparatist 32 : 2008 THE RUTLEDGE PRIZE 2008 For Graduate Students Giving Papers at the Scla Conference

Each year the Southern Comparative Literature Association offers a prize of $100 for the most promising work presented at its annual conference by a graduate student. The essay is also considered for publication inThe Comparatist. You may submit a paper for consideration for this award by sending it as an email attachment to the scla vice president. The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2008 with the prizewinner to be announced in the 2009 issue of The Comparatist. Send to: Dr. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, [email protected]. Since conference papers are often shortened from longer projects, students are encouraged to submit an essay-length version of their work that would be suitable for journal publication (no longer than 7,500 words). If publishable, prize essays normally appear in the next issue after the official announcement (i.e., a year and a half after the conference presentation), thus allowing ample time for feedback and advice from the editor.

Rutledge Prize Winner 2007

Saskia Ziolokowski, Columbia University “‘So, then people do come here in order to live’: Interiority in the Novels of Rainer Maria Rilke and Scipio Slataper”

Judges’ Citation “This clear and very well documented essay looks at the similarities in how Rilke and Slataper foreground questions concerning fragmentation, alienation, and the self’s relation to the modern city. Working with Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge and Slapater’s Il mio Carso, Ziolokowski makes a compelling case for comparing these two authors on either side of the Austro-Italian border. She also provides valuable insights into literary modernism, focusing especially on the hinge year of 1910 and on the unconventionality of these two works of fiction.

233 rutleDge Prize honoraBle Mention 2007

Matt Lorenz, Stony Brook University “Blake’s Ethical Aesthetic: Wonder and the Other in Blake’s Annotations to Rey- nolds”

Judges’ Citation “In this essay, Lorenz proposes an original Levinasian reading of Blake’s understanding of wonder. Th e author argues for the ethical force of Blake’s aesthetics, turning especially to his critical engagement with Reynolds (which also highlights Blake’s diff erences from Locke and Kant). Th e essay is comparative in the sense that it compels the reader to consider the realms of both the aesthetic and the ethical in reading Blake. It was clearly the richest theoretical essay in the competition.”

Harry C. Rutledge, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Ten- nessee, Knoxville, and an internationally recognized classicist, was the guid- ing spirit behind the founding of the Southern Comparative Literature As- sociation March 28–30, 1974. He served as President, Board Member, and Conference Coordinator, but is best remembered for his enthusiasm in encouraging comparative work of all kinds. He also helped inspire the founding of Th e Comparatist.

234 the CoMParatist 32 : 2008 Southern Comparative Literature Association Call for Papers

“Comparative Literature and World Literature: Textual, Visual, Aural Interconnections and Interfaces” October 2–4, 2008 Auburn University, Auburn Alabama

Auburn University will host the Southern Comparative Literature Association conference October 2-4, 2008. It will feature papers on all areas of comparative literature and all critical approaches. Panels will discuss literatures from the classical to the postmodern, explore genres from the epic to newly emergent multimedia, consider literature and other artistic forms from Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, Australia, and other regions and traditions.

Plenary Speaker: Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

We welcome proposals for papers on the conference theme, “Comparative Litera- ture and World Literature: Textual, Visual, Aural Interconnections and Interfaces.” To submit a paper proposal, send an attachment to [email protected] before May 1, 2008. For conference information, go to http://media.cla.auburn.edu/scla/.

Co-Organizers Donald R. Wehrs, Department of English Robert Weigel, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

235 symploke ¯

editor-in-chief Jeffrey R. Di Leo a journal for the intermingling of literary, cultural and associate editor theoretical scholarship Ian Buchanan

advisory board symplok¯e is a comparative theory and literature journal. Our aim is to provide an arena for critical exchange between established and emerging Charles Altieri voices in the field. We support new and developing notions of comparative Michael Bérubé literature, and are committed to interdisciplinary studies, intellectual Ronald Bogue pluralism, and open discussion. We are particularly interested in Matei Calinescu scholarship on the interrelations among philosophy, literature, culture Edward Casey criticism and intellectual history, though will consider articles on any Stanley Corngold aspect of the intermingling of discourses and disciplines. Lennard Davis Robert Con Davis Henry Giroux forthcoming issues Karen Hanson ANONYMITY  GAMING AND THEORY Phillip Brian Harper Peter C. Herman Candace Lang past issues Vincent B. Leitch CINEMA WITHOUT BORDERS Paisley Livingston COLLEGIALITY  FICTION’S PRESENT Donald Marshall Christian Moraru PRACTICING DELEUZE & GUATTARI Jeffrey Nealon AFFILIATION  THEORY TROUBLE Marjorie Perloff ANTHOLOGIES  SITES OF PEDAGOGY Mark Poster RHETORIC & THE HUMAN SCIENCES Gerald Prince GLOBALISM AND THEORY Joseph Ricapito Robert Scholes Alan Schrift some past & future contributors Tobin Siebers Michael Apple on doing critical educational work Hugh Silverman Peter Baker on deconstruction and violence John H. Smith Tom Conley on border incidence Paul M. Smith Ronald Bogue on minor literature James Sosnoski Frederick Buell on globalization and environmentalism Henry Sussman Matei Calinescu on modernity and modernization Mark Taylor Peter Caws on sophistry and postmodernity S. Tötösy de Zepetnek Claire Colebrook on happiness, theoria, and everyday life Joel Weinsheimer David Damrosch on world literature anthologies Jeffrey Williams Samuel R. Delany on fiction’s present Elizabeth Ellsworth on pedagogy and the holocaust museum submissions Brian Evenson on fiction and philosophy Editor, symplok¯e Caryl Emerson on berlin, bakhtin and relativism School of Arts & Sciences John Frow on terror and cultural studies University of Houston-Victoria Elizabeth Grosz on the future in deleuze Victoria, TX 77901-5731 Alphonso Lingis on bestiality email [email protected] Cris Mazza on postfeminist literature John Mowitt on queer resistance David Palumbo-Liu on asian america and the imaginary subscriptions Marjorie Perloff on poetry and affiliation University of Nebraska Press Steven Shaviro on the sublime 1111 Lincoln Mall David Shumway on marxism without revolution Lincoln, NE 68588-0630 John Smith on queering the will William V. Spanos on humanism after 9/11 www.symploke.org J. Hillis Miller on boundaries in toni morrison Jeffrey Williams on the posttheory generation Ewa Ziarek on foucault’s ethics

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2000 CELJ PHOENIX AWARD FOR SIGNIFICANT EDITORIAL ACHIEVEMENT

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