Colson Whitehead's Zone

4 Introduction Tadeusz Rachwał

6 “Poor Naked Wretches” The Wound of the Ordinary Joseph Kuhn in Agee and Warren

16 At Home in Loneliness, Domesticity and the Early Loneliness at Home Short Stories of Richard Yates Karl Wood

28 Domestication of Foreigner’s Agnieszka Home in Toni Morrison’s Home Łobodziec

38 Southern Antebellum Plantation Home, Prison, Enterprise? Jerzy Sobieraj

48 Domesticating the Flâneur Colson Whitehead’s Zone One Karolina Słotwińska

56 Alienation and Dislocation Joanna Stolarek versus Homeliness and Norm in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley

66 The Secret History A Study in Elitism and Evangelia of Hamden Campus Murder Kyriakidou

76 Out of the Ordinary The Event and its Repetition Priyanka in Paul Auster’s Prose Deshmukh

86 Exile in Julia Alvarez’s Aristi Trendel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

96 “It ghosts” Language as a Haunted Paulina Ambroży Dwelling in Selected Poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore

110 “Why Am I Cold” Sylvia Plath’s English Agnieszka Home and the American Refrigerators Pantuchowicz

122 Other Presences Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics Anna Warso of Hospitality

133 Tracing the Form of Compassion Homelessness in Leslie Małgorzata Myk Scalapino’s “bum series”

142 Abstracts Everyday Spaces

4 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Tadeusz Rachwał Everyday Spaces Introduction Everyday Spaces

Tadeusz Rachwał Everyday Spaces 5

Tadeusz Rachwał The notion of the everyday can be easily conflated with what is routine, mundane, is professor of English usual, ordinary, perhaps also normal. The “where” of this normalcy, the space at University of Social or place of the everyday, seems to be a fairly complex issue, if only for the Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. He published fact that the scene of the everyday may always be the same as the scene of books and articles on the unusual. Freud saw this duality at work in the German word unhemlich British and American in which the security of the homely is as it were haunted by the irreducible culture and literature, literary theory, and sense of the unhomely, the source of homesickness which he famously located cultural studies. His in the place of one’s “mother’s genitals or her body” (Freud, 245). From this academic interests concentrate on the perspective, anything beyond the body of the mother seems to be unhomely, cultural and ideological with the home of everyday life being a remainder of something lost. What aspects of labour and has thus always already been lost is the place where we are in an ordinary the metamorphoses of its ethos in different way, the place, or space where, as Maurice Blanchot phrases it defining the discursive formations. everyday, “[n]othing happens; this is the everyday” (Blanchot, 15). The everyday, for Freud and Blanchot, is a space of withdrawal and anonymity from whose perspective anything that happens, any event, may seem to be something unusual. If the “everyday is without event” (Blanchot, 17), as Blanchot has it, then any event is as it were eventful, something momentous and significant which evades the uneventful being of the everyday. The space of the everyday is not to be found at home for Blanchot, or indeed in any closed and regulated space. He sees the most uneventful of spaces outside, in the street of the city, in the environment of what seems to be fully constructed and controlled:

The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, night, do not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the dense presence of great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts that are the world’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in our dwelling- places, it is not in offices or churches, any more than in libraries or museums. It is in the street – if it is anywhere. (Blanchot, 17)

The space of the everyday is, perhaps paradoxically, an unhomely space also exactly because it is a space rather than a place, it is an unmappable terrain which, however, haunts places with the impossibility of normalization. The essays included in this issue address the everyday and its spaces as it were tangentially, without bringing the notion to the fore and thus without concretizing it as an analytical category. Rather, they approach the everyday spaces as nostalgic constructions of home and homeliness away from the street, within the enclosures of domesticity from which the everyday inevitably slips away and opens them up to what Henri Lefebvre called everydayness (la quotidienneté), designating with this term the destructive attractiveness of the banality of repetitive life. The space of everyday le( quotidien), unlike the places of everydayness, is a polyrhythmic construct, a realization of “the multiplicity of rhythms and the uniqueness of particular rhythms” (Lefebvre, 16) to which everydayness is as it were deaf.

Works Cited Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Yale French Studies, No. 73 (1987), 12–20. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Transl. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London and New York: Continuum 2004. “Poor Naked Wretches”

6 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Joseph Kuhn “Poor Naked Wretches”: The Wound of the Ordinary in James Agee and Robert Penn Warren

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0566 “Poor Naked Wretches”

Joseph Kuhn “Poor Naked Wretches” 7

Joseph Kuhn teaches In 1930 a group of twelve Southerners, in a collection of essays entitled I’ll American literature Take My Stand, tried to establish in their region a set of agrarian principles at Adam Mickiewicz that were, on the face of it, counter-historical and utopian. The conservative University in Poznań. He is the author of metaphysics of the soil that underlies these essays was hardly restricted to these Allen Tate: A Study Nashville Agrarians. Such a metaphysics may be found, in less theoretical of Southern Modern- language, in works of Southern modernism ranging from Faulkner’s paean to ism and the Religious Imagination (2011) and the mule in Flags in the Dust (1927) to Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke- has published articles in White’s photo-essay You Have Seen Their Faces(1937). One consequence of this The Southern Quarterly, Notes and Queries and conservative metaphysics was, as may be seen in Ransom’s poem “Antique Journal of American Harvesters” (1923), that the “harvester” (Ransom’s archaic term for the ten- Studies (forthcoming). ant or small farmer) became abstracted from the mechanisms of the market. In 2016 – 2017 he received a research fellowship It does not really matter that Ransom’s harvesters raised a crop that was only to study the manu- a “meagre hill of kennels, a runnel of juice” (Ransom 1952, 50) because the aim scripts of James Agee at the Harry Ransom of the harvester was to turn labour into a “form”, a form that was comparable Center in the University to the aesthetic forms of literature and manners (Ransom 1938, 30). Similarly, of Texas, Austin Andrew Lytle observed in “The Hind Tit”, his contribution to the Agrarian anthology, that: “A farm is not a place to grow wealthy: it is a place to grow corn” (205). But as the Depression continued into the mid-1930s this key figure in earlier Agrarian aesthetics—the Southern farmer—began to unravel and to turn into the cotton tenant depicted in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) or, further down the socio-economic scale, the tramp who walks off in Robert Penn Warren’s short story “Blackberry Winter” (1946). Robert Penn Warren was later to say that the project of Agrarianism that began in 1930 with I’ll Take My Stand “seemed irrelevant” by the late 1930s and he and some other Southerners now placed the farmer within the framework of an international economic crisis and chose rougher naturalisms to describe him (Warren 1980, 22). The intention of this essay is to track this process of transmutation of “harvester” to impoverished tenant or tramp in Agee and Warren: from figure of natural or autochthonous wealth to one who was emptied out by the historical processes at work in the Depression South. Agee’s strange angle of vision on agricultural life in Alabama seems especially subversive of the conservative metaphysics of the soil that prevailed in the discourses of southern modernism. Agee dissented from the Agrarian adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s notion of the tradition to the South and his radicalism brought him close to being a Marxist writer. But in the end his sensuous receptiveness to creaturely life—or, put more philosophically, his overwhelming phenomenalism of the object and its “cruel radiance” (Agee 1966, 11)—prevented easy short cuts to the ideological formula. The result was a type of Southern literary radicalism that was unique to Agee, although it had certain affinities to Georges Bataille’s theory of the sacred community in interwar France. Agee came to his work on Praise with a certain bias toward documentary naturalism that was common in the 1930s. In this decade the appropriate mode of representation for the dispossessed “harvester” seemed that of quasi- photographic exactitude (“the camera seems to me … the central instrument of our time”, Agee said [ Agee 1966, 11 ]). The assumption lying behind the works of the writers associated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) was that a scrupulous documentation of poverty could be the foundation for effective state intervention. When Agee was commissioned in 1936 to undertake the cotton tenants’ project by the business magazine Fortune he perhaps first intended to follow this path: he initially described what he was going to do to his friend Father Flye as 8 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

“a study of Farm Economics in the South” (Agee 1962, 92). But as the project protracted itself over five years Agee found the subject matter became as sticky as a lime twig and undermined all complacencies of neutral observation. He discovered that he could no longer see the object of poverty and keep a serene liberal distance. As his epigraph in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from King Lear suggests, his stance became closer to that of Lear on the heath, who saw for the first time “poor naked wretches” and was appalled by “the thing itself“, the “poor, bare, forked animal” (Agee quotes from Act 3, Scene 4 [ Agee 1966, xvi ]). In Agee’s description of this “thing itself” in the three tenant families of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—the Gudger, Woods, and Ricketts families— it is as though an extra protective layer has been stripped off the natural, leaving the narrator stricken, blinded, and co-opted by the sight of sacred or “wounded” poverty. It is “obscene”, Agee begins his account by saying, for the liberal reader to pry “into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings” (Agee 1966, 7). For Agee, in short, there is a difference between the neutral “thing” of naturalistic documentation and the “thing itself”, in which perception wounds the beholder. This is why mimesis always has an edge of pain in Agee’s work. He compares the effect he wants in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to that of having one’s ear jammed next to the phonograph while a record of Beethoven is playing at full volume: “You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it” (Agee 1966, 15). The power to hurt means that Agee sees the tramp or the tenant as emanating a sacred poverty rather than as belonging to a sociological classification. The tramp, Agee wrote, is the “most nearly complete among the religious figures our time has evolved” (Agee 2005, 303). Warren’s “Blackberry Winter”, in turn, criticizes the naïve anthropology of the New Deal discourse of the “Common Man” and discloses an image of the ordinary citizen that is stained and complicit. “Blackberry Winter” is an ironic pastoral set in the Kentucky of Warren’s boyhood (around 1910) and concerns the intrusions of a sordid maturity upon the pastoral consciousness of a young farmer’s son, Seth (one lesson of the story is that the lyric, static mind of the young Seth has to grow into an involvement in plot, replacing time as simultaneity with time as succession). The principal intrusion is the figure of a nondescript tramp who turns up at the family farm after a flood and who is employed by Seth’s mother to pick up drowned chicks from the yard. Sullen and disdainful in his work, the tramp is later peremptorily dismissed by Seth’s father. Seth follows the tramp off the premises but the tramp suddenly turns on him and threatens to cut his throat if he continues. The narrator concludes: “That is what he said, for me not to follow him. But I did follow him, all the years” (150). That is to say, the narrator is held for a lifetime by a common bond with the tramp. In his exposition of the story in “Blackberry Winter: A Recollection” Warren says that Seth as narrator now recognizes that this “this lost, mean, defeated, cowardly, worthless, bitter being” is “somehow a man” (381). Although the tramp is “a creature altogether lost and pitiful”, he is “a dim image of what … our human condition is” (379). As with the unlosable companion in Warren’s poem “Original Sin: A Short Story” (1942), it is the banality of the tramp that is his chief characteristic: it is as though in him guilt has been levelled out into a collective and insidious ordinariness. It is clear that Warren’s story is given a special focus by being recollected in 1946, just after the end of the Second World War. One might, indeed, see the tramp of 1910 as a distant anticipation of the disintegrated mass being of the interwar years on both sides of the Atlantic: the figure that Hannah Joseph Kuhn “Poor Naked Wretches” 9

Arendt was to call in The Origins of Totalitarianism the “superfluous” man (296) or the person who, lacking the mediating structures of class and institution, possesses only a bare biological life. Warren said that when he wrote the story just after the end of the Second World War he was thinking of Melville’s Civil War poem “The Conflict of Convictions” (1860 – 1), in which Melville states that the coming conflict, regardless of the rights of each side, will reveal “the slimed foundation” of the world (Warren 1979, 378). Warren’s story takes place during the flooding of a river and his tramp figure is—as it were—disinterred by the action of the river, together with carcasses of cattle and with the trash from the underside of houses. The tramp is part of the unredeemable sludge that gets stirred up by historical change. Hence the narrator’s saying that he has followed the tramp for thirty-five years is Warren’s admission of his lifelong possession, over the critical years 1910 – 1945, by figures of exposed being and that these have been now revealed, by recent world war, at the “slimed foundation”. At the time Warren was writing “Blackberry Winter” he was also compos- ing All the King’s Men (1946) and this novel supposedly originated in Warren’s meeting with another tramp figure, a battered old Louisianian hitchhiker that Warren picked up in 1934 on the way to a position at Louisiana State University and who turned out to be an uncritical panegyrist of Huey Long (the radical governor of Louisiana that Warren felt had some similarities with the European dictators) (Warren narrates the story in “All the King’s Men: The Matrix of Experience”). For Warren, there are totalitarian possibilities in the presence of so many “superfluous” citizens akin to this hitchhiker in the Depression South, since they were potentially amenable to demagogic influences of populists such as Long. Just because the hitchhiker has no common polis or ground of “acting and speaking together” with others, he looks to regain the lost immanence of community in the idea of “one” leader and in the novel Warren tries to show the dark implications of this identification, and its parallels with the European dictatorships, in his creation of a Long- figure, Willie Stark (Arendt 1998, 220). What makes Warren’s tramp or Agee’s tenants different from the documentary representations of the New Deal writers is that Warren and Agee place their figures of poverty within a larger trans-Atlantic context. One of the earliest reviews of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that by the novelist Anna Kavan in 1943, recognized this and aligned the tenants with the “dam aged and helpless human beings” produced by the war (Kavan quoted in Davis 57). Perhaps the fact that Agee and Warren were classically-educated Southerners—with a strong sense of their region as an offshoot of a Latin or Catholic Europe—meant that they could look outside the strict boundaries of the South in understanding its economic and political difficulties: their meta-geographic imaginations were capable of seeing the “space” of the South in other countries. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or All the King’s Men they strove to construct a discourse of global modernism or of the global South within which to situate the poverty of the Depression. “[ T ]he economic source” of the tenants’ plight, Agee writes, “is nothing so limited as the tenant system but is the whole world-system of which tenantry is one modification” (Agee 1966, 186). Within this discourse of global modernism, the extremities of southern poverty in the 1930s do not constitute a unique stigma of the region, but can take on the power of representing zones of non-synchronicity within the international economy as a whole. Within the global totality that Ernst Bloch called the “Now” (97) both archaic and modern elements coexist within 10 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

a simultaneous moment (the sharecropper South being an embedded archaic zone within the world market). Agee recognized that it was just this disparate co-existence or non-synchronicity of the South that inserted it within the modern political consciousness of the 1930s (Bloch, who came up with the concept of non-synchronicity in 1932, referred to late Weimar Germany as a composite of pre-modern agrarianism and an advanced financial state). In driving to Alabama for the first time, Agee said in a draft note forLet Us Now Praise Famous Men that the South appeared to him “basic, generic, primal” and yet “in every detail it has edge, and participation, and involvement in what we think of as the present” (quoted in Davis 133). What gave Agee his primary orientation toward Europe was not only his sensitivity to the web of economic and political interconnections within which the Depression South was placed. In a more basic sense this orientation was provided by his classical education at Harvard University and is seen in the way his first major work, the book of poemsPermit Me Voyage (1936), taps into the Elizabethan and Virgilian roots of the idea of a historic Europe. Although Agee was too close to Communism ever to be an Agrarian (his poem “Dixie Doodle” [ 1938 ] is a satire of Agrarianism), he nevertheless had at the back of his writing a Catholic model of community derived from his Episcopalian upbringing. It is indeed quite plausible that Agee considered Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an Alabama version of Virgil’s Georgics, a work that he thought had reached “absolute mastery and beauty” in the genre of “agricultural poetry” (Agee 1962, 171). One might ponder, for example, why Agee gives the fictional name George Gudger to Frank Burroughs, the father in the principal family that Agee visits (George means “farmer” and is derived from the same Greek etonym as Virgil’s Georgics). Agee also suggests that the tenants have the Virgilian virtue of pietas, a virtue that originates in a literal piety toward the earth as sacred site. He observes, in allusion to Georgics (Book 1, lines 424 – 460), that the Alabama tenants are like Latin farmers “constant readers of the sky” in their lookout for weather that might destroy their cotton crop—a sky that is “the lodestone of their deepest pieties” (Agee 1966, 304). For Virgil, it was Jupiter himself who gave mankind the divine gift of labour and substituted an age of iron for the ease of Saturn’s age of gold (Book One, line 121). The adherence of the tenants to the debt-ridden monoculture of cotton, a persistence that lodges a “dark knotted iron of subnausea at the peak of the diaphragm”, is not a rational way of bestowing their labour, but it recognizes this necessary Virgilian ligature between labour and pain (Agee 1966, 296). The coming to the surface of an ancient Latin world in Alabama sharecropper country comes out in the tenants’ instinctive classical feeling for “exact symmetries” and explains why the Gudgers’ house, although only built in 1928, already seems “timelessly ancient” (Agee 1966, 141, 187). The Virgilian perspective goes with a pronounced aspect of Agee’s work: his need to return to genetic roots, to the earth as sacer. Hence despite Agee declaring in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that he is a “communist by sympathy and conviction” and despite his being a contributor to such Marxist journals as New Masses he veers away from sociological explanations of the tenants’ poverty and ontologizes their suffering as a permanent condition (Agee 1966, 225). This is why Agee is critical of New Deal intervention such as that provided to the feckless three “clients of Rehabilitation” whom he meets in the “At the Forks” section and why he quotes Roosevelt’s claim to be “a farmer myself” with sarcasm (Agee 1966, 33, 105). Liberal “talk as if tenantry as such were responsible”, Agee writes, is “dishonest” and “dangerous” because it persuades Joseph Kuhn “Poor Naked Wretches” 11 one that a “cure” is possible (Agee 1966, 185). If the documentary method of the 1930s writers wants to lessen the gap that separates the viewer from the poor, Agee wants to widen this gap and he emphasizes the sacred in its archaic Latin sense of that which is kept apart — Georges Bataille’s sacred of what is untouchable, bleeding, abject (Leigh Anne Duck is perhaps the first critic who points out similarities of Bataille’s work to Agee’s). In the “Preamble” of the book Agee wishes that he can do no writing, preferring to put before the reader “fragments of cloth … lumps of earth … plates of food and of excrement”. The final example is that of a raw wound: “A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point” (Agee 1966, 12 – 13). It is not known if Agee knew of Bataille’s writing, although he was certainly aware of the surrealists and thought their avant-garde work should be incorporated into Communist practice (“Art for What’s Sake?” [ 1936 ]). It could be argued that Agee and Bataille were both drawing on the late nineteenth- century sociological “discovery” of the ambivalence of the sacred found in such thinkers as Emile Durkheim. But this ambivalence in fact had far older origins in Latin religion and the agricultural sacred of Virgil’s Georgics. It was a fourth-century commentator on Virgil, Servius, who first pointed out the two meanings—purity and pollution—in the concept of sacer (Lennon, 52). As has often been remarked by critics, Agee frequently applied the category of the right or pure sacred to the tenants: he says, for example, that he finds in them “predicaments of human divinity” or compares the “gestures” of the Gudger family as they prepare for daily life in the morning to the ritualism of early mass at his boarding school (Agee 1966, xiv, 84). So deeply lodged is this equation of the tenants and divinity that Agee even absolves them of their “cruelty in relation toward extra-human life and toward negroes”, saying that it is not meant in malice but in “innocence” (Agee 1966, 194). Less remarked on than Agee’s evident use of a right-hand sacred, however, is his use of the left-hand variant and its emphasis on the repulsive and the tabooed. Official religions work hard to transmute the left-hand sacred into its right-hand counterpart, just as the village church builds over the bones beneath its floor (Bataille 1988a, 122). Agee is aware of, and sometimes reverses, the direction of this process of transmutation: for example, he says that the Gudger Bible gives out “a strong and cold stench of human excrement” (Agee 1966, 385). The word which best encapsulates Agee’s use of the left sacred is “wound”. The wound is pervasive inLet Us Now Praise Famous Men. At one moment Agee says that every sense impression in the lives of the tenants “cuts its little mark”; at another he observes that the lamplight that pours from the windows of the homes of the tenants is like “wounded honey”; later he mentions “the ultimately mortal wound which is living” (Agee 1966, 97, 52, 206). All of this means that the scene of Golgotha is central to Agee’s book. Agee and Bataille agree that the chief example of the right-hand sacred emptying into the left is the Crucifixion, the emptying out of the high God through the material gap of the wound. Hence Agee’s insistence on the Crucifixion as the symbolic cornerstone of Alabama tenantry: he even says that “those three hours upon the cross are but a noble and too trivial an emblem” for the ordeal of the three families (Agee 1966, 92). The families inLet Us Now Praise Famous Men are torn apart from each other; each family, Agee says, is isolated behind its “shell and carapace” (51). They are like, in Agee’s comparison, prisoners at Andersonsville prison camp, starved Union soldiers who prefigure the war survivors of the total wars of the next century. Each family, therefore, is very far from the organic 12 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

community that is put forward in I’ll Take My Stand. Nevertheless as an ex- Anglican Catholic Agee sees that experience must relate to non-individual being, to a community of sorts even if it is “the community of those who have no community” (in Bataille’s formulation quoted in Blanchot 25). In fact the only way part of this broken community may communicate with another broken part is through the wound. Agee would concur with Bataille, who writes: “the wound of incompleteness opens me up.…. What is required is the overlapping of two lacerations, mine and yours” (Bataille 1988b, 27, 30). This is why Agee so assiduously cultivates an art of the wound: “I shall touch nothing but as I would touch the most delicate wounds” (Agee 1966, 124). The wound is an emptying out of the subjective self and its false lure of immanent being, a turning to the outside and a loss of self. In Praise Agee is constantly trying to invent new ways to crucify himself. In one episode he is forced to stay overnight at the Gudgers and is consumed by bed-bugs; he crushes some of them and smells the rank odour of his own blood, but realizes that getting rid of them is a hopeless task and finally welcomes their “pricking and munching away”, even feeling “a certain amount of pleasure in it” (Agee 1966, 388). This urge to self-laceration in Agee is usually castigated by his critics as a psychological weakness but perhaps it is rather a mode of political rhetoric; it is Agee’s overlaying of his sensibility upon the very way the broken community communicates from wound to wound. Praise belongs in the trans-Atlantic context of the 1930s not so much for its direct reference to the European dictatorships (Agee only went once to Europe when he was sixteen) but because it comes into the interwar context, shared by Bataille in the France of the late 1930s, of failed versions of the organic or utopian community. Bataille attempts to re-think the community as what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “inoperative” community. Agee’s rejection of political “cure” leaves him, as a notional communist, in a difficult place in 1941: the place of failed revolutions, or, as Richard Wright was to say in 1949, of a God that failed. That is why Agee, like Bataille in the 1930s, tries to replace this communist vision of community with another, one that leans toward a sociology of the sacred and toward seeing the tenants as members of a sacrificial community. Agee, as a consequence, perhaps goes deeper than Warren in his understand ing of the southern poverty of the 1930s. Warren is ultimately an existential individualist who believes in a core of subjectivity that can resist immanent shapelessness or the mud that lies at the bottom of history (as he shows in his later essay “Knowledge and the Image of Man” [ 1955 ]). In inner dramas like that of Jack Burden in All the King’s Men Warren tries to withstand the lure of the fused community that the Stark type of dictator represents and he does this by means of an existentialist definition of the self (the word “definition” has a unique place in Warren’s lexicon). With this Jack can finally go out “into the convulsion of the world … and the awful responsibility of Time” (438). But for Agee it is this very subjective self that is suspicious, that needs to be exscripted (to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s term) or turned inside out in the name of the would-be community. One might offer here a brief coda, like that of Agee’s own final statement in “(On the Porch:3”. In this conclusion to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Agee sits on the porch at night and hears two eerie fox voices up in the hills, each answering to each. What Agee hears in these voices is the world talking to itself and its “grief of incommunicability” (Agee 1966, 426). One might say that these fox voices are the model of the strange kind of community that Joseph Kuhn “Poor Naked Wretches” 13

Agee has discovered among the cotton tenants of Alabama. Its basis is not speech, which would allow the voice to be turned into knowledge (for these are examples of animal phone and convey only “the grief of incommunicability”). It is rather exposure to, and incorporation of, an alien presence that is outside one and excludes one (Blanchot 12). One way of trying to describe this voice is to use the language of the left-hand sacred and Agee does indeed say that these voices are “as cold and as chilling as the pupil of a goat’s eye” (Agee 1966, 421). What these fox voices give expression to is Lear’s “thing itself”, the thing that is embodied in the naked wretch; and this wound of the ordinary can send the old King on the heath, also known as James Agee, mad. Or, put less dramatically, it can exscript him, turn him outside himself onto the dark hillside of the inoperative community. The question of the literary representation of the cotton tenant and farmer belongs primarily to the period of the 1920s and 1930s (by the 1960s the cotton tenant who picked by hand had all but disappeared in the South). In this interwar period Ransom and Lytle gave powerful articulation to the figure of the “harvester” and of the regenerative earth; and many southern modernists made similar references. One could even say that the very idea of the South in this period was founded on these figurations of the organic or whole life. But other southerners, notably Agee and Warren, were more sceptical about the autochthonous potential of the “harvester”. Agee in particular matched his scepticism with innovative modernist form in Praise: a form that put the conservative logic of agricultural substance into “exscription”. The result in Praise was a type of boundary-less writing that through this externalizing process brought out the “incommunicability” of the tenant community (“This is all one colon:” he said in Praise [ 101 ]). In Agee one can see a new type of southern literary radicalism or avant-gardism that has similarities with the sociology of the sacred in Bataille and the inoperative community in Blanchot, both products of trying to envisage a third way between liberalism and Com munism in pre-war France.

Works Cited Agee, James. “Art for What’s Sake?” New Masses. 21.12 (15 Dec. 1936) 48, 50. 21 March 2018. http://www.unz.com/print/NewMasses-1936dec15 – 00048/. —. Film Writing and Selected Journalism. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2005. —. Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. New York: G. Braziller, 1962. 21 March 2018. https://archive.org/details/lettersofjamesa00agee. Agee, James and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1998. —. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Second Edition. Cleveland: World Publish- ing Co., 1958. Bataille, Georges. “Attraction and Repulsion II: Social Structure”. The College of Sociology (1937 – 39). Ed. Denis Hollier. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1988a. 113- 124. —. Guilty. Trans. Bruce Boone. Venice CA.: Lapis P, 1988b. Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown NY: Station Hill P, 1988. Bloch, Ernst. Heritage of Our Times. Trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice. Berke- ley: U of California P, 1991. 14 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Davis, Hugh. The Making of James Agee. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2008. Duck, Leigh Anne. “Arts of Abjection in James Agee, Walker Evans, and Luis Buñuel”. The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the American South.Ed. Fred, Hobson, Barbara Ladd. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016, 290 – 309. Lennon, Jack J. Pollution and Religion in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 21 March 2018. https://books.google.pl/books/about/Pollution_ and_Religion_in_Ancient_Rome.html?id=JXxGAAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y. Lytle, Andrew Nelson. “The Hind Tit”. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. New York: Peter Smith, 1951.201 – 245. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Exscription”. Trans. Katherine Lydon. Yale French Studies 78 (1990), 47 – 65. —. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1991. Ransom, John Crowe. Selected Poems. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1952. —. The World’s Body. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1938. Virgil, The Eclogues. Trans. Peter Fallon. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2006. Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. New York: Bantam, 1959. —. “All the King’s Men: The Matrix of Experience”.Robert Penn Warren: Critical Perspectives. Ed.Neil Nakadate. Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 1981. 54 – 59. —. “Blackberry Winter”. A Robert Penn Warren Reader. New York: Random House, 1987.131 – 150. —. “‘Blackberry Winter’: A Recollection”. Understanding Fiction. Third Edi- tion. Ed. Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 377 – 382. —. “Knowledge and the Image of Man”. Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John L. Longley Jr. [ New York ]: New York University Press, 1965, 237 – 246. —. Robert Penn Warren Talking. Interviews 1950 – 1978. Ed. Floyd C. Watkins and John T. Hiers. New York: Random House, 1980.

At Home in Loneliness

16 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Karl Wood

At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home: Domesticity and the Early Short Stories of Richard Yatese Asylum

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0568 At Home in Loneliness

Karl Wood At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home 17

Karl Wood holds a PhD Richard Yates is best known for his first and most would say best novel, Revo- in History from the lutionary Road, published in 1961. Typically viewed as a harsh, yet insightful University of Illinois at critique of American suburban life in the mid-twentieth century, the novel Chicago, and is on the staff of the Department speaks clearly and powerfully to questions of home, escape and ultimate of English Studies entrapment in the suburban idyll of Eisenhower-era middle-class white at Kazimierz Wielki

America, a bleak examination of an ideal that promised safety, community, and University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, where he belonging (to those allowed to belong). As fine a novel as Revolutionary Road teaches courses is, Yates’ short fiction is in ways more compelling and poignant. In stories that in American Cultural Studies. His academic focus on unremarkable, ordinary individuals, Yates addresses a considerably interests and publica- broader range of experiences of home, isolation and loneliness in the 1950s in tions include American dialogue with the postwar hegemonic ideal of white suburban middle-class suburbia and masculinity studies, as well as leisure domesticity and masculinity. The intent of this paper is to critically examine studies and the cultural themes of home and alienation in three stories from Yates’ short story collec- history of medicine tion Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), “The Best of Everything,” “The B.A.R. Man,” and “Out with the Old” 1 in order to explore the complexity of 1950s American discourse surrounding home and domesticity, perhaps surprisingly from the pen of a mainstream white male author. This was the decade of the ascendancy of the suburban ideal, which, while far from uncontested, provided the “template” for an ideal or an ideology of middle-class life that was propagated by television and the outlets of mass consumer culture. The “myth of suburbia,” as sociologist Bennett Berger wrote in 1961, was useful for both critics and boosters of suburbia alike. For critics, the “row upon monotonous row of mass produced cheerfulness masquerading as homes” (Berger 316) produced a dangerous hyperconformity: row upon row of William Whyte’s colorless Organization Men with their housekeeping wives sequestered behind their identical picture windows gazing over their baby-boom children as images of the idea of a vapid, lonesome suburban existence behind pretty facades of superficial pleasantness and codes of “nice” behavior that resonate into the present day. 2 For developers like the iconic William Levitt, marketers of consumer goods like Redbook magazine, 3 as well as countless thousands of (white, middle-class) suburbanites, this similarity, even this homogeneity was perceived as a clear advantage, as it helped to build the bonds of community and a sense of belonging. More importantly, however, the suburbs and their very homogeneity, or what Peter Bacon Hales argues residents adapted into “reiterations and reinventions of the American dream” (42) provided a sense of security and homeliness. This provided solace in an era which had a constant undertone of fear of nuclear annihilation and the perceived threat of Communism to name the most salient causes, but also the hopes and anxieties related to the growing Civil Rights Movement and the underlying social and cultural tensions simmering beneath the surface, waiting to come out (as indeed they would) in the 1960s.

1 Each of the stories discussed in this article, according to Bailey, were written in 1954 for magazine publication. Only “The Best of Everything” sold, to Charm together with one other story, “Fun with a Stranger” were published at the time (168).The others, Bailey believes, were rejected as they offered readers little in the way of moral uplift, as was expected by magazine publishers at the time, but rather an unflinching view of “frustration and failure” (273). 2 The popular culture references to this kind of interpretation are too numerous to list, but an obvious reference could be made to the filmPleasantville (1998). 3 Well worth a look for insight into the marketing of suburbia is a 1957 Redbook promotional film “In the Suburbs”, widely available online, most easily and reliably at archive.org 18 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

It was feared however, that comforts of this sense of security came at a cost. In a dichotomy that continues to shape thought about suburbia to this day, the new suburban landscape which some saw as a kind of new utopia, one of community and a society based on home ownership, others saw as a stifling, dangerous, and oppressive conformism rising in the suburbs. Extending

far beyond homogeneous tract-housing with picture windows and all the latest conveniences of the kind that then Vice President Nixon would boast of as an embodiment of American freedom of choice in the 1959 so-called Kitchen Debate, critics saw (and often continue to see) how over-organized and highly regulated lifestyles promoted a conformity of thought and action. Betty Friedan’s critique of the suburban lifestyle in The Feminine Mystique (1963) as oppressively crushing women’s human potential, is of course well known. Friedan’s work was an essential corrective as well as a complement to works such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd(1950), William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), or Arthur Schlesinger’s essay “The Crisis of American Masculinity” (1958), to name only a few of the most salient contemporary critiques of the new suburban ‘utopia.’ In such works, much attention was devoted to the supposed dangers posed to American men by the suburbs and the femininization of their lives through the suburban environment. This was seen as colluding with the corporate ‘hive’ mindset to erode American manhood by destroying male autonomy of thought and action and bringing about a “shift from individualism to the socialized personality” (Gilbert 56). Yet the dreamlike (or denial-based) security of this domestic environment, built with the promise not simply of security, but of economic advancement in this era of cultural and political anxiety was highly appealing to millions of mostly white Americans who were included in this vision – racial exclusivity was, as it were, a founding principle of the suburbs. In their self-perception, many who lived there did not put much stock in such criticisms, seeing themselves rather as part of a new, even pioneering community, that was a mix of private and public life, both a “huddling place and open community” (Hales 109). Yates himself fell more in line with the critics, later decrying in an interview in Ploughshares what he saw as the “general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price” (Henry and Clark, 208). In this trend, the home, and in particular the suburban domestic ideal, took on an iconic status of a bastion of that security – at least for those allowed to belong, namely white middle-class people, the characters of Yates’ work. Yates’ fiction engages and questions this milieu most notably in Revolution- ary Road, in which the themes of the suburban home and security are most tragically evident. April and Frank Wheeler, echoing much of the critiques of the time, believe that their hollow feelings of an empty and meaningless life were a direct result of their exile to the suburban wasteland. They feel little but scorn, even contempt for their neighbors in this suburban ‘paradise’ where “[ n ]obody thinks or feels or cares anymore; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity” (60). Fancying themselves something better, April a “first-rate girl” and Frank “a first-rate mind,” see how Frank’s value as a man, his “very essence [ was ] being stifled” (115) and soon hatch an unconventional plan in which they would escape with their two children to Paris – a symbol of promise, hope, freedom and a new start – April would work as a secretary for the embassy, perhaps, and support the family. There is not space in this paper for a full summary of the plot but suffice to say that the story ends tragically. April Karl Wood At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home 19 dies of a self-performed abortion, 4 Frank is left a shattered shell of a man, the family is scattered, and all the Wheelers’ hopes and ambitions are in ashes. The novel quickly earned a reputation as a harsh indictment of suburban life, which subsequently was only reinforced by the film adaptation. Yet Yates himself was not pleased with that characterization. When it was suggested in an interview that he had “really lambasted the suburbs,” his response was clear:

I didn’t mean to. The book was widely read as an antisub- urban novel, and that disappointed me. The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems, but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was their delusion, their problem, not mine (Henry and Clark, 208).

As Kate Charlton-Jones points out, the problem for Yates was not necessarily with suburbia per se, but rather with the generally exaggerated tenor of optimism and progress present in American life, which he found “not only misplaced, but damaging” (192). Rory McGinley argues that to read Revolu- tionary Road primarily as a “suburban indictment severely limits and restricts our understanding of the topic” (31). In Yates’ vision, the suburbs were not the cause of the obsessive conformism then prevalent in mainstream American culture. To blame the suburbs, like the Wheelers did, was simple solution, and explains their ill-fated attempts to escape; in the end, such blame and escapism costs them their dreams and April her life. This view is somewhat at odds with the highly influential critics of the 1950s, and yet is in greater concordance with some more recent scholarship on suburbia. As Robert Beuka argued, while the suburban space itself certainly helped to shape and promote strong tendencies in American culture, for example materialism and cultural homogenization, or the reassertion of what were thought to be traditional gender roles, this “suburban landscape … both reflected and facilitated these tendencies, emerging as a symbolic manifestation of these values and contradictions” (7). The problem, then, was not so much a suburban one as a mainstream American one that the suburbs both symbolically embodied and strongly propagated. A central theme in Yates’ work are the tensions of this sort of a dual Zeitgeist, a Janus-faced fusion of optimism, faith in progress and a loneliness-producing anxiety of not being able to “make it” in the dominant spirit of the age. As sociologist Joseph A. Kahl observed in the early 1950s, this norm of “living well” in a well-ordered nuclear family home well-stocked with consumer goods set the tone, as “[ a ]ccording to the mythology, almost every American lives this way, and the few who do not expect to as soon as they ‘get on their feet” (110). Yates’ characters with their anxieties are not the ‘winners’ of the age, those who claimed and owned their chunk of the happy promise of the era (and perhaps worried about losing it, or how it was gained and at what cost), nor are they those who were fully excluded. Instead, Yates’ characters, are those in the grey zone, people who think and feel that the promise of the American Dream should be theirs (the unspoken assumed entitlement of their white privilege), and who yet remain on the margins, their inflated dreams of grandeur, adventure, or at very least of a satisfactorily happy life

4 Yates includes enough ambiguity in his narrative to leave open the possible reading that April’s failed abortion was in fact suicide, evocative of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. 20 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

“in an atmosphere of official optimism” (Castronovo and Goldleaf, qtd. in Charlton-Jones, 205) go unfulfilled at best. For Yates’ characters, loneliness lies in the discrepancy between the Dream and the reality of their lives, or perhaps of themselves. Neither outcasts nor outright failures, Yates’ characters are trapped not simply by the confines of their environment, but rather in

their inability to succeed in terms of the ideal of a “normal” life, but equally by their inability, or unwillingness, to transgress the prescribed norms. And this kind of loneliness, while quite apparent in the Connecticut suburb of Revolutionary Road, was hardly limited to “the suburban wasteland.” This is clearly apparent in the stories collected in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Here, we see a range of characters in diverse settings, from ordinary New York neighborhoods (“The Best of Everything,” “TheBAR Man”), a US Army basic training camp in Texas (“Jody Rolled the Bones”), a VA hospital (“No Pain Whatsoever” and “Out with the Old”), or even abroad (“A Really Good Jazz Piano”). Set and written in the 1950s, the stories illuminate the domestic lives of people who we might say lived in the shadow of the ideal of the era. The characters in these stories are themselves not suburban dwellers, although they could be and were certainly of the kind who over the course of the 1950s, might well be found there. While not living suburban ideal, their lives exist within those dominant cultural streams. The three stories selected for analysis here are those which most directly address questions of home and safety, and all diverge substantially from the ideal while working simultaneously within it. All three involve the domestic ideals of marriage, family and home – ostensibly the basis for home and security in the suburban ideal. We can begin our investigation of Yates’ treatment of domesticity at its very beginnings: a couple just before their wedding, eagerly awaiting the promised happiness waiting just at the other side of the threshold. In “The Best of Everything,” Yates introduces us to a young couple, Grace, and Ralph, about to be married. Both are quite ordinary people, she innocent and a bit naïve, he a young man full of New York bravado who still could be tender and sweet. The narrative opens with Grace at her office job, receiving congratulations and gifts on her last working day before her wedding, a long and tiring day ending in a ‘bedlam of farewell’ and wishes (26), as they send her off, exhausted from their good intentions, into married life. Ralph, too, was given a sort of shower at work. Taken to a lunchtime drink by his office colleagues, they offer him formulaic jovial consolations “(Aw, don’t feel too bad Ralph – worse things could happen!)” (29), and before leaving work, he is unceremoniously given a fifty-dollar bonus from his boss, a sum which he brags about to Grace, oblivious to her tiredness, while masking his disappointment that it had not been more. Disappointing, too, was that he had hoped for a proper party, most of all from his best friend, Eddie, for whom he waited, alone, in a bar, morosely sipping his beer. He does not yet know that his buddies were planning to make his dream come true. The couple had arranged to meet in the evening at the Queens apartment that Grace shared with her roommate. The roommate, who had never believed that Ralph was much of a catch, makes a rather contrived excuse of needing to visit her brother, thus missing the wedding. But as a sort of wedding present, she decided to leave a day early, leaving the place to Ralph and Grace to be alone together. At first unsure, and then quite taken by the idea, Grace nervously makes preparations to welcome her husband-to-be as seductively as she can, dressing for the first time in the negligee “treasures of her trousseau” (28), waiting for him in an awkward and aroused anticipation. Karl Wood At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home 21

When Ralph arrives, two hours late, he brushes past her at the door with a dismissive “Hi, baby. [ … ] Guess I’m late, huh? You in bed?” Still trying to maintain some semblance of seductiveness, she strikes a movie-star like pose against the door and stumbles her response: “I was just – waiting for you.” (34). Yet Ralph’s excitement is for quite something else. The reader knows, but Gracie – a somewhat childish diminutive used in the narrative only when she is together with Ralph 5 – is surprised to learn that Ralph’s friends had prepared a surprise party for him. What is more (for Ralph, at least), in a manner reminiscent of Mr. Gower and George Bailey in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, his best friend Eddie had bought him a fine tawny Gladstone suitcase of the kind he had dreamed of for his honeymoon. Yet where George Bailey ultimately settles into the loving arms of his wife, Mary, rendering the suitcase unnecessary, for Gracie and Ralph another vision of the future is unfolding. Gracie continues her attempts to be seductive, reminding her fiancé that they have the apartment to themselves, all weekend, drawing attention to her negligee, yet Ralph cannot contain himself as he tells the story of how he nearly burst into tears at how thoughtful “the guys” were. In fact, he could only stay a few minutes. He had promised to return to the party. When Gracie protests, now speaking “with the whine of a wife” Ralph is appalled, clearly concerned with needing to set appropriate boundaries now, before the wedding. Gracie yields, and Ralph prepares to leave, asking first “mind if I use ya terlet?” In the final moment, Yates leaves no doubt where the future is headed:

When he came out of the bathroom, she was waiting to say goodnight, standing with her arms folded across her chest, as if for warmth. Lovingly, he hefted the new suitcase and joined her at the door. “Okay, then, baby,” he said, and kissed her. “Nine o’clock. Don’t forget, now.” She smiled tiredly and opened the door for him. “Don’t worry, Ralph,” she said. “I’ll be there.” (37)

Here we see a couple at the outset of their married life, and already Grace is dismissed, with her husband more devoted to his circle of friends and, ominously, feeling a need to keep her in her place, as it were. While not yet in the suburbs, it is easy to imagine Grace and Ralph settled in a Levittown house a few years hence, leading a life far removed from the ideal. While one could give a simple reading of “the honeymoon is over before it even begins,” the subtle phrasing of how Grace folds her arms seems important here. They are not crossed in anger, or in scolding disapproval, but rather she seems to be huddling for warmth, for comfort in the face of the coldness from her husband. Ralph will certainly still have his circle of friends, and we can easily see Grace asking herself “is that all?” But the story makes it clear that at least in this case, that the suburbs were hardly the cause, but rather Ralph and his need to assert his perceived male prerogative and authority. While “The Best of Everything” seems sadly ironic and leaves the reader pensively contemplating Grace’s lonely future, in the second story, “The B.A.R. Man” Yates offers another, much darker vision of the domestic life of a married couple, John and Rose Fallon. Twenty-nine years old and ten years into their married life, the Fallons have some of the superficial trappings of a settled,

5 This use of “Gracie” could have been chosen as a simple diminutive, or might have been chosen to evoke Gracie Allen, of the popular comedy team Burns & Allen. 22 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

middle-class life: they have a home together, spending evenings playing cards or watching television, spending Saturdays together at the movies or some other entertainment, and Sundays at home. John works conscientiously in a dull office job, it would seem, at first, one of Whyte’s Organization Men. Yet Fallon’s suit is not the gray flannel uniform, but he prefers a cheap gas-blue

suit, suggesting a man of modest means and common, hardly aspirational tastes. 6 This is hardly the only divergence from the 1950s ideal. We soon learn that the Fallons are the 1950s – to use an anachronism – DINK’s, living in the city, no children, both employed. Rose, who apparently cannot have children due to her “tipped uterus,” earns more as a highly-skilled typist than her husband, a low-paid office drone. What becomes rapidly apparent, beginning with a minor disagreement over what to do on a Friday evening, is the level of dissatisfaction and resentment present in the relationship. Instead of the usual Friday routine when John has his night with the guys watching a prizefight on television, Rose suggests a movie instead, a Gregory Peck film on its last night 7 That evening, the tension seethes beneath the surface. The couple spars in rounds of petty bickering over shopping, over an unfinished glass of milk John left on the table before the anger spirals out of control. Soon the unfinished milk is retorted with a resentment-filled accusatory question about why Rose stopped the exercises that were supposed to correct her posture and her tipped uterus. Her retort is clear: “Well,’ she said, ‘I certainly don’t wanna get pregnant, if that’s what you mean. May I ask where we’d be if I had to quit my job?” His sense of breadwinner-masculinity directly challenged, he snaps, verbally assaulting her body with an angry “Why d’ya wear these goddamn things?” as he waves her padded bra in her face. He then leaves, slamming his way out of the apartment (125) to have himself a night on the town. At first, it seems the themes of a lack of fulfillment of the 1950s ideal of a man as the sole breadwinner for a family with children seem the clear source of John Fallon’s aggression. To be sure, from his suit on up, he does not meet the measure that was set as the standard of hegemonic masculinity of the period. But the anxiety about his masculinity, as read through the lens of Whyte and others (Cuordelione 97) was not just about his failure to be a ‘proper’ head of a family, but also in the very nature of his work. Office work, especially in lower positions such as Fallon’s, was feared to have a potential ‘softening’ effect on American men, who faced the impossible task as drones of living up to the mythic ideal of man as creator of his own destiny, the self- made-man ideal. Unsuccessful both in his performance as a man in control of his own fate, but also as a successful Organization Man, Fallon lashes out. Yates, however, is not content to leave us with such simple explanations. As the title of the story suggests, Fallon roots his sense of masculinity, his sense of self not in his work, nor in his identity as a husband, but in his war service. A World War II veteran, he takes pride in the fact that he was “a damn-good B.A.R. man” (122): a soldier who carried and operated the Browning Automatic Rifle, a physically demanding and particularly dangerous role in an infantry squad. Yet we also learn early in the story – and this is quite characteristic for

6 In his 1976 novel The Easter Parade, Yates re-uses the gas-blue suit to indicate a lack of sophistication: “he showed up in a cheap gas-blue suit with padded shoulders – no Columbia boy would be caught dead in a suit like that” (65) 7 It would be too perfect to believe that the film suggested here is The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but Yates wrote “The B.A.R. Man” in 1954, and the film was released in 1956. The film suggested here would more likely be Roman Holiday (1953). Karl Wood At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home 23

Yates as an author – that this is Fallon’s own self-deception. While he presents and vehemently defends this image of himself to other veterans from work or to two young soldiers he tries to befriend that evening at a nightclub, the reader knows something that Fallon appears to hide behind a wall of denial. He did, in fact, carry the weapon during his service in Europe, yet he only fired it twice, never at any visible enemy soldiers, and the second time was reprimanded for “wasting ammunition” (122). Lacking the foundations on which to build a sense of ‘acceptable’ masculinity, Fallon compensates with escalating violence. After storming out of his home, he seeks a night on the town. He foists himself on two young soldiers in strained camaraderie and tries to join them in picking up three young women. While the young soldiers are flirting and laughing with their new companions, Fallon’s advances are clearly rejected. As he tries all the more to be awkwardly, then creepily charming, his fantasies turn from seduction and passion at the woman’s apartment to an overtly violent rape fantasy in which “[ h ]e’d loosen her up!” (131). Clearly uncomfortable, the woman takes advantage of Fallon going for more beer during a raucous musical number and convinces her friends, and the two soldiers, to ditch him. Yet Fallon’s evening does not end there. Wandering through the streets, he comes across an auditorium where a meeting on Civil Rights has just ended with the participants, black and white, exiting the building, including a notable activist. Joining some picketers outside, Fallon is swept away by his rage. He charges the activist with a yell of “Kill the bastard! Kill ‘im!), only to be taken down “with an absolute sense of fulfillment and relief” by a blow to his head from a policeman’s billy club (134). If Fallon’s violence is the result of his failed aspiration to assert his masculinity in some way that fits to the criteria of the 1950s construct of hegemonic masculinity, his ironic fulfillment at being defeated by a billy club is a kind of last ditch effort that if all else fails, a “man” can still be violent toward those seen as weaker than himself, i.e., toward women or toward minorities. While some may find this story particularly cruel (Bailey 274), even repugnant, it offers an unflinching look at the dark potential of what a thwarted kind of American Dream can produce in an angry white man with a sense of “aggrieved entitlement” (Kimmel 21) that resonates into the present day. Fallon is by far the ugliest character in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. In the third story to be discussed here, “Out with the Old”, we meet more likeable and yet also flawed men: the patients on the tuberculosis ward of a Veterans’ Administration hospital on Long Island. The first and obvious cause of these men’s loneliness is their separation from their homes. As might be expected, they have weekly visitors to ameliorate this feeling of isolation, but this is of little help to these men. What is most important to them is a kind of bond they share because of their shared lot, much as if they were still in the service. Similarly, they pass the time with cigarettes which are allowed and whiskey which is not, with talks of operations and treatments, or in the case of Tiny, a bear of a man, with pranks and practical jokes, one of which turns out to be central to the plot. As entertainment, Tiny hopes to inaugurate the New Year (1951) with a bit of juvenile theater in violation of the rules. Here we find little that is surprising – the men act and seem to feel much like soldiers in their barracks with nothing to do, the difference being that rather than facing a future of combat, their lives are threatened by disease. All the while, as one would expect, the men long for the Christmas holiday and the short furlough home. Much as soldiers taking off their uniforms and 24 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

returning to their “civvies” to go on a five-day pass, the patients undergo a transformation from their hospital personae into ‘themselves’ as they put on their own clothes again. This affected them all: Tiny went from being a childish prankster to a serious, calm, controlled adult, another losing his “common” touch and becoming visible as Yale man in his J Press flannels, and even “several

of the Negroes had suddenly become Negroes again, instead of ordinary men” (164). Of course, on their return after the holiday they all sadly, reluctantly don their VA pajamas and their hospital personae and lonely camaraderie. All, that is, except for McIntyre, the older man on the ward. Ordinarily sarcastic and independent, he returns quiet and sullen, working intently on a letter. He remarks that he had wished he had not been allowed to go home, masking his true feelings behind a dismissive remark about how it was simply difficult to return to the hospital. This was the case for Tiny, who now again as Harold was in the embrace of his family and shows himself warm, sensitive and gentle. McIntyre’s home visit in contrast was a very difficult one. After some time of his wife (none of the characters at his home are given names) awkwardly trying to make things as “normal” as possible, the theme of the inadequate provider emerges. McIntyre mentions something about the VA raising pensions, and his (for 1951) long-haired, adolescent son makes a smart (but accurate) remark about how McIntyre’s brother-in-law is really supporting the family financially. While irritating and frustrating, this does not cause the accounting clerk McIntyre the kind of distress it does Fallon – here we have a man who, despite his illness, seems to feel more secure in himself. The real issue is related to his daughter, who is nervous and agitated the whole time. McIntyre’s wife tries to explain it away to McIntyre that the girl is simply stressed about her new job and adjusting to an eight-hour day. But he persists and tries to communicate with his daughter, asking her what the trouble is, trying gently to have her confide in him. But his daughter refuses, pleads for him to leave her alone, and storms to her room. Only when pressed does his wife blurt out with the warning of “it’s your funeral” that the girl is in fact four months pregnant. He sits down, short of breath, he asks who the father is, but she has told no one. It is then that the sarcastic teen son remarks with a smirk “Maybe she don’t know they guy’s name.” This causes McIntyre to rise and he slaps his son once, then twice, bloodying his nose in a violent outburst. Shortly thereafter, he is back at the hospital, the holiday presumably cut short. Disappointment and anger at home is not all of McIntyre’s story, however. Back in the hospital he still wishes to connect with his daughter and is trying to compose a sensitive and caring letter to her. Here we learn her name, Jean, and how he wishes they could have the kind of heartfelt talk they would have on walks together a few years earlier, before he was hospitalized. As he comes to his point, one can almost imagine a scene from Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best in which the caring, loving father offers paternal wisdom to his troubled child. 8 He writes:

Your old dad might not be good for much any more, but he does know a thing or two about life and especially one important thing, and that is That was as far as the letter went. (171)

8 Of course, such as scene involving unwed teen pregnancy would have been impossible in such suburban sit-coms. As it was, Yates’ agent felt the story was unsaleable for publication in 1954 due to the theme (Bailey 167). Karl Wood At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home 25

Looking out the window, he sees how it had grown dark, the window that should let in light only reflecting the bright yellow colors of the hospital ward. He looked back into the room with “an oddly shy look of rejuvenation and relief” (174). Resigned to the impossibility of communication with his family, he accepts the reality of the hospital as a place he may never leave. The story ends with McIntyre taking part in Tiny’s little theater to the sounds of the lonely men of Ward C singing – the predictable order back in place – Should auld acquaintance be forgot…. This, for Yates’, is what passes for a happy ending. In each of the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, as well as in most of his work, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Instead, we see ordinary people confronted with the lonely reality of their lives quite at odds with the “official optimism” of the era, and more in keeping with the anxiety that that optimism tried to keep at bay. Then, as now, it would be easy to say that the suburbs with their facades of perfect order and the repressed, conformist Organization Men and lonely, isolated housewives who dwelled within those walls were the hallmark of mainstream white America of the period. Yates offers in his stories a richer version of this. The characters are, in many ways, the same people who we would meet in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit or on the repetitive clichéd sitcoms of the era, in other words white, middle-class (or aspiring middle-class) families, who, by all rights, “should” be happy, at least in the mythology of the era. Revolutionary Road can be (mis) read in terms of an indictment of suburban life as the root of the Wheelers’ (and countless others’) misery. The stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness clearly suggest that the suburbs themselves did not cause this malaise, but rather disappointed dreams, misguided optimism, or self-delusion did. While the Wheelers of Revolutionary Road at least fit the model of suburbia, and they themselves believe that the suburbs are the root of their problems, the characters of the stories discussed here show that in Yates view, the problem lay in an unrealistic optimism. The suburbs may have been the most crass (and exaggerated) expression of this as iconic refuges from fear, perhaps, but for Yates this was a larger phenomenon. Illusions, false hopes or misguided optimism, universal human traits, alas, are to blame, and this is what gives Yates’ work power beyond that of a ‘mere’ critique of suburbia. As Stuart O’Nan wrote in his now well-known 1999 Boston Review celebration of Yates and his work:

It’s this merciless limning of his people that makes Yates unique and the process of reading his work so affecting (some would say terrifying). We recognize the disap- pointments and miscalculations his characters suffer from our own less-than-heroic lives. And Yates refuses to spoon-feed us the usual redeeming, life-affirming plot twist that makes everything better. No comedy dilutes the humiliation. When it’s time to face the worst, there’s no evasion whatsoever, no softening of the blows. The reader recoils even before these scenes begin, like horror movie viewers realizing the victim is going to open the wrong door. In fact, part of the drama – as in Dostoevsky – is anticipating just how terrible the humiliation will be, and how (or if) the characters will survive it. 26 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Grace of “The Best of Everything” is a young woman in love, who still believes, it would seem, in stories with in happily-ever-after fairytale endings. Of course, her environment has encouraged her to believe this, especially in 1950s America with its well-known cult of domesticity pushing women out of the workplace and back into the home, probably in a suburban devel

opment. Yet so humanly, she allows herself to be swept off her feet by an at least somewhat handsome, somewhat charming young man, and ignores her friends’ warnings. In clear contrast to a happy-ever-after story, Yates seems to leave little doubt as to the long, tiring future that lies ahead of Grace, and that clearly the cause is Ralph, his priorities, and his desire to establish “who is boss”, i.e. his male authority and autonomy at the outset, that no sexual seductiveness can apparently undermine. If Grace is to blame, it is only for believing naively in a dream, at least with Ralph. The only ‘hope’ that the ending leaves for the future is that perhaps, someday, the immature Ralph may grow up into a man able to enter a mature relationship, but Yates does not seem to leave much room for this interpretation. The most troubling character is John Fallon, “The B.A.R. Man”. Where Ralph from “The Best of Everything” might be (perhaps) excused as immature and wedded to his homosocial network (homosexual themes, even subtle ones, are difficult to find in Yates’s work), Fallon cannot be so easily written off. We do know that John and Rose’s marriage is a troubled one, but while there are suggestions that Rose’s infertility could be to blame, or even the fact that she earns more than her husband, none of these is a complete explanation. In an era when one might argue the hegemonic norms of masculinity in America were at their most pronounced, Yates shows us a character failing at successive levels on which to build his masculine self-esteem. To be sure, the ‘suburban’ ideal is one he does not live up to in the least (aside from holding a white- collar job), which then in turn causes him to fall back on the last reliable bastions of ‘manliness’ – military service, sexual conquest, and ultimately physical violence. Yates’ formulation of Fallon finding an “absolute sense of fulfillment and relief” seems to suggest that failing in all other ways, that at least getting bloodied in a violent conflict was a “manly” thing for Fallon. The tuberculosis patient McIntyre in “Out with the Old”, also a veteran, presents a different case. At first, he is set apart from the other, sophomoric men; he is the mature family man, evidently the embodiment of masculine fulfillment but for his unfortunate physical ailment. His resultant inability to provide for his family financially does not seem to be a threat to his sense of self in the way that it is to Fallon, the B.A.R. Man. Yates leaves us guessing as to why – evidently McIntyre has other foundations for his self-esteem. Like a fine model of the 1950s paterfamilias, he seems to place great value on imparting his paternal wisdom to his daughter in crisis – explaining, illuminating, not listening. Yet unlike the suburban sitcom father, perhaps no better embodied by the fictional Ozzie Nelson, who James Gilbert argues “was allowed to think that his patriarchal values had meaning, even as each episode demonstrated their futility” (163), McIntyre sees his efforts could lead nowhere. He is unable to communicate in person, and unable to do so in writing. This acceptance of this failure leads him to a strange sort of resolution. His “oddly shy look of rejuvenation and relief” at letting go the burdens and responsibilities of family life expresses a kind of paradoxical sort of happiness to grow out of misery, out of acceptance of one’s failures and lost dreams. This vision is quite at odds with the prevalent notions of happiness and fulfillment of the 1950s. That era promised – for some, at least – the idea that Karl Wood At Home in Loneliness, Loneliness at Home 27 a new kind of American Dream, encapsulated in the suburban ideal, would bring happiness and fulfillment to those who took part in it. For some, that promise seemed (and may seem) to be a bold-faced lie. For Richard Yates, it would seem the larger problem was the lies and self-deceptions we tell ourselves.

Works Cited Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty. The Life and Work of Richard Yates. New York: Picador, 2003. Print. Beuka, Robert. SuburbiaNation. Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Cen- tury American Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print. Berger, Bennett M. “The Myth of Suburbia.”Journal of Social Issues 17 (1961), in (2006) The Suburb Reader.Ed. Becky A. Nickolaides and Andrew Wiese. New York: Routledge, 2006. 312 – 320. Print. Charlton-Jones, Kate. Dismembering the American Dream. The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. Print. Cuordelione, K.A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Gilbert, James. Men in the Middle. Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chi- cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print. Henry, DeWitt, and Geoffrey Clark. “From The Archive: An Interview With Richard Yates.” Ploughshares 37.2/3 (2011): 207 – 224. Academic Search Com- plete. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Hales, Peter Bacon. Outside the Gates of Eden. The Dream of America from Hi- roshima to Now. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Print. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Perf. James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and Thomas Mitchell. RKO, 1946. Kahl, Joseph A. The American Class Structure.1953. New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1967. Print. Kimmel, Michael. Angry White Men. American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation Books, 2013. Print. McGinley, Rory. “Playing Suburbia in Revolutionary Road.” in Richard Yates and the Flawed American Dream. Ed. Jennifer Daly. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. Print. O’Nan, Stewart. “The Lost Word of Richard Yates.” Boston Review. October 1, 1999. Web. http://bostonreview.net/stewart-onan-the-lost-world-of- richard-yates. 5 January 2016. Yates, Richard. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. 1962. London: Vintage, 2008. Print. —. “The B.A.R. Man.”Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. 1962. London: Vintage, 2008. 118 – 135. Print. —. “The Best of Everything.”Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. 1962. London: Vintage, 2008. 21 – 37. Print. —. “Out With the Old.” Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. 1962. London: Vintage, 2008. 159 – 178. Print. —. Revolutionary Road. 1961. London: Vintage, 2007. Print. —. The Easter Parade.1976. London: Meuthen, 2004. Print. Domestication of Foreigner’s Home

28 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Agnieszka Łobodziec Domestication of Foreigner’s Home in Toni Morrison’s Home

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0569 Domestication of Foreigner’s Home

Agnieszka Łobodziec Domestication of Foreigner’s Home 29

Agnieszka Łobodziec is Introduction Senior Lecturer and the head of the Section of Toni Morrison has coined the phrase ‘Foreigner’s Home’ in reference to spaces Literature of the English Speaking World, Uni- effectuated by the process of (im)migration. With regard to America, she versity of Zielona Gora. contended during the 2012 America Festival in France that Since 2015, she has been a member of the Toni Morrison Society’s Everybody in America has come from some place else, International Programs except Native Americans. And immigrants who came Committee. She is the author of Black Theologi- because they were pursued, or because they wanted riches, cal Intra-racial Conflicts or because they were bought, sold, told “Either you go to in the Novels of Toni Mor- jail or you go to America,” as they did in England. Every rison (2012) and From Oppressive Patriarchy to body was from some place else. Thrown out or exiles. So Alternative Masculinity: the idea of home for Americans is fraught with yearning. Black Men and Violence in African-American It’s a romantic place. It’s a kind of utopia, just out of reach. Womanist Novels (2016). So it’s less a place than a mental state that you acquire when you are in a place where you are safe and nobody is after you, and people will help you. (“Interview”)

Morrison’s contemplations of the meanings of ‘home’ can be found in her literary narratives. To her, the quest for home bears within it the following inquires: “Where is the culture? Where is the history? And what is it? And having one. So the house becomes a haven or it can become a haven [ … ] (Profile).” In concord with the African-American women’s literary tradition which “provides a rich resource and a coherent commentary that brings into sharp focus the Black community’s central values” (Cannon, 62) and consist- ently with her own objective of “writing for black people” (Hoby), Morrison’s later novel Home ponders the roots and multidimensionality of the African- American sense of foreignness and pursuit of domesticity (the transformation of one’s house into a haven) in the racially segregated America of the 1950s. Two primary approaches to literary studies that have been generally defined as a result of recapitulation of varied literary schools are aesthetic and cultural. “While aestheticians debated how most accurately to judge a text’s degree of perfection or imperfection, cultural criticism has opened up for discussion how both literary texts and critical standards are produced and what social forces they may reflect” (Hall 2). Following the cultural approach to literary analysis that entails contextualization of a literary work, the aim of this discussion is to ferret out the sociological and political context that Toni Morrison envisions in Home while portraying African-Americans’ endeavor to attain the sense of belonging within the mainstream American society. Bearing in mind the fact that cultural approach emphasizes the interdependence, or even cognitive competition, between literature and other fields such as history, psychology, sociology, journalism etc. the analysis involves a number of references to phenomena external to Morrison’s work, evidencing the correspondence between Morrison’s fiction and actual reality. The African-American Sense of Foreignness

The storyline centers on the main character Frank Money’s rediscovery of home, in the process of which certain antecedents that may account for black American 30 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

alienation from their native land are put forward. One event was forced exile that led to the creation of segregated black towns and a sense of black dislocat edness. Frank’s family underwent forced exodus from Bandera County, Texas, which shattered black population’s sense of home and security, and resettled in a fictional town Lotus, Georgia. Lotus represents the peculiar reality of so-called “colored towns” that Morrison describes in one of her interviews:

It’s like many areas that were segregated off from the white towns. They were black towns. They would call them “colored towns” and remember that Frank was, along with another black neighborhood, expelled. When he was young [ …. ] whole cities would be freed, black people were just told to leave. The property taken, expropriated, and under the threat of death they got out of town. And he was born in this family in one such place. So the idea of the closed black town, village, hamlet was very pervasive. It still exists in certain parts of the United States. [ … ] Of course, they did not give them water, and they did not give them electricity, and certainly no schools. It was a terribly oppressed version of segregation then, and in a different way, I suppose, now. (“Interview. America Festival.”)

The dispossessed population came to realize that in racialist America one’s domicile could be violated at any time, as the narrator in Home opines:

You could be inside, living in your own house for years, and still, men with or without badges but always with guns could force you, your family, your neighbors to pack up and move – with or without shoes. Twenty-four hours, they were told, or else. “Else” meaning “die.” (9 – 10)

Threatened, in escaping to new territory, they became homeless. Frank’s family was seemingly fortunate as his grandmother Lenore allowed them to stay with her until they could move into their own house. Interestingly, Lenore herself was not the actual proprietor of her house. After her first husband, a well-off gas station owner, was murdered in Alabama, most probably by envious racists, Lenore fled to Lotus, Georgia, where she occupied abandoned property that had been willed to her husband by his cousin. Frank family’s plight sheds light on the insecure black settlement during the period of racial segregation. As time went on, the atmosphere of the segregated town induced familial alienation in the youth and they began to dream of home elsewhere. Lenore’s mean-spiritedness, caused by the loss of her sense of homely quietude, turned out too overbearing. “Tight quarters, inconvenience, extra chores, an increas ingly indifferent husband – her haven was destroyed” (88). Moreover, the busy elders did not have requisite time to attend to their children. Looking back, Frank recalls: “When we got home we expected to be whipped or at least scolded for staying out so late, but the grown-ups did not notice us. Some disturbance had their attention” [ italics in original ] (5). He now understands that the lack of adult concern that he and his sister Cee perceived with relief actually jeopardized their security. Unattended, “Frank and Cee, like some forgotten Hansel and Gretel, locked hands as they navigated the silence and tried to imagine a future” (53). Agnieszka Łobodziec Domestication of Foreigner’s Home 31

Other factors that induce senses of displacement and uncertainty within Frank are racial profiling and the impoverishment even black veterans may be subject to. Frank experiences particularly acute alienation when his pursuit of the citizen-soldier ideal remains ever illusive. Before recruitment he believed that “the army was the only solution. Lotus was suffocating, killing him and his two best friends” (35). His thought reflected the black soldiers’ perception of military service which has historically served as a rite of passage through which young men prove their fitness for manhood [ … ]. Add to this the emasculated position of black men in the South and the centrality of masculinity to military socializa- tion culture [ … ], and it is no mystery why black men sought to certify their masculinity by participating in combat. (Parker, 78)

For a time, Frank seemed to have succeeded in finding a domestic space, a sense of belonging to the broader nation, away from confining Lotus. “In the photograph he’d sent home, a smiling warrior in a uniform, holding a rifle, he looked as though he belonged to something else, something beyond and unlike Georgia” (53). Unfortunately, upon repatriation the black veteran feels like a stranger in racially segregated America for several reasons. First of all, he cannot afford decent living conditions, as “there [ is ] nothing in his pants pocket now but his army medal” (14). Secondly, because of racial profiling targeting black men, he remains susceptible to unwarranted stop-and-frisk policing. Added to that, while traveling across the country, he cannot even utilize freely public restrooms that only whites may utilize. On one occasion, he even has to relieve “himself in the shrubbery behind the station” (23). In picturing the dilemma of the black veteran’s sense of foreignness, Toni Morrison employs a number of signifiers relative to belonging, home, house, and family. The initial symbolic place that the returned veteran finds himself situated in after repatriation is not a welcoming home but a “nuthouse” (11), within which he, along with other patients, is subject to medical experimentation under sedation. Only after emerging to a condition from which he is able to pretend immobility to avoid further injections, does he manage to release himself from confining bed straps. His escape, however, does not provide settlement prospects, so he travels from one city to the next, unable to lodge in “rooming houses, hotels” (23) and “tourists homes” (25) either because of his race or lack of money. As time passes, Frank develops a sense of dislocatedness. When asked about his place of origin, he replies, “Aw, man. Korea, Kentucky, San Diego, Seattle, Georgia. Name it I’m from it” (28). Moreover, he considers legislation whereupon he is likely to be “sentenced for vagrancy. Interesting law, vagrancy, meaning standing outside or walking without clear purpose anywhere” (9). Paradoxically, the law classifies his state to be a transgression. His dislocatedness also reflects his traumatized psyche. Physically as well as mentally he cannot be certain of the location he is going to find himself in and of the behaviors his psychological impairment may engender. Uncontrol- lable confusion haunts him, for instance, when he endeavors to recall the circumstances surrounding his arrest:

He couldn’t explain it to himself, let alone to a gentle couple offering help. If he wasn’t in a fight was he peeing on 32 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

the sidewalk? Hollering curses at some passerby, some schoolchildren? Was he banging his head on a wall or hiding behind bushes in somebody’s backyard? “I must have been acting up,” he said. “Something like that.” He truly could not remember. Had he thrown himself on the ground at the sudden sound of backfire? Perhaps he started a fight with a stranger or started weeping before trees – apolo- gizing to them for acts he had never committed. (14 – 15)

Additionally, the “medical industry” (122) does not provide healthcare but the opposite. For black people it is a social menace, as illustrated the incapacitation Frank experienced under ‘care’ of doctors at a mental institution, who injected him with drugs, and by the experiments of the white supremacist eugenicist that left Frank’s sister barren. The latter may be approached as a literary allusion to white supremacist healthcare political practices that subjected black people to inhumane scientific experimentation referred to euphemistically as “medical abuses – particularly the Tuskegee (Alabama) experiment (1932 – 1972) and the high incidence of involuntary sterilization” (Dorsey qtd. in Nelson, 104) to curb the black population’s growth over against whites. The objective of Morrison’s fictional eugenicist has two foundations – the political stance of “a heavyweight Confederate” (62), influenced by ideologies lauded in books such as The Passing of the Great Race and Heredity, Race and Society” (65), and frustration resulting from awareness that his family line may come to an end, as he has fathered two infirm daughters. Sarah, a second black domestic employed by the doctor, informs Cee, “They’re in a home. They both have great big heads. Cephalitis, I think they call it. Sad for it to happen to even one, but two?” (63). For this reason, the doctor “seemed pleased to hear” (64) that Cee had not born a child before he subjected her to experimentation. Towards the Domestication of Foreigner’s Home

As previously stated, Toni Morrison understands home in relation to a particular state of mind. Interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel, Morrison unequivocally states, “At home you feel that the world is beautiful, gorgeous, magnificent” (“Interview. CBC.”). In Home, Frank Money harbors these feelings upon his journey towards self-awareness and self-affirmation, whereby he discovers possible means of transforming alienation into a sense of belonging even in overly unhomely spaces. An occasion that triggers the outcast veteran’s reconsideration of manliness and life’s essence is a visit to Billy’s family. The two men came to know each other by happenstance in a bar. Frank was impressed by the way Billy and his wife transcended the traumatic experience of their son, Thomas, who was permanently injured by a white policeman, who maintained that the boy “had a cap pistol. Eight years old, running up and down the sidewalk pointing it” (31). From that moment on, the family engaged in hard work and employed their religious faith to overcome rage and helplessness. Billy is proud of his son, deemed a “math whiz” (31). The child inspires Frank to think again about manhood, thoughts that the impaired veteran had repressed upon returning from foreign battlefields. Frank also discerns the crucial role that familial Agnieszka Łobodziec Domestication of Foreigner’s Home 33 unity plays in assuring the boy’s sense of security and self-confidence at home, away from the violent and oppressive outside world. Additionally to his observation of empowering parent-child dynamics with regard to homeliness, Frank also, in redefining the meaning of home, reconsiders life’s gender and sexual spheres. For example, he recalls the hopes he once had at the beginning of his relationship with Lily. After the horrific images of torn and lacerated bodies on the battlefield, Lily’s unimpaired physical beauty was healing. Furthermore, by way of an internal dialogue, he clarifies his true emotions “You are dead wrong if you think I was just scouting for a home with a bowl of sex in it. I wasn’t. Something about her floored me, made me want to be good enough for her” [ italics in original ] (68). Frank, therefore, challenges traditional gender and sexual notions surrounding home. He feels that honest commitment to mutual support grants a sense of security and belonging. Probably, for this reason, he is not able to establish a permanent relationship, regardless of Lily’s sexual attractiveness and her meticulousness about household maintenance as well as gender role division. For Frank, home has more to do with feeling than carnal satisfaction and orderly space. A greater challenge to gendered patriarchal conceptions of home occurs when Frank observes a black married couple after a racist white mob attacks the woman’s husband. The omniscient narrator relates that Frank assumes that the victimized man will beat her when they get home [ … ]. It’s one thing to be publicly humiliated. A man could move on from that. What was intolerable was the witness of a woman, a wife, who not only saw it, but had dared to try to rescue – rescue! – him. He couldn’t protect himself and he couldn’t protect her either, as the rock in her face proved. She would have to pay for that broken nose. Over and over again. (26)

For a while, Frank indeed seems to assume that black male domestic violence is an affirmation of black masculine prowess in order to compensate for the powerlessness felt in the outside world. This is reflective of a possible function served by black-on-black intimate violence noted by Mark Antony Neal as “a way of releasing pent-up frustration at one’s oppression by “hurting an enemy” – a black enemy, in all but the most grievous circumstances, since the white enemy one might prefer to hurt [ is ] protected by the full force of white law and lynch law” (209). However, upon recognizing the value of homely serenity, Frank re-evaluates his earlier attitude towards the publicly assaulted husband:

Earlier you wrote about how sure I was that the beat-up man on the train to Chicago would turn around when they got home and whip the wife who tried to help him. Not true. I didn’t think any such thing. What I thought was that he was proud of her but didn’t want to show how proud he was to the other men on the train. I don’t think you know much about love. Or me. [ italics in original ] (69)

At this point he no longer adheres to a patriarchal conception of home as a space requiring the performance of traditional gender roles, particularly with regard to the misusage of masculine virility. 34 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

A breakthrough in Frank’s journey towards domestication occurs when he attains a sense of fulfillment after rescuing his sister, Cee, from the life- threatening eugenic practices. The letter calling Frank to come to his imperiled sister’s aid recalls familial connectedness that existed when he formerly took care of little Cee. “Maybe his life had been preserved for Cee, [ … ]. Even before she could walk he’d taken care of her. The first word she spoke was ‘Fwank’.” (35). After Frank brings Cee back to Lotus, he begins to perceive the town differently as he sees it as a distinctive unit that empowers the black community to domesticate the foreign space. One newly felt emotion is a sense of security, manifested by way of Frank’s color discernment. Earlier, while traveling across his racially segregated nation, everything seemed colorless, in black and white shades. “All color disappeared and the world became a black-and-white movie screen. He didn’t yell then because he thought something bad was happening to his eyes. Bad, but fixable” (23). After a time, he became increasingly “annoyed and a little frightened by the colorless landscape” (23 – 24). Although here and there the grass seemed to have “turned green” (24), it was in Lotus where he regained the ability to recognize the complete colors spectrum:

The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loi- tered there in a white heaven [ … ] Crimson, purple, pink, and China blue. Had these trees always been this deep, deep green? [ … ] Color, silence, and music enveloped him. This feeling of safety and goodwill, he knew, was exaggerated, but savoring it was real. (117 – 118)

Also the women of the community, who apply their natural healing power while treating Frank’s sister, create the atmosphere of embracing and empowering unity. Miss Ethel establishes a “womanist home,” where women reflect the womanist personae defined by Alice Walker as a woman who

[ a ]ppreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. (XI)

The women who gather at Miss Ethel’s engage in chores common to the cultural tradition of black women – singing, quilting and natural healing. Their preference for women’s culture is also evidenced by their formation of a female enclave, from which Frank is temporarily ordered to remove himself while his sister recuperates. Although seemingly female-oriented, the women, following womanist custom, empower both women and men. Cee’s healing, as the consequence, fosters Frank’s reconsideration of his past experiences of dislocatedness and alienation, enhancing his journey towards domesticity. First, he reconsiders his relationship with Lily as a stage towards mental empowerment, although they were not able to establish a traditional household. Frank is “now convinced his attachment to her was medicinal [ … ] Effectively, [ … ] Lily displaced his disorder, his rage and his shame. The displacements had convinced him the emotional wreckage no longer existed” (107 – 108). Secondly, upon revisiting, “cleaning and repairing his parents’ house that had been empty since his father Agnieszka Łobodziec Domestication of Foreigner’s Home 35 died” (120), he feels at home in Lotus. He thinks positively of surrounding cotton fields, although “he had hated this place once” (120). The embracing homely location facilitates development of Frank’s self- awareness as he goes on to ponder “what else [ is ] troubling him and what to do about it” (132). He develops the courage to face the repressed battlefield memory of his lustful murder of the hungry Korean girl. Tormenting thoughts about the girl intertwine with those of Cee’s unborn child. He hopes in “time to work it loose” (135) so that he might regain a sense of integrity and inner peace. He succeeds in doing so only after Cee and he rebury the profaned corpse of a black man, who was unwillingly killed by his son during a forced switchblades fight for a white racist crowd’s amusement. Upon his grave, Frank places a marker that reads, “Here Stands A Man” (145). He reminiscences the sense of power, security, and familial bonding he felt at that moment. “I stood there a long while, staring at that tree. / It looked so strong / So beautiful. / Hurt right down the middle/ But alive and well. / Cee touched my shoulder / Lightly. / Frank? / Yes?/ Come on, brother. Let’s go home” [ italics in original ] (147). The relief may also reflect the African-American traditional belief in death as home-going. For instance, during an African-American Christian funerals, “there is an opening hymn that captures the spirit of celebration and the joy of home-going for the deceased” (Armstrong, 101), and “[ c ]onsistent with the theme of home-going, the eulogist must uplift those gathered with a message of hope for a better future for the deceased” (102). Often liturgy includes spirituals expressing despair and hopefulness, for instance, “Sometimes I am tossed and driven / Sometimes I don’t know where to roam, / I’ve heard of a city called ’Heaven’ / I’ve stared to make it my home” [ italics in original ] (Jones, 86) or “Steal away, steal away, / steal away to Jesus! / Steal away, steal away home, / I ain’t got long to stay here” [ italics in original ] (Jones, 74). The attitudes and emotions of Morrison’s characters educed by the dignified reburial of the black male victim indicate salvific hope in death and concomitant ancestral unity. Also the surrounding nature radiates homeliness and comfort: “The sun had reddened and was about to set. [ … ] Honeybees had gone home. Fireflies waited for night. And a light smell of muscadine grapes pierced by hummingbirds soothed the gravedigger. When finally it was done a welcome breeze rose. Brother and sister slid the crayon-colored coffin into the perpendicular grave” (144). Conclusions

The alienation from the American homeland that Morrison’s fictional characters experience echoes to a certain extent the condition Michael Walzer describes in his essay “What Does It Mean to Be an “American?” as follows, “To be ‘at home’ in America is a personal matter: Americans have homesteads and homefolks and hometowns, and each of these is an endlessly interesting topic of conversation. But they don’t have much to say about a common or communal home” (592 – 593). In Home, Toni Morrison tends to individualize domestication in America. She portrays particular members of the fictional Lotus black community as ‘homefolks and hometowns’ that are outside the broader American national family. Frank’s experience also is that of an individual searching for a spiritual essence of home over against unwel coming, confining, or discomforting dwellings, signified epigraphically at the novel’s beginning, from whence an unknown person, akin to Frank, speaks of estrangement from a domestic structure: 36 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Whose house is this? / Whose night keeps out the light / In here? / Say, who owns this house? / It’s not mine. / I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter / With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats; / Of fields wide as arms open for me. / This house is strange. / Its shadows lie. / Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key. (epigraph)

This is emblematic of Frank’s remembrance of the childhood and young adult feelings he harbored in Lotus before military service while living at his grandmother’s house, parental home, and later on as a psychologically devastated veteran at his lover Lily’s apartment. In these spaces, the occupants turned out to be overly taken up by everyday chores and housekeeping, neglecting concern for each other’s needs and feelings. Although his key fit the locks to doors of the houses, he did not feel secure. Toni Morrison postulates that a sense of belonging might lead to a rede- velopment of domesticity that Frank regains within foreigner’s home when called upon to rescue his imperiled sister, together with the community of women healers who fostered a sense of communal security, with both arising out of resistance. Frank’s assumption of responsibility for his sister motivates him to struggle against menacing acts. He breaks free from his bed straps in the “nuthouse” (11) (mental institution) and absconds to confront the white supremacist doctor in Atlanta. Likewise, in Lotus, the women healers resist “the medical industry” (122) with convalescent care and inculcate a spirit of resistance within the victimized. After Cee recovers, Miss Ethel counsels her on transforming the space where she once felt foreign to home:

Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seed your own land. [ … ] Don’t let Lenore or some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That’s slavery. Some- where inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world. (126)

Taking Ethel’s advice, Cee returns to her parents’ residence, where she and her brother begin to transpose their house into a home. The domicile that the siblings recreate symbolically challenges traditional patriarchal gendered households in several ways. First of all, they inhabit the space asexually. Secondly, Cee exhibits self-confidence despite her inability to fulfill a fundamental patriarchal maternal directive. Lastly, as the characters begin to furnish and equip their abode, no mention is made of fixed gender roles performance. The most significant purposes of Frank and Cee’s home are to bring security and authenticity into their individual lives, and to empower the two siblings to face and transcend traumatic past experiences. In turn, the broader black community of Lotus creates a homely milieu, free from negative external norms, be they racial or gendered or both. In terms of race, black men and women find pathways to transcend the hopelessness and helplessness resulting from their oppressive and atrocious experiences, providing feelings of home at least within the immediate black community. In terms of gender, the familial dynamics among them is a far cry from the dominant western patriarchal models of mainstream white society. Certain gender roles are even reversed. The women serve as healers, over against a “medical industry” (122) dominated by white male physicians and scientists. Agnieszka Łobodziec Domestication of Foreigner’s Home 37

The men are associated with well-cooked meals, contrasting with “classic Western traditions [ in which ] the kitchen figures as the most feminine of already feminized domestic spaces” (Dobbs, 116). When Frank sees two men playing the blues, he thinks “that somewhere nearby pork ribs sizzl[ e ] on a yard grill and inside the house there [ is ] potato salad and coleslaw and early sweet peas too” (118). In his own kitchen, Frank offers to help his sister cook. In conclusion, Toni Morrison portrays the process of domestication in foreigner’s home to evidence the fluidity of home, the “shifting quality of home” (Mayberry, 565). Home is perceived to be temporal, not eternal, a mental and emotional state that can be kindled and rekindled even in previously alienating locations, represented by the characters’ reconnection with Lotus, the community they formerly disfavored.

Works Cited Armstrong, Tonya D. “African and African-American Traditions in America.” Religion, Death, and Dying: Volume 3: Bereavement and Death Rituals. Ed. Lucy Bregman. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. 83 – 109. Print. Cannon, Katie Geneva. Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum, 2003. Print. Dobbs, Cynthia. “Diasporic Designs of House, Home, and Haven in Toni Mor- rison’s Paradise.” MELUS 36. 2 (Summer 2011): 109 – 126. Web. 15 Aug. 2015. Hall, Donald E. Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Application. Boston: Houghton, 2001. Hoby, Hermione. “Toni Morrison: I’m Writing for Black People. I Don’t Have to Apologize.” Gulf News. 3 June 2015. < http://gulfnews.com/culture/ books/toni-morrison-i-m-writing-for-black-people-i-don-t-have-to- apologise-1.1529228 >. Jones, Arthur C. Wade In The Water: The Wisdom Of The Spirituals. New York: Orbis Books, 1999. Print. Mayberry, Susan Neal. “‘Everything about her had two sides to it:’ The For- eigner’s Home in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review 42.3 – 4 (Fall/Winter 2008): 565 – 578. JSTOR. Web. 15 Aug. 2015. Morrison, Toni. Home. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Print. —. Interview. America Festival. France. 20 – 23 Sept. 2012. —. Interview. CBC. Eleanor Wachtel. 13 May 2012. Web. 26 Jan. 2014. —. Nobel Lecture. 7 Dec. 1993. < http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html>. —. Profile of a Writer Series. Prod. RM Arts, videocassette, Home Vision, 1987. Neal, Mark A. Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Nelson, Jennifer. “‘Hold your head up and stick out your chin:’ Community Health and Women’s Health in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17.1 (Spring 2005): 99 – 118. Print. Parker, Christopher S. Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Strug- gle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Print. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: A Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. SanDiego, New York, London: Harvest/HBJ, 1983. Print. Walzer, Michael. “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘American’?” Social Research 57. 3 (Fall 1990): 591 – 614. JSTOR. Web. 23 Aug. 2015. The Homely Sublime in Space

38 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Jerzy Sobieraj

Southern Antebellum Plantation: Home, Prison, Enterprise?

this picture, steeped in the intense quivering summer moonlight, filled the soul with unspeakable emotions of beauty, tenderness, peace, home. Dr. George W. Bagby

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0570 The Homely Sublime in Space

Jerzy Sobieraj SOUTHERN ANTEBELLUM PLANTATION 39

1 Jerzy Sobieraj is This article addresses various functions of the antebellum Southern plantation. Associate Professor of The author covers both major “actors” who experienced the plantation system, American Literature at planters (and the members of their families) and slaves. The former group is the University of Social Sciences and Humanities represented by such participants of the plantation life as Thomas Nelson Page in Warsaw. His research or Bennet Barrow. In the latter group the voice belongs to Harriet Jacobs or focuses on Southern

Solomon Northup. literature and the history th of the nineteenth and In the 19 century, many Southern writers started making the planta- twentieth centuries. tion theme significant in their various texts, novels, stories, and essays. In Among his works is the first Polish monograph this way Southern plantation crossed the borders of the South. Plantation on the Ku Klux Klan. fiction emerged before the Civil War and the writers often came out with Professor Sobieraj is the idealized picture of the microcosm they described. In John Pendleton also author of Collisions of Conflict: Studies in Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832), the planta- American History and tion’s center was “an aristocratical old edifice, … a time-honored mansion” Culture, 182 – 920. (19). The plantation was an expression of the aristocratic world of the agrarian South. The plantation literature, fiction and non-fiction, was continued in the post-Civil War decades, and though the idealization of the plantation still marked the genre, the message it carried changed. In the post-bellum period Southern authors expressed their longing for the world that was gone; idealizing it they offered consolation to the white Southerners, often broken financially and, after all, morally and mentally by the defeat. The writer who focused in his fiction and non-fiction on the plantation, making it both home and homeland of its owner, and sometimes showing it as his own home, was Thomas Nelson Page. Page, whom Woodward calls “the undisputed champion among the glorifiers of the Old South and the plantation legend” (429), introduced an idealized and sometimes sentimental picture of the plantation which was additionally reinforced by his quite personal attachment to the plantation world; he himself, being the son of a Virginian aristocrat, spent his childhood on a plantation, before the Civil War shattered the world of the white Southerners. Thus not only social and political reasons stood behind the ideal plantation world he pictured, but also his own experience of the life on the plantation as a child. His childhood memories naturally made the world he described ideal, spotless and, thus, secure. Speaking about Page’s idle childhood spent on his family plantation, Oakland, Virginia, Lucinda H. Mackethan concludes that the fact that Page “would idealize the past was an inevitable consequence of the experiences which made up the most impressionable years of his life” (1978, not paginated). As in the case of many other Southern writers who created the plantation world, memorizing the past events and objects was characteristic of Page’s writings. One of the epitomes of a romanticized plantation picture is his collection of essays entitled The Old South: Essays Social and Political (1892), and especially his personal account of his plantation childhood, “Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War.” Here Page employs his memory as a tool determining the shape, details, and atmosphere of his plantation image. He opens his account with a short introductory paragraph: “Let me see if I can describe an 1 A simple and explicit definition of the term “plantation” is given by Martin Ruef: “[ T ]he term plantation refers to any large agricultural unit (500 acres or more) that is owner-operated (rather than rented or tenant farmed) and heavily reliant on hired or enslaved labor” (1366). It must be noted that the plantation system developed in the South in the first half of the 18th century and the character of plantations depended much on the crops the planters grew and harvested. Slaves on tobacco and cotton plantations were put to labor under a “gang” system, whereas those working on rice plantations followed the “task” system. Apart from tobacco, cotton and rice plantations, there were also sugar plantations, located mainly in Louisiana; these ones demanded extremely hard slave labor to be profitable. 40 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

old Virginia home recalled from my memory stamped with it when it was a virgin page. It may, perhaps, be idealized by the haze of time; but it will be as I now remember it” (143). Page gives us his image of the plantation he remembers from childhood but somehow entitles this account of his innocent years rather seriously, “Social Life in Old Virginia before the War,” perhaps

unconsciously emphasizing that we remember in socio-cultural contexts and that even if we refer to our childhood that we remember as idealistic, our account of that childhood will be filtered through our present knowledge, needs, obligations and expectations. In this sense, memory is somehow lived, personal, concrete, and still alive in the context of the aspects of the “now.” 2 In this respect, it differs from sheer history, that is sometimes conceived as “abstract, totalizing, and ‘dead’” (Erll, 6). We cannot exist without constant employment of our memory, and not only because of pure physiological reasons; we need it, since “[ t ]o strengthen our sense of self the past needs to be rescued and made accessible” (Tuan, 187). Lucinda Mackethan emphasizes the three aspects of Page’s Arcadian world: “the plantation locale itself with the great house at the center; the image of Southern gentleman; and … the ‘old time’ Negro, the slave or ‘servant’ as Page calls him…” (1978, not paginated). These three aspects of Page’s homeland can be traced in most of his accounts of the plantation. The same occurs in his “Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War.” The plantation house is at the center of the microcosm described; it is a container of life but also the hub around which all important events take place. Here absolute concentration is on the house and its inhabitants; the economic aspects of the plantation, work in the fields, are almost absent. Memories of childhood refer to the close, secure and intimate place, rather than to the difficult-to-grasp space. Childhood needs a home as shelter that guarantees security, not to mention that, naturally, “[ h ]ome is at the center of an astronomically determined spatial center” (Tuan, 149). Page’s account of his plantation home contains the aspects that give it some uniqueness, emphasizing its individuality and history. The house is “set on a hill in a grove of primeval oaks and hickories” (143), this way its superiority is expressed by being above and attached to old times, thus underlining its residents’ organically belonging to the place and creating some aura of mystery that can cover the unwanted. “Long ago” is associated with some utopian perfectness. As Tuan states, “Antiquity is idealized…. The Golden Age is shrouded in mystery…”(122). Much of Page’s attention is focused on the garden surrounding the place, that shapes its atmosphere, that of joy, warmth and idleness; it contained “lilacs and syringas and roses, and locusts of every age and size, which in springtime filled the air with honeyed perfume, and lulled with the ‘murmur of innumerable bees.’… [ E ] verywhere were tall lilies, white as angels’ wings…” (144, 146). Page slowly transforms the house on a hill and its surroundings into a mythic territory, where things are associated with some glorious, idealized past : Some beautiful flowers were “sweet as if they had come from Paradise to be worn upon young maidens’ bosoms”(146), some others “on their stout stems, glorious enough to have been the worthy badge of victorious Lancastrian kings” (147). One of the plantation houses was so greatly appreciated by the boys “as was by the youth of Rome the wearing of the toga virilis “(144). A fine home at 2 Alun Munslow expresses this conviction in the following way: “[ H ]uman beings reflect upon not just what happened in the past but we do so within the context of our own personal experience of living on the receding edge of time” (157). Jerzy Sobieraj SOUTHERN ANTEBELLUM PLANTATION 41 the center with its serene and beautiful surroundings, anchored in the past and loaded with some mythical associations, well expresses the Aristocratic dimension of the South as well as the dream of Arcady itself. Mackethan emphasizes that Page’s ”locales are charged with special significance…. And it is through these descriptions that Page is establishing the credentials of his heroes – if they come from a fine plantation, they are almost invariably of high moral quality and deserve universal admiration” (1978, not paginated). As Mackethan expressed it elsewhere, “the plantation … [ is ] the breeding ground for heroes” (1980, 48). In Page’s version of the plantation community, some intellectual activity of the owner is emphasized. The master not only talked about “philosophy, politics, and religion,” with his guests, but he increased his considerable knowledge in his own library “and read only the best. His book-cases held the masters…. Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Goldsmith, “Mr. Pope,” were the poets; Bacon, Burke, and Dr. Johnson were his philosophers” (159, 160). The depth and richness of intellectual life of Page’s master works well as an element of the dream expressing the gentleman’s wisdom. However, it was not typical of a Virginian gentleman to always express such learning and intellectual qualities. As Bertram Wyatt-Brown clearly states, “learning, especially the venerable kind, marked the possessor as a gentleman. Yet, in the South at least, too much of it allegedly spoiled the result. There was a strongly anti-intellectual streak in Southern society…” (46). Anyway, book reading or books on one’s shelves often find a significant place in Southern plantation writing, as for instance in Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance. This significance is perhaps well expressed by Aristides who tried to declare convincingly that “[ a ] book in one’s own library is in a sense a brick in the building of one’s being, carrying with it memories, a small block of one’s personal intellectual history, associations unsortable in their profusion” (qtd. in Tuan, 187). Speaking of this learned gentleman/Aristocrat/master Page introduces him as an unshakable and indestructible “stronghold” of the family and plantation itself. His spotless picture, that could serve as an idealized description of a Virginia aristocrat, shows a man of pride whose character is based on self-respect and consciousness of power.… [ T ]here was absolute self-confidence…. There was not a doubtful line in the face nor a doubtful tone in the voice; his opinions were convictions; he was a partisan to the backbone…. He was proud, but never haughty except to dishonor. He believed in God, he believed in his wife, he believed in his blood. He was chivalrous, he was generous, he was usually incapable of fear or mean- ness. To be a Virginia gentleman was the first duty; it embraced being a Christian and all the virtues.… He had inherited gravity from his father and grandfather before him.… The greatness of the past, the time when Virginia had been the mighty power of the New World, loomed ever above him. (157, 158, 159)

Page, looking at his childhood time on the plantation, but from a perspective of a grown-up man’s experience, politicizes his gentleman/aristocrat/master. He undoubtedly asserts the solidity of the Southern social hierarchy. There is a powerful master living in his mansion on the hill, but he deserves the 42 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

power due to his features of character, patriarchal heritage, wisdom, and high morality; he is thus qualified to be at the top. Introducing the idealized master class, Page glorifies the antebellum order, but doing so he cannot, irrespective of what some scholars say, avoid showing “his portrait of the South as an oversimplified depiction serving as local color propaganda…” (Hagood,

423 – 424), regardless of what it is designed to aid or to serve. The gentleman’s best companion was undoubtedly the lady of the house. The mistress “was the most important personage about the home… “ (152). In the conservative mind of Page, she was her husband’s “guide, philosopher, and friend,” to put it nicely, but in fact her freedom was limited due to her devotion to others and, first of all, to the master of the house: “Her life was one long act of devotion – devotion to God, devotion to her husband, devotion to her children, devotion to her servants, to her friends, to the poor, too all humanity” (155). And her daughter, like her mother when she was younger, “had not to learn to be, because she was born a lady. Generations had given her that by heredity” (162) For Page, the mistress exquisitely expresses the paternal world of the South, in which a white lady, irrespective of her features of character and privileges, is often only the enchanted symbol, the one locked in the castle on the top of a glass mountain, “[ r ]emoved from the fullest exercise of power by her womanhood” (126), to borrow a phrase from Drew Gilpin Faust. Those who expect that Page’s plantation picture will be destroyed by show ing the exploitation of hard working slaves are certainly wrong. First, one notices that Page refers to the plantation slaves as “servants” which diminishes and neutralizes our obvious associations with the evils of slavery and thus enables Page to construct his Agrarian world. Second, the way the “servants” are pictured makes them closer to the some kind of friends or members of the master’s family than to the cruelly exploited hard working hands:

[ T ]he boys mixed up with the little darkies as freely as any other young animals, and forming the associations which tempered slavery and made the relation one of friendship.… From the back yard and quarters the laughter of women and the shrill, joyous voices of children came. Far of, in the fields, the white-shirted “ploughers” followed singly their slow teams in fresh furrows …, loud shouts and peals of laughter, mellowed by the distance, floating up from time to time, telling that the heart was light and the toil not too heavy. (150)

Though Page idealizes the lives of his African American characters, he, undoubtedly, becomes a spokesman for the superiority of the Caucasian civilization. It was the white man who “christianized the Negro race … [ and ] impressed upon it regard for order, and gave it the only civilization it has ever possessed since the dawn of history. It has maintained the supremacy of the Caucasian race, upon which all civilization seems now to depend” (184, 185). Such protective tone and paternal attitude towards black slaves while at the same time emphasizing the superiority of the white man, is characteristic of some more 19th and early 20th century plantation and/or Reconstruction literature written by white Southern writers. Thomas Dixon very well echoes Page’s conviction. African Americans should be given the protection and care of a white man, as long as they know their place in the world governed by the supreme Caucasian race. Jerzy Sobieraj SOUTHERN ANTEBELLUM PLANTATION 43

As mentioned above, Page looks at the antebellum spotless and idealized world of his childhood home and nostalgically explores it, consciously or not, for the purpose of somehow preserving that lost world and offering some comfort to the white Southerners who lived in the post-Civil War decades of sharp civilizational changes that occurred in their region 3. When “a people perceive that changes are occurring too rapidly …, nostalgia for an idyllic past waxes strong” (Tuan, 195). Page’s point of view is filtered through his up-bringing and his sense of once belonging to the class of white rulers. To break out of this world is often impossible, even keeping in mind the memories of innocent childhood. The word “home” and the message it carries, is rarely mentioned, if ever, by the remaining inhabitants of the plantation, slaves. In their narratives they may refer to the plantation, their quarters or cabins, the master’s house but very rarely to their home. Mary Ella Grandberry describes the slave cabins on a plantation in the following way: “There was a lot of cabins for the slaves, but they wasn’t fitten for nobody to live in. We just had to put up with them” (not paginated). A “home,” a center of our universe is often silenced in slave and ex-slave narratives. Certainly, whatever this is, it is devoid of the features that fill home with content, at least as free people feel and understand that content. However, Harriet Jacobs exploring her memory about her childhood, sees it, similarly to Page, as a happy one:” I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away” (5). Being a child, probably protected by her mother against getting the truth about who she was, she was unaware about the evils of slavery. Her family, mainly due to her father’s skills and the income he secured for his mistress, could live in a house more comfortable than those of other slaves. While growing up, her awareness of her position and the life around her was structured enough to notice the difference between black and white people whom she met daily. Imprisonment is the notion that perhaps best refers to the position of slaves. Being encapsulated, limited in freedom of movement, experiencing all sorts of punishments inflicted on them, best express their situation. Ben- net Barrow, owner of about 200 slaves, states clearly in his plantation rules, that he composed in 1836, the obvious, that “[ n ]o negro shall ever leave the place at any time without my permission…” (not paginated). However, in his plantation rules he tries, smartly, to explain this imprisonment: “The negro who is accustomed to remain constantly at Home, is just as satisfied with the society on the plantation as that which he would find elsewhere, and the very restrictions laid upon him being equally imposed on others, he does not feel them, for society is kept at home for them…” (not paginated). 4 Bennet Barrow’s attitude toward a slave is a fine example of, what Stanley Elkins calls, “a perverted patriarchy” (104). Elkins in his controversial, though instructive and inspiring, classic, goes far in searching for common aspects of an American slave plantation and a Nazi concentration camp. As the common aspects of both kinds of imprisonment, Elkins mentions perverted patriarchy, lack of privacy, uselessness of making any plans for the future, outside life as sort of abstraction, being under a significant amount of stress, the impossibility of any individual

3 W. J. Cash, writing about the destruction of the Old South, speaks about the changes that occurred in the post-Civil War decades and a Southern society which at that time „has been rapidly and increasingly industrialized and modernized both in body and mind” (x). 4 Some masters erected jails for slaves on their plantations. Harriet Jacobs refers to one of them: “There was a jail and a whipping post on his grounds; and whatever cruelties were perpetrated there, they passed without comment” (46). 44 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

heroics, childlike quality. (104 – 111) Speaking about a concentration camp he emphasizes that prisoners there were “reduced to complete and childish dependence upon their masters…” (113). Reading Barrow’s plantation rules one can come to a similar conclusion. The protective, paternalistic tone emerges when he, playing the role of a severe father, instructs: “You must, therefore

make him [ a slave ] as comfortable at Home as possible, affording him, What is essentially necessary for his happiness – you must provide for him Your self and by that means creat (sic) in him a habit of perfect dependence on you” (not paginated). Elkins, however, does not pay much attention to one more significant aspect of both institutions, i. e. labor. Though labor is their significant element, its purpose certainly differs. With certain simplification it can be stated that in case of a concentration camp, labor is used to produce, but first of all, it is applied as some sort of perverted economy whose goal is the extermination of prisoners. In the plantation system, work is first of all to produce in order to secure income for the master and his family, irrespective of the fact how inhuman and degrading it is for the slaves (see also Sobieraj, 35). Plantation world, a home for Page and all other members of slave-owning families, is often pictured by those who experienced slavery, as horrible, terrifying, and offering no hope. Jacobs’ words well express what slavery is for a slave: “Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery” (62). Solomon Northup speaks about his being a slave in utmost sadness, and, like Jacobs, refers to death : “I must toil day after day, endure abuse and taunts and scoffs, sleep on the hard ground, live on the coarsest fare …, live the slave of a blood-seeking wretch, of whom I must stand henceforth in continued fear and dread. Why had not I died in my young years…” (81). Death, like in an old negro spiritual, can be some freeing solution. As such, death can ease the horror of being imprisoned, everyday hard work, sense of helplessness and hopelessness, “fear and dread.” Without the system of slavery, without that imprisonment, an antebellum plantation could not exist as an enterprise, which is what it, from an economic point of view, was. As Bennet Barrow wrote about Southern plantation system, “[ a ]plantation might be considered as a piece of machinery, to operate successfully, all of its parts should be uniform and exact, and the impelling force regular and steady…” (not paginated). What Southern plantations produced was crucial not only for American economy but equally important for European industry and markets. Sugar, tobacco and, especially, cotton were extremely significant for individual European states. American cotton created highly specialized cotton market in Great Britain. Many European newspapers commented on the situation of this market threatened by the ongoing war. For example, Gazeta Polska, in its report published in August 1861, gave as one of the reasons for the war, the defense of the cotton market by Southerners:

What then do Southern states want, if not the defense of cotton…. England needs 2,5 million bales of cotton … to keep their factories in motion … to give employment to 4 illion workers, one fourth of England’s population, and one eight of the whole of Great Britain.… Four fifths of the cotton indispensable to keep up this machinery running, to feed these workers, to bring this colossal capital to England, is delivered by the United States of America. (1) /translation mine/ Jerzy Sobieraj SOUTHERN ANTEBELLUM PLANTATION 45

That delivery was certainly possible due to the slave labor; without it any agricultural economy would be impossible. Though the “economic root of slavery was only one of several roots…it grew strong enough to produce an ugly organism” (Genovese, 247). Many business historians agree, that slavery flourished so quickly “’in response to economic stimuli’” (252). As Eugene

Genovese 5 makes it clear, a peaceful transition from slave labor to free labor in the South was simply impossible. (269). Bennet Barrow described the slave plantation in terms of “a piece of machinery,” whereas Solomon Norhtup focused on some aspects of that machinery from a perspective of a hard working slave:

When a new hand, one unaccustomed to the business, is sent for the first time into the field, he is whipped up smartly, and made for that day to pick as fast as he can possibly. At night it is weighed, so that his capability in cotton picking is known. He must bring in the same weight each night following. If it falls short, it is considered evidence that he has been laggard, and a greater or less number of lashes is the penalty. An ordinary day’s work is two hundred pounds. A slave who is accustomed to picking, is punished, if he or she brings in a less quantity than that. (108)

The antebellum plantation, though sometimes commented upon as a certain sort of capitalist enterprise, resembles in some respects the pre-Industrial Revolution organization of work, when work and home were close, sometimes inseparable spheres of human activity. The plantation can be defined as a certain microcosm experienced by its inhabitants depending on “who’s talking.” For Page, a member of the Southern ruling class, it is home, warm and uninterrupted by the image of his father’s slaves working hard in the fields; for the slaves, it is an encircled space, a curious bleak labyrinth with no exit, and for the slave owner it is also an enterprise organized to bring income, an enterprise in which the slave is only a tiny, though necessary, part of the plantation machinery. Thus, on its social level the plantation was a home for planters and their families and a peculiar prison for its slaves with all limitations characteristic of a prisoner. On the economic level the plantation was an enterprise securing profit for the slave-owned families.

Works Cited: Bagby, George W. The Old Virginia Gentleman and Other Sketches. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910. Barrow, Bennet. “Plantation Rules.” July 27, 2015.. Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. “The Cul- tural Landscape of the Plantation: ‘We Kept Our Dirt Floors … Clean and White.’ The Quarters.” . June 15, 2015.

5 Eugene Genovese is an advocate of the so-called “pre-bourgeois civilization” interpretative model of the plantation. The other popular interpretative model is the “planter capitalism” one. These two models are discussed in more detail by Charles Post. 46 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. Erll, Astrid. ”Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008. 1 – 11.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. “Moment of Truth: A Woman of the Master Class in the Confederate South.” Slavery, Secession and Southern History. Ed. Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferleger. Charlottesville and London: Uni- versity Press of Virginia, 2000. 126 – 139. Gazeta Warszawska. (August 8, 1861).1. Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. Hagood, Taylor. “’Prodjickin’, or mekin’ a present to yo’ fam’ly’: Rereading Empowerment in Thomas Nelson Page’s Frame Narratives.” Mississippi Quarterly LVII (Summer 2004). 423 – 440. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832. Mackethan, Lucinda Hardwick. The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Mackethan, Lucinda Hardwick. “Thomas Nelson Page: The Plantation as Arcady.” VQR Online (Spring 1978). (no pages) Munslow, Alun. A History of History. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Northup, Solomon. 12 Years a Slave. London: Penguin Books, 2014. Page, Thomas Nelson. The Old South: Essays Social and Political. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893. Post, Charles. “Plantation Slavery and Economic Development in the Antebel- lum Southern United States.” Journal of Agrarian Change 3.3 ( July 2003): 289 – 332. Ruef, Martin. “The Demise of an Organizational Form: Emancipation and Plantation Agriculture in the American South, 1860 – 1880.” American Journal of Sociology 109.6 (May 2004): 1365 – 1410. Sobieraj, Jerzy. Collisions of Conflict: Studies in American History and Culture, 1820 – 1920. Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877 – 1913. Baton Rouge: Loui- siana State University Press, 1987. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Domesticating the Flâneur

48 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Karolina Słotwińska-Pełka

Domesticating the Flâneur: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0571 Domesticating the Flâneur

Karolina Słotwińska-Pełka Domesticating the Flâneur 49

Writing of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus on the nineteenth- Karolina Słotwińska- Pełka graduated from century arcades, Susan Buck-Morss notes that Benjamin provided posterity the University of Warsaw, with “a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collection Institute of English Studies, where she is of concrete, factual images of urban experience” (99). One of the most strik- now teaching Practical ing images of such experience was the flâneur, an observer of the city crowd English and working

relegated to the arcades by the encroachment of industrialization. As a liminal on her PhD. Her research focuses on the figure standing “on the threshold—of the metropolis as of the middle class” politics of apocalypse (Benjamin 2002, 10), the flâneur illustrated the fantasy of being able to know in American speculative fiction after 2000. the life of the city through passive observation. The crowd was for such Her interests include observer “the veil through which the familiar city [ beckoned ] to the flâneur posthumanism, zombie as phantasmagoria—now a landscape, now a room” (Benjamin 2002, 10). In studies, and race studies. She has contributed to this way, the flâneur was an early avatar of the alienated city dweller and a collection of essays, the consumer of looks—an attitude that, as Buck-Morss notes, has come to Po humanizmie (WN Katedra, 2015), and has define the general modern experience of mass consumption (Buck-Morss 104). written for Polish Journal Despite the supposed obsolescence of the figure, the flâneur has been recently for American Studies. theorized, for instance, as “a methodological tool for investigating literary representations of [ twenty-first ] century American masculinity” (Ferry 49). It is then perhaps not surprising that we discover a distinctly flâneurian quality in a contemporary American writer’s étude on a postmodern metropolis, namely Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York (2003). A revision of E.B. White’s Here is New York (1948), Colossus strives to reproduce the hectic pace of the city, relishing in the kaleidoscopic progression of faces as observed at bus stations, airports, on park benches, bridges, or subway. These spaces emerge as the new arcades where the resurrected flâneur can once again know the city. Propelling this project is Whitehead’s striking declaration of what it means to live and belong in a metropolis such as New York: “[ y ] ou are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now” (Whitehead 2003, “City Limits”). The remark pinpoints the precariousness of urban experience, while proposing that it can be only grasped through the flâneurian fantasy of knowing. Perhaps such admission of urban ephemerality is all the more necessary in the case of the city marked by the trauma of the September 11 attacks. Indeed, if Colossus aims to celebrate the rhythms of the city, leaving unspoken the tragedy looming over it, Zone One (2011), Whitehead’s later novel on New York, sounds an elegy for the metropolis frozen in the shock of an apocalypse. As such, Zone One is situated within trauma literature that emerged in the wake of the September 11 attacks, as it grapples with the inassimilable experience of the catastrophe by returning to the ravaged cityscape, which can now only be known through the intrusive memory traces of what was there before. This narrative gesture translates onto the literary realm the repetition compulsion that Sigmund Freud locates at the heart of psychological trauma, which manifests itself in insistent dreams or hallucinations of sufferers, aiming to allow for a retroactive assimilation of the traumatic event (609). In cultural and literary studies, the need to fully comprehend the repercussions of the traumatic event is conceptualized in terms of an ethical “witnessing,” which Ann Kaplan recognizes as one of the key contributions of literature to the process of working through the collective or cultural trauma such as the September 11 attacks (22 – 23). Yet at first glance, Whitehead’s Zone One does not fit easily within such rhetoric of “witnessing” as it employs the fantastic framework of a zombie apocalypse to talk about both the contemporary urban experience and, specifically, about the experience of living in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. As I argue, in his meticulously crafted novel, 50 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Whitehead reclaims the ruined city as a home by transforming his earlier flâneurian optics of the observer (as expounded inColossus ) and assuming a more involved and ethical attitude. The novel can thus be seen as outlining a paradoxical process of domestication in which the flâneur is transformed from an obsessed outsider into a “man of the crowd” 1 that belongs in the city

streets and among its masses, regardless of the pain such belonging implies. This transformation is visible at the level of both the plot and the narrative style in the shift from predominantly phantasmatic treatment of metropolis echoing modernist literature to the action-driven narrative of a zombie novel emphasizing active involvement in the change in the urban fabric. Fittingly for a story of urban fascination, Zone One opens with the as-yet unnamed protagonist’s admission that “[ h ]e always wanted to live in New York,” which he could admire during his childhood visits to one Uncle Lloyd, a resident of Manhattan (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”). Those earliest memories of the city where the boy’s family would take photographs mark the protagonist as an outsider, integrated in the fabric of the city only through the screen of the camera. Throughout the first part of the novel, the boy’s perception of the city is in fact continually mediated by various screens, such as the TV screen, or windows of skyscrapers. His childhood fascination with the city skyline—as viewed from behind “smoky anti-UV glass, nineteen stories up”—is in his initial memories of the city conflated with another obsession, namely monster movies (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”). Crucial in this conflation is the boy’s continued alienation from the objects of his fascination and the ensu- ing possibility to project fantastic images onto these objects. Consequently, he does not see people inhabiting the city, but from his uncle’s Manhattan apartment observes mere “pieces of citizens on display in the windows . . . the splayed pinstriped legs of an urban golfer; half a lady’s torso . . . a fist” (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”). The gruesome piecemeal imagery marks the boy as a mere seeker of thrill, conjuring out of the “pitiless and blank” buildings “an uninhabited city, where no one [ lives ] behind all those miles and miles of glass… The city as ghost ship on the last ocean at the rim of the world” (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”). The vision of the ghost ship-Manhattan proves especially apt as the narrative moves from childhood memories to the post-apocalyptic present, in which both New York City and the entire US have been overrun by zombies, or “skels.” The protagonist has survived the outbreak and managed to get to Chinatown, renamed Fort Wonton, an enclosed human outpost. Despite the raging zombie apocalypse, for the protagonist, now called Mark Spitz, the Manhattan high-rise buildings still constitute screens for his fantastic projections, even as he is deployed in a ragtag team of sweepers, consisting of himself—a black middle-class man, Gary—a redneck, and Kaitlyn—former Secretary of the Student Council. This team’s job is to eliminate any skels remaining in the Manhattan skyscrapers after the recent marine corps purge of the area, and to gather statistical data. Sweeping the former offices of highest profile corporations, Mark Spitz is thus roaming the post-apocalyptic arcades, observing the human stubs he encounters, and dreaming of living in the reclaimed Manhattan once the restoration is complete.

1 Although the term “man of the crowd” is frequently treated as a synonym of the flâneur, Lauster explains this as a mistake originating in Benjamin’s misreading of Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (144). “The man of the crowd” is in this short story in fact a mere object of flâneur’s fascination. Karolina Słotwińska-Pełka Domesticating the Flâneur 51

In spite of the perceived proximity of his object of fascination, Mark Spitz remains an outsider to Manhattan—both as a human survivor in a world overrun by skels and a sweeper in a world run by the remnant capitalistic central government (located in Buffalo) intent on restoring the old order. His situation is reflected in the fact that he and other survivors living in militarized

Chinatown are deployed to menial but dangerous duties, and kept under the spell of the central government’s massive PR campaign to restart the US. Furnished with merchandise, whose trademark is a cartoonish armadillo, 2 and fed the stories of folk heroes such as the porn star-turned-politician, or triplet babies surviving the apocalypse against all odds, the denizens of the walled Fort Wonton carry out the campaign of reclaiming Manhattan, despite not knowing whether they will be allowed to live there. The survivor’s strong adherence to their old habits and their willingness to submit to the fantasy of reclaimed consumerism mark them all as shell-shocked in this new zombified reality. Although typically reclusive, Mark Spitz turns out to be the perfect survivor, “[ possessing ] a strange facility for the mandatory” (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”). Prepared by the life of mediocrity as a corporate employee responsible for “[ nurturing ] feelings of brand intimacy” using social media, Mark Spitz navigates alienation easily, proving to be “a natural at ersatz human connection and the postures of counterfeit empathy” (Whitehead 2011, “Saturday”). His aptitude in detachment, undying and morbid fascination with New York City, as well as his middle-class background render him a fitting consumer of post-apocalyptic vistas. Trapped in a surreal detachment from his fellow survivors, he still yearns for the abstract city life as he strolls the corridors of Manhattan skyscrapers in a sort of daze, incapable of seeing it as anything other than a grave:

All he wanted was a shred of uptown. He tried to orient himself: Was he looking north or south? It was like drag- ging a fork through gruel. The ash [ from the incinerator ] smeared the city’s palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity. He was an insect exploring a gravestone… (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”)

This disoriented reverie ends suddenly when Mark Spitz is assailed by four skels, once human resource employees, which figure as a violent reminder of how unattainable Manhattan remains for him. Interestingly, Mark Spitz’s attitude even during the attack mirrors his fascinated observation of the city dwellers prior to the apocalypse. He straggles into a disjointed investigation of the physiognomy of each attacking skel, and the reader is trapped in a play of comparisons between the skels and people from Mark Spitz’s past rather than being allowed to follow the action. Description of the zombies as “a thin membrane of meat stretched over bone” is here supplemented with a catalogue of shriveled commodities defining people: brand panties, the actress-inspired hairdo, torpedo bras (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”). Overburdened with such accumulation of remnants of the past, action jams and freezes in a still frame, which is punctured only by another hallucination of a lofty aim:

2 The armadillo is known to be a vector for leprosy, and is thus an apt symbol in the times of the plague. 52 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

It happened every so often that he recognized something in these monsters, they looked like someone he had known or loved. Eighth-grade lab partner or lanky cashier at the mini-mart, college girlfriend spring semes- ter junior year. Uncle… He hadn’t decided if conjuring

an acquaintance or loved one into these creatures was an advantage or not… [ P ]erhaps these recognitions en- nobled his mission: He was performing an act of mercy. (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”)

As Mark Spitz tries to justify his fetishization of physiognomies as human- izing rather than commodifying, his musings are violently stopped as reality interferes and he finally needs to shoot the skel attacking him. This scene becomes a self-referential comment on the narrative’s stunted progression until this point. Mark Spitz’s multiple musings and reveries, while befitting the flâneur, are reminiscent of modernist stream of consciousness technique rather than the action-driven zombie genre. As a result, the protagonist’s attempt at mystifying and elevating his position brings to the fore the narrative conflict at the heart of Zone One: the clash between thematizations of urban experience in exclusive high literature and inclusive popular fiction. Thus instead of only thinking of Mark Spitz as the flâneur-focalizer, we need to point out the flâneurian optics structuring the story through multiple surreal deviations from action, disturbed chronology of events, and extended flashbacks, which disorient the reader. Such intrusively retrospective narrative style, while amplifying the dream-like quality of post-apocalyptic urban existence, prevents the plot from progressing and the reader from fully comprehending the reality of the post-apocalyptic city. The sense of entrapment in stillness is reflected by the mental state of the human city dwellers, all of whom suffer from PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. Interestingly, the list of PASD symptoms is in fact so inclusive as to be ultimately useless as a medical definition, and covers for instance:

feelings of sadness or unhappiness; irritability or frustration, even over small matters; loss of interest or pleasure in normal activities; reduced sex drive; insomnia or excessive sleeping; changes in appetite leading to weight loss, or increased cravings for food and weight gain . . . (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”)

For Mark Spitz, PASD constitutes not so much a “diagnosis but an abstract of existence itself,” employed to predispose survivors all the more in favor of the central government’s campaign of restitution of the past (Whitehead 2011, “Friday”). PASD is in a way another illusion that exonerates the inability to enter into real relationships and reinforces passivity. Yet the most poignant illustration of the standstill narrated in the novel is the atypical zombie, the straggler. Stragglers do not bite or attack humans, but only stand immobilized, frozen in grotesque tableaux vivants in places they formerly visited. Whether struck by an office copy machine in official attire, or by a helium tank in a gorilla costume, stragglers offer themselves as social types whose past lives are to be deciphered by the post-apocalyptic flâneur. Fittingly, the favorite pastime of Mark Spitz’s team of sweepers is “Solve the Straggler,” a game in which everyone tries to offer the most fantastic Karolina Słotwińska-Pełka Domesticating the Flâneur 53 explanation for a given straggler’s haunting presence at the place where they are found. Fantasy is here once again used to mediate the traumatic experience the urban life in the ravaged metropolis. To Mark Spitz, however, encounters with stragglers prove invariably and weirdly disconcerting, as he is found weeping after one straggler is killed, and later asks his team to spare another.

The stragglers’ disturbing immobility along with their close resemblance to living people reveals to Mark Spitz his own ultimate entrapment and makes him question the viability of past habits and optics in a radically changed world. The many parallels between the shell-shocked survivors and the stragglers become increasingly obvious, especially after the evocation of Mark Spitz’s dreams in the second part of the novel. As the reader learns, following his settlement within Fort Wonton’s walls, Mark Spitz dreams scenes of everyday life peopled by fully functional, but nonetheless dead skels. The epigraph to this part of the novel, taken from Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and reading “The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace” (Whitehead 2011, “Saturday”), invites the reader to interpret these dreams as defining the post-apocalyptic urban experience, characterized by the inability to process the catastrophic change that has reshaped the city. From desolate vistas and phantasmagoric stillness of the first part, the narrative moves in the second part to initially hesitant exploration of human interactions. While the early post-apocalypse encounters with other groups of survivors are recounted and dismissed as ephemeral, one meeting cuts through the shell of Mark Spitz’s isolation. Miriam Cohen Levy, once a mother of three, met in a desolate toy store, becomes for Mark Spitz the only woman whom he has not demonized, but has actually loved (Whitehead 2011, “Saturday”). That relation with another human being, taking place already in the post-apocalyptic reality, is the first in a line of encounters that disturb Mark Spitz’s isolation, making him think of “[ o ]ther people in their surprises, the different social outcomes in the new world” (Whitehead 2011, “Saturday”). In this way, he is increasingly forced out of his sense of detachment, a movement that is reflected in his descend from the glass skyscrapers onto the actual streets of the city (Whitehead 2011, “Saturday”). In keeping with this changing narrative trajectory, Mark Spitz’s mediocrity gives place to the striking new fantasy of invincibility. This is underscored in the story of the origins of his nickname as told to his team members, Gary and Kaitlyn, in the second part of the novel. Before he became a sweeper, the reader learns, Mark Spitz was deployed as a wrecker, a member of a team that—instead of clearing Manhattan skyscrapers—would clear the roads of remaining car wrecks and skels. During an ordinary assignment on interstate I-95, when clearing a bridge, his team was assailed and immediately over whelmed by a large group of skels. Everyone saved themselves by jumping into the river, but not Mark Spitz, who decided that in this mediocre world where survival was all that mattered, he simply could not die and thus in a heroic fashion did in fact kill all the skels. 3 When asked why he had not jumped into the water, he told his wrecker team that he could not swim, despite noting in an aside that it was the epiphany regarding his own invincibility and not his inability to swim that had guided his actions. But the remark, fitting so perfectly with the “black people cannot swim” stereotype, struck the team as hilarious, and thus the hero was mockingly nicknamed after white Olympic

3 This superhero moment, when recounted by Mark Spitz, is undermined only by the curtness with which it is summed up (Whitehead 2011, Saturday). 54 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

gold-medalist Mark Spitz (Whitehead 2011, “Saturday”). Although intended as an affront (even though initially not understood by the protagonist), this nickname is reclaimed by Mark Spitz and turned into his proper name in the post-apocalyptic world, a superhero pseudonym of a kind. Although marking him, yet again, as the outsider to both the group of wreckers, the

interstate I-95 incident is also one of the watersheds in the transformation of the flâneurian optics of the narrative toward a more involved, active attitude. This shift in the attitude is also reflected in the increasingly action-oriented narrative style, which reaches its apogee in the third part of the novel. This part begins with the fall of the wall protecting Fort Wonton from the hordes of skels. The former settlement is turned into a terrordome, as the epigraph from Public Enemy warns: “Move as a team, never move alone: Welcome to the Terrordome” (Whitehead 2011, “Saturday”). Yet despite the menacing sound of the term “terrordome”, the original Public Enemy’s message is one of black activism and the power of communal action, which suggests a more optimistic interpretation of the last part of the novel. The fall of the wall can be thus interpreted as the lifting of illusions, one of which is the cultural barrier separating modernist literature on the universalized urban experience from pop-cultural and post-colonial productions relating the life in the city. Thus in this last part of the novel, the isolated flâneur transforms into the black man of the crowd that refuses to see reality through a veil. We find a confirmation of this transformation in Mark Spitz’s team’s last encounter with a straggler—a fortune teller—whose hand Mark Spitz’s friend, Gary, takes in jest, while playing “Solve the Straggler.” The second Gary breaks contact with the creature, he is bitten, revealing that the illusion of the immobile stragglers has also been lifted. It is then, as his friend is dying from the bite, that Mark Spitz tells Gary and Kaitlyn not only the story of his nickname, but also the story of the leader of his former wrecker team. An Indian woman, the Quiet Storm is recalled by him as being very particular about the arrangement of the cars they would clear off the interstate. This, he says, he did not understand until he saw the patterns she carved from above: “While the other wreckers, indeed all the other survivors, could only perceive the wasteland on its edge, the Quiet Storm was in the sky, inventing her alphabet and making declarations” (Whitehead 2011, “Sunday”). Asked by dumbfounded Gary what this story means, Mark Spitz replies by emphasizing the need for “paying witness” to the changing world, the changing city (Whitehead 2011, “Sunday”). This is then a declaration of new ethics geared not toward phantasmagoria, but toward real human relations and willingness to tell stories to others, to act and influence the world. The city itself is consequently freed from the play of projections as Mark Spitz reconfigures his childhood obsession:

He’d always wanted to live in New York but that city didn’t exist anymore. He didn’t know if the world was doomed or saved, but whatever the next thing was, it would not look like what came before. There were no intersections with the avenues of Buffalo’s shimmering reconstructions, its boulevards did not cross their simu- lations and dioramas of futurity. It refused the shapes Mark Spitz conjured in his visions of reinvention in the big city. (Whitehead 2011, “Sunday”) Karolina Słotwińska-Pełka Domesticating the Flâneur 55

It is only fitting that the constructors of this new city should be the new transformed masses of skels overrunning the streets. It is also fitting that the story of the flâneur should end with him plunging in the new crowd overflowing the streets. But it is crucial to discern that through this gesture, through his willingness to risk being jostled or killed in the streets, the flâneur actually transforms into something new himself—a beacon of activism. Zone One thus juxtaposes the attitude that seeks to neutralize the shock of any catastrophe through a play of mirrors with a stance that accepts the aftermath of such catastrophe and turns observation into an ethical act of witnessing. As Kaplan explains, witnessing “involves a stance that has public meaning or importance and transcends individual emphatic or vicarious suffering to produce community” (23). A ragtag community is not only something Mark Spitz ultimately becomes a part of—be it when he shares personal stories with his team, or when he steps into the sea of skels—but also something the text itself builds by utilizing different perspectives on dealing with urban catastrophe, especially the flâneurian optics and popular horror imagery, on one hand, and the dialectic of passivity and activism, on the other hand. In this way, the horrors of catastrophe are “worked through”, and the ruined city becomes once again a home for the transformed flâneur. In this light, Whitehead’s novel may be situated among other literary works dealing with the trauma of 9/11 attacks by offering a reconfiguration of the shock of the catastrophe and providing an alternative to the disjointed spectacle of catastrophe in the form of ethical focus. Thus, the post-catastrophic reality may begin to be accepted as calling for shared witnessing, which would “[ prepare ] us to take responsibility for preventing future occurrence” of injustice (Kaplan 23).

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39. Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (1986): 99 – 140. Ferry, Peter. “Reading Manhattan, Reading American Masculinity.” Culture, Society & Masculinities 3.1 (2011): 49 – 61. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989. 594 – 626. Kaplan, E. A.. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Lauster, Martina. “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the ‘Flâneur.’” The Modern Language Review 102.1 (2007): 139 – 156. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” Poestories.com. 10 Jan. 2016. Pound, Ezra. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Project Gutenberg, 2007. 10 Jan. 2016. Whitehead, Colson. The Colossus of New York. A City in Thirteen Parts. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Kindle file. —. Zone One. A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Kindle file. 56 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Joanna Stolarek

Alienation and Dislocation versus Homeliness and Norm in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0572 Joanna Stolarek ALIENATION AND DISLOCATION 57

Patricia Highsmith (1921 – 1995), a notable American novelist and short story Dr Joanna Stolarek is th an Assistant Professor writer of the 20 century, known mostly for her mystery stories, defied at Siedlce University of simple categorisation in her violent, complex, psychologically stimulating Natural Sciences and Humanities in Poland. novels. Highsmith is mainly credited for her psychological thrillers, and She holds her PhD on a number of film adaptations based on her works were made and gained her Anglophone crime fiction much acclaim in the literary world. Having written 22 novels and 8 short- and BA on French studies. She has authored story collections, the author won a variety of literary awards including those 5 monographs and over for Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. Despite her American 30 articles on British and American detective upbringing, first career paths and significant experience as a writer, reviewer fiction, late Victorian and literary critic in the USA, Highsmith’s works were particularly successful literature, modernist po- in Europe, especially since the late 1950s. Besides, throughout her life, the etry, and postmodernist American literature. Her American writer travelled to various places around the world, however, she post-doctoral projects never felt fully satisfied with one location. After her extensive world travels, focusses on spatial and temporal labyrinths in Patricia Highsmith concluded that she “would know hundreds of people in postmodern de- different cities and yet she would still be lonely. ‘I am forever-seeking,’ she tective fiction said” (Wilson, 12). The writer’s feelings of desolation and abandonment are frequently reflected in her works of fiction and aid in the creation of her characters and the depiction of the place. In fact, Highsmith’s sense of loneliness and estrangement significantly affects her picturing fictional homes which stand for refuges, hiding places, mansions and castles and are often featured as full-blown characters (“Patricia,” 2006). Homes play crucial roles in the works of the American writer, yet they are hardly associated with domesticity, hospitality and stability. Luxurious mansions and magnificent castles epitomise temporary asylums and places of exiles rather than genuine secure harbours providing domestic warmth and comfort. More importantly, fictional homes frequently symbolise dream factories that shelter the lunatic concoctions of the unstable minds of their dwellers, like David’s, the main protagonist’s secret weekend house of This Sweet Sickness(1960) or constitute impenetrable fortresses and private prisons, such as Belle Ombre, a splendid stone house belonging to Tom Ripley, the eponymous character of The Talented Mr Ripleyand a repeat protagonist of The Ripliad or Charles Anthony Bruno’s huge and desolate mansion in Strangers on a Train (1950). The sense of place is a crucial motif in Patricia Highsmith’s fiction. Space which plays a significant role in her novels and short stories constituted an integral part of the novelist’s childhood, adolescent and adult experience, determining her relations with others. During adolescence, Highsmith suffered from the cramped conditions in New York apartments she shared with her mother Mary Coates and her stepfather Stanley Highsmith, after whom she took the name. She expressed her sense of confinement, the feeling of lack of privacy and inner anguish in the personal diaries the author kept for a number of years. Thus, the writer later paid close attention to the spaces in which she lived, and developed a sustained interest in architects and their creations, both of which are reflected in her literary oeuvre and pictorial work (“Patricia,” 2006). Homes play major roles in Highsmith’s fiction, reflecting the works’ ambience and mood. In fact, the author has created a world of her own – claustrophobic, irrational, labyrinthine, chaotic and disorientated. Her novels and stories, largely influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka, reflect existential concerns and simulate existentialism by envisioning a modern world filled with bedlam, absurdity and preposterousness. Similar to the solitary individual scrutinized and extolled by existential writers and philosophers, Highsmith’s 58 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

protagonists are cut off from previously secure bearings of community, habit, tradition, and religious assurance and placed in crisis situations where they must nakedly face the reality, confront and answer absolute questions of identity, ethics, faith and decease (Rubin, 11). These protagonists, though often dwelling in luxurious apartments and grand mansions, are portrayed

as the prisoners of their wealthy domestic cells, and their vagabond lifestyles, eccentricity and deviation from socially accepted norms are viewed as hazards to the domestic harmony and peace enjoyed by most “ordinary” US citizens. The aim of this article is to examine the problem of alienation and dislocation in the context of homeliness and norm in the United States after World War II in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. The emphasis is laid on the study of normality, morality and oddity reflected in the main characters’ home environment and their relations with other protagonists, epitomising “decent” American citizens. Charles Anthony Bruno and Tom Ripley, Highsmith’s visible anti-heroes – psychopaths and killers, depicted as unfulfilled artists, social outcasts, alienated from their community, mostly due to their homosexual inclinations and “extravagant’ behaviour, symbolise the abnormal and deviant side of the American life. With respect to homeliness and domesticity, the two characters embody rebellious men whose lifestyle and home environment challenge traditional domestic values that were cherished and promulgated by the American society and government in the late 1940s and 1950s. Patricia Highsmith’s protagonists are exposed to the suspicious meticulous examination of an orthodox and frightened society that rejects them and hounds them, thus reinforcing their misanthropy. It is worth remarking that as a lesbian, the American writer was imbued with a feeling of social non-conformity from an early age and later, her status as an American living in Europe also marginalized her, mak ing her as much of an outsider in her chosen home as she had been in her country of birth (Fort Worth, Texas). Therefore, it should be emphasised that Highsmith’s living in deeply conservative American society and having tense relations with her mother and stepfather affected her writing. It was her sense of loneliness, dejection and anguish that shaped her description of fictional homes as cramped, claustrophobic places and influenced the creation of the characters who operate outside the norm and live on the fringe of society. In Patricia Highsmith’s novels homes are not only endowed with spatial attributes or refer to the background and family roots of the main anti-heroes. Being refuges, hiding places and dream-like, visionary spaces, they reflect the complex interior world of the protagonists. Highsmith’s homes aid in creating tension and apprehension as well as reflect cruel, sadomasochistic relations between the protagonists. Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the novels which were made into successful movies, first by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951 and then by René Clemént in 1960 under the title Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) as well as in 1999 by Anthony Minghella, feature socio- paths and murder, and, more importantly, offer a thorough examination of the psychology of guilt, and abnormal human behaviour in a world devoid of firm moral ground. Furthermore, they introduce the readers into the questions of fading identity and double personality (Liukkonen, Pesonen, 2008). As was previously underlined, in these works homes are featured as fully-blown characters, illustrating the protagonists’ inner selves, assumed and mistaken identities. Prior to the analysis of homeliness and norm in Strangers on a Train one ought to refer to the social-historical context of the USA in the 1950s as well Joanna Stolarek ALIENATION AND DISLOCATION 59 as to the author’s personal history as a writer. It is worth emphasising that in her book Highsmith outlines the contradictory feelings and tempestuous relationship between the protagonists that not only build the tension in the story but above all illustrate the author’s anxiety over the homophobic hysteria in the United States after World War II. Strangers on a Train was the writer’s debut novel, but her sense of anxious foreboding was already fully formed in the crucible of Cold War paranoia that surrounded her. For Highsmith, a lesbian novelist, that paranoia was shot through with anxiety, because American Cold War politics intertwined with an intense homophobia that labelled homosexuals as an official security risk. Hence, as Highsmith wrote in her notebook at that time, her creative goal was “Consciousness alone, consciousness in my particular era, 1950” (Wilson, 158). What is important, she expressed that consciousness through guilt. Beginning with the character of Guy Hines in Strangers on a Train and continuing through 18 novels and collections of short stories, Highsmith’s inverted version of guilt creates the crime, not the other way around. Furthermore, the novelist’s statement implies that, through her works of crime fiction, she strives to raise awareness and display grim realities of society. In her endeavour to create social consciousness, Highsmith refers to the public concern for the abnormal citizen and the feared other (Weinstein, 2014). When Strangers on a Train was written, the concept of the psychopath began to surface as a feared figure within society. Interestingly enough, the notion of the other manifested itself not through skin colour or ethnicity, but through certain personality traits and behaviour that the rest of the society regarded as abnormal, such as impulsiveness, instinctive action, hiding or masking one’s identity, lack of stabilisation and professional life. In this regard one should cite Foucault who refers to the phenomenon of psychopathy as, “The great indefinite and confused family of ‘abnormals,’ the fear of which will haunt the end of the nineteenth century” (Foucault, 51). Thus, Cold War paranoia of the other and the enemy at home aided in the formation of the psychopath. Highsmith responds to societal hysteria by creating Charles Anthony Bruno, a character that incarnates these abnormal characteristics, and by writing a novel that addresses the fears and anxiety of US citizens (Weinstein, 2014). Bruno’s deviant behaviour, sadomasochistic inclinations, male insecurity and manic depression deserve to be scrutinised in terms of his domestic situation and home life. In the conversation with Guy Hines, Bruno admits to him that he does not have a truly satisfactory home life and confesses to his interlocutor that he lives; “In a house I call the Doghouse…There’s dogwood all around it and everybody in it’s in some kind of doghouse, down to the chauffeur” (Highsmith 1950, 16). The fact that Charles calls his house a “Doghouse” and later, when Guy turns up at Bruno’s home to murder his father, he uses the same name for his residence, may suggest that the place is inhabited by mysterious characters who commit secret and questionable acts. In addition, the name implies a masculine, animal relationship that ties to the homicidal desires of Bruno and Oedipal relationship between him and his mother (Weinstein, 2014). Charles confides in Guy that everyone in his house is in some kind of a doghouse, like Bruno’s father, a wealthy, arrogant man who is not faithful to his wife; Mrs Bruno who is imprisoned in a love less marriage and has to endure her husband’s affairs; and Bruno, a young adult who acts like an adolescent and suffers from a classic Oedipus complex. More importantly, the protagonist uses the word “house” instead of “home” to describe where he lives. The distinction between these two terms implies 60 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

that he does not perceive his house as a home due to his inability to create close meaningful relationships with members of his family and therefore he cannot see the abode as a place of warmth, comfort and domestic peace. For Charles Anthony the house embodies his hostility and anguish and becomes a doghouse because of its cold, functional nature and the animalistic, mascu-

line qualities it carries (Weinstein, 2014). In this way, Highsmith challenged the concepts of homeliness, norm and domestic stability, promulgated by US government, society and media in the late 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, one cannot fail to notice that in Strangers on a Train the concept of home is closely linked with the notion of masculine power and empowerment. As was previously mentioned, in the classic Oedipal complex, with his father alive, Bruno is unable to possess masculine qualities and consequently he views homicide as the only alternative. As Hesford observes, “In his (violent) need to control…[ he ] mimics, in a perverse way, the discourse of national security that demanded a return to, and defense of, the home as the site of a national power that was so masculine” (Hesford, 225). Following the state ment of the critic, one may see that the power of Bruno’s father is established in the family’s mansion and his authority over Charles. Thus, for Bruno the only way to claim the power role is to have his father murdered. The same applies to Miriam and Guy in Miriam’s emasculation of her spouse through her committing adultery, therefore humiliating him in the domestic sphere. Hence, the murder of Miriam Hines and Mr Bruno challenge Hesford’s hypothesis, since they are attacking the home in order to protect it, however, they regain this sense of masculinity through the violence and brutality they use within the home. Strangers on a Train is a dark, sombre novel aptly describing the link between the notions of home, violence and power as well as displaying tempestuous, obsessive relationships between the protagonists. Added to that, it is a moody and disturbing excavation of guilty paranoia, and the author’s inverted version of guilt creates tension. One of the features of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, is the book’s relation to the sensational, sadomasochistic aspect of the thriller. It is especially noticeable during the conversations and meetings between Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno which reflect tempestuous, queer, homoerotic relations between two male characters. Moreover, when put aside Alfred Hitchcock’s film which clearly shows positive and negative characters, Guy Hines as an innocent victim with whom the audience sympathise, and a culprit, Bruno, in Highsmith’s novel it is hard for the reader to feel compassion and sympathy towards one of the main protagonists. In the novel Charles Anthony Bruno is a physically repugnant character who kills Hine’s wife, yet at the end he dies in a boating accident far removed from a merry-go-round, whereas Guy Hines is a promising architect who does indeed go through with the murder of Bruno’s father. Contrary to the movie in which Guy is shown as a tennis player and a decent man who refuses to carry out his part of the crazed bargain, in the novel he is pursued, arrested and jailed by a tenacious detective. In Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train Bruno feels connected to one person only by murdering another, and Guy’s descent offers no relief for a reader searching for somebody to root for, thus the shared decline of Bruno and Guy constitutes less a morality play than a bizarre, grotesque spectacle of disintegration (Walker, 2005). As the author once stated: “I find the public passion for justice boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares whether justice is ever done or not” (Highsmith 1990, 51). Therefore, instead of illustrating a moral, Strangers on Joanna Stolarek ALIENATION AND DISLOCATION 61 a Train creates a pervasive and inexorable tension, a gnawing pressure that erodes the characters from the inside. In Patricia Highsmith’s book the relationship between the two male protagonists is complex and queer, and it is their relation, not Guy’s attitude towards Anne Morton and his ex-wife Miriam, which is thoroughly analysed by the author and which becomes the central motif of the novel. It is difficult to describe Bruno either as a heterosexual (“he didn’t care too much about sleeping with women”) (Highsmith 1950, 208) or a homosexual. Nevertheless, it is Guy for whom he feels the strongest attraction, yet whom he mostly tortures, threatening him with exposure until Hines surrenders and murders for him. Guy, on the other hand, apparently resents Charles Anthony yet he protects him and he keeps the deal that Bruno forces him to make, leading him to wonder whether Bruno is not in fact his own “cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved” (Highsmith 1950, 163). As the novel progresses, the relationship between Guy and Bruno becomes more and more complex and ambiguous. Furthermore, Highsmith explores a sexual attraction between Guy and Bruno, which is not a healthy one on the part of Bruno. As a matter of fact, the man is too deranged to engage in anything healthy and normal, and his strange relationship with his parents, especially with his mother, precludes him from developing either healthy hetero- or homosexual relationships. Still, the dynamics between Guy and Bruno seem fascinating, particularly when one witnesses Guy’s emotional and moral deterioration. Some readers may perceive Hines as a victim when in fact he is sane, and as such, must be held responsible for his actions. Strangers on a Train is an in-depth study of crime, guilt and madness. Patricia Highsmith scrutinises the psyche and motives of her anti-hero, a psychopath Charles Anthony Bruno, and the capacity of an ordinary, decent person (Guy Hines) to become a senseless killer. The author employs omniscient narration to explore the minds of Bruno and Guy. The realistic narrative of the two murders is both shocking and humorously banal. In fact, the novelist depicts both the criminals as unfulfilled artists or manipulative maniacs. The last characteristic applies to Bruno who is pathologically obsessed with the planning of perfect crimes. His principal aim is to find a proper accomplice to his father’s murder. As a result of his manipulation and unscrupulousness Guy Hines, an apparently decent person with artistic gifts and a promising future, a man of a deep sense of social responsibility, turns into a fearful wreck and becomes a vicious murderer. As was mentioned before, in Patricia Highsmith’s novel one can hardly identify or sympathise with one of the characters. Unlike in Hitchcock’s film which influences the audience’s attitude towards the characters and events and which accentuates emotional factors (the character’s feelings are evoked strongly and convincingly enough that we may share them), moral considerations (we feel that the character is in the right, thus we share her or his moral perspective), physical point of view (we share a character’s field of vision), commonality (we recognize a character’s thoughts and feelings as familiar to our own experience), admiration (we find aspects or features of the character compellingly attractive and therefore worthy of imitation, mostly on an idealized fantasy level) and shared curiosity (we are equally in the dark and wish to discover the truth as much as the character does), in her novel Highsmith skilfully perverts the workings of sympathy towards the main characters by depicting them and their relation as queer and bizarre. The shared decline of Bruno and Guy reflects their moral disintegration 62 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

and fall, therefore while reading the book one could not make a distinction between positive and negative characters, between a hero and an anti-hero, contrastingly to Hitchcock’s film. Overall, Strangers on a Train is a powerful psychodrama, an in-depth study of the characters, motifs and circumstances of their crimes as well

as the diagnosis of social and political situation in the USA in the 1950s. In contrast to Alfred Hitchcock’s film which centres on the convoluted plot and suspenseful events, Highsmith’s book is darker, more sombre, with the author focussing on the characterisation of its protagonists and on the exploration of their internal world. It is also worth mentioning that Patricia Highsmith’s novel became the inspiration for other film directors, such as Robert Starr who filmed the story in 1969 under the title Once You Kiss a Stranger, though it did not gain much attention, and Danny de Vito, whose spin-offThrow Mamma From the Train (1987) which turned the story into black comedy, was well received. When set beside a suspenseful Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) is distinguished as a psychological thriller in which the novelist created her most popular, appealing and enduring character, an anti-hero, Tom Ripley. Highsmith’s most famous and ambivalent protagonist appeared in several sequels, among them Ripley Under Ground (1970), in which he both masquerades as a dead painter and kills an art collector, Ripley’s Game (1974), a story of revenge, in which the protagonist is paired with a first-time murderer, The Boy Who Followed Ripley(1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991), the final character’s adventure, in which Ripley is pursued by a sadistic American, who knows too much of his past. Despite a huge popularity of The Ripliad, it is The Talented Mr. Ripley which draws the readers’ and literary critics’ special attention due to the author’s dexterous depiction of a bisexual serial killer who, like Dorian Grey, lives a double life, yet remains unpunished for his actions. Similar to Strangers on a Train, this story was made into successful movies, first by René Clemént in 1960 under the titlePlein Soleil (Purple Noon) and secondly by Anthony Minghella in 1999. The Talented Mr. Ripleyconstitutes a profound (psycho)analysis of a protagonist, a charming criminal of intelligence and cunning who goes unpunished for his crime. Ripley became Highsmith’s most enduring character, who could be regarded as a sadist and an understanding husband, a parody of upper-class mentality and a criminal only by force of circumstances. It is interesting to notice how the author seduces us into identifying with her villain and sharing his selfishness. In Highsmith’s story Ripley is convinced that getting his own way is worth whatever price anyone else might have to pay and it seems that there is a little of this egocentricity in each of us. Moreover, similar to Strangers on a Train, the author depicts the main character who is strongly attracted to another man, and expresses his obsession with crime. Although it is not overtly stated, there is an obvious allusion to homoerotic attraction – the criminal essentially wants to become the other man and assume his identity. What is more, by creating and portraying the main characters as gay criminals the author endeavours to suggest how this criminality results from restrictions placed on homosexuals and by assuming the queer, or abnormal perspective of a gay man her novels imply how violence and criminality can proceed from repressive sexual norms (Hart, 2011). Hence, according to Patricia Highsmith, repressed emotions may lead to murder. There is no denying that Tom Ripley’s inhibitions in sexual sphere and social interaction as well as his desperate attempts to change his material and Joanna Stolarek ALIENATION AND DISLOCATION 63 class status result from his traumatic childhood experience, lack of genuine parental guidance, domestic warmth and stability. The protagonist’s ‘weird’ and ‘eccentric’ behaviour, attributed to his homosexual inclinations, along with his vagabond lifestyle and lack of professional stability, threatened American norms and standards during an age of conformity, marked by the

Red Scare and the Cold War. Nevertheless, in contrast to Charles Anthony Bruno who gets ‘punished’ for his brutal murder and deviant behaviour, Tom Ripley enjoys complete impunity after committing two crimes. According to Pizer, when set beside the anti-hero from Strangers on a Train, Ripley becomes slave to the American Dream of Success and without hesitation resolves to murder in order to fulfil it (Pizer, 2011). Tom’s obsession to change his social status, assume the identity of his rich friend, Dickie Greenleaf, inherit his fortune and enjoy domestic peace is a desperate attempt to build his own home, restore order to his life and expunge the memory of his poignant childhood. Besides, similar to the very author, Ripley is American who spends most of his time in Europe where he feels like an outsider and a rootless stranger. Like Highsmith who often travelled to Europe during the 1950s, nourish- ing her view of herself as an expatriate and an outsider, the eponymous character of The Talented Mr Ripleymakes frequent trips around Europe, yet he never feels fully satisfied with one location (Cassuto, 135). However, after murdering Dickie and taking over his identity, Tom strives to live a stable life and build his dream home, having ‘inherited’ Greenleaf’s fortune. Ri- pley gains material success largely thanks to chameleon-like features and a multitude of talents, especially his mathematical aptitude and “proleptic imagination” (Tuss, 2004). Similar to Strangers on a Train, in The Talented Mr Ripley the concept of home is closely linked to the notions of masculinity, violence and power. Here, home does not only signify domestic security, warmth and peace that Tom wishes to enjoy but also his personal reputation that Dickie Greenleaf threatens. The boat scene draws the final homosexual connection between the main characters, symbolising Tom’s physical and sexual triumph over Dickie as the dominant male: “Tom stood up and brought the oar down again, sharply, all his strength released like the snap of a rubber band” (Highsmith 1956, 101). Since Dickie threatens Tom’s masculinity, the main character resolves to defend it in the most masculine way – using violent force (Weinstein, 2014). In Tom’s brutal defense of his character he echoes “the discourse of national security that demanded a return to, and a defense of, the home as the site of a national power that was also masculine” (Hesford, 225). In this context, Ripley embodies the Cold War discourse of the defense of one’s self and home in order to expose masculinity. In an attempt to restore order to his life and cleanse the impurities from his surroundings, Tom once again resorts to violence and brutality by killing Dickie’s friend, Freddie, who accuses Ripley of being gay and discovers his secret plans. Finally, it ought to be pointed out that with Ripley the novelist created a new kind of criminal, not seen before in crime fiction – his nearest relative and model being the protagonists of Marquise de Sade – his criminal libertines challenge what we understand by good and evil, and also thrive unpunished. As a confirmed psychopath, Ripley imposes his own code of ethics on a world which, with a few exceptions, offers little resistance. As was mentioned before, Patricia Highsmith frequently identified with her anti-hero, and throughout the plot, she polished his complex personality by placing him in chaotic situations, or else assigning to him bizarre, incomprehensible actions. Moreover, 64 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

in The Talented Mr Ripley, readers find pairs of two males involved in a love-hate relationship. These unsettling duos enact an unconfirmed homo-erotic relation through an abundance of allusions and unspoken comments. Highsmith mirrored herself in these fictional couples, entrusting them with much of her own painful experience in her relation to others. Therefore, the sexually

ambiguous Ripley was her favourite character and a kind of a literary alter-ego. All things considered, homeliness and norm are crucial notions and common denominators in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. In these two novels the American author carefully scrutinises the problem of alienation and dislocation in the context of domesticity, home and community in the United States after World War II. By the examination of the vicissitudes of her two intriguing anti-heroes, Charles Anthony Bruno and Tom Ripley, incarnating psychopaths and murderers, Highsmith responded to and reaffirmed societal hysteria and anxiety in the United States toward the alluring homosexuals who seduce decent American citizens and cause them to deviate from the norm. In the article I showed how Patricia Highsmith’s living in deeply conservative American society, in an era of social-political conformity and moral propriety, influenced her writing and how it shaped her description of fictional homes and the creation of the characters who operate outside the norm and live on the fringe of society.

Works Cited Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality. The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press: 2009. Foucault, Michael. “The Abnormals.”Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Es- sential Works of Michael Foucault, 1954 – 1984. London: Penguin, 2000. 51 – 57. Hart, Kate (2011). “In Which Patricia Highsmith Endures A Depression Equal To Hell. The Inner Life of Patricia Highsmith.” (15 Sept. 2011). ThisRecord- ing.com. 14 July 2015. . Hesford, Victoria. “Patriotic Perversions: Patricia Highsmith’s Queer Vision of Cold War America in The Price of Salt, The Blundererand Deep Water.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 33.3/4 (2005): 215 – 233. JSTOR. 19 July 2014. Highsmith, Patricia. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Boston: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990. Highsmith, Patricia. Strangers on a Train. New York: W. W. Norton & Com- pany, 1950. Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr Ripley. New York: Penguin Books, 1956. Liukkonen, Petri and Ari Pesonen “Patricia Highsmith.” (2008). 20 Sept. 2014. “Patricia Highsmith – Exhibition Themes.” (10 March – 10 Sept. 2006). Swiss National Library, Federal Administration. 4 Sept. 2014. Pizer, Donald. “Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley: The Literary Sub- text”. The South Carolina Review, Vol 44, Issue 1,(September 2011). 20 July 2015. Rubin, Martin. Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Joanna Stolarek ALIENATION AND DISLOCATION 65

Tuss, Alex. “Masculine Identity and Success: A Critical Analysis of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripleyand Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club”, Journal of Men’s Studies. (2 Dec. 2004). 20 August 2015.

Walker, Michael. Film, Culture in Transition. Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. (2005). 1 June 2014. Weinstein, Natalie. “The Masked Other: Patricia Highsmith in Cold War American Culture.” (2014). Trinity College Digital Repository. 18 July 2015. Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. The Secret History of Hamden Campus

66 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Evangelia Kyriakidou

The Secret History of Hamden Campus: A Study in Elitism and Murder

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0573 The Secret History of Hamden Campus

Evangelia Kyriakidou The Secret History of Hamden Campus 67

Kyriakidou Evangelia When people hear of violent crimes, murder, rape, mugging, their mind is an Adjunct Professor immediately wanders off to some urban dystopia. We instinctively-and in the Writing Program perhaps statistically too-expect to encounter such forms of deviant behavior of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the and violence in urban centers. The peaceful, idyllic setting of a University American College of Campus can hardly fit the description of a scene of a violent crime, as the Greece-DEREE. She ob-

University has long been associated with humanistic values and belief in tained her B.A. and M.A. from the Department of man’s capacity for improvement. However, University Campuses are not English, the National and angelic topoi set aside for study, reflection and high culture but a microcosm Kapodistrian University of Athens .She is the recipi- of society with all its negative connotations. Violent crimes have very often ent of a scholarship from shaken the Ivory Tower of Academia in the USA and have inspired authors the State Scholarship to give life to this idiosyncratic subgenre: the campus murder novel. In Foundation of Greece (I.K.Y.). She is currently February 1992 a 20 year old Berkeley student was found stabbed to death in working on her Ph.D the campus office of a student organization. In April of the same year a male Thesis on Space in the American Campus body was found in Vermont near a University Campus. The first event was Novel. Her published reported in the Los Angeles Times while the second comes from Donna Tartt’s work includes essays on acclaimed and commercially successful novel The Secret History. In the words spatial politics, space and identity formation in of Alexander Star, Tartt’s novel “is an elaborately conceived and artistically American Literature. ambitious thriller that turns not on the quest for tenure or pills, but on such matters as “sin unpunished, innocence destroyed, and evil passing itself as good” (47). The aim of this essay is to examine how the academic landscape serves as an ideal place for the plot, how it interacts with characters and in fact becomes a character itself, taking as a vantage point Tartt’s best-selling novel The Secret History. In Tartt’s The Secret History Hampden College, a thinly veiled Benning- ton College-Tartt’s Alma Mater, is depicted as the quintessential Vermont College: small, elite, picturesque, and in New England. The narrator ofThe Secret History, Richard Papen had been in love with Hampden Campus even before laying eyes on it; through the college’s brochure. Richard, a nineteen year old boy from Plano, California is inundated with escape fantasies from his rather bleak surroundings. Richard admits to have spent dozens of hours during his senior year in high school studying Hamden College catalogue; “studying the photographs as though if (he) stared at them long enough (he) would by some kind of osmosis, be transported into the clear, pure silence (10). Richard lived his whole life in Plano California, a hot, dusty place, full of harsh, transparent light that exposed reality for what it was. Richard opts for the foggy, autumnal, mysterious twilight of Vermont that leaves space for dreaming and imagination. Full of faith in the historical importance of the place and motivated by his love for the picturesque, Richard applies for the position despite his poor financial situation and his parents’ disapproval. He is not deterred by such obstacles as for him becoming part of Hampden means more than simply escaping the dull existence of his parents; it means fashioning a new identity for himself, creating his own home, just like Jay Gatsby with whom he feels he shares “certain tragic similarities”(79). Richard’s dreams of fashioning a new identity for himself are inextricably linked to attending University. One would surmise that his expectations are in tandem with the expectations of an entire nation since in the American imagination university matriculation has been linked with the democratizing potential of society. However, Richard longs for the enclosed, elitist, old-fashioned campus. My assertion is that the democratic vision of the University is perceived differently for Richard and his elite classmates: this becomes evident through their diverse negotiation of space as well as through their act of ultimate deviance planned within University premises. Their murderous plotting further underlines their 68 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

privileged social position within the campus which is supposed to be imbued with egalitarian and democratic values. Richard’s hatred of his birthplace and desire for change of home explain his lengthy descriptions of the picturesque, historical buildings of Hampden College. These detailed depictions of the built space reveal his need to create

space for daydreaming, fantasizing different layers of shades and light that would permit the creation of nuances and echoes of past ages. This should not come as a surprise as this lack had been already identified by Henry James. Speaking in the context of the correlation between artistic creation and one’s surroundings Henry James in his book about Hawthorne attributed the inability to produce great art in America during its founding decades to the lack of certain things that he deemed necessary to inspire an artist.

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot! (Griffith 10)

Similarly, Richard feels that Plano cannot help him fulfill his potential and that he can be a new man only by leaving “dusty Plano” behind him. In an interesting passage from the novel Richard admits that: “For a long time I looked at a picture of a building called the Commons. It was suffused with a weak academic light-different from Plano, different from anything I had even known-a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books and silence” (10). Richard becomes a kind of artist himself thanks to Hamden’s idyllic spaces: first because by assuming the role of the narrator in this secret history he “writes” the story we are reading but more importantly because he re-writes himself in his new home, Hampden. When Richard finally makes it and goes to study at Hampden he realizes that the actual campus does not fall short of his expectations, at least at first sight. In a very telling excerpt Richard explains how he could not sleep his first night at Hamden dormitories:

I sat on the bed during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to gold to black, listening to a soprano’s voice climbing dizzily up and down somewhere at the other end of the hall until the last light of day was completely gone [ … ] and I can’t remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night, or ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Plano. (12)

Richard is intoxicated by the beauty of his surroundings; he describes himself as “roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk by beauty” (12). Richard’s behavior displays a certain aesthetic pleasure which implies some sophistication and culture, all associated with the Campus, all the exact opposite from his birth place. His extensive descriptions of the campus buildings, the Evangelia Kyriakidou The Secret History of Hamden Campus 69 dormitories, the Commons clock tower “ivied brick, white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance” (12) echo a sense of enthrallment with his gothic surroundings. Gothic architecture is a landmark collegiate architecture as it evokes America’s obsession with the old, with history. The first American colleges tried hard to emulate Oxford and Cambridge in an effort to look as if they continue a long line of learning in the Anglophone world. Woodrow Wilson famously said about the gothic revival of Princeton:

By the very simple device of building our new buildings in the Tudor Gothic style we seem to have added a thousand years to the history of Princeton, by merely putting those lines in our buildings which point every man’s imagination to the historical traditions of learning in the English-speaking race (qtd. in Meyer 12)

Richard who bitterly admits that “nothing I knew of in Plano had been established much before 1962” (10) is attracted to the romantic, gothic, historical buildings of Hamden. Undoubtedly, Richard Papen a man who, in the very first lines of his narration, admits that his “fatal flaw” is “a morbid longing for the picturesque” (5) is the definition of a topophilic personality, if I could take the liberty to coin such a word inspired by Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard talked about topoanalysis and topophilia in his 1958 work The Poetics of Space. Topophilia-from Greek topos/ place and – philia/ love is a strong sense of place, which is often mixed with the sense of cultural identity among certain people and a love of certain aspects of such a place. So far we have witnessed Richard’s positive attitude towards one domesticated place: Hamden Campus. Another built space that offers a representation of predominantly positive responses, topophilia, is Francis cottage in Hamden County. Francis Abernathy is one of Richard’s new classmates in Hamden. Francis comes from a very wealthy family; in fact his mother had him when she was only seventeen and his affluent grandparents raised both his mother and him as siblings sparing no expense. The first time Richard visits Francis’s aunt’s house in the country he is taken aback by the grandeur of the place. It was tremendous with turrets and pikes, a widow’s walk (Tartt 84). However, it is not only the size and architecture of the house that has an impact on Richard, but also the sense of history and ancestry it evokes. The walls of the rooms that Richard is ushered through are lined with portraits and photographs of Francis’s family (84). In one of the pictures, as Francis explains, poses his grandmother’s brother who “went down with the Titanic, poor thing. They found his tennis racket floating in the North Atlantic three weeks afterward” (84). The reference to the Titanic is not a random one. Francis family is not only so old and so wealthy to have been able to travel with the Titanic, which was admittedly a luxury for the few, but more than that Francis’s family in this way becomes part of the American lineage. The privilege shared by Francis’s family is further accentuated by the description of the cottage’s library. The sight of the latter causes Richard to stare in amazement:

(G)lass-fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulcher, and a globed gasolier-dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading-sparkled in the dim” (85) 70 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Not only is the library luxurious and impressive, invoking the past, inhabited by many generations of noble men and echoes of past presences, that in the flat and one-dimensional light of California do not exist, but also full to the brim with rare collections of books bound in red leather or pale calfhide (85). The detailed description f the rare and expensive looking books in the library o represents the objectified state of Bourdieu’s cultural capital which will be analyzed further in the essay. These lengthy descriptions help to emphasize the elitist nature of this group of students who are privileged enough to move freely in and out of these equally privileged domesticated spaces: the campus and the cottage, both burdened with history and shadows of the past. However, the very title warns us that appearances can be deceptive. As literary critic Pieter Steinz has observed, Tartt borrows the title The Secret History from the sixth century court historian Procopius’ chronicles of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, because both books give accounts of “a horrible reality underlying a façade of normality” (25). This façade of normality is soon to be broken by an intruder to the academic world of Hamden. Richard, an outsider in all respects and purposes, notices the coterie of the five select Greek students and wants to be one of them. These students are described as “intensely cultivated” (32) and distinct from the rest of the college in various ways: they are wearing pale clothes, as opposed to the black-clad student body at Hamden, they walk together around campus, they take classes with Julian Morrow, a very eccentric teacher who insists that students need only one teacher, and, most importantly, they are geographically separated from the rest of the college since their class is situated in the far end of the campus, in a building which is abandoned. This place is called the Lyceum. This is a reference to Ancient Greek Academics, most commonly associated with Aristotle. The Lyceum at Hamden is located near a grove of trees exactly like the original Lyceum in Classical Athens. The Ancient Lyceum was connected to one of the manifestations of Apollo (Apollo Lykeios) 1 so Hamden’s Lyceum is the haven of the Apollonian spirit where only Julian and his students are allowed and only they are privileged enough to experience the sublime during their classes there. As a place the Lyceum is very powerful in an academic, Apollonian sense; it is the realm of reason. In the Lyceum it is not only the world of non-academics which is excluded but also the world of chaos and disorder. It is not coincidental that after Bunny’s murder the grove outside the Lyceum “was trampled and littered like a fairgrounds” (395). The crowds of people helping in the search for Bunny had trespassed this selec- tive place and in a sense desecrated it. This desecration could be interpreted as a violation of the world of reason by the spirit of chaos (Dionysus). It is reminiscent of the war between these binary opposites: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Hamden Lyceum, a primarily Apollonian place, is not for the uninitiated. Its material construction heightens this inaccessibility. Richard himself admits that finding the Lyceum “wasn’t easy at all” (15). He describes it as “a small building on the edge of campus, old and covered with ivy in such a manner as to be almost indistinguishable from its landscape. Downstairs were lecture halls and classrooms, all of them empty, with clean blackboards and freshly waxed floors” (15). Julian’s Greek class congregates in a room that can be found only by following a “staircase-small and badly

1 Encyclopedia Britannica, “Lyceum”, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/352514/ Lyceum (9/9/2015) Evangelia Kyriakidou The Secret History of Hamden Campus 71 lit-in the far corner of the building” (15). The classroom’s privileged status is conveyed by the difficulty of accessing it, both metaphorically and literally/ physically. Richard expresses his wish to join the Greek class as he feels that only by grouping with them will he ever belong somewhere:

I envied them [ the Greek students ], and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated. [ … ] I wanted to be like them. It was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and that, perhaps, that was the way I might learn them (32 – 33)

In this indicative ‘window’ to Richard’s thoughts, we recognize the traces of Bourdieu’s cultural capital; Bourdieu talks about the cultural capital as that which will infallibly identify you to others as a person of a certain culture with a similar trajectory in life (Bourdieu 471). He divides it in three sub- categories: the embodied state (pronunciation, dialect), the objectified state (cultural goods, such as books, records) and the institutionalized state (the educational qualifications one acquires). Richard who comes from a working class environment and whose cultural background is very low struggles to go to Hampden in order to acquire the institutionalized cultural capital that will enable him to become one of the others; the bourgeois students he so much admires. At the same time, Bourdieu’s reference to the objectified state of cultural capital is highlighted by his predilection for libraries and books. The embodied state he hopes to acquire is reflected in his realization that “it was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and, perhaps, that was the way I might learn them” (32 – 33). With these words Richard reverberates the Greek jurists who made a distinction between the inherited qualities one has (ta patroa) and the acquired ones (epikteta). Richard lies about his roots and tries to emulate bourgeois tastes and behavior throughout the novel in his effort to be included in the group of Greek students. Bunny, who is the least affluent of them all but is extremely sensitive to commodities that define class hierarchies, incessantly afflicts Richard with comments that always verge on exposing his modest origins. Richard admits that Bunny “Even in the happiest times, ….made fun of my Californian accent, my secondhand overcoat and my room barren of tasteful bibelots” (250) and that he would play tricks on him just to embarrass him in front of their friends. Richard knows that there is no way he can really infiltrate this tight group of elite students other than knowledge. In a scene laden with symbolic meaning, Richard gains access to the close-knit group by showing off his knowledge of Greek. The students are in the College Library-the realm of knowledge-where Richard overhears them troubling themselves over which case of a noun to use in a translation of an English text to Greek. He provides them with the correct answer as if giving them a secret password through which he proves he is worthy of their attention (Tartt 21). Knowledge for him as well as for the rest of the Greek students’ group is the vehicle through which they gain power in the context of college life. At the same time, their desire to acquire the knowledge of Greek and Latin is what brought them together in the first place. It is important to note that what brings these students together and makes them equals, not in class but in that they all belong to Morrow’s select cohort, is their shared desire to explore the ancient languages of Greek and Latin, erroneously believing that 72 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

this kind of knowledge would distinguish them from the rest of the students and that it would include them in a secret, obscure and mysterious ancient world (rites) accessible only to the initiated. This knowledge does more than simply set them apart from the rest of the student body; it also differentiates from ‘hoi polloi’ and empowers them. Power and knowledge-as Foucault underlines-are

not seen as independent discourses but are inextricably related—knowledge is always an exercise of power and power always a function of knowledge. In the case of the students of Greek, knowledge endows them with such a sense of superiority that they feel on top of the social ladder when everyone else is placed beneath them and is-to their eyes-insignificant. This idea of social hierarchy comes from Plato’sRepublic which they – not coincidentally-have studied in Julian Morrow’s class. Julian Morrow, the highbrow Classics Professor at Hampden, during one of his enthralling lectures, reminds them of Plato’s definition of Justice in the Republic: “Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it. A poor man who wishes to rise above his station is only making himself needlessly miserable” (235). With this line of reasoning in mind, people’s worth is directly relevant to the status attributed to him by society; the use of male pronoun is deliberate at this point because the group is exclusionary in terms of class and gender. In this way, the Greek students feel that their specific knowledge of the ancient Greek language gives them the right to treat other people as inconsequential in so far as the latter do not possess the cultural capital / power to rise above their designated status. Like their professor they employ their knowledge to justify and belittle the consequences of their actions. After they accidentally kill a farmer during a bacchanal the group experiences no remorse, only the fear of being caught. In a quite telling dialogue between them Francis says: “It is a terrible thing, what we did. I mean this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It is a shame. I feel bad about it” (220). Francis’s words reflect the whole group’s ideology: since the person they killed is not of the intellectual status of a Voltaire, he is therefore insignificant in the order of existence. They, on the other hand, are above morality, above right and wrong on account of their academic status. In a sense, they derive power from the fact that they are part of the university while they disregard the farmer who is an uneducated ‘townie’. We see here the spatial distinction between the campus as a privileged setting and what lies outside its limits. It is not a coincidence that both the farmer’s and the second murder they commit, that of their friend Bunny, take place outside the campus; the Greek students understand that a murder on campus would possibly contaminate it, desecrate it so they design to do it outside the campus. Nevertheless, all the planning for Bunny’s murder takes place on campus thus rendering the academic spaces strangely unfamiliar; Unheimlich. Using the Freudian term rather loosely here, I contend that the once homely (Heimlich) campus spaces take on a sinister, unfamiliar (Unheimlich) quality when the murderous plot is deployed on site (cf. Freud 1955). Plotting to kill their second victim, Bunny, in the academic space of the campus the students render the campus an unheimlich, uncanny terrain. Bunny, who is the ‘bad student’ and functions as their foil in The Secret History, is nothing but a hindrance to them. He is not their intellectual equal and on top of that he dares to blackmail them relentlessly. They see no other solution but to get rid of him. In this respect, it is particularly ironic when they discuss killing him in the college’s dining room which is called the Commons; the dining room is named the Commons to denote the democratic spirit of the Evangelia Kyriakidou The Secret History of Hamden Campus 73

University, a place commonly shared by people who are intellectually equal. However, even in the university there are certain hierarchies defined by the acquired cultural capital. In this sense the knowledge of the classics is above all other disciplines since it is considered an esoteric field of knowledge. In fact, it is a subject only for the few, only for an oligarchy. Especially, taking into account the impracticality of studying ancient Greek and Latin we are led to understand that people who study this branch of knowledge are not pressed to enter the workplace hence they are probably scions of a wealthy family that have all the time in the world to pursue intellectual pleasure. This is knowledge for knowledge’s sake. And the ability to partake in the use of this specific discourse is what makes them even more aloof and powerful on campus. Apart from the Commons, another place rendered uncanny by the group of students who plan to murder Bunny is the dormitory. Richard’s initial description of the dormitories, which weren’t “even dorms [ … ] but white clapboard houses with green shutters, set back from the Commons in groves of maple and ash” (11), and of his room in the dorms which was “a white room, with big north-facing windows, monkish and bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret’s” (12) come into stark contrast with what actually takes place in these romanticized topoi of the intellect: it is in this room in the dorms that Henry and Richard talk about the right dosage of poisonous mushrooms to do away with Bunny during a dinner between friends (257 – 263). In the same dorm room Bunny proceeds to a drunken confession of what he knows about the farmer’s murder to a stunned Richard (273 – 276). Immediately after this confession, Richard describes a nightmarish milieu in the place of his once perfect haven of a room: “the objects in the room seemed to swell and recede with each thump of my heart” (276) and instead of the voice of a soprano, what he had heard on his first night on campus, Richard hears “diabolical rap music” floating “from the opposite building” (276). The room and its objects acquire human agency, they become living creatures whose dimensions and weight grow. Once again, Tartt shows how the setting with its distinctive traits becomes a protagonist; the platform on which Tartt stages the plot. We know from the start that this close knit group of students murdered two people so every description of a glorious campus lit with an Apollonian light immediately assumes a double meaning: what seems familiar, safe and sophisticated, becomes at once unfamiliar, precarious and primitive (233). Tartt chillingly depicts this group of handsome, educated, young people discussing how to kill their friend Bunny after class, walking around campus, in the Commons Room after dinner, in their dorm rooms. If someone looked at them from afar, this group of bespectacled boys, well dressed, well behaved, accompanying a beautiful girl, carrying heavy books, they would believe they were discussing philosophy or trying to translate something in Greek. In fact, this group was “painfully aware of that metaphoric vial of nitroglycerin which Bunny carried around with him, day and night, and which, from time to time, he allowed (them) a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always with him, and he had the power to dash it to the floor whenever he pleased” (245). This “vial of nitroglycerin” changes their well-ordered and austere surroundings to some nightmarish landscape. Bunny’s annoying singing “The Farmer in the Dell” before Julian’s class starts unsettles everyone even though at face value it is just an innocent children’s song (101). There are several instances when Bunny justifies his secret nickname Cuniculus Molestus, annoying rabbit in Latin, (213) and manages to unnerve his peers no matter their surroundings: 74 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Bunny reading excerpts of the article “Mysterious Death in Battenkill County” in the Commons Room during lunch time (206); Bunny greeting his friends in class with a very snide “Khairei deerslayers 2” (204. Bunny’s choice of black- mailing his friends in the democratic place of the college dining room and the classroom is especially important and renders his blackmail all the more

powerful as his ominous utterances manage to subvert the spirit of equality and sharing that these campus spaces promote. The constant references to Bakchoi, maenads, omophagia, and Dionysus which are the backbone of The Secret History come to stark contrast with the Apollonian element that is supposed to be running through an educational institution. The Greek students’ choice of conspiring to kill their friend in the democratic place of the college is especially important and renders their plans even more terrible as their cold, ominous utterances manage to subvert the spirit of equality and moral uplifting that the campus landscape promotes. Despite the fact that a campus remains deeply rooted in popular American imagination as the space where the lower class can find a way out of its ills and up the social ladder, Tartt’s narrative comes to shatter dreams of education being an ideological apparatus that democratizes and preserves the myth of equal opportunities for all. Thus, spatial modalities both in the text and landscape are subverted and a foundational crisis of meaning in the campus is created.

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital”. J. Richardson, ed.Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood, 1986. Freud, Sigmund, et al. “The Uncanny”.The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth Press, 1955. Griffith, Martin, and Brendon O’ Connor.Anti-Americanism. History, Causes, Themes: In the 21.St Century. Greenwood World Publishing, 2007. Donna, Tartt. The Secret History. London: Penguin, 1993. Kenny, Anthony J.P., and Anselm H. Amadio. “Aristotle.” Encyclopædia Bri- tannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 14 Mar. 2018, www.britannica. com/biography/Aristotle. Meyer, Robinson. “How Gothic Architecture took over the American Col- lege Campus”. The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company. 11 Sept. 2013. Web. 9 Sept. 2015. Star, Alexander. “Less Than Hero.” New Republic, vol. 207, no. 17, 19 Oct. 1992, pp. 47 – 49. EBSCOhost,acg.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost. com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=12032063&scope=site. Steinze, Pieter. “Hoogmoed in Vermont”. Cultureel Supplement N.R.C. Han- delsblad, 30 October 1

2 Khairei is Ancient Greek for Hello, and the ominous sounding word deerslayers has a double meaning here, first it refers to the novels plot: after accidentally killing the farmer during one of their Bacchanals the group of friends return to Francis’s cottage where they see Bunny and in order to justify their bloody appearance they fabricate a story involving them running over a deer. The second connotation the word has is related to the God Dionysus since his votaries, in a drunken frenzy, would commit all kinds of atrocities including killing animals and wearing their hides.

Out of the Ordinary

76 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Priyanka Deshmukh Out of the Ordinary: The Event and its Repetition in Paul Auster’s Prose

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0574 Out of the Ordinary

Priyanka Deshmukh Out of the Ordinary 77

Priyanka Deshmukh Synonymous with “simplicity, plainness; rusticity,” and characteristic of received her dual “domestic life; ordinary, everyday”(OED), homeliness evokes the familiar, the PhD in Comparative norm, the trivial, the permanent, the foreseeable, the regular or the routine. Literary Studies from Northwestern University By definition, then, homeliness holds little value as subject matter for writing. and Université Paris XII As formalized in Claude Shannon’s theory of communication, what is certain in 2014, and is currently and inevitable is not worth communicating, and what is highly predictable adjunct lecturer of Anglo- American literature at may be briefly communicated. On the other hand, what is unforeseeable or Université Sorbonne highly unexpected is worth being elaborated on (Gleick, 215 – 231). Shannon’s Nouvelle – Paris 3. theory of communication seems to resonate with Paul Auster’s conception of writing, of a story, and of storytelling. Auster’s writing seems to address the question: what is worth being written about? Disastrous events (events that Auster defines as occurring suddenly and causing time to rupture into a before and after 1), a sudden turn of events, chance, and coincidence are at the heart of this prolific author’s writing, and have gained and sustained the interest of most of Auster’s critics. Since the publication of Dennis Barone’s Beyond the Red Notebook (1995), much of Austerian criticism has leaned towards postmodernist readings of his work in order to discuss the complex network of notions—such as chance, coincidence, solitude, loss, doubles, duplicity, quests, or even the process of writing 2—that govern his writings and mark the extraordinary events that are narrated. Yet, what could merit further attention is the very texture of this complexity, that is to say, the details and the trivialities that often are so obvious or insignificant that they may go unnoticed, but are in fact crucial to understand how events operate in Auster’s works. Therefore, since most (if not all) of his stories are centered around the unexpected and the extraordinary, one may wonder what place homeliness and domesticity holds in his fiction. Indeed, on looking closer at his body of work, we notice the presence of elements of homeliness, of ordinariness, contrasting with the extraordinary. For instance, rather than focusing on historical or collective events, Auster’s narratives throb with individual, personal, and domestic occurrences. From the death of his father in the first section of The Invention of Solitude, to the disintegration of his relationship with his first wife inReport from the Interior, and from Peter Stillman’s disastrous past and Daniel Quinn’s disappearance in City of Glass (The New York Trilogy) to the familial tragedy that haunts Miles Heller in Sunset Park, Auster’s autobiographies and novels also call into question the private or domestic sphere. Additionally, alongside the unexpected and extraordinary events in Auster’s autobiographical and novelistic work are to be found ample descriptions of routine, everyday life, and banalities. 3 However, the ordinary is not only manifested in the plots of Auster’s works, but also in his style. A distinctive feature of Auster’s style that pervades his novelistic and autobiographical work is the lack (if not absence) of metaphors, and

1 The narrator ofLeviathan commenting on Benjamin Sachs’s disaster (his accidental fall) says “Perhaps Ben’s life did break in two that night, dividing into a distinct before and after [ … ].” (119) 2 Some of the most significant works dealing with these questions include Ilana Shiloh’s Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere (2002), Brendan Martin’s Paul Auster’s Postmodernity (2007), and Evija Trofimova’sPaul Auster’s Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With (2014). 3 M.S. Fogg’s everyday life in his New York apartment until his eventual homelessness in Moon Palace, and descriptions of Ben Sachs’s and Lillian’s routine when Ben, uninvited, moves into her Berkeley house in an attempt to compensate for having accidentally killed her husband, Dimaggio, in Leviathan, are two of the most striking instances of descriptions of ordinary, everyday life. 78 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

a conventional (normative) syntax, which attributes a quality of ordinariness to his writing. Put differently, Auster’s style is one that is characterized by a lack of “style”—a question that we will return to and attempt to elaborate in this study. From this juxtaposition of the ordinary lives of Auster’s characters, with the extraordinary events that punctuate them and disrupt them, emerges a reading hypothesis. This cohabitation of the ordinary with the extraordinary gestures towards a peculiar relationship between the two categories – a relationship that is not so much a binary opposition, as it is an articulation, a chiasmus, if not a fusion. In order to explore this seeming chiasmus, the structure of this essay itself will attempt to follow a chiastic pattern. We will first look at the ordinary as a condition of possibility of the extraordinary in Auster’s work, that is to say how Auster’s aim of telling singular, disastrous events paradoxically forces him to tell the banal, the repetitive; in other words, how the extra-ordinary emerges out of the ordinary. We will then go on to examine how the extraordinary, in turn, appears as the condition of possibility for the ordinary, through the notion of repetition, especially in the aftermath of a traumatic event. The ordinary and the extraordinary are not so much topoi in Auster’s work as they are, instead, a central narrative strategy. The ordinary is put into place as a framework within which the extraordinary is made to occur. Such an operation is carried out, in its most striking instance, by resorting to his classic, recurrent, and contrasting themes of quest and chance. One of the most common points of departure of Auster’s novels and autobiographies is a quest. His protagonists all undertake various quests, which include, among others: geographical, metaphysical, ontological, literary, and familial quests. 4 The topos of the quest presents a pattern of predictability through a strong sense of causal order, since the characters that embark on quests usually do so with goals, intentions, and steps that are usually clearly set. This predictability and causality of events is key in opening up the possibility for the unpredictable or the extraordinary—indeed, “chance” events—to occur. The quest therefore functions as a matrix of horizontality (the physical wanderings of the characters, the horizontality of the signifiers of the stories’ text being written by Auster’s characters, who are all figures of a writer) that makes possible the verticality of the unpredictable or chance events, since chance is indeed that which “falls down on you from the sky,” as the protagonist Anna Blume of In the Country of Last Things (43) puts it. This Austerian conception of chance happens to echo that of Derrida. In his speech delivered at the Washington School of Psychiatry (later published as an essay “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies”), Derrida says:

For the moment, let us do no more than take note of this law or coincidence that in an odd way associates chance and luck with the downward movement, the finite throw

4 For instance, Auster’s career as a writer of prose (which followed his short-lived career as a poet) is inaugurated by his autobiographical work, The Invention of Solitude, which involves a quest that is at once literary and familial: he attempts to create an account of his “absent” father’s life through writing. A quest is also the starting point of In the Country of Last Things in which Anna Blume travels to the titular “Country of Last Things” in search of her brother, William. M.S. Fogg in Moon Palace undertakes several quests, from his quest for identity in the streets of New York and in Central Park, to his search for his father Solomon Barber. Priyanka Deshmukh Out of the Ordinary 79

(which must therefore end up by falling back down), the fall, the incident, the accident, or precisely the coincidence. To attempt to think chance would be in the first place to interest oneself in the experience (I emphasize this word) of what happens unforeseeably. And there are those who would be inclined to think that unforeseeability conditions the very structure of the event. An event that can be anticipated and therefore apprehended or comprehended, an event without absolute encounter, is that an event in the full sense of the word? Some would be inclined to say that an event worthy of this name does not announce itself in advance. One must not see it coming. If one anticipates what is coming, which is then outlined horizontally on a horizon, there is no pure event. So, one might say: no horizon for the event or the encounter, only the unforeseeable and on a vertical axis. The alterity of the other—which does not reduce itself to the economy of our horizon—always comes to us from on high; it is indeed the very high [ le très haut ]. (Derrida 2007, 349)

For Derrida, the experience of chance—which is to be equated with the event—is the experience of the vertical, in contrast to the horizontality of the foreseeable or predictable. The various levels at which this duality exists, for Derrida, are all present in Auster’s works. Verticality and horizontality being foremost spatial concepts, the verticality of a chance event is orchestrated in spatial terms in Auster’s writings: Benjamin Sachs’s accidental fall from the fourth floor of a building inLeviathan ; the accidental falling of eggs on the floor (perceived as a misfortune of cosmic proportions by the protagonist) in Moon Palace. This spatiality is also diffusely at work in the realm of language, and it is indeed interesting to note that Derrida uses the French word “chute” [ fall ] in his original text 5 to designate the movement of chance. Whether in English, or in French, chance or extraordinary events are said to “fall” or “befall,” and as mentioned above, Auster, through his character Anna Blume, uses the same term. Derrida’s “finite throw” (“ jet fini,” in the French), which gestures towards finitude and death, reminds us of the locution alea jacta est – another linguistic articulation of the verticality of chance. As seen above, it is the concept of encounter that binds the two aspects of chance, i.e. the unforeseeability and the verticality. In Auster’s works, encounter can also be taken to mean a chance encounter with another character or with a character’s fate, or even both, as in the case of the character Jackpot (Jack Pozzi) in The Music of Chance, on accidentally encountering whom, Nashe’s (the protagonist’s) fate changes; or in the case of Maria Turner, whose accidental encounter with Ben Sachs in Leviathan gives his life an unexpected and disastrous turn. The encounter—or the extraordinary event—is thus the

5 “Contentons-nous pour l’instant de remarquer cette loi ou cette coïncidence qui associe étrangement le hasard ou la chance avec le mouvement vers le bas, le jet fini (qui donc doit finir par retomber), la chute, l’incident, l’accident ou justement la coincidence.” (Derrida 1983, 7) [ For the moment, let us do no more than take note of this law or coincidence that in an odd way associates chance and luck with the downward movement, the finite throw (which must therefore end up by falling back down), the fall, the incident, the accident, or precisely the coincidence. (Derrida 2007, 349) ] 80 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

intersection point between horizontality and verticality, that is to say, between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Derrida’s concluding lines in the passage quoted above summarizes the instance of an encounter as the blurring between the alter (the other) and the altus (the very high, the altitude, and thus, the unexpected that falls), which in turn blurs the boundary that separates the extraordinary from the ordinary. In other words, if the extraordinary event is that which contrasts with the ordinary, it challenges the two seemingly contrasting categories to the point of operating a chiasmus: the one crosses over into the other. Such a chiastic structure is also present in the context of the ailing characters in Auster’s novels. A few of his novels start out by presenting a protagonist who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. For instance, Oracle Night opens with Sidney Orr (the protagonist and the homodiegetic narrator) declaring he had been sick for a long time, 6 while Nathan Glass—the protagonist and homodiegetic narrator of Brooklyn Follies—opens the novel with the announcement of his approaching death: “I was looking for a quiet place to die,” (1) which, as we learn later, resulted from his being diagnosed with lung cancer. Furthermore, both protagonists echo, almost verbatim, each other’s lack of hope for survival. Whereas Sidney Orr says: “They [ the doctors ] had given me up for dead” (2004, 1), Nathan Glass claims: “I had given myself up for dead.” (2006, 3) However, Sidney Orr and Nathan Glass also have in common the fact that despite their respective grim prognoses with which their narratives open, they both manage to survive at the end of the novels, and come to terms with this unexpected gift of life. In the event of an illness as serious as theirs, premature death becomes the expected, the normal, or the ordinary. However, when both characters defeat the foreseeability of death and manage to survive, it is life (the actuality of living) that becomes the unexpected, the extraordinary. In this sense, the ailing characters who manage to survive operate a chiasmus in which the categories of life and death are not only inversed, but also cross over into each other, once again blurring the distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary. One question then arises: if the ordinary and the extraordinary are so intimately tied, by which process—if any—might we be able to tell them apart? A possible answer could be: reading. It is through the act of reading—or interpreting—that an ordinary event may be perceived as extraordinary for the Austerian character. The most striking (although by no means the only) instance of this would be the episode of the falling and breaking of eggs in Moon Palace. On the brink of pennilessness (and consequently, starvation and homelessness), M.S. Fogg experiences one day the loss of his eggs, which constituted his already very meager supply of food:

The two eggs I was about to place in a pot of water and boil up for my daily meal slipped through my fingers and broke on the floor. Those were the last two eggs of my current supply, and I could not help feeling that this was the cruelest, most terrible thing that had ever happened to me. The eggs landed with an ugly splat. I remember standing there in horror as they oozed out over the floor. The sunny, translucent innards sank into the cracks, and

6 “I had been sick for a long time. When the day came for me to leave the hospital, I barely knew how to walk anymore, could barely remember who I was supposed to be.” (1) Priyanka Deshmukh Out of the Ordinary 81 suddenly there was muck everywhere, a bobbing slushof slime and shell. One yolk had miraculously survived the fall, but when I bent down to scoop it up, it slid out from under the spoon and broke apart. I felt as though a star were exploding, as though a great sun had just died. The yellow spread over the white and then began to swirl, turning into a vast nebula, a debris of inter- stellar gases. It was all too much for me – the last, im- ponderable straw. When this happened, I actually sat down and cried. (41 – 42)

What could be considered a trivial or commonplace occurrence—the falling and breaking of eggs—is magnified through Fogg’s reading and interpretation of it, after the fact. In this case, the experience of an ordinary event as extraordinary is only possible through the act of reading. The extra-ordinary emerges out of the ordinary; the ordinary is the condition of possibility of the extra-ordinary. The act of reading is, however, unreliable, and fails to mark a clear distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary by further contributing to their confusion. Moreover, perceiving an ordinary event as extraordinary through the deliberate act of reading constitutes a form of madness – the madness, or the disease of reading that Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus call “interpretosis” (127) 7. We could then even go so far as to say that the very act of reading a text—any text—consists in turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. In Auster’s work, the creation of the extraordinary out of the ordinary is not only to be found on the thematic plane, but can also be observed on the stylistic plane. The most unexpected, exceptional or extraordinary event (be it Glass’s illness in Brooklyn Follies, or Master Yehudi’s death in Mr. Vertigo, or Ben Sachs’s accident in Leviathan, or the sudden assault experienced by Adam Walker and Born in Invisible, or the chance encounter with Pozzi in The Music of Chance) in Auster’s narratives is always articulated in the most normative form of language. As mentioned earlier, in Auster’s writing, linguistic conventions are always respected, and metaphors are rare. The result is an ordinary or homely prose, which is neither subversive nor marginal. Indeed, the Austerian narrative cannot be said to belong to what Deleuze and Guattari name “minor literature.” In attempting to define “minor literature” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari write: “Only the possibility of setting up a minor practice of major language from within allows one to define popular literature, marginal literature, and so on.” (18) If one of the main characteristics of “minor literature” is the unconventional use of a major language, or the use of language that deviates from ordinary language, then “minor literature” seems to boil down to a question of style. In fact, when attempting to define “style” in his series of television interviews with Claire Parnet (L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze), Deleuze himself defines style as the creation of a “foreign language” within one’s native tongue. Given this definition of style, one could question the marginality of this “foreign” language carved by an author within his native tongue: firstly because this language is already latent in the native tongue from which it is carved, and secondly, because its popularity, or its adoption by other authors could push it

7 “In truth, significance and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other words, humankind’s fundamental neurosis.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 127) 82 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

over into the territory of the canonical. This seeming marginality then becomes the ordinary, the norm. In this sense, Auster’s use of ordinary language in his novels and autobiographies winds up setting him apart from the canonical or the conventional. Following linguistic conventions paradoxically causes him to deviate from the norm of deviation itself, thus reinforcing his singularity. Auster’s ordinary style, then, is nothing less than extra-ordinary; its extraor- dinariness is once again rooted in the ordinary, further problematizing the two categories. The fact that Auster’s ordinary language is the mark of his entire novelistic and autobiographical work leads us to believe that this linguistic conventional- ity is not a chance occurrence, but a deliberate, sovereign choice on the part of the author. The ordinariness of his prose is therefore a construct, rather than an accident. But the practice of constructing the ordinary is not limited to the author himself, on the meta-narrative plane, and can also be noticed in the choices made by his characters and the unfolding of their stories, and several characters are shown in the process of creating or constructing their routines – their ordinary, everyday lives. For Paul Auster’s characters, the construction of the ordinary may begin within the spatial realm, for instance, through the construction (though not in the strictly material sense of the term) of their homes. In certain cases, the spatial construction of the ordinary may stem from an extraordinary event. In the instance of The Music of Chance, Nashe’s life suddenly changes when he inherits, one day, unexpectedly, a large sum of money after his estranged father dies. He quits his job, leaves his daughter with his sister, leaves behind the life he knows, and embarks on a year-long journey cruising across the country in the car he buys from the inherited money:

Speed was of the essence, the joy of sitting in the car and hurtling himself forward through space. That became a good beyond all others, a hunger to be fed at any price. Nothing around him lasted for more than a moment, and as one moment followed another, it was as though he alone continued to exist. He was a fixed point in a whirl of changes, a body poised in utter stillness as the world rushed through him and disappeared. The car became a sanctum of invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him anymore. (10 – 11)

Nashe’s new car thus has all of the significant attributes of a home: a place of safety, shelter, comfort, joy, and refuge, and his new routine consists in driving around in his car. Nashe’s choice of a car as his new home is intriguing: whereas a home, by definition implies immobility, Nashe’s new home is one that juxtaposes movement and stasis, mobility and immobility. Although there is nothing ordinary or commonplace about living in one’s car, this practice becomes ordinary when it is subject to repetition in time: the repetition of an extraordinary phenomenon over time, renders it banal, causes it to become ordinary. Therefore, in Nashe’s case, the ordinary is a deliberate construct, which is the product of space (the car) and time (repetition). In Auster’s fiction, Nashe’s simultaneous state of (voluntary) homelessness and refuge in The Music of Chance is preceded by M.S. Fogg’s experience in Moon Palace. As part of a philosophical and ontological experiment of sorts, which was born of despair, the protagonist of Moon Palace, Marco Stanley Priyanka Deshmukh Out of the Ordinary 83

Fogg, adopts a life of voluntary homelessness 8. We learn in the course of the novel that Fogg’s experience of living in the streets takes him to Central Park, which, over time, becomes his new home. During this period, he seeks shelter in a cave in Central Park:

[ A ]t a certain point, I found a cluster of large rocks surrounded by overgrown foliage and trees. The rocks formed a natural cave, and without stopping to consider the matter any further, I crawled into this shallow inden- tation, pulled some loose branches in with me to block up the opening, and promptly fell asleep. (67)

Thus, Fogg makes his homelessness coincide with a short period of refuge: he builds himself a home in the cave, using branches to create a make-believe door, and seeks comfort through sleeping in this space. Like Nashe, Fogg also chooses a confined space in which to live. In fact, from A.’s tiny room at 6 Varick Street in New York, in The Invention of Solitude, to Miles Heller’s small and inexpensive Florida apartment in a poor neighborhood in Sunset Park, Auster’s autobiographical and novelistic work presents a host of characters who seek refuge in small or confined spaces. Homeliness, domesticity and security in Auster’s work is therefore synonymous with confined spaces; it is achieved in circumstances that are nothing less than extraordinary. The ordinary, however, is not only a spatial construct in his work. In certain instances, it can also gain a temporal dimension: through repetition. Auster’s texts brim with characters that settle down into a routine by regularly and deliberately repeating an act or a scene. What triggers their repetition compulsion is a traumatic event that usually occurs in the wake of a coincidence, and as such, the traumatic event itself is already a repetition – coincidence being a modality of repetition. Auster’s own definition and example of “coincidence” that appears in his Collected Prose hints at its inherent repetition: “[ meeting ] three people named George on the same day” 9 (540). In the novel Oracle Night, for instance, when Richard—the brother-in- law of the protagonist’s friend, John Trause—accidentally (coincidentally) comes across a 3D viewer with pictures of his deceased relatives, he enters into a pattern of repetition:

The viewer was a magic lantern that allowed him to travel through time and visit the dead. He would look at the pictures in the morning before he left for work, and he would look at them in the evening after he came home. Always in the garage, always by himself, always away from his wife and children – obsessively returning to that afternoon in 1953, unable to get enough of it. The spell lasted for two months, and then one morning Rich- ard went into the garage and the viewer didn’t work… It was a catastrophic loss, the cruelest of deprivations… Another round of grief, another round of sorrow – as if,

8 “I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets” (1). 9 Here, the repeated element is the name “George.” 84 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

after bringing them back to life, he had to bury the dead all over again. (33 – 34)

The extraordinary coincidence of stumbling upon the 3D viewer brings back Richard’s experience of trauma – the loss of his beloved family. The repeated act of seeing their photographs through the 3D viewer then becomes a way for him to master his trauma. In a similar vein, Benjamin Sachs in Leviathan, enters into a self-imposed pattern of repetition after his accidental fall from the fourth floor fire escape of a building:

Something extraordinary had taken place, and before it lost its force within him, he needed to devote his unstinting attention to it. Hence his silence. It was not a refusal so much as a method, a way of holding onto the horror of that night long enough to make sense of it. To be silent was to enclose himself in contemplation, to relive the moments of his fall again and again, as if he could suspend himself in midair for the rest of time – forever just two inches off the ground, forever waiting for the apocalypse of the last moment. (134; my emphasis)

Sachs’s “extraordinary” experience of the fall (which was the culmination of a series of coincidences) locks him in a pattern of repetition in which he recreates the experience over and over as a way to master the fall. And as Freud elaborates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in the context of his grandson’s (little Ernst’s) Fort-Da game following the departure of his mother, repetition is indeed a means to gain mastery over a traumatic event. Gaining mastery over trauma through the repetition of the traumatic or the “extraordinary” works by transforming the extraordinary into the ordinary or the banal. In other words, the ordinary is produced—is constructed—through subjecting the extraordinary to the process of deliberate repetition over time. Repetition compulsion indeed consists in trivializing or rendering banal the extraordinary. We have thus discussed how the ordinary and the extraordinary are intimately tied to each other, and how Paul Auster not only uses their ambivalence as a narrative technique, but also makes it part of his aesthetics. The beautiful is not banished from the realm of the banal. And neither is the sublime. Indeed, Auster’s characters could be seen as aesthetes seeking beauty and the sublime in the most ordinary and homely experiences. While one might be tempted to associate the sublime with the experience of the extraordinary event, since both notions gesture towards excess—what is excessive, what transgresses the boundaries of the banal—our analysis might lead us in a slightly different direction: the sublime could perhaps be said to be experienced through repetition, as the ordinary.

Works Cited Auster, Paul. The Brooklyn Follies.New York: Picador, 2006. —. Collected Prose. New York: Picador, 2010. —. In the Country of Last Things. New York: Penguin, 1987. —. The Invention of Solitude.London: Faber and Faber, 1982. —. Invisible. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. —. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1992. Priyanka Deshmukh Out of the Ordinary 85

—. Moon Palace. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. —. Mr. Vertigo. New York: Penguin, 1998. —. The Music of Chance.London: Faber and Faber, 1990. —. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. —. Oracle Night. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. —. Report from the Interior. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013. —. Sunset Park. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Prod. Pierre-André Boutang, Gilles Deleuze, and Claire Parnet. Éditions Montparnasse, 2004. DVD. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. New York: Con- tinuum, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “Mes chances. Au rendez-vous de quelques stéréophonies épicuriennes.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie.45.1, 1983. —. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. Seattle: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010. Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Vin- tage, 2012. “homeliness, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 8 January 2016. The Rise of the House of Usher

86 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Aristi Trendel

Exile in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0575 The Rise of the House of Usher

Aristi Trendel Exile in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls… 87

Aristi Trendel is associ- In her first autobiographical novel,How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, ate professor at Le Mans published in 1992 (the 90s being the decade that witnessed the boom of University, France. She Hispanic-American literature, especially with women writers), Julia Alvarez has published book chapters and articles pores over a major phenomenon of our century, exile, and sets up a panoramic on American writers view of this form of displacement which is both physical and mental. In fact, in American and Euro-

as one of the daughters of a Dominican family enduring political exile in pean journals. She is the author of four books of the late 50s under the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who fiction. Her forthcoming controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930 – 1961, Alvarez, a Latina writer, book is titled, Academic Politics: Master and has a personal experience of forced displacement. It is no surprise that exile, Pupil in the American this “potent, even enriching motif of modern culture” (Said, 173), appears Novel since the Eighties both as a blight and a blessing in her narrative which presents a group portrait (Lexington Books, 2020) around Yolanda Garcia, the character who seems to be the federating agent of the exilic experience. Although How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is composed of 15 episodic chapters that could be self-contained and be read autonomously as short stories, the novel is tightly structured. It is organized into three parts based on a reverse chronology – the narrative starts from the present and returns to the past spanning the period from 1989 to 1956. The multiplicity of stories that the narrative accommodates, accompanied by a shifting point of view, indicates both “the storytelling culture” (Heredia, 20) of Alvarez’s homeland and the fragmentation, break and split exile entails. Indeed, Alvarez declared that exile was one of the most traumatic experiences in her life (Heredia, 21). In her polyphonic novel, she orchestrates the woes of a divided self thus transforming the shabby condition of loss into a treasured aesthetic motif. Her ironic title points both to a story of assimilation and acculturation and to the loss which exiles keep alive. Through its reverse chronology, somewhat disorienting for the reader, the narrative inexorably advances towards a retrieval of the traumatic event that put it in motion− what one character sweepingly calls “the day you lost everything” (150). This type of chronology makes all the more clear that the exile’s progress involves a backward movement into memory. I will argue that, far from merely recording loss, the novel by assembling the fragmented memories of the Garcia family into a meaningful whole makes prominent a trajectory from the condition of ontological insecurity, brought about by exile, to the condition of the “unhomely” (Bhabha) and to a nomadic consciousness; Alvarez deftly links politics, history, culture, ontology and ethics. This trajectory also involves a movement from linguistic insecurity to linguistic mastery i.e. from silence to voice. At the outset, the exile is political and the novel could be read as a political one since Alvarez embarks on a double critique of the Dominican Republic and the US. She does so through the tribulations of the Garcia family whose upper class status and support of the US action on the island gains them easy access to the American haven. Like the ancient Sinuhe who hearing that he is to be seized by the authorities flew the kingdom of Egypt and spent his life among aliens, doctor Carlos Garcia, involved in a US-supported coup against the dictator, has to accept the American fellowship offer which saves his life – it is a decision forced upon him by the circumstances. In the course of the narrative and when the assassination of Trujillo in 1961 makes his return possible, he decides not to go back, to one of the daughter’s regret, thus turning from a political exile into an expatriate. The notorious brutality of Trujillo’s regime, which ruthlessly slaughtered civil liberties and the dictator’s opponents, is subtly depicted in the narrative. 88 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

The Garcia family is victimized in various ways. The grandfather is sent away from the country as an official in the UN for the dictator is jealous of educated men. Carlos Garcia is saved in extremis and is flown out of the country by the intervention of a CIA agent, Victor, who sends away the infamous secret police that invade the house and, under a facade of politeness, terrorize the

family. Even in the opulent compound of the Garcia family, life under Trujillo seems to be “a crazy hellhole” as the mother calls it (202). Finally, Garcia’s decision not to return to the island is based on the hopeless post-dictatorship politics at home. However, the US’s involvement in the fortunes of the Dominican Republic, which seemed to have contributed to the political troubles of the island since its US occupation in 1916 and paved the way for Trujillo’s dictatorship, is also recorded and denounced in the narrative. TheUS is certainly the savior of Carlos Garcia who committed himself to the last minute US-arrested plot to kill the dictator [ “the US chickened out of the plot” (202) ] but not the one of the Dominican Republic. Irony and disillusionment with the US is again expressed by the third person narrative voice, “A few weeks ago it was the shores of the Dominican Republic. Now it was the jungles of Southeast Asia they were saving.” (144) The American invasion of the Dominican Republic under Lyndon Johnson who seemed to have dictated the outcome of the supposed free elections in 1965 is thus paralleled in the narrative by the American action in Vietnam. This double critical vision is maintained when it comes to the politics of race and gender. Alvarez, in her depiction of exile, brings together the top and the bottom of the social scale inserting the history of the Dominican Republic into the narrative and showing its relevance to the experience of the family in the US. Just like the Garcias who are offered political asylum in the US, Chuca, the family’s Haitian servant was offered “asylum” in the Garcia’s household when persecuted by Trujillo’s action to eliminate all “foreigners” and the Dominican Republic’s African heritage. Chuca is an exile on her own island and a survivor of the so called parsley massacre, the 1937 massacre of 15,000 Haitian immigrants near the border by order of Trujillo, referred to by one of the daughters, Fifi, “Chuca had just appeared at my grandfather’s doorstep one night begging to be taken in. Turns out it was the night of the massacre when Trujillo had decreed that all Black Haitians on our side of the island would be executed by dawn. There is a river the bodies were finally thrown into that supposedly still turns red to this day, fifty years later.” (218) The Massacre River, as it is now called, becomes a reference point in the narrative. Chuca, “the blue-black” Haitian (218), a former cane-picking worker, one of the jobs that the Haitians took because the Dominicans did not want to take them, is the Other in the Dominican Republic and among the servants in the household. Likewise, the Garcias become the Other in the US where from “white” they turn into people of color. As a matter of fact, they are the “spics” asked to go back home by the man in the street. Some episodes illustrate what Chester Pierce in 1970 called racial microaggresions, commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults towards a person or group. Yolanda does experience as such the remarks made by Rudy Elmenhurst’s parents, which her platonic boyfriend reports to her, “they said that should be interesting for him to find out about people from other cultures. It bothered me that they should treat me like a geography lesson for their son.” (98). The Aristi Trendel Exile in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls… 89 parents’ anthropological stance, connoted by the simile “geography lesson,” objectify Yolanda and threaten her humanity just like the openly racist remarks addressed by the other students to Sandi. Moreover, Alvarez subtly depicts the plight of a double cultural exile. Yolanda retrieves her crucifix and puts it under her pillow after Rudy abandons her making a remark in retrospect, “Had I been raised with the tradition of stuffed animals, I would have hugged my bear ... salting the ragged fur with my tears all night.” (99) The cross alleviates the separation whether it is her boyfriend or ultimately her homeland, a process of mourning which Ricardo Ainslie called a cultural one (Ainslie). Yolanda’s retrospective observation points to the act of lamenting a lost culture. Likewise, Alvarez also eloquently illustrates “reverse displacement,” what the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti called desexilio (cited by Averis, 17) – in the first chapter Yolanda finds herself a cultural foreigner in her homeland. Indeed, her aunt reminds her that “‘this is not the States. A woman just doesn’t travel alone in this country.’” (9) This remark highlights the fact “the lost home and the homeland do not necessarily represent loci of secure locatedness for women, but sites in which identity was already problematic,” as Kate Averis demonstrated in her study of six contemporary Francophone and Latin American writers (23). Therefore, exile is not necessarily a negative event as it becomes a privileged site for the expression of women’s identity. It appears in the narrative that women are finally empowered by exile whereas men are weakened. The father is challenged by Fifi’s erotic kiss to him during the guessing game they play in her flat. In the same way, though a victim of the dictator, Carlos finds himself cast into the role of the dictator – when he tears the speech Yolanda was to deliver to her school, his daughter calls him “Chapita” to his face, unmistakeably Trujillo’s nickname “for the bottle caps he collected like medals” (Roorda, 21). Likewise, the conquest of the adolescent daughters’ independence in the US is termed as “a regular revolution” (117). Moreover, the “coup” (127) to save Fifi, “exile[ d ]” (117) in her own homeland, from the danger of an untimely marriage to her local macho boyfriend is symbolically set “on the same Avenida where a decade ago the dictator was cornered and wounded on his way to a tryst with his mistress” (127). Therefore, exile contributes to women’s emancipation, a most vital issue in the narrative. It is no wonder, then, that the position of women in Yolanda’s native land is one of the reasons that make her return, under consideration in the first chapter, appear impossible. However, the gender issue is far from being resolved in the US whose multinationals engineer a transnational objectification of women. At the end of the first chapter, the Palmolive ad picturing a blond woman under a shower, “her head thrown back in seeming ecstasy, her mouth opened in a wordless cry” (15), signifies not only the economic invasion of the island but also what women fought against, the commodification of femininity. Nevertheless, Alvarez revises the “messages of dollness” (Frever, 122) as Trinna S. Frever rightly argued. Indeed, the Spanish Barbie that Sandi appropriates is “less an enemy to be destroyed than a force to reckon with” (126) as it restores the girl’s ethnic pride. However, the author also shows the illusory nature of such pride building on the double identity of the victim and the victimizer, which Jennifer Bess analyzed through the concept of Miranda’s complex (Bess). Alvarez not only plays with the interchangeability of dictators, Trujillo/Carlos and exposes the island’s guilty history but also unearths the colonial past of the Dominican Republic, which again blurs the frontiers of dominator/dominated. In fact, 90 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

the drawing, at the beginning of the book, traces the origins of the family back to the Conquistadors. In addition, in the ambiguously titled chapter, “The Blood of the Conquistadors,” which makes the reader wonder whether it is the blood the Conquistadors had in their veins or the blood they shed, namely the first inhabitants’, the Arawaks’, the game Carlos plays is reported

as one “that nobody likes” (197). Yolanda calls it the test her father gives her to determine whether his children have inherited the blood of the Conquis- tadors – he holds her upside down till she says yes. Precisely, Yolanda’s reluctant assent entails the acknowledgment of “the violation” committed by the Garcias’ ancestors, uttered at the end of the narrative – Yolanda, beset by guilt, recalls the kitten she took away from her mother, “At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black fur thing lurking in the corners of my life .… wailing over some violation that lies at the centre of my art” (290). There is little doubt that Alvarez endorses Adorno’s aphoristic, oft-cited thought in Minima Moralia, “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home” (39). Like Nancy Huston who emigrated to France and exposed Canada’s colonial history and its extermination of the vast majority of its indigenous population, Alvarez scrutinizes this problematic position. Metonymy establishes a relation between Yolanda’s childish misdemeanor and the adults’ ones – the extermination of the island’s first inhabitants, the massacre of the Haitians, the invasion of the island by the Americans and the exile endured by the family. Though the US is life-saving for Carlos and a secure place for the whole family, it also appears as “an unsafe place” (223) and “a nation of zombies” (221) in the discourse of Chucha, the Sibylla of exile in the narrative. Her discourse anticipates the shattering of a different type of security, what Laing calls ontological security. Exile’s traumatic discontinuity seems to shatter the primary ontological security and creates the existential condition of “primary ontological insecurity” (Laing, 39). All the characters, to a greater or lesser extent, touch upon or sink into this type of insecurity. Carlos’s fear of the secret police verges on paranoia. Chucha, in her effort to control her own death, sleeps in her coffin, the only space that seems to offer safety. But the most poignant intimation of this rupture of primary ontological security is significantly related to Sandi who, just like her sister Yolanda, is committed at some point in her life to a mental institution,

It was strange how when held up to the absolute phrase— the one toy I really want—nothing quite filled the hole that was opening wide inside Sandi .… Nothing would quite fill that need, even years after, not the pretty woman she would surprise herself by becoming .… not the men that held her close and almost convinced her .… this was what Sandi has been missing (215).

Sandi’s black hole that threatens to swallow her dates back to what her sister Carla, who tried to understand her condition by becoming a psychologist, termed “the day you lost everything” (150), primary safety included. Indeed, Sandi and Yolanda go through a severe identity crisis and are committed to mental institutions at some point in their lives for a condition that goes beyond a nervous breakdown and reads like psychosis. The term does not appear in the narrative and Alvarez’s approach is clearly based on existential phenomenology that defines madness as “what is ‘existentially Aristi Trendel Exile in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls… 91 true is lived as ‘really’ true” (Laing, 37). Sandi becomes a compulsive reader for fear of turning into a monkey holding onto books as the last remnants of humanity. It is precisely this humanity that was denied to Carla when she was called monkey by the other children at school in this diffuse experience of exile. Alvarez depicts the anxieties that are aspects of a basic ontological insecurity, more particularly engulfment – Yolanda engulfed by other voices compulsively quotes and misquotes authors in the Babel Tower of herself. If one sister obsessively reads, and the other obsessively cites, “they feel most closely identified with the ‘mind’ (Laing, 65), a state that aims “to transcend the world and hence to be safe” (Laing, 80). The two sisters, both avid readers of the classics, represent the couple, writer (Yolanda)- reader (Sandi) and thus appear as paragons of the humanities which value human experience. It seems that Alvarez extends the alienation from place to self alienation and makes them indistinguishable thus setting exile on an ontological ground. Precisely, in Something to Declare, Alvarez pointed out this sort of ontological uncertainty entailed by exile : “listening to cousins my age complain about their maids, I felt like the poor relation. But what I most lusted for was not their luxuries, but their lives of certitude. They seemed so unshaken by the self-doubts and life decisions that were buffeting me.” (182 – 83). This inde- cisive middle ground corresponds to Yolanda’s mental landscape in the first chapter which ambiguously ends with an affirmation of difference; the latter is commented by Said as a defining characteristic of the exile, “clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealousy insists on his or her right to refuse to belong” (182). In addition, the last chapter of the novel that ends with an affirmation of art sends the reader back to the first chapter in which Yolanda as a grownup artist gropes for answers in an indeterminate space. The reader may wonder about what has taken Yolanda back to the island after a five year absence of visit and “a long journey, a cycle, an Odyssey” (Cas- sin, 16 my translation) with the secret hope to stay. The answer is in the title of the first chapter, “Antojio,” a Spanish term that refers both to a yearning for a certain food and a spiritual yearning. The guavas Yolanda is hungering after signify the childhood paradise which the character can no longer find as she is clearly the odd woman out and the island has become a marketer’s paradise. Likewise, the last chapter also establishes the illusory nature of this paradise spoiled by the primeval act of violation of local rights. Indeed, Barbara Cassin points out that “nostalgia has two faces, rootedness and wandering” (54) and to illustrate her view brings up Dante’s view of Ulysses as “an an emigrant who does not desire return” (56). Yolanda’s nostalgia turns out to be not the sort of Heimweh or home sweet home but rather Sehnsucht, “an open nostalgia that does not return to itself” (Cassin, 60). Cassin also brings up Heidegger’s notion of “nicht zu Hause” to signal that we are nowhere at home. The French author concludes with the vertiginous equivocity of the world and the insecurity of human beings (121) which are intimated in Alvarez’s novel. Alvarez’s open-ended ending, which depicts a dangling woman and points to the aporia of belonging, could be examined under a host of concepts that illuminate the peculiar condition of in-betweenness. First, as other critics pointed out (Goss Erickson, 86), Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “unhomely,” which blurs the frontier between the personal and the political is quite relevant. According to Bhabha, the unhomely is related to displacements “caused within cultural lives of postcolonial societies” (Bhabha, 146), and is “the uncanny literary and social effect of enforced social accommodation, or historical 92 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

migrations and cultural relocation.” (Bhabha, 141). Throughout the narrative Alvarez precisely “relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (Bhabha, 144) and it is this relation that Bhabha defines as the unhomely. Yolanda finds herself not homeless but “unhomed” as both the Dominican Republic and the US

are problematic sites that do not offer a satisfactory shelter. In addition, Yolanda’s ultimate figuration as a nomad which seals “an image of the subject in terms of a non-unitary and multilayered vision, as a dynamic and changing entity” (Braidotti, 5) also brings up Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadism. As Braidotti puts it, “The point of nomadic subjectivity is a creative alternative space of becoming that would fall not between the mobile/immobile, the resident/the foreign distinction, but within all these categories” (7). Moreover, Averis identifies a “current trend of nomadism in exiled women’s writing in French and Spanish” and points out the transcul- tural applicability of this notion across exiled women’s writing (165). Indeed, Alvarez’s writing can be understood in the light of this notion. Finally, Georg Lukács’s concept of “transcendental homelessness,” developed in his Theory of the Novel, is not irrelevant either. Alvarez’s novel with its fragmentary structure, its divided characters, its deviations from the Bildungsroman, its elusive, misleading nostalgia, prominent in the first chapter, does raise the question of a nostalgia whose object is a totality of existence. Hopelessly shattered in the modern world it refuge in language. Yolanda, the writer, in search of a lost Eden, finally holds out “the violation in the centre of her art,” an art which, unable to reach the epic unity, exemplifies the unreachable telos of the novel, “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (Lukács, 88). Alvarez’s narrative displays this sort of homelessness, the exile from the paradise of the epic that could secure satisfactory answers. Nevertheless, the type of “aerial roots” (Cassin, 130), which the narrative seems to sketch out, points at language. In the narrative, language can kill, as the parsley massacre exemplifies (the pronunciation of the wordparsley being the ‘test’ given to Haitians to supposedly distinguish them accurately from Dominicans), but it can also save, as Yolanda’s recovery illustrates. David Cowart rightly states that “language functions as a kind of pharmakon, the site or medium of both psychological collapse and emotional restoration” (48). The narrative’s ending establishes the authority of language despite the violation. It is the artist’s voice − Yolanda finally asserts her voice emerging from this remembrance from things past previously denied by the father/dictator when he tore up her speech in which she found herself. It is the language that triumphs over the initial silence pregnant with the stories Chuca can hear, “They have left—and only the silence remains, the deep and empty silence in which I can hear the voices of my santos settling into the rooms, of my loa telling me stories of what is to come” (222). It is the language that vehicles the initial double loss that of Spanish and English but also of a greater gain. As Sonia Farid puts it, It is through a disrupting of the hegemonic language codes that Latino/a writers make English malleable enough to suit their purpose: recounting the story of a Hispanic in the United States .… Spanish still features powerfully in the texts whether by the actual inclusion of Spanish vocabulary and syntax or by constant references to the way characters approach their native tongue while in exile (243). This enriched version of language, relying on both English and Spanish and in which linguists could delight, is the home of the unhomely, of the nomads, of those “beings without frontiers and beyond categories” (Kristeva). Aristi Trendel Exile in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls… 93

Just like Hannah Arendt who redefined herself in relation to a language and not to a space, Alvarez quoting Czeslaw Milosz stated that language is the only homeland (McClellen). This ever-expanding homeland whose frontiers are beyond control and which eludes all potentates is certainly large enough to wander for life. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is Alvarez’s noteworthy contribution to the literature of exile. Her depiction of exile involving a constellation of issues makes the novel a rich testimony to the complexities of our times.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. 1951. Trans- lated from German by E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2006. Ainslie, R.C. “Cultural Mourning, Immigration, and Engagement: Vignettes from the Mexican Experience.” In Marcel Suarez-Orozco (ed). Crossings: Immigration and the Socio-Cultural Remaking of the North American Space. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 28 – 300. Alvarez, Julia.Interview with Hilary McClellen. “In the Name of the Home- land.” The Atlantic on Line, July 19 2000. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/ docs/unbound/interviews/ba2000 – 07 – 19.htm. Accessed on 8 January 2016. —. Interview with Heredia Juanita. “Citizen of the World.” in Heredia, Juanita & Kevane, Bridget (eds). Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contem- porary Women Writers. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2000, pp. 15 – 32. —. Something to Declare: Essays.1998. New York: Plume, 1999. —. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill: Algoquin Books, 1991. Averis, Kate. Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing. London: Legenda, 2014. Bess, Jennifer. “Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” College Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter, 2007): 78 – 105 Bhabha, Homi. “The World and the Home.”Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141 – 153. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Con- temporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Cassin, Barbara. La Nostalgie : quand donc est-on chez soi ? : Ulysse, Enée, Arendt. Paris: Autrement, 2013. Cowart, David. Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Farouk Farid, Sonia. Aestheticizing Displacement: The Experience of Exile in Selected Novels by Contemporary Hispanic-American Women Writers. Ph.D. Thesis. Submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, 2010. https://www.academia.edu/7557071/ Aestheticizing_Displacement_The_Experience_of_Exile_in_Selected_ Novels_by_Contemporary_Hispanic-American_Women_Writers. Ac- cessed on 8 January 2016. Frever, Trinna S. ““Oh! You Beautiful Doll!”: Icon, Image, and Culture in Works by Alvarez, Cisneros, and Morrison.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2009): 121 – 139. Goss Erickson, Leslie. ‘In the Shadow of Salomé: Woma’s Heroic Journey in Julia Alvare’s In the Name of Salomé” in Kumaraswami Niamh Thornton (eds). Revolucionarias: Conflict and Gender in Latin American Narratives by Women. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 83 – 117. 94 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Kristeva, Julia. “Burgarie ma souffrance.” L’Infini 51 (Automne 1995): 42 – 52. http://www.kristeva.fr/bulgarie.html. Accessed on line on 10 September 2015. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Pelican, 1965.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. 1920. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cam- bridge: The MIT Press, 1971. Roorda, P. Eric. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic 1930 – 1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

“It ghosts”

96 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Paulina Ambroży

“It ghosts”: Language as a Haunted Dwelling in Selected Poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0576 “It ghosts”

Paulina Ambroży “IT GHOSTS” 97

Paulina Ambroży is In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that all writing is ghost-driven, for “everyone professor extraordinarius reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts.” The philosopher sees the figure of the and Head of American ghost as paramount, “the hidden figure of all figures” (1994, 20). To explain Literature Department at the Faculty of English, at the nature of spectral language and modern hauntology, Derrida uses Marx’s Adam Mickiewicz Univer- 1 formulation “Es spukt” [ it ghosts ] (Derrida 1994, 216), which, as I shall at- sity in Poznań, Poland.

tempt to prove, well captures the uncanny ‘apparitioning’ of metaphysical She is the author of (Un) concealing the Hedge- truths against the domestic and the familiar in the works of modernist poets. hog: Modernist American Derrida explains the complex and indefinite nature of the German phrase es Poets and Contemporary Critical Theories (2012). spukt in terms of “domestic hospitality”: thus, “it ghosts” denotes an undecid- Her research interests able welcome which opens up a space for our encounter with the unheimlich. include modernist and In the philosopher’s own words, contemporary American poetry, 19th-century American literature, to welcome …with anxiety and the desire to exclude the word-image relations and literary theory, and stranger, to invite the stranger without accepting him contemporary prose. or her, domestic hospitality that welcomes without wel- Currently, she is work- coming the stranger, but a stranger who is already found ing on an intermedial project, Turn of the Sign: within (das Heimliche-Unheimliche), more intimate with Crisis of Representa- one than one is oneself, the absolute proximity of a stran- tion in American Poetry ger whose power is singular and anonymous (es spukt), and the Visual Arts. an unnamable and neutral power, that is, undecidable, neither active nor passive, an identity, that, without doing anything [ emphasis original ], invisibly occupies places belonging finally neither to us nor to it. (Derrida 1994, 217)

Partaking of a similar tension between the strange and the familiar, modernist poetry can be described as “spectral”, as it often locates itself on the threshold of the presentable and the unpresentable, between the body and the spirit, thus creating the right dwelling – or the right “body” – for the haunting traces, apparitions, and re-apparitions of the past. Using Derrida’s concept of literature as the specter, coupled with Heidegger’s notion of “poetical dwelling”, in which man structures his relationship to the world through language, I shall examine selected poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore as spaces and bodies both haunted and haunting. In my analysis, I intend to borrow Derrida’s concept of undecidable hospitality to explore spectral capacities of the poetic metaphor, which, in modernist practice, often welcomes “without welcoming”, positioning the reader in the space of the (Un)heimlich. Following Derrida’s own frequent practice, my method will be close reading, as it allows both insight into the idiosyncratic practice of each poet and a comparative perspective. At the same time, however, by uncovering the textual “secrets” of the poems in question, I would like to bring to the fore broader aspects of modernist “hauntology”, along with its attempts to productively destabilize and open up meaning. As indicated above, I shall focus on selected poems: Frost’s “Directive,” Stevens’s “Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician,” and Moore’s “To a Cha- meleon”. However, I will also refer to other, related examples from the poets’

1 I am using the English translation (“it ghosts”) for the German phrase “es spukt”, rather than the more natural “it haunts”, after Derrida himself, who in The Specters of Marx points to the difficulty in translating the term:es “ spukt, difficult to translate, as we have been saying. It is a question of ghosts and haunting, to be sure, but what else? The German idiom seems to name the ghostly return but it names it in verbal form. The latter does not say that there is some revenant, specter, or ghost: it does not say that there is some apparition, der Spuk, nor even that it appears, but that ‘it ghosts’, ‘it apparitions.’” (216). 98 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

oeuvres; the selected texts will serve as instances of spectral poetics or uncanny dwelling in and through language, in which the tension between the domestic and the anti-domestic spells out the aesthetic goals of modernism as well as the spiritual, existential and epistemological doubts of the era. As I shall argue, the domestic in those poems is often haunted by the repressed

past or translated into quasi-transcendental forms and figures, suspending the reader between the impossibility and revelation of truth. The trajectory of the argument – from Frost, through Stevens, to Moore – is determined by my desire to show the poets’ different relations to language as an experience of secrecy and spectrality, within, however, a shared “hauntological” sensibility of the modernist age. Thus, the intention is to show how the three poets both “inhabit” and deconstruct metaphors of the domestic and the familiar haunted by transcendental longings, moving towards their destabilization in favor of increasingly spectral engagements with the notion of “domesticity”. If poetry, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, is indeed a house that tries to be “haunted”, the architectural metaphors of Frost take us to the familiar spaces of memory and loss – the house “under erasure”, with the ethical and metaphysical inheritances that cannot (and should not) be easily abandoned. As Frost’s poems imply, we must confront our specters as well as “reckon with them” (Derrida 1994, xx), and the confrontation itself becomes a form of moral responsibility. In turn, Stevens’s ghostly chambers suspend us at the threshold of the post-metaphysical sublime, where the arrested revelation, the “as if” of transcendence, works to redefine “being-there” both as a presence in the world but also as a differing and deferring. Moore’s uncanny imagination, firmly located in the world, and yet showing a strong penchant for the exotic, the fantastic and the liminal, employs tropes of animal camouflage to probe poetry’s oscillation between adaptability and otherness. Her metaphors of spectrality and quasi-transcendence, as will be argued, move beyond the conflicts and tensions underlying Frost’s and Stevens’s hauntological concerns. Namely, they disseminate a process that breaks the constructed boundaries between the subject and the object, the self and the Other, producing “an opening”, a haunting of non-being within being, or – to borrow from Derrida again – “an unnamable glimmer beyond the closure [ that ] can be glimpsed” (1976, 14). As proposed above, the poems under analysis represent three different visions and uses of the spectral as a metaphor, creative force and function of the imagination. The first vision is captured in the image of Frost’s spectral cellar from his early poem “The Ghost House” (from Boy’s Will, 1913) and his late poem “Directive” (from Steeple Bush, 1947), in which the domestic returns in the form of ruins – as an uninhabitable but necessary trace, generating lack and desire, which for Frost are conducive to the creation of thought, memory and language. The next metaphor is Stevens’ richly furnished room of the Poet-Metaphysician, in which the curtains become a figure of spectrality or self-haunting. The last vision is represented by Moore’s most creatively “spectral” figure of the chameleon, serving as the ultimate symbol of an ontological flicker and indeterminacy, and pointing to the inexhaustible capacities of poetry’s undomesticated at-homeness in the world. In accordance with avant-garde poetry’s anti-domestic thrust, the poetic worlds of all the three poets exhibit a curious absence of homely domesticity. Stevens’s best works are mostly landscape or peripatetic poems, topicalizing poetry for its capacity of “luminous traversing”, as can be seen, for instance, in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” or “The Auroras of Autumn”. Moore claims in her poem “Silence” that “superior people never make long visits”, Paulina Ambroży “IT GHOSTS” 99 inviting us to “make her house [ our ] inn”, as “inns are not residences” (1987, 91). Feeling safe as a somewhat detached observer of discursively mediated nature, and showing strong preference for wild but armored, erinaceous and highly protective creatures, the poet demonstrates a rather cautious, if not outright distrustful attitude to the very idea of domestication. Similarly, Frost, who often adopts “a homespun persona” (Spurr, 77) and frequently writes of homecoming in his poems, rarely presents human habitations as cozy structures teeming with life and domestic happiness. As noted by Richard Poirier, home often functions as “the initial condition or form from which it is necessary to wander” (89). “Frost is at his best”, the critic continues, “when ‘home’ is at its worst” (Poirer, 111). Taking my cue from the latter critic, I would like to begin with this peculiar condition of domesticity in Frost’s poems. Arguably, Frost can be seen as a poet who best problematizes modernism’s uneasy relation to the notion of home. What is more, his poems prepare the ground for a freer “apparitioning” of undomesticated figures and specters in the poems by Stevens and Moore. Frank Lentricchia argues that enclosure related to home is “one of the more psychologically compelling images in Frost’s poetry and essays”, adding that it often “enclose[ s ] experiences that are potentially fatal to mental serenity” (60). Similarly, Spurr sees Frost’s homes as figures of “absence, emptiness, and negation” (77), presented as “invariably lonely, deserted places”, devoid of warmth and haunted by “worn-out relics of human dwelling” (77). Among the best examples here would be such poems as “The Ghost House” (1913), “The Census-Taker” (1923), “The Black Cottage”, and “The Directive” (1946), in which, in the critic’s words, “the notion of dwelling as a poetic and spiritual condition depends, paradoxically, on the loss of the dwelling as a physical structure” (77). Indeed, Frost seems to thrive on the very ghostliness or spectrality of an abode that vanishes along with its inhabitants. Yet I wish to qualify Spurr’s understanding of the aura of “pure negativity” (77) haunting Frost’s abandoned homes as well as Lentricchia’s focus on the house as a place of darkness and crisis-driven consciousness (61 – 62). Instead, I propose to see Frost’s nostalgic “homecoming” and fascination with house ruins in Heideggerian terms, as “a return to a place that properly we can never leave” (Malpas, 311). Da-sein, literarily “being there”, means to exist in the world, to be in a concrete “there” (da). For Heidegger, as Jeff Malpas observes in his insightful study of the philosopher’s topology, returning to a place is thus a return to the place of being, “not to what is familiar but to that which is essentially ‘uncanny’, inexplicable, wondrous” (Malpas, 311). Poetry has a special role in this process, for to “speak” the place poetically means to return to the original question of being, to ponder the dynamic nature of our situatedness in the world. Through this return we do not ground ourselves in something stable and certain, but remind ourselves of who we are and gain a fuller realization of our own mortality. For the German philosopher, the critic argues, the world is “that which environs or surrounds us and also that toward which we are oriented, about which we are concerned, and to which we attend” (Malpas, 52). It is always already “a gathered place” understood as “a fundamental happening of unity” which nevertheless exhibits its “dif- ferentiated and differentiating” character (Malpas, 311). The gathering happens through being-there, Da-sein, through our encounters with things within the world in which we create “the context of meaning” (Malpas 53, 55). A similar notion of space and place underlies Frost’s homecoming poems. Significantly, Frost’s return to the vanishing ruins is frequently through the cellar 100 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

hole – the house’s foundation. In Gaston Bachelard’s influential psychoanalysis of the house’s structure, it is the space which resists rationalization (1969, 20, 19). As a symbol of the unconscious (19), the cellar can be also connected to the Heideggerian figure of “facticity” Faktizität( ), which refers both to the impenetrability, the irrationality of existence and to its temporal situatedness,

its “lingering ‘there’” (Heidegger 1999, 24). In “The Ghost House”, which is Frost’s early poem from A Boy’s Will, the speaker admits that he “dwells in a lonely house … / That vanished many a summer ago / And left no trace but the cellar walls” (15). 2 In his late and most elusive piece “Directive”, first published in 1946, and considered to be his summa poetica, the poet ‘directs’ us again to the image of the cellar hole, this time strongly insisting on our participation in the ritual of mourning for the lost abode (Frost, 341). “The walls of the cellar are buried walls”, Bachelard observes, with “walls with a single casing, walls that have the entire earth behind them” (20). This “nearness” of the earth that is more poignantly exposed in the ruined structure is important also in Frost’s poems – for the cellar-as-trace is more open to encounters and meaningful involvements, as its wound-like structure is unconcealed and concerns us as more immediate than its intact and usually concealed form. We are encouraged to accompany the poet in probing the wound in an attempt to counteract the abandonment: “weep for the house that is no more a house, / But only a belilaced cellar hole / Now slowly clos- ing like a dent in dough” (Frost, 341). Grounding our vision in a series of negations that follow – “a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm / And in a town that is no more a town” (Frost, 341) – the speaker stresses the significance of the sense of loss or absence here represented as “a dent” threatened by total disappearance. This negative rhetorical patterning of the spectral ruin combined with the persistent present tense paradoxically creates a degree of stability and consistency – a degree zero of narrative time – freezing and framing the site of loss against the dispersal of signs and further erosion or dissolution of its past meaning through this extended discourse time. At the same time, the language “gathers” this place into what Heidegger calls “presentness”, in which all happenings and things, no matter how dispersed and fragmented, come into relatedness. In the poem, Frost takes us “back in time made simple by the loss / Of detail, burned, dissolved and broken off” (Frost, 341), echoing Thoreau’s conviction that “[ n ]ot till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are in the infinite extent of our relations” (Thoreau, 213). To “be lost enough to find yourself”, as Frost proposes in “Directive” (341), is a form of “gathering” which recognizes unity in confusion and dissolution. Entropic decline, death and trauma inform the poem, written, as his biographers observe, in the wake of historical and personal tragedies: the Depression, the Second World War and the tragic deaths of Frost’s wife and daughter, followed by his own depression and illness (Thompson, 511; McArthur, 71 – 74). Thus, the negative capacity of language to uphold absence as a poignant presence partakes of the preservation of the rift, that “dent in the dough” of human forgetfulness. “Summoned by poetic will,” Tim Kendall observes, “the past both exists and is lost” (380); its fragments, which carry also the poet’s nostalgia and personal despair, are 2 McArthur traces some of the material sources of Frost’s abandoned houses, which include the cellar hole across the road from Frost’s Derry farm. The inspiration comes also from Frost’s childhood and adult experiences of frequent new beginnings, as well as his parents’ and his own inability to secure and maintain a stable home. (McArthur 2008: 44). Paulina Ambroży “IT GHOSTS” 101 pushed towards the present and fullness by acts of recollection. This fragile and temporal trace of the past, transforming the material world of wounded objects and places into a site of remembrance, becomes a clearing, a fracture in the wilderness, a differentiating rift in the wholeness of reality that lies at the origin of thought and language. Thus, the shrinking and scarred site of human presence gradually reclaimed by nature withdraws into the clearing of poetic language, producing an extension, an opening for the unconceal- ment of being. This dent-as-specter combines visibility and disappearance, suturing absence to presence, creating a new coherence, a temporary delay of the landscape’s disintegration and erosion. Frost constructed his poem as a form of guidance. The eponymous “directive”, followed by multiple references to an unspecified “you” throughout the poem, suggests that it is the reader who becomes the addressee of Frost’s spectral evidence. Invited to become lost in the unheimlich of Frost’s elusive image and to traverse the grounds of memory, personal, regional, and national history that have sedimented both temporally and spatially in the vanishing edifice, the reader becomes a necessary heir and carrier of the trace, a participant in nostalgia committed to the recovery of the semantic and affective density of the spectral abode and its salvation from non-meaning. On one level, the poem can be read as a psychological drama of repression and return, for, as Marit J. McArthur argues, Frost returns imaginatively to his previous family farmhouse in Derry, New Hampshire, his longest continuous residence, haunted by the memory of his family life and his formative years. 3 In this context, the image of the cellar implies an externalization of repressed trauma, a visual representation of the connection between the conscious and unconscious, and of the unspoken reality of suffering (McArthur, 9). The poem becomes a case of “spectral materialism”, to borrow from Eric Santner, understood as the capacity to register the persistence of past emotion that has been absorbed into the substance of material space (57). The specter of Frost’s house takes us also to the realms of human devastation and darkness that are at once physical and metaphysical. However, it also contains the traces of man’s relentless activity to withstand that darkness like the “children’s house of make believe,” “shattered dishes underneath a pine,” or “the broken drinking goblet like the Grail” (Frost, 342). The house becomes the secular equivalent of Heidegger’s Greek temple, which “structures and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory or disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny” (Heidegger [ 1923 ] 1971, 20 – 21). Heidegger sees human existence always in relation to the divine, claiming that the capacity to measure ourselves against it constitutes the true nature of humanity. Frost’s metaphor of the Grail-like goblet, hidden in the ruins of the house, from which we can drink to reach a sense of clarity beyond confusion is a material figure connecting us to the immaterial mythical reality. It is always contingent, however, on our willingness to reinvent the landscape and its tenuous afterlife, the lingering Heideggerian “thereness”, as a communicable and visionary but always human experience. Derrida sees the specter as a symbol of our need to recognize our own failure of interpretation, language and comprehension. “One does not know”, the philosopher writers, “not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, 3 McArthur observes that “by the late nineteenth century, when Frost first explored rural New England, the landscape was littered with abandoned farmhouses” – a result of “rural depopulation in New England” (12). 102 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

this non-present present, this being – there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge” (6). This shift from the knowledge and material vision to the elusive metaphysical is visible in Frost’s choice of mythical tem- porality and religious discourse in the second part of the poem. The language of the biblical parable, the brook capable of quenching spiritual thirst, the

questions about salvation and the hidden Grail all show that Frost’s return to the past is not only a nostalgic gesture, but a return to the essence of being that precedes rational knowledge and takes us beyond personal memory and remembered time. According to Bachelard, “[ a ] house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (15). Frost’s return to the homely and domestic topoi is a similar, if somewhat precarious redemptive project which comes from a trust in “constant symbols”— the unifying, even if ever shifting structures of thought and being which are best realized in poetic language. Frost’s trust is also contingent on his relentless urge to ground the imagination and language in figures of order and unity (e.g. fixable moments of childhood, images of coherent rural landscape, salvaged domestic artifacts and walls amidst modern ruins). Frost needs his own ghosts of repetition – the recurrent metaphor of the ruined home with the base of cellar walls forces the landscape, with its chaos containing fragments of history and memory, into an imagined coherence, a temporary form “beyond confusion” (Frost, 342). Similarly, Stevens’s speaker invites specters into the comforts of his home to test the creative potential of their liminality and probe the figures of instability and confusion. The poet often uses the sheltering image of the house or room, situating the poetic imagination on the threshold between the domestic and the external world, as for example in “The House Was Quiet, The World Was Calm”, and infusing his poems with human light and the sensual pleasure of the quotidian. Nevertheless, even his most domesticated figures, such as the leisurely woman in “Sunday Morning” enjoying her “late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” (Stevens, 66) or the poet-figure in “The Domination of Black”, protected from darkness by the warm light of his fireplace (8), are haunted by an anxiety, “the encroachment of that old catastrophe” (“Sunday Morning”, 67) that darkens the atmosphere and often submerges the homely character of their abodes. Recognizing that “we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves” (“Notes towards a Supreme Fiction,” 383), Stevens, like Frost, sees the modern landscape as fragmented and alienated, often connecting home to a desire for what lies beyond the domestic and homely. The unease and restlessness of his imagery, continuously oscillating between materiality and immateriality, creates a haunting effect of radical instability which disrupts the continuity of familiar, domestic and ordinary spaces. As argued by Wolfreys, the ghostly effect “needs structure, within which its efficacy assumes maximum disruption. The act of haunting is effective because it displaces us in those places where we feel most secure, most notably in our homes, in the domestic scene” (5). In Stevens’s “Domination of Black”, the secure domestic scene, the poet’s fire-lit room, is opened up for haunting and dislocation by “an internal eruption and interruption” (Wolfreys 5) of the figures of the autumnal sublime:

At night, by the fire, the colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves, Repeating themselves, Paulina Ambroży “IT GHOSTS” 103

Turned in the room Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. (Stevens, 8)

The turning of colors stirs both the landscape and the poet’s memory into restlessness: “but the color of the heavy hemlocks / Came striding. / And I remembered the cry of the peacocks” (8). The ghostly “cry of the peacocks” is an uncanny disturbance, a revenant which haunts the poet’s imagination and language. Stevens tries to protect the mind from the encroachment of darkness through the slippage and excess of discourse – the dizzying motion and re-turning of tropes: “Turning in the wind, / Turning as the flames / Turned in the fire / Turned as the tails of the peacocks” (8). The unsettling cry, with its promise of return, is of phantasmal nature, reiterated in the poet’s memory, as the poem unfolds, through a series of rhetorical displacements and deferrals. The traces that those strange articulations leave in the disjunctive structure of Stevens’s poem-as-dwelling continually disturb the poet’s perceptions of the real, filling his mind with a sense of a haunting absence and foreboding. The cry also unseals the spatial and temporal framework, blurring the boundary between sight and insight, and introducing a rift in the security of the speaker’s position – no longer insulated “against the twilight” (9). “I felt afraid / And I remembered the cry of the peacocks” (Stevens, 9), the speaker confesses in the final lines of the poem, unable to dispel the spectral memories which “apparition” as the last, quasi-eschatological, inscription. The movement of tropes unveils the spectral nature of all figuration, suspending us between reality and intimations of a “beyond”. “Spectrality”, Fredric Jameson argues, “is not difficult to circumscribe, as what makes the present waver: like the vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object world – indeed of matter itself – now shimmers like a mirage” (38). Stevens’s poem which best problematizes this wavering and flickering of reality through its use of spectral troping is the short poem “The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician” (1919). The central metaphor here is the eponymous curtain, which captures beautifully the Hartford poet’s penchant for shifting and destabilizing metaphors that push against the integrity and insularity of domestic dwelling. This is in accord with Stevens’s larger vision of reality and language, both in their physical and metaphysical dimensions, as an undulating and ever “fluent mundo” (Stevens, 407) in which meanings and truths are always subject to change, erasure and negotiation. Constructed as one meandering sentence, “The Curtains” needs to be quoted in its entirety:

It comes about that the drifting of these curtains Is full of long motions; as the ponderous Deflations of distance or as clouds Inseparable from their afternoons; Or the changing of light, the dropping Of silence, wide sleep and solitude Of night, in which all motion Is beyond us, as the firmament, Up-rising and down-falling, bares The largeness, bold to see. (Stevens, 62) 104 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

While Frost, in his home poems, opts for stabilizing metaphors of grounding, thereness, foundations, return and origin, Stevens’s curtain takes us to the truly spectral space of trembling, signaling tangible ambiguity and drifting of sense in which language and the world cannot be stilled by figures of coherence and clarity. Instead, they are often threatened by ultimate

disjointedness, opacity and loss of stability. The curtains in the house of the modernist metaphysician are in constant motion, trying to catch up with the largeness, impenetrability and fluidity of the external world. Indeed, the whole poem “drifts” in an incessant movement of language and imagery that is at once physical and immaterial, abstract and concrete, circumscribed and elusive. The enclosure of the room, the curtains, clouds, the nocturnal sky, and the light are all familiar elements of physical and observable reality and have an undeniably material effect, but when married to verbs of change and movement, and pushed into drifting by Stevens’ skillful use of enjambment, they begin to lose their ontological grounds, defamiliarizing the recognizable space until it becomes too “bold” for us to see. Stevens’s curtain is the figure of the imagination that “ghosts”, a trope located at the threshold of the unknown, between the visible and the invisible, which cannot and will not be anchored “beyond confusion”, as Frost’s containing frames of form and metaphor often can, even if the order forged by them is only provisional and ultimately unstable. In his poem “Tree at My Window”, Frost addresses the title tree: “Let there never be curtain drawn / Between you and me” (230), positing directness and clarity of vision as the source of his aesthetics. In contrast, Stevens’ partial and deeply ambiguous vision of the uncontained sublime – “the firmament / Up-rising and down- falling” (62), this largeness, or, as Joseph Carroll sees it, “some shadowy absolute” (37), afforded and protected by the drifting opaque screens of Stevens’ figuration – becomes a metaphor of partial knowledge and epistemological limits, inherent in the confrontation with the ultimate otherness and un- representability of the world. In Derridean terms, the curtain becomes the figure of a welcomed strangeness, of otherness that is always already haunting the familiar and known. While Frost reinstates our sense of wholeness and comfort in “Directive”, through the final metaphor of poetry as a restorative water in the broken goblet of modern belief, Stevens’ poem refuses to scale down the engulfing darkness and immensity of the sublime sky. Rather, he allows his metaphysician to get caught between the disorienting curtains, in the space of language where every revealing is at once a re-veiling. The curtain, like the cry of the peacock in “Domination of Black”, is also a figure of return and (un)forgetting, capable of holding the past within the shifting “folds” of the present. The past, here indicated by the tropes of the Romantic sublime and the titular metaphysician, is a difficult “spectral” heritage for the poet. In Specters of Marx, Derrida claims that “an inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself”, adding further that “[ if ] the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. … One always inherits from a secret – which says read me, will you ever be able to do so?” (Derrida, 1994, 16). Stevens’ “inheritance from a secret” is kept safe and alive through the undulating curtain of language which takes us to the limit of imagination and knowing, offering no absolute closure, as it always stops short of the final revelation. I would like to close this analysis with Marianne Moore – a poet whose use of spectral figuration confronts us with yet another aspect of the tension Paulina Ambroży “IT GHOSTS” 105 between the domesticated and the untamable. Since the author of Observations defines poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” (1961, 40), the metaphors that dominate her work belong to the world of nature rather than domestic architecture. If Moore does refer to architectural enclosures, as in the poem “The Fish”, where the poet takes us underwater, to a mystifying subaquatic “edifice” (1967, 33), her tropes always defamiliarize and “pierce” the construction, creating gaps and interruptions in its continuity and, as with Stevens, opening up porous boundaries between inner and outer realities. In the latter poem, the eponymous fish that “move / through black jade / Of the crow-mussel shells” (32), uncover a spectral space of ruins, filled with mysterious “ash heaps” and “turquoise sea of bodies”: a quasi-gothic space carrying “the physical features of ac- / cident – lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes” (33). The violent “marks of abuse” on this “defiant edifice” (32) as well as the constantly shifting of imagery which the poet’s imagination keeps “opening and shutting” throughout, “like an injured fan” (32), evokes the spectral other, an uncanny apparition of something unnamable and incorporeal, namely the subject of absence and death. Considering the date of the poem’s publication (August 1918) and Moore’s brother’s service as a marine chaplain (Leavell 159), the violent imagery can be linked more directly to the historical moment – the global and personal trauma of the war, coupled with the painful memory of its casualties, all of which had by then invaded the American consciousness. The site, haunted by an indication of wounding, erasure and fragmentation, becomes a burial ground, or crypt, where the “ash heaps” and “marks of abuse” trouble our memory as “repeated evidence” (33), at once real and phantasmic. “The estranging materiality of the spectral,” as Wolfreys observes, “persists in its disturbance, even if we can acknowledge its effect at the limit of comprehension” (6). The enigmatic liminality of Moore’s representation, which serves both to cover and uncover the encrypted memories and bodies, points also to the poet’s aesthetic engagement with absence as a quasi-concept which resists conceptualization and coherent identification typical for epistemologies of presence. Hovering at the limits of knowability, Moore’s tropes resist wholeness and bear witness to the existence of something other, the secret which ultimately cannot be told but only uncannily intimated. This secret, protected by Moore’s quasi-transcendental figuration, haunts also her poems devoted to animal camouflage. Spectral metaphors do abound in her work, 4 but it is the chameleon which seems to me the fullest expression of Moore’s understanding of poetry as a special form of dwelling. The chameleon recurs in various contexts in “The Plumet Basilisk,” “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing,” “To Disraeli on Conservatism” and “Saint Nicolas,” finding its fullest representation in the poet’s tribute to this master of disguise, i.e. her early ode “To a Chameleon” (1916).

Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape-vine twine your anatomy

4 Moore frequently uses figures of lizards, echidnas, hedgehogs, unicorns, pangolins, basilisks, etc. I discuss those metaphors, along with that of the chameleon, in more detail in my book (Un)Concealing the Hedgehog: Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetry and Contemporary Critical Theories (2012). See especially Chapter Three, devoted to the figures of haunting in the work of Stevens and Moore. 106 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

round the pruned and polished stem, Chameleon. Fire laid upon an emerald as long as the Dark King’s massy one,

could not snap the spectrum up for food as you have done. (Moore, 179)

The creature’s liminal and empirically unstable nature which allows it to simultaneously haunt, inhabit, and possess reality, makes it a perfect choice for Moore, who espoused a belief that illusion is more precise than precision (1967, 151) and whose poetic credo was “to value in style the principle that is hid” (85). The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Artpresents the chameleon as the animal of perfect camouflage and adaptability – capable of moving through diverse environments and equipped with protective coloring due to a layer of chromatophore cells. Endowed with quick tongue and perfect vision, the chameleon is often seen as a quasi-supernatural being – a symbol of contingency, transformation, spiritual knowledge and as an intermediary between the world of men and gods (Werness, 82 – 83). Through his ability to elude perception by blending perfectly with his surroundings, the lizard overcomes the opposition between absence and presence, visibility and invisibility, belonging and otherness, containment and freedom. At once at home in the world and elusively disappearing from it by “snapping” its colors, the chameleon becomes the most flexible and intriguing spectral being – a perfect metaphor for the power of poetry to both hide and reveal. The creature is not so much a ghost that returns as the repressed, unburied and haunting past that waits to be revealed and exorcised, but a phantom made of color and light, whose goal is to open us up to the very experience of mystery and transformation, suggesting the futility of our search for the ultimate secret of a poem. Thus, the chameleon – protectively “hid by the august foliage and fruit / of the grape-vine”, and “twining” around its stem – signals a productive opening of poetry to the spectral instability and contingency of meaning, and its ultimate rejection of a pre-determined script or form. Just like the chameleon, which exemplifies the experience of becoming other, as it uses light and its own anatomy to continuously push and modify the contours of its being, poetic language and form push the boundaries of thought, representation and expression, thriving in the space of sense that cannot be domesticated. The chameleon assumes diverse colors of the world, both partaking of reality and shielding itself from it; similarly, Moore’s language absorbs multiple forms and voices to create a space of contact between reality and imagination without violating the poem’s ultimate secret. By “twining” the lines and margins of her poem to mimic the movement of the creature’s agile body, the poet reveals her understanding of poetry as a form inseparable from the raw materials of its immediate environment and capable of capturing a ceaseless variety of linguistic, stylistic and thematic registers. The image suits the poet also for another reason: with its shifting identity that refuses to stay put, but which is never objectively detached from its surroundings, it blurs the boundaries between the subject and object. It “gathers” colors and shapes of reality in its own body, and yet remains free of a desire to possess them. As such, it overcomes the metaphysical anxieties and self-haunting of Paulina Ambroży “IT GHOSTS” 107 both Stevens and Frost, as its thrives in the space of the undecidable and is not haunted by dreams of unity. It seems thus that the modernist poets presented above are indeed ill at ease with the comforts of the domestic and homely. However, as Christopher Reed notes, when repeatedly repressed, the ghost of the domestic returns (13) with a vengeance and, as I have demonstrated, it is its spectral rather than material form that becomes a productive site for modernist poetic practice. To quote Julian Wolfreys, “a spectre haunts modernity, and the spectral is at the heart of any narrative of the modern” (2 – 3). Frost, Stevens and Moore certainly have learnt to live with their ghosts. Frost seems to corroborate Michel de Certeau’s convinction that “haunted places are the only ones people can live in” (108), as his poem thrives in the ruins and disintegration of domesticity, where loss and dispossession represented as an abandoned house, haunted by spectres of wholeness, creates a desire for a poetic extension and coherence of being. These, for Frost, can be found in the ordering capacities of language, integrations of metaphor and form. The trace of the cellar hole in his poetry serves also to trigger the intersections of memory and emotion, which seem to be out of grasp or inarticulate, making space for contact between the external world and the self. Stevens, in turn, uncovers language as a more ambiguous dwelling, in which drifting and withholding of sense, its spectral trembling, to borrow a hauntological term, becomes a peculiar mode of confronting reality and a new form of metaphysics. While Frost’s poem is a directive, implying a sense of guidance and destination, Stevens’s is a house of spectral and spectacular secrets, with language functioning as veils or theatrical curtains that both reveal and conceal meaning, and take us to the limits of perception, figuration and interpretation. The metaphor of the curtain, combined with the tropes of the sublime informing his poem, imply also that our acts of perception and cognition are always circumscribed and framed, and thus never free of the commands of ghosts or the force of their secrets. The latter in Stevens’ work elude final coherence, for the “fluent mundo” of negotiated meanings will not be contained, always pressing against familiar categories and transparencies of sense. Finally, Moore’s chameleon is one of the most imaginatively apparitional beings in her oeuvre, functioning as a figure of the spectral agency of modernist poetry, which is most at home in continuous acts of occlusion, displacement, epistemic inventiveness, readjustment and redefinition. As noted by Esther Peeren, “the specter stands for that which never simply is, and thus escapes the totalizing logic of conventional cognitive and hermeneutic operations” (10, emphasis original). The lizard’s uncanny materiality and intermittent visibility, which results from its productive fusion of being and becoming, subvert the image of dwelling as belonging, rootedness and boundedness; instead, it demonstrates the porousness of the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown, the self and the other, identity and nonidentity. The chameleon does not assimilate otherness; rather, it thrives in the non-appropriative relation to it: in the strategic necessity of continuous transformation, a repetition with a difference. As such, it becomes the most flexible trope of the modernist effort to grasp the inherent instability of language and the world.

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Works Cited Ambroży, Paulina. (Un)Concealing the Hedgehog: Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetry and Contemporary Critical Theories.Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader. Blooms-

bury. New York and London, 2013. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities.” The Spectralities Reader. Ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 1 – 27. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. “The Spectral Turn.” The Spectralities Reader. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. 2013. 31 – 36. Carroll, Joseph. Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berke- ley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. 1993. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. New York: The Library of America, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Trans. John van Buren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 15 – 86. Jameson, Fredric. “Marx’s Purloined Letter”, Ghostly Demarcations: A Sympo- sium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Ed. Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1999. 26 – 67. Kendall, Tim. The Art of Robert Frost. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Leavell, Linda. Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013. Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Dur- ham, N.C. Duke University Press, 1975. Malpas, Jeff.Heidegger’s Topology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008. McArthur, Marit J. The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Moore, Marianne. The Complete Poems.New York: The Macmillan Company / The Viking Press, 1967. Moore, Marianne. Collected Poems. New York: MacMillan, 1961. Peeren, Esther. The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invis- ibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing.New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1977. Reed, Christopher. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Spurr, David. “Architecture in Frost and Stevens”. Journal of Modern Literature 28. 3 (2005): 72 – 86. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. Paulina Ambroży “IT GHOSTS” 109

Thompson, Lawrence Roger. Robert Frost: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Inc., 1988. Thoreau, Henry, David. Walden; or Life in the Woods. Mineola, NY: Dover Pub- lications, 1995. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Lit-

erature. London: Palgrave, 2002. Werness, Hope, B. “Chameleon.” The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Sym- bolism in Art. New York: The Continuum Publishing Group. 2006. 82 – 83. “Why am I cold”

110 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Agnieszka Pantuchowicz

“Why am I cold.” Sylvia Plath’s English Home and American Refrigerators

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0577 “Why am I cold”

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz “Why am I cold” 111

Though it is difficult not to agree with Jeannine Dobbs that for Sylvia Plath Agnieszka Pantucho- wicz presently teaches “domesticity is an ultimate concern” (Dobbs, 11), the domestic spaces and objects literature, gender studies, in her poems seem to have a certain tendency to becoming de-domesticated, translation studies, workshops in practical estranged or defamiliarized. Her poems with “domestic settings,” Dobbs notes, translation, M.A. and “are usually her most ominous poems” and they transform the homely warmth B.A. seminars at the

to something unhomely and, as the title of Dobbs’s essay (“Viciousness in the University of Social Sciences and Humanities Kitchen”: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry”) informs us, “vicious” (Dobbs, 21). in Warsaw, Poland. She Reading Plath from a different critical perspective, Lauren Zane looks at has published numerous articles on literary criti- such transformations in the light of the formalist idea of defamiliarization. cism, theoretical aspects To Zane, Plath represents various domestic issues “not as simply confessions of translation as well as of her own problems in life, but as a means of defamiliarlizing the reader on cultural and ideological dimensions of transla- and the reader’s conventional assumptions about the domestic” (Zane, 261). tion in the Polish context. In her view, Plath agreed with Victor Shklovsky’s idea of art and, by way of subverting “traditional connotations with familiar things” (261), helped “readers overcome false ideas drawn from the collective social connotations of domestic relationships” (265). This slightly didactic purpose clearly suggests that, for Zane, Plath was strongly critical of the routine of the everyday habitualization and automatization of domestic life. Automatization “impov- erishes experience” and “eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and our fear of war,” writes Zane quoting from Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (Zane, 263, Shklovsky, 5), and suggests that what Plath performs in her writings is an attempt at recovering experience and imagination by way of rejecting “the ‘poverty’ of a life without ‘moving, working, [ and ] making dreams’” (Zane, 262, Plath 1979, 272). Such a stance seems to be at least debatable in the light of Plath’s penchant for domestic equipment which she expressed in her Journal (January 20, 1959) when she and Ted Hughes decided to live in England: “We decided to live in England. I really want this. Ted will be his best there. I shall demand an icebox and a good dentist, but love it” (Plath 1987, 464). What she probably meant by “an icebox” was, as we shall see, an American size refrigerator which was difficult to be bought in England in the 1950s and which, alongside the American teeth, may be well treated as a nostalgic trace of longing for ideals of American home and everyday life figuring in various advertisements of domestic equipment. As Marsha Bryant notes in her insightful reading of commodity culture in Plath, the poet “reiterates and revises, coincides and collides with American advertising and its representations of domesticity” (Bryant 1975, 18). Writing to her mother from Cambridge in November 1956, Plath literally refers to American advertising and declares that she would transform her kitchen into “an ad out of House and Garden with Ted’s help” (Plath 1975, 283), the declaration which Bryant finds to be “hardly the bohemian image we expect from someone seeking to become the female equivalent of W.B. Yeats” (Bryant, 18). English fridges were, as we shall see, “diminutive” for Plath. She received an American size refrigerator only in 1960, having to live in domestic spaces which did not match the American ideal, and which she transformed into a home exactly through defamiliarization of that ideal and through domestication of something which might be called living in the cold. What I suggest below is a reading of the idea of coldness in her writings as enthused by a certain lack of technological control over temperature in England which, though discomforting, offers a possibility of a closer contact with the reality of living, a possibility of “wintering” which she explores not only in the poem carrying that title (“Wintering” 1962), but also in other texts alluding to feeling cold 112 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

both inside of domestic spaces and elsewhere. Though the demand of having an icebox seems to be quite mundane and unpoetic, Plath’s poetic renditions of domestic spaces and places which I will discuss below make refrigerators and, more generally, coldness, an intriguing theme in her treatment of the idea of dwelling and of dwelling places – those left behind in America, and those in

England to which she has never fully, as we shall see, accommodated herself. ‘Being cold’, treated as a cultural concept, is surrounded with negative connotations of bodily discomforts and emotional lack, and the invention of the refrigerator was also a culturally significant advancement which made cold easily useable and controllable. In the 1950s, 96 per cent of American homes already had a refrigerator (compared to 13 per cent in England), and the American ones were, now proverbially, big. The coming of the refrigerator made it possible and easy to have outside inside, the cold of winter within the warmth of the domestic hearth. Though the opposition of warmth and coldness is connotationally quite complex, it seems to be an inviting one from the perspective of the possible identification with one’s milieu, of being at home – inside, by the fire – rather than outside, among the uncertainties of weather and out in the cold with which, at least in some climates, being outside is associated. The association of home with shelter, with the material form of home which offers a “roof over one’s head,” goes hand in hand with the perception of home as hearth which “connotes the warmth and cosiness which home provides to the body, causing one to relax in comfort and ensuring a welcoming and ‘homely’ atmosphere for others” (Somerville, 532). Adding to this the idea of home as origin, of home as roots, we may provisionally assume that what Peter Somerville categorises as “rooflessness” does not apply only to those who are deprived of places to live in, but also to something which may be called an ideology of homeliness defining what and who we are. Homes and roofs also provide us with roots, and associated with the idea of “rooflessness” is that of “rootlesness” (cf. Somerville, 532), of not belonging to a home – a family, a state, perhaps also a world – and thus of being deprived of one’s beginnings, be it in paradise or elsewhere. The seemingly simple concept of “home” has even more senses than the ones mentioned above because these senses are themselves ambivalent and symbolically expandable. According to Somerville, home

can be argued to have at least six or seven dimensions of meaning, identified by the ‘key signifiers’ of shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode and (possibly) paradise. Each of these signifiers can be explicated in terms of its wider symbolic meaning (its ‘general connotation’), its evocation of a specific sense of security, and its characteristic mode of relating to oneself and to others. (532)

The dimensions of the meaning of coldness are also quite numerous, and being, or staying, outside is only one of them. Social interactions are frequently described in reference to temperature, and coldness may well be associated with social rejection or indifference, the association which according to Chen- Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli is rooted in our early experience with caregivers in which “an infant being held closely by the caregiver experiences warmth, whereas distance from the caregiver induces coldness” (Zhong and Leonardelli, 838). Though the term “acclimatization” refers first of all to one’s adjustment or adaptation to a new climate, it is easily expandable to adaptation Agnieszka Pantuchowicz “Why am I cold” 113 to places or situations, to social and political climates, sometimes being used as a synonym of acculturation and cultural assimilation. The coldness induced by distance from the “caregiver,” perhaps from the mother, might also be an interesting aspect of Freud’s having envisioned the beginning of culture in human taking control over fire, of finding some means to substitute for the motherly warmth in the homely hearth. However, this positioning of home, and thus also of the homely, seems to be a little more complex from the topographical perspective which Georges Van Den Abbeele offers in his reading of the metaphorical transpositions of travel. In his view, what is constitutive of the existence of the idea of “home” is its loss, or at least a temporary deprival, because the positing of a point we can call home can only occur retroactively. The concept of home is needed (and in fact can only be thought) only after the home has already been left behind. In a strict sense, then, one has always already left home, since home can only exist as such at the price of being lost. (Abbeele, xix)

Writing about home, and thus about closeness and warmness, from a distance, from the position of being away from home is, from such a perspective, a model perspective of writing about home, one from which both the writer and the reader confront some more or less matching dilemmas. In other words, it is in fact rooflessness that enables a perspective on the images of a roof of one’s own, also of a hearth of one’s own, a perspective which seems to be quite relevant in interpreting Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Though Boston, Sylvia Plath’s hometown, has a continental climate with relatively cold winters, feeling cold seems to be an important aspect of her inability to feel at home in Britain where, in 1955, she was to spend a year as a Fulbright scholar at Newnham College, Cambridge. Initially (October 1955) she is only struck by the fact that her room in Cambridge is “cool enough to keep butter and milk in.” (Plath 1975, 187). This information is in fact an explanation for the fewness of refrigerators in England: “I can see why there are so few iceboxes here. Imagine, in the morning when I get up to wash in the bathroom, my breath hangs white in the air in frosty clouds!” (Plath 1975, 187). The cold she experiences becomes the subject of various rhetorical transformations in which her new English home figures as a space with which she cannot fully identify herself and from which warmth has evaporated. The English coldness is reflected not only in “the hedonistic delight … of cold pork pie” (cf. Brain, 55), but also in the zombie-like brilliance of Cambridge lecturers whose second-handedness is “tantamount to a kind of living death,” as she wrote to her mother a months later, on 22 November 1955 (Plath 1975, 198). In February 1956 she seems to be beginning to accept the cold along with the English food not only “out of simple practicality” but also, as it seems, as something that could enable her a better understanding of English architecture: “I accept the cold, the perpetual shivering, the bad coffee and starchy food with a stoic amusement and walk through historic arches with familiarity and a certain regrettable ignorance about their background in time” (Plath 1975, 216, italics mine). Coldness seems to be responsible for Plath’s rendition of England as a strange, alienating space which she sometimes does treat with a stoic kind of amusement, though one which is as it were paired with a more fearful kind 114 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

of shivering. In “Leaving Early” (1960), a poem which Tracy Brain reads as a poem dramatizing alienation and debunking “the idea that anyone can naturally belong anywhere” (Brain, 65), England is shown as flooded with an abundance of ugly objects and overabundance of flowers, sometimes displayed in kitchy Toby jugs:

The roses in the Toby jug Gave up the ghost last night. High time. Their yellow corsets were ready to split. You snored, and I heard the petals unlatch, Tapping and ticking like nervous fingers. You should have junked them before they died. Daybreak discovered the bureau lid Littered with Chinese hands. Now I’m stared at By chrysanthemums the size Of Holofernes’ head, dipped in the same Magenta as this fubsy sofa. (Plath 1981, 145)

The ugly objects display the coldness of dead flowers which the snoring English do not care about and are comfortably living with the dead. The dead roses are accompanied by chrysanthemums which are, in turn, compared with Holofernes’s severed head with which Judith saved the city of Bethulia. The co-presence of deadly flowers with the solid piece of furniture translate the interior into a space which harbingers death, thus rendering the English home as a sepulchre of sorts, a cold place which allusively reflects the coldness which cannot be really treated with a stoic kind of amusement. The poem also seems to be alluding to D.H. Lawrence’s (who for some time fascinated Plath, cf. Bayley 2008) short story “Odour of Chrysanthemums” where the smell of chrysanthemums is literally described as cold. The room in which the dead body of the family father is to be laid has no fireplace:

The air was cold and dump, but she could not make fire, there was no fireplace. The candle-light glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums, and on the dark mahogany. There was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.” (Lawrence, 193)

In “Leaving Early” the image is even heavier and denser. The flowers mix with the coldness of the smell and become a palpable kind of substance, a dense swamp which immobilises the body and makes the narrator breathless and speechless:

Lady, what am I doing With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood, Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers? (Plath 1981, 145)

This cold and dense atmosphere of the home is hardly a space which can leave one stoically unaffected, and the inability to speak which it evokes goes hand in hand with the experience of something unspeakable, with something alien to one’s language and to the experience of the domestic as safe and secure. Agnieszka Pantuchowicz “Why am I cold” 115

This expression of the “unhomeliness” of the English home which is also, as Tracy Brain notes, a depiction of “the confusion of an American in England” (Brain: 65), brings in the question of the homely nature of language becoming confused. Plath’s homely American English, though almost the same as the English English of her new home, becomes a confusing mixture of homely and unhomely, exactly as in Freud’s notion of the unheimlich through which Tracy Brain reads the stoppage of communication in the poem: “Most pressingly, the speaker’s feeling of what Freud describes as unheimlich … the opposite of what is familiar, is experienced through language itself, through an inability to communicate in the Lady’s speech” (Brain, 65). Plath’s “tongue of wood” cannot communicate with the cold Englishness which surrounds her, the theme which she takes up reflecting on a walk with her daughter in Dartmoor (“New Year on Dartmoor” 1961):

This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only you Don’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There’s no getting up it by the words you know. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat. (Plath 1981, 176)

Though coldness is not literally mentioned in the poem, the “glass-wrapped” surrounding resists translation into the words she knows, into a familiarity enabling some kind of identification. The land is slippery and slant, inhospi- table and unfamiliar, the effect which is amplified by the choice of Dartmoor as the setting of the poem. Brain sees Dartmoor as “an unexpected piece of England” which is not “typically ’English’ to non-English readers,” in fact to tourists who would rather go to Bath or Stratford to see what English- ness is. Choosing Dartmoor, Plath “increases the sense of defamiliarisation” (Brain, 67), thus in a way ascribing to the landscape the formalist feature of literariness in which the communicative function of language goes, as it were, to the background. “The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant” of the landscape is itself a poem which, perhaps as in Emily Dickinson, tells the truth “slant,” gradually dazzling the daughter who accompanies her, though leaving that truth inaccessible to the words she knows. The words one knows also appear in another “roofless” poem which Plath wrote after her visit to France in 1961. The poem’s title, “Stars over the Dor- dogne,” is distantly reminiscent of Kant’s starry sky (whom Plath read at Smith College), and some allusive hints at a possible relationship between the nightly horizon above one’s head and one’s moral constitution are readable in it. The poem also brings the reader to a non-English space of rooflessness. Written away from both England and America, the poem offers a look into the night sky, though one marked by the use of words which destabilize the apparent universality of the vision. Though seemingly a description of stars “dropping thick as stones into the twiggy // Picket of trees” which are then “eaten immediately by the pines,” the poem brings in a memory of some more domestic stars:

Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort. 116 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

And they are wan, dulled by much travelling. The smaller and more timid never arrive at all But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust. (Plath 1981, 165)

On the French sky the stars are strange and unfamiliar with the exception

of the English Plough which she recognizes with the American name of the Big Dipper:

The Big Dipper is my only familiar. I miss Orion and Cassiopeia’s Chair. Maybe they are Hanging shyly under the studded Horizon.

[ … ] Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me. The few I am used to are plain and durable; I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth Or much company, or the mildness of the south.

They are too puritan and solitary for that – When one of them falls it leaves a space, A sense of absence in its old shining place. (Plath 1981, 165)

The American stars seem to be fewer compared to “such a luxury of stars,” and the few she is used to are simple and stable. They are also “too puritan” for the “dressy backcloth” displayed in front of her eyes. In the poem, as Tracy Brain notes, “the seemingly American speaker recoils against the supposedly American excess, instead identifying with the English sparseness” (68). Though the topography of the poem is somehow convoluted, Brain seems to have been slightly misled in her identification of the excess as American. The excessive richness may well be read as French (perhaps catholic) overdressing, and though America is “too puritan,” it is not fully posited outside exactly because of the recognizable simplicity of the American Big Dipper. Brain rightly notices that while “‘Stars over the Dordogne’ focuses on the situation of the American as alien, it positions any British reader unacquainted with the term Big Dipper as outside, and any American who uses such a vocabulary as inside” (Brain: 68). The question of the position of Plath’s home, however, slips from these considerations and Brain, in accordance with most Plath criticism, in fact says that it is undecideable and depends on the fluidity of “us” and “not us.” The “us,” she claims, may be either Anglo-American alliance which excludes France, or it may “leave England isolated, and pair France with America” following the historical pairing of American Revolution and French republicanism, including France’s support during the War of Independence (68). Although the possibility of the “we” to include French-British alliance within its scope goes unnoticed in Brain’s interpretation, such a possibility seems to be emerging at the end of the poem where in the French peach orchard the speaker finds some “chill” which reminds her of the second, perhaps English home:

Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard. There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well. … I shut my eyes And drink the small night chill like news of home. (Plath 1981, 165) Agnieszka Pantuchowicz “Why am I cold” 117

The chill, reminiscent of the coldness of the English home, seems to be a trait of a major concern with temperature which is strongly present in Plath’s writings. The phrase “why am I cold” (Plath 1981, 176) posed as a question though without the question mark in “The Bee Meeting,” may suggest that the “domesticated bee hive” (McFarland, 261) appearing in the poem is her coffin, especially in the context of her other “bee poems” (“The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Wintering” and “Stings”) in which, as written in weeks preceding her death, she is also said to be foreshadowing it. “I am cold” of course might mean “I am dead,” but such a straightforward association of coldness with death in the poem seems to be too obvious and too simple. (Ff. McFarland, 261 – 262). “Why am I cold,” without the question mark, is preceded by the phrase “what have they accomplished,” the “they” referring to the villagers hunting the queen bee, to the society at large, perhaps British, with which Plath does not identify and survives in it rather than lives. The mode of this survival is hinted at in the poem “Wintering” which in a complex way transforms the question “why am I cold” into a statement of fact by way of shifting coldness from the sensory domain of feeling cold, to coldness as the existential quality of being cold. In other words, the narrator does not feel cold, she is cold, in fact hibernated:

Tate and Lyle keeps them going, The refined snow. It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers. They take it. The cold sets in. (Plath 1981, 218)

Tate & Lyle is a British company which produces sugar-based food ingredi- ents and, among others, animal foods. In this context, the pronoun “them” in “keeps them going” refers both to the society and to the wintering bees. Sugar, the “refined snow,” comes in the cold time of winter, simultaneously allowing the bees to live through the winter, huddling around the queen in a semi-hibernated state 1. It seems to be this state which, rather than death, whose figurations Plath explores in a number of her texts. The theme of hibernation, interestingly, was also, somewhat unknowingly, taken up by Ted Hughes who compared in his Birthday Letters (“The Chipmunk”) both America and Sylvia Plath to a chipmunk, perceiving them as “Alien to me as a window-model, // American, airport-hopping super product” (Quoted in Bassnett, 148). Concentrating on the mobility of chipmunks, Hughes seems to have forgotten that chipmunks hibernate in the winter. Some of them, like bees, winter, relying on the stores in their burrows. Perhaps living in England, where chipmunks do not live, Plath found some sort of hibernation to be a way of living and writing, an idea which she more explicitly expressed not from the position of a chipmunk or a bee, but that of a frog. In “Frog Autumn” the frog, who, in the name of the whole species, uses the pronoun “we,” depicts the world in which shortness of food is accompanied by scarcity of expression:

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother. The insects are scant, skinny. In these palustral homes we only Croak and wither. 1 Honey bees do not fully hibernate in winter and busy themselves with keeping the nest warm and safe. “Winter is a time of semi-hibernation for honey bees. The whole colony huddles around the queen, who will generally stay deep in the middle of the hive. They try to stay as warm as possible, so they stay organized” (Bratman). 118 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Mornings dissipate in somnolence. The sun brightens tardily Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us. (Plath 1981, 99)

What may be thought of as a linkage of wintering, hibernation, and somno-

lence are inactivity and non-participation, a passiveness, or even stupor which also characterize hospital patients whose figures can be found in a number of Plath’s poems along with hospital spaces. What she constructs is in a way an “uncanny” (unhomely) space of stuporous inactivity which is as it were metonymically glued to the English cold, and which she uses as an imaginary space of escape both from her English and her American homes. This space could be, very provisionally, called “hibernaculum,” the provisionality of the use of the term resulting from the provisional and changing range of that space. Plath uses this term in “Electra on Azalea Path,” a poem written on the occasion of a visit to her father’s grave:

The day you died I went into the dirt, Into the lightless hibernaculum Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard … (Plath 1981, 116)

In the above lines, the hibernaculum offers a space of escape from the mem ories of the father which haunted her throughout her life. Her father, as an entomologist, knew that honey bees do not hibernate in winter, and so probably did Sylvia Plath. And yet she posits the hibernaculum as a homely space away from the home of the father, an alternative shelter which strongly connotes a religious kind of adulation. Simultaneously going “into the dirt,” Plath endows this space with the negativity of death and buries herself from the father’s world of hailing Hitler “in the privacy of his home” (Plath 1987, 430), 2 but in fact withdraws to the coldness and lightlessness of the imaginary hibernaculum which lives its own bee-life in winter. The bees are not inactive or passive in the winter time, but cluster to keep themselves warm and create heat by shivering and moving between the inner and the outer part of the cluster so that the queen and the other bees in the hive do not freeze. 3 In “Wintering” Plath quite explicitly genders the life of bees bringing to mind Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and its vision of a world without fathers:

The bees are all women, Maids and the long royal lady. They have got rid of the men, The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. (Plath 1981, 219)

2 In the poem “Daddy”: “I have always been scared of you,/ With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo./ And your neat mustache/ And your Aryan eye, bright blue./ Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You – / Not God but a swastika.” 3 The worker bees create heat by shivering and they also move back and forth between the inner part of the cluster and the outer part . In this way no bee will freeze . On nice sunny winter days you can see honey bees flying a short distance out of the hive and then quickly returning. Sometimes if they go too far out or stay out too long they can get chilled and will not be able to fly back into the hive. It is too bad the bees have to leave the hive at all but they kind of have to, the object of these short flights is to eliminate body waste. (http:// www.bees-online.com/Winter.htm) Agnieszka Pantuchowicz “Why am I cold” 119

The space of Plath’s hibernaculum is evidently some figuration of the, however figurative, coldness of the English home which, through the image of semi- hibernating bees, she projects as a kind of dwelling which is closer to nature than the warmth of an American home which keeps coldness either outside, or within the usually white body of a refrigerator. Plath’s already mentioned demand for a refrigerator may be read as an expression of a seemingly paradoxical wish of having home at home, of bringing America to England in the form of domestic equipment which would function as a reminder of the home left behind. This does not mean that she is unequivocally positive about America, and the home left behind may be a reminiscence of the glossy aesthetics of House and Garden. Though in one of her letters she despaired that she would be unable “to get the American size” refrigerator” (cf. Brain, 58), later, when she eventually received one, she wrote (2 February 1960): “My pride and joy arrives Thursday: a beautiful refrigerator.” This aesthetic excitement, in the next line of the letter, gives way to the cooling function of English homes:

Most of the fridges here are diminutive … a freezer just big enough for icecubes. Women here need a sales to buy one – most of them just use “cold-cupboards”, the closest windowsill, or a closet! (quoted in Brain, 58).

Yet people do not freeze in the English homes, and this modest condition seems to be quite acceptable for Plath, the American refrigerator standing, perhaps quite ironically, for the American greatness. However odd the image of an American refrigerator in the English hibernaculum may seem, this technological improvement also seems to be an offer to somehow aid the English women, perhaps the “bees of England” 4 in their daily routine of wintering, though without transforming them into American Madonnas of the refrigerator. This last phrase is a reference to the title of the second draft of the poem “The Babysitters” (completed in 1961) in which her best friend, Marcia Brown, whom she had left on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and herself from ten years before appear. The draft’s title was “Madonna (of the Refrigerator),” and both Brown and Plath are “placed among ‘glittering’ white tools of domestic trade, household appliances linked to ‘square white Alps’” (Connors, 81), an American refrigerator being one of them. What is thus brought, from a distance (both spatial and temporal), to the American home is Alpine snow, a coldness which she ascribes now to the American domestic equipment, thus estranging, or foreignizing, the space which used to be the space of her own.

4 “Bees of England” is a phrase which Percy Bysshe Shelly used in his revolutionary “A Song: ‘Men of England’” to awaken the working class from the slumber and blindness to the exploitation by the “drones” of capitalist production: “Wherefore, Bees of England, forge // Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, // That these stingless drones may spoil // The forced produce of your toil?” (Shelley 1914: 568). Though he does not write about a hibernaculum in the poem, the poem’s address to “Men” through the image of female worker “bees” seems to be quite telling. 120 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Works Cited: Abbeele, Georges,Van Den. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Bayley, Sally. “’I need a master’: Sylvia Plath Reads D.H. Lawrence.” English: The Journal of the English Association, Vol. 57, Issue 218 (2008): 127 – 144.

Bratman, Eve. Winter Update, (2012). 23 May 2017. >http://www.evebratman. com/winter-update/>. Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. Bryant, Marsha. “Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising.” College Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2002): 17 – 34. Connors, Kathleen. “Living Color: The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath.”Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, ed. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, 4 – 118. Dobbs, Jeannine. “‘Viciousness in the Kitchen’: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry.” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1977): 11 – 25. Lawrence, D.H.. “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. McFarland, Ashley. “Bee-ing There: The Existential Influence in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems.” Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, No. 6 (2013): 259 – 269. Web. Retrieved from https://scholarworks. iu.edu/journals/index.php/plath/article/view/4292/3926 Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York: Knopf Doubleday Pub- lishing Group, 1987. Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Shelley, Percy, Bysshe. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Lon- don: Humphrey Milford, 1914. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, 717 – 26. Somerville, Peter. “Homelessness and the Meaning of Home: Rooflessness or Rootlessness?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 16, No. 4 (2009): 529 – 539. Zane, Lauren. “Defamiliarization in the Domestic Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies,No. 4 (2011): 260 – 290. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ plath/article/view/4470 Zhong, Chen-Bo and Leonardelli, Geoffrey J.. “Cold and Lonely Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?.” Psychological Science Vol. 19, No. 9 (2008): 838 – 842.

Other Presences

122 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Anna Warso Other Presences. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Hospitality

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0578 Other Presences

Anna Warso Other Presences 123

Anna Warso is an assis- Letters exchanged between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in spring tant professor at the Uni- 1962 include, among others, a conversation about his use of one of her short versity of Social Sciences stories as a source material for “The Scream”, a poem published later in the and Humanities in War- saw where she teaches winter edition of The Kenyon Review. “In the Village”, the story in question, courses in American deals with the subject of formative trauma and is directly related to the events literature and workshops of Bishop’s childhood: her widowed mother suffered from a series of nervous in translation. She wrote her doctoral disserta- collapses and became institutionalized. The narrator recalls: “First she had tion on the figurations of come home with her child. Then she had gone away again, alone, and left loss in John Berryman’s the child. Then she had come home. Then she had gone away again, with The Dream Songs. her sister; and now she was home again” but “in spite of the doctors, in spite of the frightening expenses, she had not got any better.” (Prose, 63) Left in the care of her maternal grandparents until the age of six, Bishop was then relocated – “unconsulted and against my wishes” – from Great Village to her father’s wealthier relatives in Massachusetts “to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet . . . perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family”, as revealed by the narrator of “The Country Mouse” (Prose, 89). The landscapes and memories of Nova Scotia will echo in the work written during the decades of the poet’s displacement in Florida and Brazil. On 10 March 1962 Lowell sent Bishop a few of his poem drafts, adding warily:

I tried versing your “In the Village”. The lines about the heart are Harriet’s on her kindergarten society, the rest is merely your prose put into three-beat lines and probably a travesty, making something small and literary out [ of ] something much larger . . . I send it with misgivings. Maybe you could use it for raw material for a really great poem. (WIA, 390)

To which she replies:

I don’t know why I bother to write “Uncle Artie” really. I shd. just send you my first notes and you can turn him into a wonderful poem. He is even more your style than the Village story was. “The Scream” really works well, doesn’t it. The story is far enough behind me so I can see it as a poem now. The first few stanzas I saw only my story -- then the poem took over -- and the last stanza is wonderful. It builds up beautifully, and everything of importance is there. But I was very surprised. (WIA, 401 – 402)

Despite the praise, there is a degree of ambiguity in Bishop’s reply, which probably unsettled Lowell and may have prompted the following confession: “I was rather on tiptoe that my poems had been intrusive, and read your letter with great relief. . . Glad this and my tampering with ‘In the Village’ didn’t annoy you. When ‘The Scream’ is published I’ll explain, it’s just a footnote to your marvelous story.” (WIA, 405) This is met with the following reassur- ance: “No – I was very pleased with ‘The Scream’. I find it very touching you were worried for fear I might be annoyed – I thought it was only I who went around imagining people were cross with me when I didn’t hear from them” (WIA, 412). Lowell’s poem is indeed furnished with a bracketed annotation reading: “Derived from Elizabeth Bishop’s story, ‘In the Village’” (Lowell, 8). 124 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Although the literary and personal connections between Bishop and Lowell have been analyzed rather extensively over the last decades (Paulin, Travisano and others), and David Kalstone’s 1989 study of her poetic development and friendships has remained a crucial reference work for those curious about the intersections of Bishop’s writing and life, the 2008 publication of Words in Air. The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell allows for fresh insights into the relationship of the poets and their work. Letter writing itself constitutes a special form art and of being together, an awareness of which will resonate throughout Bishop’s own voluminous correspondence as well as her writing. They are a form of self-presentation and an offering to another, but also a physical manifestation of the reciprocity upon which the epistolary hinges, a mediation between two distant points, a bridge: “correspondence” means a “harmony, agreement”, from the as- similated form of com, meaning “together, with (each other)”, and respondere, “to answer”. The exchange of personal letters is dependent on the economy of goodwill and trust between the writer and the addressee as the missive from the former becomes the property of the latter. But correspondence is also, as Franz Kafka observes in Letters to Milena, “a communication with spectres, not only with the spectre of the addressee but also with one own’s phantom which evolves underneath one’s own hand in the very letter one is writing or even in a series of letters, where one letter reinforces the other and can refer to it as a witness (cited in Altman, 2)”. In her classical Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Altman notes that letters extend also across presence and absence as the sender and the receiver who “meet” through the letter “are neither totally separated nor totally united” (43). Discussing what she calls the ethics of correspondence (since the space of the encounter is inevitably an ethical space), Siobhan Phillips posits, in fact, the possibility of an epistolary kind of inter-subjectivity, which she traces in Bishop: a form of selfhood developed by the poet practicing “self-connection rather than self-expression” through letters “not necessarily autobiographical and yet . . . undeniably personal” (Phillips, 348). By their constitutive properties and their inherent in-betweenness, letters problematize the boundary between presence and absence, the private and the non-private, the literary and the non-literary in ways which become salient for the discussion of Bishop’s attitude to the issues of representation, property and, generally, the presence of others in one’s writing. Her reaction to Lowell’s use of his ex-wife’s letters in The Dolphin is particularly interesting in this regard, as are the several instances of her and Lowell’s poetic reciprocity and their declared willingness to share: “By the way, the mermaid wasn’t your Millay parody, but something in one of your letters, inspired by Wiscasset probably” – Lowell remarks about his poem “Water” (WIA, 405). Referring to their paired lyrics – Bishop dedicated “The Armadillo” to Lowell, who responded with “Skunk Hour”, modeled upon the former – Lowell writes in April 1958: “I used your ‘Armadillo’ in class as a parallel to my ‘Skunks’ and ended up feeling a petty plagiarist” (WIA, 258). Five years later Bishop still insists: “You shouldn’t, however, say that ‘The Armadillo’ is ‘better’ than the skunk. I am not being modest – how I wish it were!” (WIA, 466). The “image of a blue china knob” which – as Lowell confesses – “somehow started the current of images in [ the ] opening stanzas” of his “Skunk Hour” (Collected Prose, 228) recalls the white china doorknob topping the flag pole in Bishop’s “Cape Breton” and was, in fact, white in the first draft of his notes on “Skunk Hour”, David Kalstone notes (186). Anna Warso Other Presences 125

Her letters are scattered with bits of self-reflective commentary: in No- vember 1955 she writes to Lowell: “I just noticed the other day that I must have got my pig’s feet in ‘The Prodigal’ from your spiders in ‘Mr. Edwards’… And here, I’m afraid, ‘improvident as the dawn’ is out of Yeats” (WIA, 171), even though the phrase is probably rather Yeatsian than Yeats’s. At the same time, Anderson mentions her discomfort caused by Marianne Moore reusing some of her observations:

Significantly, both poets reacted in different ways to evidence that their writing had imitated, or had depended on, an already existing text of the other. Whilst Bishop excoriated herself for unconscious borrowings from Moore’s poem ‘The Frigate Pelican’ OA( , 54) Moore, on the other hand, seems to have been calmly insouciant about assimilating images from Bishop into her writing, a fact Bishop was still registering as a “slight grudge” years later. (Anderson, 26)

It was also, inevitably, through a letter that Bishop expressed her objections to Lowell’s creative use of Elizabeth Hardwick’s correspondence. Having reassured him that The Dolphin contains “magnificent poetry” and that “every 14 lines have some marvels of image or expression” (WIA, 707) Bishops kindly but steadfastly advises against the publication of the sonnets, unless major revisions are to be introduced: “there is a ‘mixture of fact and fiction’ and you have changed her letters. That is ‘infinite mischief’ I think… One can use one’s life as material – one does anyway – but these letters – aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission – IF you hadn’t changed them… etc. But art just isn’t worth that much.” (WIA, 708) She references a letter from Thomas Hardy to James Douglas about another instance of “abuse” which she describes as “Not exactly the same situation as DOLPHIN, but fairly close” (WIA, 707). Returning to The Dolphinin April 1972 Bishop stresses again “What I have objected to in your use of the letters is that I think you’ve changed them – & you had no right to do that” (WIA, 716) and in the earlier exchange she revokes the notion of gentleness from the letter by Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, where the idea of being a “gentleman” is conceived as “higher than being a ‘Christian’ even, certainly than a poet’”. She explains: “It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way – it’s cruel . . . I also think that the thing could be done, somehow – the letters used and the conflict presented as forcefully, or almost, without changing them . . .” (WIA, 708). Bishop’s references to Hopkins may strike as impossibly Victorian today and there is perhaps a degree of despaired awkwardness in her attempt at explaining that it is the “changing” which rendered Lowell’s maneuver wrong. After all, she knows well enough that one is destined to report only one’s own, domesticated perceptions; she knows that the world will slip away from even the most disciplined attempts to translate it accurately to the words on the page – as the carefully captured fish does in one of her frequently anthologized poems, where the eye of the speaker zooms in and focuses on the animal’s eyes “far larger than mine,/ but shallower, and yellowed,/ the irises backed and packed/ with tarnished tinfoil/ seen through the lenses/ of old scratched isinglass.” (Complete Poems, 43) In “Cape Breton” the concentration on language and description is both intense and exhilaratingly futile: the ancient writing “made on stones by stones” remains undecipherable as “these regions now have 126 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

little to say for themselves/ except in the thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward/ freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing/ in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets.”Complete ( Poems, 68). In “Santarém” the speaker confesses “Of course I may be remembering it all wrong” (Complete Poems, 185) and questions her own writerly authority “hadn’t two rivers sprung/ from the garden of Eden? No, that was four” (Complete Poems, 185) – “imagine T.S. Eliot or Marianne Moore misremembering their carefully documented sources” Thomas Travisano observes (190). Bishop’s attentive descriptions are indeed often read as an echo of Moore’s fondness for focus, accuracy and precision and while the importance of Moore for Bishop’s poetic development is undeniable, I propose to view the attentiveness exhibited by the latter poet not as a sign of her eagerness to document and re-present but as a result of her specific sensitivity shaped by the principles of reciprocity and trust inherent in correspondence and tied to the more general laws of hospitality. Importantly, Bishop was also keen reader of letters (Chekhov, Coleridge, Fitzgerald, Hardy, Hopkins, Henry James, Yeats and others). In Art and Memory Ellis aptly demonstrates how the “anecdotes [ she ] chooses to repeat themselves suggest aspects of each writer’s characteristic tone of voice” and, recalling Bishop’s difficulties with writing the foreword for Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, discusses the extent to which the poet tended to apply literary standards to correspondence (143 – 145). In 1971 – 1972 at Harvard, she taught a class on “Letters: Readings in Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous, from the 16th to 20th Centuries” the plans for which she described to Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale as “Just letters – as an art form or something” hoping to select a “nicely incongruous assortment of people – Mrs. Carlyle, Chekhov, my Aunt Grace, Keats, a letter found in the street, etc. etc.” (OA, 544). In May 1970 she revealed to Lowell: “I’ve been reading Carlyle’s life – I have a poem about him I’ve had around for years” (WIA, 674) – it was published posthumously in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box as “Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle” and, in fact, is not as much “about him” (Carlyle) as it is about an event described in one of Jane Carlyle’s letters: Mr. Carlyle misses Mrs. Carlyle at “Swan With Two Necks” and in Bishop’s versed rendering of the anecdote the image on the signboard becomes the emblem of their marriage, and “the epistolary dynamics of that relationship in particular” (Phillips, 343). Also her own correspondence contains kernels of future poems: in 1946 she traveled back from Great Village to the United States by bus and, as she reports to Marianne Moore: “Early the next morning, just as it was getting light, the driver had to stop suddenly for a big cow moose who was wandering down the road . . . The driver said that one foggy night he had to stop while a huge bull moose came right up and smelled the engine. ‘Very curious beasts’ he said” (OA, 141). It took over twenty five years for the episode to materialize in “The Moose”, published in Geography III (see also Kalstone, 119). Tóibín reports:

In 1956 Bishop wrote to her Aunt Grace: “I’ve written a long poem about Nova Scotia. It’s dedicated to you. When it’s published, I’ll send you a copy.” Sixteen years later, the poem was finished. She wrote to Aunt Grace: “It is called ‘The Moose.’ (You are not the moose.)” (Tóibín, 19)

In “The Bight” the water is the “color of the gas flame turned as low as possible” (Complete Poems, 60) – echoing a description of the coastline from Anna Warso Other Presences 127 a January 15, 1948 Key West letter to Lowell, where “the water looks like blue gas – the harbor is always a mess” (WIA, 23). There are “junky little boats all piled up with sponges and always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane. It reminds me a little of my desk” (WIA, 23). In “The Bight” she writes:

Some of the little white boats are still piled up against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in, and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm, like torn open, unanswered letters. (Complete Poems 60)

In the context of the Hopkins reference and Bishop’s insistence on the importance being “gentle” – Pickard notes her praise for Chekhov, who is “good as well as [ a ] good artist” (Bishop in Pickard, 46) – her objection to Lowell’s manipulation of Hardwick’s voice seems to point to the ethical dimension – in terms of the obligation and the practical (im)possibility of opening up the space of one’s poem to other presences. Doing that in the case of The Dolphin “would mean a great deal of work, of course – and perhaps you feel it is impossible” Bishop continues (WIA, 708). Indeed, to make possible a just presence of (the voice of) another in a poem seems to require a lyrical equivalent of what Jacques Derrida refers to as genuine hospitality. But being hospitable hinges upon having the power to host: it is always tied to one’s dwelling place, identity, space and limits as well as a degree of control over the guests, all of which predetermine the possibility of hospitality (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 149). If poetry is tied to the development and mastery over one’s “own” voice, hosting other presences in a poem becomes a tremendously difficult balancing act. An analogous predicament may be found in the act translation where the strangeness of another is always at a risk of becoming violently domesticated as it is inevitably rewritten: Bishops alludes to that difficulty suggesting improvements to what was, in fact, Lowell’s rather careless translations of Rimbaud: “You have been careful to call them ‘free translations’ and of course you are free to change the line order, interpolate, point up . . . I just can’t decide how ‘free’ one has the right to be” (WIA, 356 – 357). This is not to say that Lowell is unaware or unfazed by the effects and consequences of his free translations. In a letter from 21 August 1947 he writes about “The Fish”: “I’m glad you wrote me, because it gives me an excuse to tell you how much I liked your New Yorker fish poem. Perhaps, it’s your best. Anyway, I felt very envious reading it – I’m a fisherman myself but all my fish became symbols, alas!” – and in November 1954, remarking on the difficulties of writing prose, he notes: “- a hell of a job. It starts naked, ends as fake velvet.” (WIA, 153) Bishop is similarly confused by prose: “it’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry, I think, but in prose, it keeps eluding me in the funniest way.” (WIA, 161) She is also well aware of the degree to which the writing of others inspires and influences one’s own (“Perhaps we are all magpies” she confesses reminiscing Moore, admitting to that “very slight grudge” against the older poet (Prose, 130)), but she consistent and adamant in her objection to what she views as a violation of trust. As early as 1948 she gently rebukes Lowell for his failing to comment on William’s use of another person’s letters in Paterson: “I read your Williams review on the train . . . I still felt he shouldn’t have used the letters from that woman. To 128 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

me it seems mean & they’re much too overpowering emotionally for the rest of it so that the whole poem suffers” (in Ellis, 154) To go back to her praise of Chekhov, Williams is a good artist but he is not good. One of her essays, “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore” (an allusion to Moore’s “Efforts and Affection” whose title in Bishop’s copy was changed by Moore crossing out “and” and writing “of” above the poem) includes a reflection which may shed more light on her reference to the Hopkins letter, the remark on “gentleness” and the issues in question. Trying to sum- marize her reminiscences of Moore, Bishop becomes “foolishly bemused”:

Marianne’s monogram; mother; manners; morals; and I catch myself murmuring, “Manners and morals; manners as morals” Or is it “morals as manners?” Since like Alice, “in a dreamy sort of way,” I can’t answer either question, it does not much matter which way I put it; it seems to be making sense. (Prose, 140)

The connection is obviously risky and Bishop remained troubled by the situations where Moore’s insistence on protocol lead to outcomes which could be viewed as morally questionable: a young writer “was never invited to Cumberland Street although his friends were. Once, I asked innocently why I never saw him there and Marianne gave me her serious, severe look and said, ‘he contradicted Mother’” (Prose, 127). While little is known about the exact incident and the reply itself may have been simply a manifestation of Moore’s eccentricity, Bishop’s tone and the choice of events recalled in the memoir suggest that she was somewhat puzzled by the arbitrariness of the system of manners practiced by her mentor. Nonetheless, in a letter to Anne Stevenson, she writes: “[ John Dewey ] and Marianne are the most truly ‘democratic’ people I’ve known I think. -- He had almost the best manners I have ever encountered, always had time, took an interest in everything, -- no detail, no word or stone or cat or old woman was unimportant to him” (Prose, 396). Bishop’s discomfort with the anachronism and the problematic nature of certain codes of behavior, accompanied by a sense of gravitas with regard to what is at stake, result in the tension of “Manners”, a retrospective poem written “For a Child of 1918”. The tone of simple, balladic “Manners” vacillates between elegiac, deferential and patronizing when Bishop’s speaker recalls the instruction received while riding a wagon in Nova Scotia with her “Pa”, William Bulmer. His words of wisdom seem almost embarrassingly clichéd to the adult speaker who tries to distance herself from the pastoral world of childhood recreated in verse and even the formal simplicity of the poem could be viewed as a gesture of irony. From the perspective of the adult, the grandfather’s teachings were impractical already in 1918:

When the automobiles went by, the dust hid the people’s faces but we shouted “Good day! Good day! Fine day!” at the top of our voices. (Complete Poems, 121)

And yet, the lessons in kindness received in (or attributed to) Great Vil- lage, towards “a stranger on foot”, a passing child, a crow, “man or beast”, Anna Warso Other Presences 129 culminating in the last stanza where they “all got down” from the wagon and walked beside it because “the mare was tired”, inform Bishop’s writing and manifest in the attentive treatment of her objects. In the long poem about a bus journey from Nova Scotia to Boston, the encountered moose

. . . stands there, looms, rather in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at he bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless; high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses). A man’s voice assures us “Perfectly harmless. . . .”

Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherwordly.

. . .

“Curious creatures,” says our quiet driver, rolling his r’s. “Look at that, would you.” Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam; then there’s a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. (Complete Poems, 173)

The language and form of the poem emphasize relations of affinity and- mu tuality. “Towering, antlerless” obviously refers to the “grand” animal but if the stop at the end of the previous line is omitted, those adjectives may also describe the vehicle from the perspective of the moose, who approaches the alien to sniff at its warm hood. Bishop repeats this poetic gesture in another stanza, this time more forcefully and openly: the driver’s remark (“Curious creatures”), referred to the moose, presents the curious beast as both strange, “otherwordly” and interested in the visitors who suddenly appeared on the road. However, the driver’s observation may refer also the passengers who, curious about the animal, “exclaim in whispers/childishly, softly” and later keep looking back (“craning backward”) while the windows let in the “smell of moose.” The speaker asks: 130 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? (Complete Poems, 173)

It is curious indeed: “Look at that, would you.” – says the busman invitingly. In that moment of encounter both the passengers and the wild animal turn into intrigued “creatures”, including the “quiet driver” who “shifts gears./ For a moment longer,/ by craning backward” (in Bishop’s letter from 1946 it was the moose who “walked away very slowly into the woods, looking at us over her shoulder” [ OA, 141 ]). The driver is “rolling his r’s”, like people back home in Nova Scotia and unlike those in Boston, and the moose seems “homely as a house/(or safe as houses)” – like the fish from another poem, who is “battered, venerable and homely” (Complete Poems, 43) and whose lower lip (“if you could call it a lip”) shows several signs of the animal’s long experience in combating anglers. In instances such as these, likeness and difference become recognized, resulting in one’s sense of kinship with the other as well as a separateness from it, confirming the relation between the self and the world. In “The Moose”, the “sweet sensation of joy”, born from that recognition, confronts the speaker also with her past self: childlike, inquisitive and excitable, and takes her back to the half recalled, half imagined family home: the poem is dedicated to Grace Bulmer Bowers and during the long, tedious journey “a dreamy divagation/ begins in the night,/ a gentle, auditory,/ slow hallucination. . . ./ In the creakings and noises,/ an old conversation/ --not concerning us,/ but recognizable, somewhere,/ back in the bus:/ Grandparents’ voices” (Collected Poems, 171) – the reminiscences which follow are interrupted by the jolt of the bus. Bishop’s work is scattered with affinities and correspondences. The coastline in “The Bight” reminds the poet of her desk, the boats are “piled up . . . like torn unanswered letters” (Collected Poems, 60) and the text itself extends between two parallel dimensions, of the bight and of Bishop’s workplace:

The bight is littered with old correspondences. Click. Click. Goes the dredge and brings up a dripping jawful of marl. All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful. (Collected Poems, 60 – 61)

The clicking accompanies the work of both the dredge and the typewriter bringing up a “jawful of marl” – or a mouthful of words. The writing and reading (of poems, correspondences), “awful but cheerful,” continues because ”The Bight”, self-dedicated parenthetically under the title: [ On my birthday ], is about the Key West landscape, whose description had been offered to Lowell in a letter, but also about Bishop’s internal landscape, her attitude to poetic work and her fearful desire to communicate, just as “Manners” is a poem about the possibility of togetherness engendered by speaking and being spoken to. Bishop’s famously reticent speakers are, in fact, on a constant lookout for potential connections and it is their distance which helps to create a space for other presences to be heard and resound. In all of this “untidy activity” – the last two verses of “The Bight” are engraved on the poet’s gravestone – Bishop’s was the principle of kindness and reciprocity, nourished Anna Warso Other Presences 131 by her fondness of the epistolary; her manner is that of hospitality towards the strange, curious creatures and objects given residence in the writing which Bishop considered home.

Works Cited Altman, Janet. Epistolarity: Approaches to Form. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1982. Anderson, Linda. Lines of Connection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Bishop, Elizabeth. Complete Poems. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003. —. Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box. Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Ed. Alice Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. —. One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus, anGiroux, 1994. —. Prose. Ed. Lloyd Schwartz. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. Bishop, Elizabeth and Robert Lowell. Words in Air. The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008. Costello, Bonnie. “Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop: Friendship and Influence.” Twentieth Century Literature 30.2 – 3 (1984): 130 – 149. Ellis, Jonathan. Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Transl. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, 1989. Lowell, Robert. For the Union Dead. London: Faber and Faber, 1970. —. Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. Paulin, Tom. “Newness and nowness. The extraordinary brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters.” Times Literary Supplement (29 April 1994). 3 – 5. Phillips, Siobhan. “Elizabeth Bishop and the Ethics of Correspondence.” MODERNISM/modernity 19.2. (2012). 343 – 363. Pickard, Zachariah. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2009. Travisano, Thomas. Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999. Tóibín, Colm. On Elizabeth Bishop. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2015. Tracing the Form of Compassion

132 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Małgorzata Myk Tracing the Form of Compassion: Homelessness in Leslie Scalapino’s “bum series” [ P ]ain is nonlinguistic: It is what we human beings have that ties us to the non- language-using beasts. So victims of cruelty, people who are suffering, do not have much in the way of a language. That is why there is no such things as the “voice of the oppressed” or the “language of the victims.” The language the victims once used is not working anymore, and they are suffering too much to put new words together. So the job of putting their situation into language is going to have to be done for them by somebody else. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 94

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0579 Tracing the Form of Compassion

Małgorzata Myk Tracing the Form of Compassion 133

Dr Małgorzata Myk is American avant-garde author Leslie Scalapino described her acclaimed 1988 an Assistant Professor serial poem way as a text devoted primarily to the theme of homelessness. at the Department of Explored most directly in the section entitled “bum series,” homelessness American Literature of Lodz University. She emerges for the poet as a concrete, material condition of social exclusion that co-edited (with Kacper puts the individual in a situation of victimization and deprivation that turns out Bartczak) a volume to be life-threatening. Making a question of poetic response to homelessness Theory That Matters: What Practice After a recurring concern in her writing, Scalapino explains the intention of the Theory and a special poem in following terms in her later 1996 work The Front Matter, Dead Souls: issue of The Polish Journal for American Studies devoted to In a poem I wrote, way, I wanted compassion objectively technical innovation in to be in the moving shape there, as the form in the se- contemporary North American poetry. She ries—pressed in its moving of shape in the real events. is the recipient of It occurs not subject to one and outside of one. / I was 2017/18 Kosciuszko trying to get a shape, which is in some way a sound, Fellowship (UCSD). that’s movement in location, and is also compassion by itself (objectively) occurring (not imposed) in these locations. / The writing is the minute moving or shape of a real event. Sentiment has no relation to existence. It isn’t an act?” (21, original emphasis)

In way, Scalapino does not reflect on homelessness, but rather creates a site where both the author and the reader must confront the difficulty of grasp- ing with the material reality of, to use Judith Butler’s term, the homeless person’s “derealized” position. 1 Scalapino’s work problematizes the poetic task of forging an ethical response to homelessness, on the one hand pointing to concrete aspects of the person’s circumstance and the ways in which it directly threatens their lives (e.g. homeless individuals freezing to death), and on the other hand engaging with the problem of inadequacy of any conceptual treatment of homelessness, investigating perspectives inherent in one’s construction of its condition. In this brief paper, I focus on way’s section “bum series” and contend that its minimalist poetics radically re-examines the ways in which homelessness is engaged both in poetic language and social space. Whereas the poem is evocative of Rorty’s claim that victims are deprived of language and his suggestion that poets may be the ones with a special mandate and ability to put one’s suffering into language, Scalapino enacts in writing the very impossibility of this task, simultaneously speculating on the possibility of arriving at a form capable of objective and non-perspectival scrutiny. In doing so, she attempts to forge a radical form of response that does not pretend to speak for the other or in any way rely on the poet’s authority and privilege. Rather, the poem becomes a critical space where both the author and the reader must remain conflicted and become aware of the risks involved in their attempts to formulate a response. The poet shows that suffering and pain are unrepresent- able. They are material and as such irreducible to representational language. Consequently, the poem forgoes representation and relies on a different mode of articulation, foregrounding the movement of language that fosters active engagement rather than relies on any conventional portrayal.

1 Cf. Butler’s use of the term “derealization” in her 2004 Undoing Gender. Butler uses the term in the political context to speak of particular groups of individuals that become “unreal” through exclusion and silencing, and I extend its use to the situation of the homeless to convey a sense of their alienation and subaltern position. 134 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

The discursive inability to speak of the other’s suffering has been recently addressed by the founder of the so called non-standard philosophy François Laruelle. It is in contrast to his essay General Theory of Victims that I propose to approach Scalapino’s language-oriented experimental text as a radicalized poetics of scrutiny. 2 According to Laruelle’s non-standard thinking, radicalization is understood as both abstraction and subsequent reduction of a concept to its minimal transcendental (i.e. linguistic) content necessary for the unveiling of the mechanism that gave rise to the auto-legitimization of a particular concept. Such radicalization, according to one of Laruelle’s commentators philosopher Katerina Kolozova, aims at “getting to the roots of the discourse that has become one’s theoretical inertia” (Cut of the Real 53). I argue that “bum series” shows a specific form of engagement that can be encountered in many of Scalapino’s other writings, such as Defoe, The Front Matter, Dead Souls, as well as The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion: a Trilogy, and that could be approached vis-à-vis Laruelle’s radicalized concept of the victim. As I am about to show, even though Scalapino shares Laruelle’s preoccupation with the philosophical insufficiency of any available discourse on suffering (“bum series” indeed departs from a position similar to Laruelle’s concern for the victim), her nonnarrative and non-representational writing emerges as much more nuanced and concrete in accounting for the mechanism of the victims’ objectification. To begin with, Laruelle explains his position as follows in his General Theory of Victims:

The victim is now a blurred, ambiguous generality, an object of indiscriminate use. Forgotten by conceptual thought, it is now overexploited by images and information in the doxa of “we are all victims.” . . . Our goal is different: to relocate the victim, if possible, from the phase of being an intellectual and media object to the status of an object of knowledge, from its image to its concept. (3)

Laruelle critiques the role of those present-day intellectuals who presume to know the victims and claim the right to represent them or speak for them. He further proposes an intentionally abstract, radicalized concept of “the victim-in-person,” a formal symbol of the concrete human subject, defined in following terms:

. . . is not a particular or individual victim, but the state of humans insofar as they are capable as such of being persecuted . . . The victim is not victim immediately but is immediately capable of being or of becoming victim.

2 Laruelle’s position is evoked here for both comparison and contrast. It is not my intention to claim that Scalapino’s oeuvre neatly and unproblematically fits into all aspects of Laruelle’s model; however, I discern some potential, very much in the spirit of his non-standard thinking that relies on tracking the element of insufficiency in any self-contained way of thinking (including philosophy), in considering particular aspects of Scalapino’s work in light of several defining characteristics of the non-philosophical position. Its experimental character, aversion to hierarchies and norms, focus on immanence and materialism, ethical concerns, as well as preoccupation with ordinary experience and posthumanist rather than humanist aspects of lived experience strike me as important affinities with Scalapino’s writing. Małgorzata Myk Tracing the Form of Compassion 135

The victim is the most exposed depth of humans, their capacity to be defeated on occasions that also revive this capacity as a weak force of resistance. (8, original emphasis)

Today, as the philosopher argues, the victims deserve to rise above the ubiquitous overrepresentation of those who bear responsibility for their predicament and exploitative overexposure of their situation continually projected by the media. For Laruelle, addressing today’s endangered humanity in an ethical way means a radical change of optics, beginning with condemning the victims’ overexposure and exploitation by the “media-savvy intellectuals,” as he snidely calls them. Already at this point, Laruelle’s way of privileging abstract conceptualization smacks of generalization that Scalapino’s poetics radically undercuts. Whereas the poet also reiterates the need for a reconceptualization of our optics regarding ourselves and others as potential victims, the poetry of “bum series” refuses to perpetuate any singular or universal perception of the victim or pretend that conceptualizing will be free from the risks that it faces in every other form of discourse; instead, the text simultaneously foregrounds the conceptual excesses of discourse used in relation to the victims and shows them as situated against a setting whose infinitely variable structure must be attended to at every turn of the sign and every line break of the poem. The precarious life situation of the homeless is not presented as emblematic of present-day existential alienation; rather, it is shown as concrete and material. The ethical gesture of the poem entails accounting for the spectator’s inescapable implication in social mechanisms of exploitative observation and overexposure. Scalapino articulates these concerns by having the speaker of “bum series” straightforwardly admit ignorance, expressing radical uncertainty that resonates in the poem’s persistent rhyming of the words “bum” (as related to the homeless) and “dumb” (as related to the speaker): “I have been—am—/ dumb—as the way/in which that would occur—the/bums—not their existence or/dying from the weather—though/the effect of that” (58). Invoking these colloquially-sounding words rather than their more formal equivalents of, respectively, “homeless” and “stupid,” the poet enacts a radicalized performance of ambivalence, pointing to the risk of banality or sheer arrogance inherent in any portrayal of homelessness, or, as the other sections of way show, any other form of social victimization. Consequently, the condition of victimization is enacted and engaged rather than presented in the text whose language is reduced to the minimum of simple vocabulary framed in short, heavily hyphenated stanzas, often comprising only single words or paratactic phrases that unfold in deliberately broken syntax and are sparsely arranged across the empty space of the page in a poetic gesture of withholding any contained narrative invested in representation. Foregrounding the speaker’s recalcitrance towards speaking for the victims, Scalapino investigates the possibility of “non-hierarchical structure of writing,” first proposed during her talk “The Radical Nature of Experience” at the 1996 Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire and later published in her important 1999 collection of essays The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence (3). The serial form of way intentionally resists pattern as well as transparent and unambiguous singular articulation. The poem enacts a sense of conflict and struggle related to one’s failure to address and engage actual deprivation and despair. Reducing the poem’s movement to a minimalist yet effectively disruptive interplay of repetition and difference, 136 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

Scalapino suggests that any definitive presentation is impossible; rather, the poem’s strained, austere motions signify great difficulty and insist on closer investigation of multiple perspectives that bear out the homeless’ precarious life situation, simultaneously suggesting that both the speaker and the reader of the poem are guilty of complicity if they adopt any fixed and transparent position in approaching the text. Hence, the poem’s language relies on movement dynamics that Scalapino elsewhere referred to as “sound-shape” and aims at direct engagement of the line of separation between reality and our own projections of it. Scalapino’s choice of the serial form bears out the multiplying of interrelated perspectival frames of which “bum series,” and the whole text of way, is composed. 3 Despite its apparently abstract quality, the poem is informed by concrete social and ethical concerns that Scalapino addresses conceptually, and thus materially (the poet often emphasized the material aspect of thought in her writings), continually interrogating the gap between writing (i.e. conceptualizing) and events. In her correspondence with poet Judith Goldman, Scalapino comments on this aspect of her work: “As relation between political-social actions and writing: writing, since it is conceptual, is separate from action but may itself be an action by engaging that gap of separation” (Firestone and Lomax 192). “bum series,” like Scalapino’s entire oeuvre, is preoccupied with the mind’s constant confrontation with lived experience and concrete social reality, foregrounding conceptual dimension of writing as highly con- sequential and tracing the dynamics between the real’s events and thought. The underlying concern of the poems inway is how one’s mind is formed, how we respond when confronted with the presence of the other and their extremely vulnerable situation, as well as how our own construction of this encounter occurs and unfolds. Scalapino’s poetry shows the impossibility of sidestepping the constructed nature of our conceptions, yet at the same time calls for dismantling of perspective itself, pointing towards limitations and distortions inherent in various social determinations. Her radical investiga- tions carry an impetus that pushes writing toward a conceptual horizon where the lingering poststructuralist dilemma of approaching the real in the face of its entirely discursive character is revisited and addressed in an immanent manner, evocative of Laruelle’s non-standard thought. The theorist’s sense of the real, aptly captured by Kolozova, proposes a position that offers some insight into Scalapino’s writing:

The Real is the only certainty of ourselves we necessarily experience as such, and that experience of certainty is made of “the sheer lived” we all are in the last instance. Thus, I am referring to the notion of certainty in its sense of immanence—of the inalienable, inalterable, inexorable “being there,” of the lived each “human-in-human” is in the last instance. This utter experience, this absolute Lived is overwhelming… Therefore, it is necessarily mediated, and mediation is by definition a working of the transcendental (i.e., of signification or of Language). For the mediation to take place the human-in-human

3 For a sustained discussion of the differences between the epic poem form and the serial poem, including an early analysis of way, see Joseph Conte’s article “Seriality and the Con- temporary Long Poem” as well as his book Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Małgorzata Myk Tracing the Form of Compassion 137 must execute the auto-alienating gesture of instituting the “Stranger” which will re-present and mediate the suffocating Real one is in the last instance. One is necessarily alienated. (“The Figure…” 63)

For Scalapino, however, alienation itself must be re-examined as a notion that no longer stands for detachment, but rather for the condition of being always already implicated. In her 1994 experimental novel Defoe, Scalapino wrote that “[ a ]ll the constructions around appear to occur at the same time,” pointing towards the imperative of constant scrutiny of the process of thought formation in relation to the outside (19). “bum series” enacts such scrutiny through a formally radical and non-reflective modality of writing that appears dilated (similarly to the way in which the pupil of an eye reacts to stimuli by widening). It emerges as a heightened mode of language whose task is to sustain a state of attention and active engagement on the part of the author and the reader: “so—dumb as an/ active relation to/the bums or the freighter and/the still oil/rigs—on the ocean” (58). As Scalapino observed in Zither, such writing is capable of effecting the “process of dismemberment of one’s own thought as the instant of tackling the ‘process of hierarchical definition’”; a radicalized way of constantly scrutiniz- ing one’s subject position, observing one’s mind’s actions as they inevitably participate in the internalization of normative hypotheses, acknowledging existence of hierarchies yet simultaneously unmasking them as arbitrary formations; in short, figuring language as a material site of resistance (18). Whereas in Scalapino’s other writings the idea of resistance is frequently accompanied by elements of speculative thought, the poetry of way relies on a distinctly realistic, or even naturalistic mode. The speaker’s attention is focused on ordinary individuals in concrete settings and situations their lives are contingent upon. The text’s array of soldiers, the handicapped, the elderly, the homeless, factory girls, construction workers, or bus drivers is evocative of Laruelle’s figures of “strangers,” whose ethical modality is the victim, and who partake of Laruelle’s non-philosophical sense of solitude radicale. As Kolozova explains, this radical solitude is “one of the many names Laruelle’s non-philosophy gives to (the state of inhabiting) the identity in the last instance of the human-in-human, the radical concept of humanity, correlating with the real of the pure, nonreflected experience of ‘being human’” Cut( of the Real 242). The homeless in “bum series” emerge as such “generic” victims, where the term “generic” denotes a non-philosophical rather than philosophical orientation; they are doubly victimized due to their underprivileged social status and their precarious human condition in the present 4: the bums—the men—having died—from the weather—though their doing that, seeing things from their view when they were alive

4 See also Laruelle’s discussion of his notion of “the generic” in General Theory of Victims, p. xiv-xviii. 138 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

so not to be upper class—the new wave baggy pants—the man with the dyed blonde hair—who’s always standing in front of the hair salon on the corner” (53)

The poem foregrounds sights that illustrate the extent of class difference and simultaneously urges attention to their accompanying indifference. The same social space is occupied by the homeless who are completely dispossessed and the upper class individual, perhaps a hair salon owner, who appears to be an idle observer of the surrounding reality. The construction of these stanzas intentionally refuses to facilitate our judgement of the situation. We only learn how radically different the individuals’ perspectives are. The passage additionally forces the reader to consider the erased perspective of the homeless who froze to death. Their already absent “view” does not overlap with the blonde man’s carefree perspective (and never did), but the speaker points to the need to recognize the position of the homeless, “their view when / they were alive,” and suggests their proximity to the man indifferent to their suffering. This need is what writing brings into sharp focus. Scalapino envisions writing as an experimental site where every optics must be exposed and deconstructed, including one’s own perception of events and habitual ways of thinking. By foregrounding coexistence and interdependence of radically different perspectives and settings, the social dimension of spatial relations between people, their coming together and separation, construction of visibility and invisibility, examining the situatedness of one’s knowledge and frameworks that impact our ways of seeing, the poet searches for a mode of articulation capable of installing observation as an activity of continual reconceptualization of our received notions about the public world as well as our private existence. It strives for achieving in writing the level of awareness and attention that, while forgoing perspective, allows greater objectivity and clarity of seeing how events occur:

I have been—am— dumb—as the way in which that would occur—the bums—not their existence or dying from the weather—though the effect of that

for me to be dumb—to have been actually stupid—so that really could occur—the bums—in an event (58)

The poem brings into focus occurrence itself as a fact of existing or being found in a particular place and under a particular set of conditions. Attending to this fact emerges as the imperative of our active being in the social world. To this end, Scalapino eschews self-reflexive language based in introspection and imbues the poem with a sense that one is no longer a detached observer, Małgorzata Myk Tracing the Form of Compassion 139 but always an implicated participant. At the same time, the poem reminds us that every act of observation entails perspective, definition, as well as appropriation. The act of conceptualizing automatically involves objectification of what is seen: “contemplating them, therefore endangering them” (way 22). way’s characters are generic persons in Laruelle’s meaning of the term; they are vulnerable and prone to becoming victims of various life circumstances and frequently projected as individuals who are already or about to be violently dislodged from their illusory position of safety. They are constantly subjected to the public gaze, or perceived by a self-conscious observer who herself is similarly exposed, grappling with a sense of failure to account for her own discomfort, and thus incapable of adequately responding or reacting to observed instances of social deprivation: “I almost/froze—and realized I/could die from it—when the bums/were in that situation—and then not/ caring, though that’s not possible” (60). Scalapino equally emphasizes the processes of individual perception and social observation, unmasking both as constructions. The observer’s vision in the poem is never objective; rather, she unavoidably adopts a particular way of seeing that falsely presumes her own security, an illusory sense of not being the victim that she undeniably is if one is willing to agree with Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. Every field of vision is a matter of subjective and therefore partial perspective; an effect of one’s own as well as externally-imposed projections and assumptions. Simultaneously, striving for objectivity paradoxically becomes a gesture on which the poem hinges despite the sheer impossibility of this task. Scalapino’s “neo-objectivist” poetics, to use Charles Altieri’s term, adopts a speculative stance to objectivity (Altieri qtd. in DuPlessis and Quartermain 302). For Scalapino, tracking mind’s action is what poetic writing must be invested in, even if it is unavoidably implicated in the creation of formations that it seeks to critique and dismantle. Again, the words of Kolozova capture the spirit of Scalapino’s conceptual installation in way:

The subject is subjected to the rule of the ‘constructed world’ which—in the last instance—installs itself as an acting real vis-à-vis the intentionality of the self to reinvent it (and itself). The self is ultimately limited in its workings of autotransformation also by the rule of the real, which is mostly directly enacted by the pure labor of self-preservation of the (human) individual as the continuity of the self-identical “I.” (Cut of the Real 171)

Scalapino’s characters seen through the lens of Laruelle’s figure of “the stranger- in-person” are representative of the radicalized form of subjectivity, which entails a return to the figure of the ordinary individual who is formed by the outside, vulnerable, and mortal. Nevertheless, Scalapino’s ethical preoccupa- tions both echo and move beyond a negative version of ethics formulated by philosopher Alenka Zupančič in her 2000 book The Ethics of the Real, where ethics emerges as one’s continual confrontation with the intransigent real: as something that “happens to us,” surprises us, throws us “out of joint,” because it always inscribes itself in a given continuity as a rupture, a break or an interruption. Ac- cording to Lacan, the Real is impossible, and the fact 140 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

“it happens (to us)” does not refute its basic “impossibility”: the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible, as “the impossible thing” that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe. (234)

Whereas such negative understanding of ethics also resonates in Scalapino’s writing, her poetics urges attention and engagement as countermeasures to the Lacanian disempowering sense of the Real. The writing in “bum series” insists on the imperative of investigative (re)writing of the status quo. Tempted as one may be to evoke Slavoj Žižek’s “irreducible homelessness”; an abstract paradigm in which homelessness signifies the space of philosophy open to the movement of negativity, Scalapino’s careful reinvestigation of the ways in which homelessness is conceptually situated does not fully yield to this definition 5. As Scalapino observes in her short essay “Narrating,” published in the anthology Biting the Error/Writers Explore Narrative, her writing derives from an anarchic impulse of “writing-as-illusion” and its speculative relation, however incommensurable, to the events of the world:

These are illusions in the practical sense of being ‘only’ writing (writing has no relation to present or historical reality—it has no reality, is it as well, being mind phenomena. So the ‘ordinary’ small action is [ to be ] as much ‘reality’ as events that are devastating). I am trying to divest hierarchy-of-actions. ‘Hierarchy-of-actions’ voids people’s occurrences (that is, individuals’ actions are relegated to inconsequential or invisible). Such hierarchy substitutes ‘overview’ of ‘history’/interpretation/ doctrine—therefore, to divest ‘hierarchy-of-actions’ is certainly a political act. (In one’s/reader’s/viewer’s conceptualization then—[ is the intention ]). What I’m referring to as ‘divesting hierarchy-of-actions’ by definition has to be in oneself… Fundamentally anarchism (view- ing that as being observation itself) is necessitated. (155)

Addressing a gap between writing and events, this passage offers a number of indispensable insights into Scalapino’s complex poetics. While the poet remains skeptical towards writing’s role in directly changing social reality, she locates its potential in conceptual experimentation with non-hierarchical writing mode that puts “ordinary actions” on the same level as those projected as highly visible and “devastating,” which validates actions of those individuals who reside at the bottom of social hierarchy. Such horizontal approach becomes part and parcel of her entire oeuvre and derives from Scalapino’s early interest in anarchism. In her later writings, however, anarchism becomes another formation that must be dismantled. The poet rejects any notion of ground as ultimately constraining and probes much more radically into speculative exploration of groundless scrutiny.

5 Cf. Žižek’s 2006 The Parallax View, where the philosopher writes that “homelessness remains irreducible; we remain forever split, condemned to a fragile position between the two dimensions, and to a ‘leap of faith’ without any guarantee” (9). Małgorzata Myk Tracing the Form of Compassion 141

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York & London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Conte, Joseph M. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991. Print. —. “Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem.” Sagetrieb 11 (1992). 12 Dec. 2015 . DuPlessis, Rachel Blau and Peter Quartermain. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics.Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999. Print. Firestone, Jennifer and Dana Teen Lomax, eds. Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community. Philadelphia, PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008. Kolozova, Katerina. Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Print. —. “The Figure of the Stranger: A Possibility for Transcendental Minimal- ism or Radical Subjectivity.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11.3 (2011): 59 – 64. Print. Laruelle, François. General Theory of Victims. Trans. Jessie Hock and Alex Du- bilet. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Print. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Scalapino, Leslie. way. New York: North Point Press, 1988. Print. —. “The Radical Nature of Experience.”The Public World / Syntactically Im- permanence. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. 3 – 14. —. Defoe. Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2002. Print. —. Zither and Autobiography. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003. Print. —. “Narrating.” Biting the Error/Writers Explore Narrative. Eds. Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004. 152 – 55. Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London & New York: Verso, 2000. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. London: MIT Press, 2006. Print. 142 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Abstracts

“Poor The pastoral figure of the small farmer in the writ- Joseph Kuhn ings of the Nashville Agrarians and other south- Naked Wretches”: ern modernists gave expression to a conservative metaphysics of the soil, one that underpinned The Wound the unitary, organic notion of “the South” in the interwar decades. This agrarian figure of the “har- of the Ordinary vester” was subsequently criticised by two southern radicals, James Agee in Let Us Now Praise in Agee and Warren Famous Men (1941) and Robert Penn Warren in “Blackberry Winter” (1946). Both Agee’s cotton tenants and Warren’s tramp show how any southern poetics of the earth had to take account of the intrusion of economic depression and world war into the region. Agee’s work is particularly incisive and close to the European avant-garde in that he envisages the ruined agricultural families of Alabama through a perspective close to Georges Bataille’s sociology of the sacred and Maurice Blanchot’s theory of the inoperative community. Keywords: agrarian principles, harvesters, community, J. Agee, R.P. Warren, At Home Richard Yates is best known for his 1961 novel Karl Wood Revolutionary Road, which speaks clearly and in Loneliness, powerfully to questions of home, escape and ultimate entrapment in the suburban idyll of Loneliness at Home: Eisenhower-era middle-class white America, a bleak examination of an ideal that promised Domesticity safety, community, and belonging (to those allowed to belong). As fine a novel as Revolutionary and the Early Short Road may be, Yates’ short fiction is in ways more compelling and poignant. In pieces that focus on Stories of Richard unremarkable, ordinary individuals, it addresses Yates abstracts 143

a considerably broader range of experiences of home, isolation and loneliness in the 1950s in dialog with the postwar hegemonic ideal of white suburban middle-class domesticity. The intent of this paper is to critically examine themes of home and alienation in selections from Yates’ short story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) – stories written from 1951 – 1961 and published in various periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, in order to explore the complexity of 1950s American discourse surrounding home and domesticity, perhaps surprisingly from the pen of a mainstream white male author. Keywords: domesticity, suburbia, safety, Ameri- can Dream, R. Yates

In a number of interviews, Toni Morrison refers Agnieszka Łobodziec to America as Foreigners’ Home. This concep- Domestication tualization is linked to the historical processes related to the formation of the New World by of Foreigner’s Home immigrants who sought to make America their new homeland. Upon their expropriation of land in Toni Morrison’s from native inhabitants, there arose a need for a labor force to work the acquired land that Home engendered forced chattel African immigration to America out of which grew a particular African-American experience. Enslavement as well as Jim Crow segregation induced within the New World black American community feelings of foreignness, “a long way from home”. One of their survival strategies and forms of resistance against oppression was the development of another sense of home over against the oppressive conditions that engulfed them. In her novel Home, Toni Morrison reconstructs the journey of a black Korean War veteran, Frank Money, who reaches a sense of homeliness in the racially segregated South despite failing to realize the citizen-soldier ideal and being victim and witness to continued widespread racist oppression. He attains a sense of belonging and security upon returning to the black community of Lotus, Georgia, where black people are regarded as foreign because of their settlement there as forced exiles. The community, by its unity, manages to domesticate this foreigners’ home, which enables Frank Money, the traumatized black veteran, to perceive Lotus as an empowering space contrary to the alienation he felt before his engagement in combat abroad. Keywords: foreigness, immigration, segregation, J. Crow, T. Morrison 144 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

The article addresses various functions of the Jerzy Sobieraj antebellum Southern plantation. The author cov- Southern Antebellum ers both major “actors” who experienced the plantation system, planters (and the members Plantation: Home, of their families) and slaves. In reports written by white Southern writers, including planters Prison, Enterprise? and the members of their families (e.g. Thomas Nelson Page, Bennet Barrow) the plantation is introduced, mainly, as a great place, a real home for its inhabitants. For black slaves, as some of them (e.g. Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup) noted in their journals, the plantation resembles a prison; the place that appears to a slave as the one “[ he/she ] can never get out” of (Jacobs). The plantation also functions as a commercial enterprise – often employing torturous methods of production – run by slaveholders who “exhibited a considerable degree of profit consciousness and market responsiveness” (Paquette and Ferleger). The author of the paper discusses Stanley M. Elkins’ conception of the plantation slave system as the concentration camp imprisonment, as well as Eugene Genovese’s interpretation of the plantation as an enterprise. Keywords: Plantation fiction, Civil War, slavery, S. Northup, H. Jacobs,

The paper analyzes the appearance of the flâneur Karolina Słotwińska in Colson Whitehead’s 2011 apocalyptic zombie Domesticating novel Zone One. Although considered an obso- lete figure of nineteenth-century literature, the the Flâneur: flâneur as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin can be still seen as useful in guiding discussions Colson Whitehead’s of contemporary urban experience. The essay argues that the ruined city in Zone One, although Zone One initially frozen in the aftermath of the shock of zombie apocalypse, is in the course of the novel reconfigured as the space of change owing to the transformation and actualization of flâneurian optics. The novel can thus be seen as outlining a paradoxical process of domestication in which the flâneur changes from an obsessed outsider into a “man of the crowd” that belongs in the city streets and among its masses. This transformation is visible at the level of the plot and the narrative style in the shift from predominantly phantasmatic treatment of metropolis echoing modernist literature to the action-driven narrative of a zombie novel emphasizing active involvement in the change. Through its engagement with the theme of a ruined city and its location in Manhattan, Zone One aligns itself with other abstracts 145

literary works dealing with the trauma of 9/11 and provides an alternative to the disjointed inassimilable spectacle of the catastrophe in the form of ethically focused writing, which attempts to map out the trajectory for communal witnessing. Keywords: flaneur, zombie, witnessing, metropolis, C. Whitehead

The aim of this article is to scrutinise the problem Joanna Stolarek of alienation and dislocation in the context of Alienation and homeliness and norm in the United States after World War II in Patricia Highsmith’s (1921 – 1955) Dislocation versus Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. The author examines normality and oddity with Homeliness and respect to the main characters’ home environment and their relations with other protagonists. The Norm in Patricia emphasis is placed on the analysis of Charles Anthony Bruno from Strangers on a Train (1950) Highsmith’s and Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley Strangers (1955), psychopaths and killers, depicted as unfulfilled artists, marginalized by their community, on a Train mostly due to their homosexual inclinations and extravagant behaviour. The author of the article and The Talented is going to show how Highsmith’s protagonists, being homosexuals and strangers, are exposed to Mr Ripley the suspicious examination of an orthodox society that hounds them. As a lesbian, the writer was imbued with a feeling of social non-conformity and her status as an American living in Europe also marginalized her, making her as much of an outsider in her chosen home as she had been in her country of birth (Fort Worth, Texas). The author of this article is going to prove how Patricia Highsmith’s living in deeply conservative American society affected her depiction of fictional homes and the creation of the characters who operate outside the norm and live on the fringe of society. Keywords: P. Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr Ripley, home, alienation, dislocation

This paper examines Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) from the perspective of cam- Evangelia pus spatial modalities and their use or abuse Kyriakidou by a privileged group of students. As in other The Secret History campus mystery novels, the supposedly egalitarian and democratic space of the campus is of Hamden Campus: transformed into an elitist enclave by a group of students who use knowledge-as-power in or- A Study in Elitism der to plot the murder of threatening intruders and Murder 146 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

into their exclusive world. The unexpected turn of events brings about the disenchantment of Richard Papen, a low-class but talented, young Californian who enrolls to Hamden, Vermont with high academic expectations. At the same time as it introduces a series of personal disil- lusionments it also creates a crisis of meaning in the American campus in general. Keywords: campus novel, elitism, egalitarianism, idyll, D. Tartt

Devoid of metaphors, conventional in its syntax, Priyanka Deshmukh and resolute in its ordinariness, Paul Auster’s Out of the Ordinary: prose is centered around nothing less than the extraordinary. However, the extraordinary in The Event his narratives—which often takes the form of unexpected, chance events—originates and and Its Repetition remains rooted in the mundane, the routine, the domestic, the trivial. The ordinary, in his in Paul Auster’s writing, is the condition of possibility for the extraordinary, and in so doing, calls into ques- Prose tion this very dichotomy. This paper attempts to examine what happens when this inversion of categories repeats itself within a narrative, and throughout Auster’s work. Keywords: repetition, theory of communication, ordinariness, domesticity, P. Auster

Exile in Julia Alvarez’s novel, How the Garcia Aristi Trendel Girls Lost Their Accents is polymorphous and incre- Exile in Julia mental. It involves politics, culture, race, gender, ethics, ontology and language. If homelessness Alvarez’s haunts the narrative, homesickness is equally poignant and is not cured by the return of the How the Garcia Girls native. Exile forges nomadic consciousness in the narrative. This paper inquires into the multiple Lost Their Accents facets of exile linked with what Alvarez’s main character refers to as “a violation in the centre of her art.” Edward Said, Barbara Cassin, and Ronald Laing provide the theoretical framework of the paper. Keywords: abstracts 147

In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that all writ- Paulina Ambroży ing is ghost-driven, for “everyone reads, acts, “It ghosts”: Language writes with his or her ghosts.” Modernist poetry can be described as particularly “spectral”, as as a Haunted it often locates itself on the threshold between the presentable and the unpresentable, between Dwelling the body and the spirit, thus creating the right dwelling – or the right “body” – for the haunt- in Selected Poems ing traces, apparitions, and reapparitions of the past. Using Derrida’s concept of literature as the by Robert Frost, specter and Martin Heidegger’s notion of “poeti- Wallace Stevens cal dwelling”, I shall examine selected poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne and Marianne Moore Moore as the spaces and bodies which are both haunted and haunting. To explain the nature of spectral language and modern hauntology, Derrida uses Marx’s formulation “Es spukt” [ it ghosts ], which, as I shall attempt to prove, aptly captures the uncanny apparitioning of metaphysical truths in the works of the above poets. Robert Frost’s “Ghost House”, Stevens’s “The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician”, Marianne Moore’s “To a Chameleon”, among other poems, will serve me as instances of spectral poetics in which spiritual and epistemological doubts of the era assume quasi-transcendental forms and shapes, suspending the reader between the impossibility of truth and its revelation. Keywords: haunting, specter, quasi-transcendence, R. Frost, W. Stevens, M. Moore

The paper addresses the theme of coldness in Sylvia Plath’s poetry and other writings as Agnieszka a significant element of the construction of Pantuchowicz imaginary domestic spaces and their linkage “Why Am I Cold.” to the reminiscences of her American home and the experience of life in England. English Sylvia Plath’s homes, which she finds to be “cool enough to keep butter and milk in,” are transformed in her English Home poems into a natural living space of what she calls hibernaculum. What she expresses in her and the American letters and in her Journal, however, is a wish to Refrigerators have an American size refrigerator, a domestic device whose ambivalent role complicates and defamiliarizes the senses with which she endows places and objects of everyday life. Keywords: S. Plath, everyday life, domesticity, coldness, refrigerators 148 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55)

A stranger in Brazil, where she found home for 15 years, Bishop is known for her attentive Anna Warso depictions of landscapes, objects and animals. Other Presences: The article looks at the presences of others in her writing and postulates the possibility of an Elizabeth Bishop’s ethical impulse behind the restraint of Bishop’s Poetics of Hospitality poetic voice, her fondness of correspondence and her insistence on the importance of goodness. The inevitability of appropriation inherent in the acts of representation (or translation into language), countered by Bishop’s reticence, is viewed as gesture of hospitality, on whose challenges and/ or impossibility Jacques Derrida commented in the 1996 seminars. Keywords: hospitality, ethics, letter writing, homeliness, E. Bishop, R. Lowell

The article examines American avant-garde poet Małgorzata Myk Leslie Scalapino’s poem “bum series,” included Tracing the Form in 1988 collection way. Devoted to the theme of homelessness, “bum series” problematizes of Compassion: a poetic gesture of forging an ethical response to suffering, focusing on scrutiny rather than Homelessness representation. I offer a reading of the poem alongside François Laruelle’s non-standard in Leslie Scalapino’s philosophical reflection, presented in his 2015 General Theory of Victims, according to which “bum series” the ethical role of the intellectual needs to be rethought beyond the impulse to speak for the other, or to represent the other’s suffering. I trace similarities and differences between Laruelle’s and Scalapino’s positions. Whereas Laruelle’s abstract critique re-emphasizes “overexposure” that turns suffering into an image used by the media-savvy intellectuals, Scalapino’s poetic writing moves towards a nuanced investigation of the ways in which our perception of suffering is formed. Scalapino’s sense of ethics entails recognition of one’s implication in mechanisms of representation, emphasizing one’s accountability for one’s actions as well as conceptualizations. I also identify a speculative trajectory that informs Scalapino’s neo-objectivist experimentation with the non-hierarchical form of writing. Keywords: homelessness, suffering, representation, derealization, L. Scalapino Kultura Popularna nr 1 /2018 (55), Everyday Spaces / Przestrzenie codzienności ISSN 2391 6788

Kultura Popularna Redaktor naczelny: Wiesław Godzic Zastępca redaktora naczelnego: Mirosław Filiciak Sekretarz redakcji: Małgorzata Bulaszewska Redakcja: Małgorzata Kowalewska, Lidia Rudzińska-Sierakowska, Paweł Wieczorek

Koncepcja, przygotowanie i redakcja numeru: Tadeusz Rachwał

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Rada Naukowa: Barbara Czerniawska (Uniwersytet w Göteborgu), Andrzej Gwóźdź (Uniwersytet Śląski), Tomáš Kulka (Uniwersytet Karola), Wacław Osadnik (Uniwersytet Alberty), Andrzej Pitrus (Uniwersytet Jagielloński), Roch Sulima (przewodniczący, Uniwersytet SWPS)

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The thematic issueEveryday Spaces has been generously sponsored by the USA Embassy in Warsaw.

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